So when the mail got dropped off at The Marin Foundation’s office today there were 3 huge boxes. The sender was Zondervan. I thought… Here it is! The DVD Curriculums are here! So give me some grace and view the excitement with me of opening the very first copies of our new Love Is an Orientation DVD and Participant Guide.

It officially releases on December 13th.

You can pre-order the DVD and Participant Guide combo pack here.

You can pre-order the DVD by itself here.

You can pre-order additional Participant Guides by themselves here.

I’m popping it in my DVD player right now… Can’t wait to watch it myself as I haven’t seen the final version yet. Awesome!

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org 

A few days ago the BBC World News featured the work of The Marin Foundation in written and audio form! Above is a screenshot I took of the BBC’s home page on their website… And that’s us as the feature story! It’s been crazy since it went live. We have gotten tons of folks reaching out from all over the world. This impact of our story is being felt! It’s such a humbling thing to have happen, and it’s definitely surreal to know that our bridge building message is getting spread across the globe through the most internationally trusted media company in existence. Just unreal.

You can read the full article here

You can listen to the 30 minutes segment the BBC ran on us here (and you have about 30 days to download it to keep it if you want)

Yesterday I got an email from the BBC and they gave me the following, crazy, update about our stories since they went live:

—Our radio segment (which has also been featured throughout America on NPR) is the most listened to segment of any from the BBC World Service

—Our radio segment is the most downloaded segment of any from the BBC World Service

—Our article is the 2nd most shared article of any story on any of the BBC websites

—Our article is the 3rd most read article on any of the BBC websites

I have to thank Christopher Landau so very much. He was the producer of the segment, as well as the writer of the article. Christopher was the one who fought for this story to be done! Even after some higher-ups said no to his initial proposal, he kept at it over almost 1 full year (!!!!) before they finally said yes. And now look what is happening! Brenda and I first met Christopher while I was speaking in London earlier this year. He had read my book when it first released in 2009 and as he said, “kept it in the back of my head to do a story on it for just this time.”

I’m not the most trusting person when it comes to media folks… They never seem to quite tell the truth in how they are going to present or edit something. But Christopher did exactly what he said he was going to do. A stand up man. A balanced journalist. And now a person ever so dear to not only my heart, but the millions his work has reached around the world.

Just absolutely amazing what the Lord is doing with this.

No matter the outcome, faithfulness always wins out.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

I was recently alerted by a good friend to the 9/11 Walks happening all over the world this Sunday, September 11th, on the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I believe these interfaith walks are an important step to continue moving our culture forward in its healing and our constant, and intentional, pursuit of reconciliation. We must show love in tangible, measurable, expressions of unconditional behaviors.

I have already signed up for the walk in Chicago, and if any of you are interested in the Walks in your local community, go to the following links:

9/11 Walk hompage

Find a Walk in your Country or State

Organize a Walk in your Country or State

Hope you can join in!

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

As many of you know from Twitter and Facebook I was asked to go to the first day of Willow Creek Association’s Global Leadership Summit, as a special guest of Willow, to hear Bill Hybels response to Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks, cancellation to appear at the Summit. I was then asked by the Washington Post to write an article about it. I did. The Post decided instead of the article being “event” specific, they would like different article that focused on broader cultural thematic overviews. That article will be published by the Post soon. In the meantime, the original article, about Willow and Starbucks has been published by my friends at Patheos.

You can read my thoughts about the Starbucks and Willow Creek situation here.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org 

I am a Christian, so I know love. I know love because I am loved.

Unconditionally.

I know what love is supposed to look and feel like. I know how I am supposed to love because Jesus invented the come-as-you-are-culture. Therefore if I am a believer in Jesus I must follow in his ways. The Way.

Love.

It’s an odd thing when you think about it: That I must act, feel, support and have my spirit intwined with another in such a way that it provokes a deafening reaction of realness, contentment and security that are sunken deep into the core of the others’ being. That’s what love is.

Tangible.

Measurable.

“Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”

Love is real and truthful. Love causes tears of joy. It causes a pause that elicits a quivering deep breath of exhaustion and relief with the understanding that the root of the most pain is finally engulfed in the core of the most secure of places.

Jesus.

Love.

That’s our command. It’s our Kingdom Job Description. There are no two ways around it. The Bible tells us that it is the Holy Spirit’s job to convict; God’s job to judge and ours to love. Billy Graham said that in defense of his love for our President after being accused by a Christian magazine that he was capitulating to President Clinton’s agenda after the sex scandal. That sex scandal.

