DWELL Missional Church of Burlington, Vermont - A Vermont Church Seeking to be missional in all areas of life.

Posted by: Rachel Stewart | November 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment(0)

My husband and I moved to Burlington about three and a half years ago. Before that I had been working as a graphic designers for two and a half years. I loved all four years of college and design was so exciting for me, but after working in the real world, the passion was wearing thin. Moving here forced me to have to search for another job, which was so hard since I lacked a desire to do design any more. God answered my prayers by opening up a job where my husband works and in a field I knew nothing about. I was interviewed, hired and started work in less then 24 hours, God moved fast!

It was a job all about color, and color was a main part of what I loved about design and being creative. Color says so much, it communicates on a whole other level, just like God. Colors have cultural meanings, historical meanings, can be "on trend" or passé, and communicates with no words. And in the last three years, I have learned more about the language of color. Such as red means passion or danger, blue means calm and serene, yellow is warm and happy, white is pure and clean, black is impure or moody. The human eye can take in and recognize over a million colors. There are different levels of complexity of eyes in various organisms, the simplest "eyes", such as those in unicellular organisms, do nothing but detect whether the surroundings are light or dark. Lightness and Darkness, good and evil, pure and impure are main themes that run through out the entire Bible.

Paul relates the gospel to light in 2 Corinthians 4: 1-6: he says

Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not loose heart. But we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God deceitfully, buy by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the gods of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of God should shine on them. For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus' sake. For it is God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Light is detected by our eyes and it allows us to see beautiful colors. Our eyes are either symbolically full of light or full of darkness. Opened or closed.

So as we come into worship, we should have a singular heart and opened eyes for Christ Jesus alone, and know that His light shines into this world, opening blind eyes to see his truth and reveal the saving gospel of peace, giving hope here and now.

I love this lyric by Switchfoot: "The shadow proves the sunshine."

 

 

comment

Posted by: Nick Hoag | October 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment(2)

So my brother Zach and I took this trip one time. We didn't take this trip because we had to. We didn't take this trip because we were supposed to. We took this trip because we wanted to - because it made perfect sense, because we were best friends and I was about to get married, and we had never heard the song "True Believers" in person. Let me back this train up a little bit.

In the summer of 1994, at the ripe old age of 10, I was sitting in the family living room watching MTV (like all good Christian boys do). A song came on (this was back when there was this thing called "music" on MTV) and I was in awe. I had never heard a song like this before. It was fast, it made my heart beat faster, it made me smile, it just flat out got me pumped about life. The song? Basket Case, courtesy of Green Day. I had never heard this thing called "punk" before and when I heard this song I was truly never the same again. Something about it struck a chord in my heart... this was it, this was how music was supposed to be, this was how it was supposed to make a person feel... it just felt geunine.

Webster's definition of the word genuine is simple - "Not Counterfeit; Authentic".

Makes sense I suppose.. but for me, it goes beyond that. When I encounter something truly genuine - be it a song, or a person, or a perfect summer day, or a truly great movie, or a kiss from my wife at the exact moment when I need it most - I feel it's a glimpse. A glimpse of the world we are all longing for; the world we know should exist, the world every human being on earth is searching for, but can't find because it's been cracked, broken, and torn to pieces (thanks to us). When I encounter something genuine, my heart feels whole, I'm filled with hope, and I usually can't stop smiling or can't stop crying, one or the other.

So, back to the trip. Here I was, on this fateful "bachelor bro-down" trip to Jersey, the very place I fell in love with punk rock. I was with my best friend on this earth, and we were going to a punk rock show. We weren't trying to do what brothers are supposed to do before one gets married, we weren't trying to listen to cool kid music to be...cool. We were simply being who we truly are - two dudes who love Jesus and love Punk Rock.

And let me just tell you, it was amazing. It was one of the greatest days of my life. Multiple times that day I saw authenticity. I saw guys playing music, not to make a lot of money or to get recognized by a label, but because they loved it. Plain and simple.

The Bouncing Souls were one such group. Their tattered and torn Marshall amps were a perfect picture of what they are all about. They've never made the crazy money, never been on MTV, never been very popular, but they are doing what they love, for the people who love them, and it shows. The lead singer came out into the crowd and shook probably 100 kid's hands as he sang. These kids were why he was out there. He was why I drove 6 hours in the pouring rain and stayed in some doo-drop inn off of route 46. And he knew it and was grateful and gave it his all, not for himself, but for the people. It was flat-out genuine.

