G.L.O.W.

 In November of last year a group of CityWellers began meeting weekly for the purpose of coming to a succinct articulation of who we believe Jesus is calling us to be as a church, and to tie that articulation to specific and concrete practices that will become our way of life together. This group is called our Formation Team, as they are working to form our communal rhythms and practices that we hope will reinforce our identity as the church. Our driving question has been: What are the ways of Jesus that will form our way of life?

More than ever we are convinced that we are called to so much more than just believing the right things about Jesus; we are invited to actually know Him and to allow Him to redefine every aspect of our lives. This is about receiving the ways of Jesus as our way of life… in our families, in our personal ambitions, in our work, in our encounters with every person that crosses our path, in the ways we love our neighbors and serve our city, in the ways we use and give away our money, in the ways we share life with each other and learn to live joyfully, in the ways we hold onto hope together in the midst of our suffering, and in the ways we structure our schedules so as to make room in life to be with our Lord so that we might be transformed by Him to be the people he created and redeemed us to be, that we might actually taste the abundant life Jesus came to give and become partners with God in pouring that abundance into every part of our lives and our communities! Now that is an awesome calling (and run-on sentence)!

With all of this in mind, the Formation Team adopted a framework that we hope will capture the vision God is giving us in a broad enough way to always call us forward, but in a specific enough way to help us order our lives around concrete practices that all of us can integrate into our daily lives, both together and individually. Our hope was to come up with a simple and memorable way for The CityWell to express what we are about… how the ways of Jesus are becoming our way of life.

So here it is… receiving the ways of Jesus as our way of life means The CityWell becoming a people who G.L.O.W. We will Gather, Listen, Offer and Welcome. Each of these elements of our life together is a reflection of Jesus, and each is GOOD NEWS!

Gather: The Good News is that we have been given a beautiful, communal identity! 1 Peter 2:9-10 says: But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. You could say the grand narrative of the Bible is a story about God forming a people - giving us an identity founded upon our relationship to God through Jesus and our relationships to one another. This Good News speaks to the heart of every person’s longing for connection, community, embrace, acceptance and belonging!

For The CityWell, gathering has three concrete forms, Wells, Huddles, and Worship. Each of these serves unique purposes that all contribute toward the goal of our becoming a family and being formed as God’s people through deep relationships, an intentional discipleship process and passionate worship.

Listen: The Good News is that we have a God who actually speaks to us, and a God who actually listens to us! So we are seeking to become a people who develop habits of listening to our Lord’s voice in the Scriptures, through Prayer, through attentiveness to the Holy Spirit, and in listening to one another. Along with this, we long to be a people who love others and our city well enough to listen to them. Listening will require God to produce in us the fruit of patience, humility and gentleness.

Offer: The Good News is that we have a God who offers Himself fully to us – holding nothing back! In response we seek to be a people who offer ourselves to God, and likewise offer ourselves to one another. However, offering is not only an internal affair as we seek to imitate Jesus in offering ourselves to neighbors, strangers and even enemies. Check out Romans 12 for a biblical picture of this threefold offering.

Welcome: The Good News is that God unconditionally welcomes us! In Romans 15:17, we are exhorted: welcome one another as Christ welcomed you. So, we intent to become a community that welcomes E-VER-Y-ONE!

No exceptions.

This is about becoming a people whose corporate and individual lives are marked by extravagant hospitality, who invite others into our community and into our experience of God with the hope that others may come to see God’s heart for them through us.

This is what we mean by G.L.O.W. We are not talking about any exceptional luminosity in ourselves, but rather a way of life determined by communal commitments to rhythms of Gathering, Listening, Offering and Welcoming.

This way of life is both a response to and a picture of the Gospel of Jesus, and I am convinced that the more we live into this, the more we will come to know God’s love for us, the more we will become like Jesus, the more we will have impact as Jesus’ partners and friends in our community, and the more we will experience (and share) the abundant life Jesus gives. Please join us in praying that The CityWell will, indeed, become a people who G.L.O.W!

The Gospel of Adoption

Adoption is at the heart of the Gospel. I was reminded of this beautiful truth this week in the confluence of our family receiving a foster child and two of the Lectionary texts assigned for Sunday, January 1.

New Years Eve Amy and I picked up 2-day old Noah at a local hospital, welcoming him into our family for what is yet an undetermined period of time. Where this is only a foster placement and could end at any point with the reunification of mother and child, there is also a chance that this could become an adoptive scenario. In either case, receiving this baby into our family has opened my eyes afresh to the beauty of God's grace, in which our Heavenly Father welcomes us into His family.

Amazingly, all of this happened in a week in which two of the Lectionary texts speak very compellingly about adoption: Galatians 4:4-7 and Isaiah 62:2. So, on Saturday, my sermon from Luke 2 got chucked and I enjoyed the gift of reflecting on God's adoptive heart.

The Galatians text reads: But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, ⁵in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. ⁶And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” ⁷So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

The Isaiah text: The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory; and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give.

So you can see why I tossed out my sermon! Wow! 

So here are some reflections. What happens when a child is adopted? What does it mean that we "have received adoption as children" of God?

1. Adoption means a new name... a name the Lord gives, and a new name means a new identity, an unshakable identity, an identity not rooted in the shallow ground of our accomplishments or self-making, not subject to the frailty of our faith or inevitability of our failures, but rooted deeply in the steady faithfulness and irrevocable choice of God.


2. Adoption means a new family. We are not adopted metaphorically into an individualistic arrangement with God, but concretely into a family of faith where we have real, flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters, an actual support structure and network of real relationships through which God speaks to, challenges, leads, and blesses us.


