Grace Toronto. A church for the city in the city. Get to know us.

This is a great quote I transcribed from a Tim Keller sermon; any errors are mine. Enjoy!

“You and I were created to sing. If secular people are right, then we are an accident, and love and hate and good and evil are how you are hard-wired, but they do not really exist. But if you were created by someone then you were created for someone. If by God, then created for God, if by the king, then for the king. We were created to make Him our king. Until you are, true to your original nature – you are like a fish on the ground; like a seed of a tree left on the windowsill. You need to plunge into the Lord Jesus Christ to become who you were meant to be. When the trees come into the full presence and lordship of God, they will be able to sing and dance – they are mere shadows now, they will be fully themselves then – and if that is true for them, then what about for us?”

If you had not noticed, our stores are screaming at us that Christmas is here. Tomorrow is Black Friday in the U.S.- the start of the Christmas shopping rush. Which reminds me that the days of anticipation have begun.

My question is: what are we anticipating? Food and family certainly; and these are good things. But they are not ultimate things. The ultimate reason is that a carpenter’s Son turned out to be more than a carpenter. He made the whole world new. The great poet Swinburne once wrote:
“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath”

I could not disagree more. I would say this: Thou hast come, o child- King, and the world has grown new at thy death.’

May you enjoy the ultimate reason for Christmas, and find some still small moments of quiet joy in remembering that there was One who became a child, and then a criminal, that we could become kings and queens.

Tomorrow night we have a Mezzanine event, one of a series of events run out of our Grace Centre for the Arts. It is a first-rate, professional jazz gig. The artists are from a diverse spiritual spectrum. People are constantly confused and amazed that we have these kinds of art events. They don’t quite understand why we are having this ‘conversation’ between artists of Christian and non- Christian persuasion. Most Christian art endeavours are about the making of Christian art, by Christian artists, for Christian people.

We need that work, desperately. We need to learn to make new art, for the glory of God. I applaud that. But we also need to make artists new, for the glory of God. And we need to make both Christian and non- Christian artists new by the renewing power of the gospel.

The city needs the gospel because it is only in the gospel that it’s hopes are realized, it’s fears banished and it’s dreams consummated. Only the redeeming work of Jesus can free us from the idols of work, success and wealth that threaten to enslave us. So the city needs the church which confesses the gospel of Jesus.

The church needs the gospel because the church, like the city, is threatened with the slavery of the same idols. We are alike, because the church and the city are filled with the same basic building block; people. People who are beautiful and broken, who are made for God but want to live independent of God.

The church speaks the gospel to the city, but we sometimes forget that the city speaks the gospel back to the church, if we have ears to hear. How? In this way: the city reminds the church to live up to it’s beliefs.

You see, the city loves the ethics of Jesus. The city loves His emphasis upon love, justice, mercy and grace, forgiveness and charity. They don’t want to come under the authority of the person of Jesus, it is true. They need the church to call them to repentance of that reduction of the gospel.

But they understand intuitively that if the gospel is true, it affects everything. That is indeed what gives them pause.

The church loves Jesus. But we often reduce our faith to Sunday- morning faith; a set of beliefs without public consequence. We believe in the person and fail to apply His commands. This is where the city prophetically calls us to repent. And we need to hear them.

Mezzanine is about this mutually beneficial conversation, this transforming dialogue between church and city, that helps both of us understand the gospel better.

If you read my last post, I was shocked, appalled, and outraged by the degradation of women in the mean streets of Mumbai. God hates exploitation. God hates sexual slavery. God hates the abuse of women. God hates indifference in the face of injustice.

So talk to me; what can we do for these lost girls of Mumbai? Here is perhaps a start: let’s raise some money and get some help to the organizations that are ministering to them. One of them, that some missionary friends whom I trust visited and spent significant time with, are an oasis of God’s love in the midst of this darkness. We can partner with them; they are called Project Oasis and their specific ministry is ‘The Aruna Project.’ See their web page here. But we know they help women directly; they have rescued women, and they have workers who are former sex slaves who have been rescued and are now transformed.

So if you give to us, we will forward the money to them on your behalf, and receipt you for it. Simply designate your gifts ‘Mumbai’ and we will do it.

And pray with us. Stand in the gap for them. Raise a voice for those who have none.

I am sitting in a conference that is interested in planting a movement of the gospel in the city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). We just heard a report on the sex slave trade in Mumbai. Did you know that:
– 40,000 sex trade slaves ply their trade in a 2 square mile area in the middle of the city- and nobody in the police or government is trying to help them;
– pimps get over $200 million per year from this trade;
– girls are sold into this trade (mostly by their families) at age 10 or so;
– girls this young, because they are a flight risk, are held captive in hidden rooms and cellars, tied to their prisons, raped repeatedly, and tortured with among other things live electrical wires, until they are ‘broken’ and won’t flee;
– People who try to help them are targeted by the local mafia

This is not acceptable. This is monstrous, horrifying sin. This is the heart of satanic darkness. Pray for light to break this darkness. Pray for God to break this vicious cycle. Pray for the church to stand up and fight this. This is THE issue of our time.