Don't believe me? Take a gander at these lyrics, imagine the most perfect punk rock chords behind them, and then you might start to see it:

I've met some people along the way,
Some of them split some of them stay,
Some of them walk some walk on by,
I've got a few friends I'll love till I die

From all of these people I try to learn,
Some of them shine some of them burn,
Some of them rise some of them fall,
For good or bad I've known them all

We live our life in our own way,
Never really listened to what they say,
The kind of faith that doesn't fade away
We are the true believers
We are the true believers

In retrospect, that trip was a huge pivot point in my life. Not only was I about to get married, but on the trip down Zach and I talked about this bible study thing we were doing and how it had truly become our church. How maybe it was time to just call it that and go for it. That maybe it was time to recognize what we had known in our hearts for some time - that this was the most genuine and authentic expression of Jesus and His community that we had ever experienced. It wasn't forced - we weren't doing it because we had to - we were doing it because it brought us closer to Jesus than we had ever been before, because our relationship with our creator was flourishing in the midst of this community of Jesus followers that we were simply 'doing life' with. We had experienced the opposite, the Christian life that's built on rules and regulations, on behavior and how you dress, and we were never going back.

It is my sincerest belief that this is exactly what Jesus lived, died, and was raised for. He died to bring us back - back to the relationship that Adam had in the garden, where everything was "right", where everything was as it is supposed to be; man walking with God in perfect harmony. He didn't leave his home in heaven and come down to us to tell us to try harder and to clean up our acts. He came to fulfill and redeem the one relationship in our lives that will never disappoint and will forever fill that hole inside all of us. To put this world to rights in the most mind-blowing way possible. By dying for us. By rising from the dead, conquering sin once and for all, and ascending to Heaven, to sit on his victiorious throne forever as a sign and seal that it is finished. Like Josh prayed on Tuesday, he is the "Defender of our Hope", and he will defend it to the end (Matt. 28:20, Heb. 10:11-14, Rom. 8:38-39).

When I encounter the "genuine" in my life it always brings me back to Jesus. It's like a giant flashing arrow pointing right back to Him. When I saw the genuine in Greg of the Souls that day, I saw Jesus. I could see the desire in the kids that we were reaching out to him for the genuine and I could see the desire in his eyes to produce the genuine. And yet punk rock and the bouncing souls can't quite do it can they? They're still just fallible dudes in a fallible world. They can't save all those kids from the depression and anger they all harbor inside, no matter how much they'd like to. This is why Jesus came. If we could do it on our own, then there was no need for Him.

These little moments in my life have become reminders, and rather than fizzling back down into depression and sadness, these moments now lead me directly into the arms of my Savior, who has secured a place for me and has forever filled that hole in my heart. The result? A desire for a continued, authentic relationship with Him and the people around me. A desire to walk with Jesus as my best friend, to recognize Him as the only true savior this world has to offer, to take Him at His word, to believe everything He has placed in His perfect scriptures, and to to give every last breath I have to seeing His name proclaimed on this Earth and lives changed because of it.

I am so blessed to be a part of this community and the people in it. May we all keep our eyes focused on Jesus, never wavering, and enjoying every genuine moment along the way.

- - -

Without further ado, here's a video from that day courtesy of the offical dwellChannel on youtube (keep your eyes peeled on it for more vids to come!)

Quick Disclaimer: I was not going for perfection with my little flip video camera that I smuggled into the joint. It's messy, the sound is rough, and I got banged around the entire time...but how often do you get to see big pastor Z scream his head off at a punk rock show?!

 

 

continue

Posted by: Zach Hoag | October 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment(0)

This is the first post in a little blog series I did over at the nuance. Given our recent focus on Jonah, preceding love, and covenant, I thought it might be helpful. (Feel free to check out the rest of the series here.)

---------------

deconstruction, pt. 1

Not sure if anybody has heard Regina Spektor’s song “Laughing With”, but it’s been making the rounds in the evangelical blogosphere of late, and I caught a glimpse a couple weeks ago. And I like it, a lot.

It actually reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend yesterday. The thought I got after the conversation was, Deconstruction. We Christians are in the business of deconstruction now. Because when you think about it, what most folks believe about God and the church and Jesus and the faith called Christianity is largely or at least partly a strawman, a caricature, an imbalanced broadstroke of one-dimensional summation incapable of getting the nuance – the truth that’s all in the emPHASis.

Our conversation went kind of like this:

Do you think this or that lifestyle is wrong or sinful?

Well, yeah, but the question becomes what you mean by sinful. If by sinful you mean “bad,” as in “those people who live that lifestyle are bad,” as in “we people who don’t live that lifestyle are good,” then you don’t have a biblical understanding of sin. That understanding of sin works fine if you are looking for a religion of moralism, but not if you are looking for a redemption-spirituality like Christianity. And that’s just it – the religions of the world are generally about defining what’s bad and what’s good and doing your darndest to be on the good side (as Nick explained well last Sunday, check the podcast). And Christianity is about redemption.