3. Adoption means a new privilege. Being brought into this new family and given this name entails having the full range of God's resources as our own. The Spirit by which we are adopted is none other than the Spirit of Jesus, and everything that is His is not ours. His rights have become our rights, as we are full co-heirs with Him.

4. Adoption means new responsibility. In this family there are no freeloaders. When God adopts, God empowers and God gives us the amazing gift and dignity of being partners in the work of the Kingdom. In the scripture we have other instances of God declaring people to be His children. The Lord calls Israel "his firstborn son" (Exodus 4:22). The kings of Israel were often called Son of God (Psalm 2:7). And, of course, Jesus is declared to be God's beloved Son (see the Gospel accounts of Jesus' baptism and transfiguration). In each case, sonship comes with great responsibility, to be a light to the nations, to be the leader of God's people, and to be the savior of the world. Our adoption means nothing less... we have great responsibility as children of God.

5. Adoption means having a new story. Our lives are defined by stories, and adoption by God means we are redefined by God's story, the story of Israel, Jesus and the church. In this great story we are given a hope-filled and confident sense of who we are, and we can say with assurance in the face of any competing story, "My daddy is stronger than yours!"

6. Adoption means a new table. In my family, eating together is central to how we share life together. This is only more so in God's family, where are are invited to the family meal at which there is always enough food and drink, always space for sharing our joys and hurts, and always assurance that whatever grievances may have occurred among us, none are stronger than the ties that bring us back to this Table.

On Sunday morning, I wrote down these reflections through bleary eyes, having not slept much the night before (victim of a vicious two-infant tag-team). My fatigue reminded me that receiving a child is a costly endeavor... in many ways. This is supremely the case for our Lord, for whom adopting us cost the very life of Jesus. This adventure is also  risky. Our hearts are already bound to Noah, and we may well have our hearts broken if he leaves our family. This, though, is the nature of love. God takes the greatest risk of love in making the ultimate sacrifice in order to adopt children who may never recognize Him as Father. And yet, in the face of the cost and the risk, God adopts us still, graciously choosing us and determining to love us.

Thank you, Father.

December Update

Faithful Friends,

Merry Christmas and happy New Year! I pray the end of 2011 offered you opportunities to enjoy the gifts of family and friends and of remembering God’s presence, provision and comfort in the year past. As I think back over the last year I am amazed at all that has come to pass and how clearly God has been in the midst of a whirlwind of change in our lives. A year ago, Amy, the girls and I were enjoying the awesome gift of a dynamic church and incredible community of friends in Southern Pines; we were waiting for confirmation that we would indeed be sent to begin a new work in Durham; and we were anticipating the immanent expansion of our family with the birth of a new baby. In the months that followed began concrete planning for the The CityWell, we built a new home in Durham, we said goodbye to our beloved church and friends in Southern Pines, and we welcomed John Coleman May III into our lives. In the midst of those transitions we grieved (and are still grieving) the loss of our amazing sister-in-law, Katie Noel Parsons May.

Needless to say with all that going on, The CityWell began with fits and starts, but we really began finding rhythm and picking up steam (forgive the mixed metaphor) in the fall, and what an adventure this has been! Amy and I are continually amazed to see all God is doing in the birthing of this new church, and we are deeply grateful to be a part of this. In previous updates I have mentioned the centrality of mission in our life together, the hope that we will be a people who look like the Kingdom of God as traditional dividing walls (race, ethnicity, economics, etc...) come down, and our intention to develop an integrated rhythm of life in which our identity as the church pervades every element of our lives. In December I was captivated by another component of our life together that I pray will remain a part of our communal DNA: an Advent freedom of speech. Along with churches throughout the world, we spend the four Sundays of Advent remembering that the Christ who came, comes to us still, and will come again. Within this tri-fold promise we found the freedom to begin naming the brokenness of our lives, our community and our world. In every time of worship we gave generous amounts of time to the vocalizing of our gratitude for Jesus’ coming and blessings, our dire need for His continued presence, and our confident longing in the face of messy lives that He will indeed come again to make all things new. Several times I found myself amazed at the power of the things shared, the courage and freedom found to publicly name sin and brokenness, the willingness to put away pretense for the sake of a truthful rendering of our lives before God and one another. The freedom of speech that so moved us was not only in the content of things shared, but in the space created for all to share, in the opening of the air to any and every voice. This open and un-scripted element of corporate worship has been unique in my experience of church and I am excited to see where this will go.         

On Christmas Eve we decided to trade in a candlelight service for a more unconventional way to remember the birth of Jesus. Once again we partnered with Open Table Ministries and at noon gathered for an absolutely decadent feast with friends from Grace Park Church and nearly 30 members of a homeless community that lives in the woods here in Durham. We met in an open space of grass on an access road next to the highway; we listened to Christmas music booming out of a PA; we ate wayyyyy too much; we made new friends; we sang carols and Christmas hymns and laughed together; we spoke of the amazing gift of God in Jesus; and strangers who otherwise would never likely meet became friends through the unifying gifts of food and song. It was simply wonderful. 

Finally, on the very last day of 2011, a year that involved an unprecedented amount of change in our lives came to an unexpected and thematically appropriate climax as we welcomed a beautiful foster baby into our family. Noah Andreas was two days old when we joined us and we are already coming to love him deeply. Please pray for Noah, his mother, and for God’s will in the outcome of this placement.

Yes, it has been quite a year, and through it all, God has been God – faithful, generous, tender, funny, and always surprising. Oh, what will 2012 hold?

Grace and peace,

Cleve