This is what it means to practice in the Way.

That Way.

The challenge of our time is not how correct we can be. How orthodox. How much of a defender of the faith to keep out all potential heretics, haters and hooligans. We must stop being driven by the fear of the future and focus on how to love well in the here and now.

Right now.

A close friend of mine recently said:

I continue to find myself caring less and less about what each respective person professes to believe, and more about how they profess those beliefs in word and deed.

Oh.

My friend…

He’s gay.

“We should love one another.”

I’m not asking you to give up on the evangelicalness of who you are and what you believe. Not theologically or socially or politically. I’m suggesting it’s time to commit ourselves to the radical love that is irrevocably tied to the One we claim as our Savior.

“For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

Who is our brother?

Other believers? Those who go to church like us? Look like us? Think like us? Act like us?

If someone from ‘the other’ isn’t a part of what you’re doing you’re not building a bridge toward the Kingdom you’re building an army here on earth.

Anyone can build an army. Takes no faith. No guts. No love.

No Jesus.

On the reality show NY Ink about a New York City tattoo parlor, a man tatted from head to toe described his understanding of love:

You know someone’s commitment is real when they charge in when everyone else is running out.

Who and what are you committed to? Who and what are you charging towards?

Is it to the fidelity and work of Jesus’ love that created the best case scenario for living a faithful and righteous life,

or

Is it to feeling ok that you’re right with none of Jesus’ intimate love for the others whom you believe are wrong…

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org 

My wife was listening to this song, Grenade, by Bruno Mars recently. She looked over at me and said:

“Listen to the words, Andrew. Doesn’t this just perfectly describe the messge of Jesus?”

Yes; yes it does. Who knew?

Powerful stuff.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

Here is a question I get quite a bit; and just recently have been asked it more than usual:

Why did Jesus talk in parables?

I also wrote about this question here, but because I’ve been asked it so many times recently I thought I would say something again. I believe he did so for reasons that are two-fold. First, Jesus spoke in parables to get others in his era, for the first time, to think for themselves in knowing what it means to implement Kingdom Principles in their own real-time situations. Until the point that Jesus came along, all ‘believers’ were force-fed rules and regulations by religious gatekeepers who did all of the thinking and disseminating for everyone – ‘everyone’ who was then just expected to fall in line.

God could have had the Bible written, specifically in the Gospels, as another laundry list of yes/no situations that Jesus could have very easily communicated to everyone. What is considered the New Testament today could have been nothing more than an updated version of Leviticus. But, secondly then, Jesus knew that such a simplistic yes/no medium for living and thinking within the new covenant would not work for every situation in every circumstance throughout all of the generations to follow until he came back.

That is why today, hermeneutically speaking, it is so vital for us to start clinging to the ever-applicable Principles within Scripture that we might start to instill a Jesus-inspired baseline biblical framework to work off of. I am not trying to relegate Paul or the Old Testament as second or third class citizens because the same means of principled-interpretation can be used for them as well. I speak more about this in my book (specifically in Chapters 6, 7 and 10), but,

I’d love to hear your thoughts on why you believe Jesus spoke in parables when he clearly could have answered everything, with much ease, in more easily accessible fashion? And what does this mean for us today?

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

This is my friend, Native American leader Richard Twiss, speaking about the abuse against Natives by the white power structure of our country. The first one minute and twenty four seconds of this video Richard throws it down (because he’s speaking at a conservative Christian college’s chapel service, it seems like he eased up a little on them the last minute of his talk. I’ve heard him bring it for hours before!). Over the last few years Richard has opened my eyes to the atrocious treatment in which the white dominated government of the United States, since day one, has bestowed upon Native Americans.

Did you know that Native American reservations aren’t even owned by Natives? We all think they own their land. They don’t. A person appointed by the President is their liaison to the land they live on, and before anything happens on a Native reservation, this man has to give them approval!

This was their country. We took if from them and now are continuing to oppress them. 

On this day I am thankful, among many, many other things, for one thing in particular:

That Jesus Christ came to this earth as a baby of no status or privilege, incarnating himself into a broken world and righteously loving all of humanity to Him, even though many didn’t, and don’t, want to believe. I am also thankful for Jesus brutally dying on the cross, that my sins are forgiven because I believe in an unchanging God who longs to flood this world and all humanity with redemption and reconciliation to God, and to each other.