The wholiness of God (missp. intentional) brings with it the implication that anything less than his wholiness is incomplete, broken, lacking, missing the mark. Most people say, “I’m not perfect, I’m just human” and by this they mean that they are not whole like God is whole but instead they are fractured, a cracked Eikon as Mr. McKnight would say. They fall short of the perfect design, fall short of the sheer glory of God. And in a whole biblical-theological sense, that’s sin.

The other piece to consider in this equation is brought out nicely by the song:

But God can be funny At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke Or when the crazies say he hates us and they get so red in the head you think that they’re about to choke

Is it crazy to say that God hates sin or sinners? Is it crazy to imagine a God of wrath? Because this is the way most traditionalist, conservative evangelical types present God, at least when they “begin” their presentation. The reason strong, pulpit-based, political campaigning against gay marriage or abortion seems justifiable to some Christians is because God hates sin, and he intends to judge sin, and so making public the anger and judgment of God towards sin is a good thing, they say, perhaps even “preparing” one for the gospel message of Jesus’ forgiveness. The problem here is that the longer one lingers in the anger and judgment of God – and evangelicalism has been lingering for over 20 years in its culture-warring and politicizing position – the more forgiveness becomes overshadowed, secondary, and even superfluous to a good-guy moralistic subcultural movement.

And this is American Evangelicalism as we know it.

I want to coin a phrase at this point in the diatribe, and it might be completely unoriginal. It’s this: the Preceding Love of God. This is my understanding of the gospel, and it runs somewhat counter to the modern evangelical version which is based on the old pseudo-Reformation Law-then-Gospel method (popularized in recent days by Todd Friel and the uber-annoying Way of the Master gang).

In my opinion (for what that’s worth), Preceding Love is the biblical emphasis to which the Christian church must return, by and large, if it is to properly represent Jesus in the next century. I think that Preceding Love is the heart of the Christian faith and presents the antidote to the culture-warring false gospel.

To begin, instead of focusing on a broken-moral-code understanding of sin, a Preceding Love emphasis takes as its starting point creation and Fall, not Sinai and Law. Only when creation and Fall are properly seen as the fountainhead of sin can Sinai and Law be properly understood as contributing to and exacerbating the preexisting problem of sin (which is exactly Paul’s understanding of the Law’s [or the Torah's] weakness according to the flesh and its sin-increasing tendency, cf. Ro. 7). And I like to locate God’s fundamental response to man’s rebellion against him not in Joshua (where God deals militarily with pagan nations in Canaan) or in the Prophets (where God deals militarily with his own nation Israel), but in Genesis 6:6-8, where God prepares to deal with humanity in general directly through the hand of nature:

And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with the preceding love of God since it seems to directly precede judgment. But look carefully and see God’s heart: Very early on in human history, after mankind broke his relationship with God and began to worship creation instead of Creator (Ro. 1), thus allowing brokenness to enter all his relationships, the Lord was so grieved (NIV: “his heart was filled with pain”) that he considered stopping this downward spiral before it got any worse. What we see here is not some capricious pleasure in punishing immoral lawbreakers, but rather an emotional moment of decision where God could have prevented what is surely now the most tragic series of events one could imagine: human history itself.

For one thing is beyond debate: Human history has been nothing short of a death-machine.

Yet in this Creator’s heart, there was a deep-seated unwillingness to end it; and this is the place, in the crisis moment of God surveying human sin and destruction in the early days of history, that I think we can locate the genesis of his preceding love.

Since God did not, in fact, end it all in the Great Flood but rather purged the young world of desperate evil in hope of a better future, promising never to do it again, then everything after, and certainly everything in our own 21st century experience, is marked decisively by his preceding love.

Even our existence is owed to the fact that he loved first and did not prolong his judgment.

(We love because he first loved us.)

comment

Posted by: Zach Hoag | October 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment(0)

On the last Friday of every month, a group of dwellers goes to hang out at the Burlington Emergency Shelter right around the corner from the church, on North St. BES has been a home away from home for us since we began last fall, and we have formed lasting, wonderful friendships through our connection with this outreach.

We call these visits "Blessing Nights", and they include bringing a meal for the guests at the Shelter, bringing other items that the guests might be needing that month, and having a time of singing and spiritual conversation to encourage the guests. The pictures above were taken at our September Blessing Night, during the music time, which was awesome.

If you are interested in attending the October Blessing Night (Friday October 30th), please contact us. We'd love to have you join us!

comment