Pray, and pray for a way to make this thing END.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the Christian faith is under deep spiritual assault in our day. I am not talking about the headlines that chronicle political and cultural changes. I am talking about personal conversations with pastors, friends, missionaries, and others who are seeing havoc being wreaked in their ministries right now. Why? Nothing new; marital divisions, family breakups, impurity, greed. All the usual suspects.

All of this need fuels my desire to be a fix-er. My desire is to ride in and try to be the cavalry. Except for one thing; the cavalry rides unarmed. We – and I feel this personally – go into battle weak, weary, tempted and inadequate for any kind of real spiritual battle. If we do not go in the strength of the Cross, boasting of our weakness -we will surely ride in vain and become statistics ourselves. At least I will.

And so, at this time of great spiritual assault, I think I need to go and meet with Jesus, and get some rest, and realign myself with Who actually is doing the riding, and the delivering, around here.

The great enemy of true Christian spiritual formation today is, in my mind, how busy we are. And how busy we think we need to be. Busy-ness is a synonym for idolatry in me. Being busy makes me feel important; irreplaceable – in short, God-like.

The busier I get, the less effective I think I become. Certainly, the less like Jesus I think I become.

I need a Sabbath rest from myself. I need a Sabbath rest from my workaholism. I need a Sabbath rest from my driving need to be useful, important, significant.

And I might just get one; sort of. The staff of our church are all going to a conference together. We are driving together, hanging together, learning together. Building some community, some team, some fun and some reality into the surreal overdrive that is ministry today.

Jesus said to us come apart and rest awhile. I think I need to come apart, lest I come apart.

This is Christian, pastor of Berlinprojekt in Germany, for Dan:

This week, brainstorming together with Dan and others about the future of our church-planting in our cities, my college Konstantin and I put down a daunting sentence. It’s the first one heading our vision statement for the next 15 years in Berlin: “We want to see a number of new churches planted in the very city center where we are present with Berlinprojekt that grow to have at least the size and influence of Berlinprojekt and beyond our influence.” This was a difficult sentence to write because am I really ready for this? My pride? My desire to be this important person with this important church in the network – all the sudden there are all these thoughts coming up that are pretty embarrassing, but pretty real at the same time. But the more I reflect about this important goal for us in Berlin, a goal to deliberately dwarf us in the midst of others for the sake of the kingdom, I’m realizing: this it is that we have to be all about. I need a new attitude of service. A new dedication to the goals of God’s kingdom that surpass by far my little activities. I think this all has to do a lot with a spirit of servanthood in which, a bit surprisingly, again is so much gain. Not only for the other – but for me as well in very real terms.  Just as Jesus said (about): Those who want to keep his church will loose it – but those who are willing to loose it will gain it and with it so much more. I gues that goes not only for church but for many areas as well… Greetings from New York and Berlin to Toronto, Christian from Berlin

Preaching the Psalms has been a refreshing summer. I have forgotten how real, how relevant, how raw they can be in describing the reality of our spiritual journey, in all of its beauty and brokenness. They deal with stuff all of us face; guilt, regrets, anger, depression, alienation, and of course the need for grace.

I am reminded that unless we put shoe leather to our doctrine, unless we make the truth of grace practical, we strip it of its beauty and of it’s power. This week I am preaching on an old doctrine, much forgotten – the doctrine of repentance. What a glorious thing it is to be able to repent and be restored by a loving, gracious God!

I am presently re-reading a classic book that helped form my understanding of God when I was a young Christian. It is Knowing God by J.I. Packer, and I am loving it. There are few writers as clear as Packer, whom I found out about from my first theology teacher, Rod Rosenbladt. Rod, no mean writer in his own right, said this of Packer: ‘He is constitutionally incapable of writing an unclear sentence.’

Knowing God will inform you, edify you, stir you to worship, challenge you to think more deeply and biblically about God – in short, it will do a work of sanctification in you. His chapter “God Incarnate” is, by itself, worth the price of the book, and some of the simplest, clearest writing on the incarnation of Jesus in the English speaking literature.

This experience reminds me of an old truth that needs to be dusted off. We need to read, and re-read, great books. Our generation is the poorer for our a-literacy. We miss out on great gold from the giants of the faith, upon whose shoulders we are standing. Great books, like the books of the Bible, have staying power, have fresh power every time you read them. They don’t have the same power, of course, because they don’t have the same Author. Yet He guides the writers of the best books just as surely as He guided the writers of Scripture. And he uses them to guide us into deeper, stronger, more thirst-quenching waters than the wading pools we regularly churn out today.

So put away the books of the week that have caught the culture’s eye, and drink deeply from those whose knowledge of God surpasses our own.