With that said, on this thankful day of Thanksgiving, I am thankful for what Jesus did so I, as a white man a part of the dominant culture that has given me extraordinary privilege for doing nothing other than being birthed into a powerful socially constructed group of people, can sincerely apologize for:  

Metaphorically and physically raping and pillaging the Indians over centuries, the thing that created this holiday; and using the death of Christ for the cultural sins of slavery, colonization, the crusades, racism, sexism and anything else that holds others captive because they are not like the dominant culture of the day.

I’m sorry. And I’m thankful I believe in a God who is bigger than all of my people’s sins committed on behalf of God’s name.

Please watch the video of Richard. It’s powerful. Here is Richard’s website and here you can find him on YouTube.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

The other day I was reading around the blog of Paul Young, the author of The Shack. I really enjoyed The Shack, in fact last year I thought it was the best fiction book I read all year. I didn’t even know Paul Young had a blog until recently. I was excited to learn that he did have one because I enjoy his mind and writing style so much; so I started reading as much as I could.

And then I happened upon this interpretive story he wrote…

It blew my mind!

It’s a story about the inner-thoughts of the disciple Andrew after someone comes up to him to ask him some clarifying questions about the parable of the Good Samaritan, which this person just heard Jesus tell to a group of people.

Depending on how fast you read, it will take up to 7 minutes. Please, take the time to read this and not just skim it. It’s so, so worth it. Powerful stuff.

What are your thoughts on our own inherent judgements about how fiction, truth and reality can all be one in the same?

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

Thanks for all of your great insights yesterday on what you believe is the Gospel! I loved reading them, and I generally like to think that the people that read this blog are at least 82.6% smarter than people who read any other blog Maybe it’s just that the people who have thought about what the Gospel means are the only ones who commented, but man, preach those definitions my brothers and sisters!

In the broader Christian world the word Gospel is thrown around so easily and quickly without a clue what it actually means. “Gospel” is now a part of the Christianeze language that, when someone says it, is to be automatically assumed they are: 1) A great Christian; 2) Totally know what they’re talking about. I would tend to say that neither of those points are accurate.

In fact, I physically cringe when I hear people say the word Gospel. I cringe because I know when people say it, that’s all I’m going to get from most of them when it comes to that word … just a bunch of lip service. This is kind of what I feel like when I hear most people talking about the Gospel:

Let me try and make this as clear as I can:

“Gospel” is not a word, it’s a way of life.

It’s not an understanding. It’s not a theology. And it’s sure not something that should ever be said lightly. Yet it has turned into all of those things.

In fact, I think the word Gospel should never be said.

You heard me right. Never. It should be lived. No one out there (especially those who are not Christian) cares about an over-used, under-impacted word that Christians say as the password to get in the club. However, through the message of Jesus living through you and I, we will be the hands and feet of Jesus’ reconciling work to bring ourselves and others into a restored relationship with God, each other, and have the strength to live a daily faithfulness of what it means to establish Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Jesus references the word translated to “gospel” seven times, five of them coming in the book of Mark. Five of those seven times Jesus says something to the effect of “preach the gospel.”  Narrowly looking at the phrase “preach the gospel” it would assume most Christians are right today in their spoken usage of the word. The problem comes in to play when looking at the whole of Jesus’ life and ministry. His overtly intentional incarnational ways (not just as the God-man but also in the way he went about ‘living in the neighborhoods’ doing good deeds) were the presupposition to his earning the right to speak about what people call ‘the Gospel’ today.  

There is no such thing as a Capital-G Gospel. 

I say this because the capital letter denotes a person or a name; a label. You could argue that Jesus (a person) is the Gospel (a label to Jesus’ work). But the problem I see with that is that Jesus the person commanded us to live as he lived – not just label as he lived. So many times throughout Jesus’ life the roadblocks people encountered with him were because they weren’t ready to live as he lived (the Rich Young Ruler, the Pharisees, etc).

The “Gospel” is based on a life lived, not a construction of how to get saved.

The Gospel is meant to be a verb that describes an action; not a label of the ideal of someone’s actions for us.

So please, I ask you to stop saying the world Gospel and instead just faithfully live your life. The “Gospel” will be felt with more impact through active unspoken mediums than any intellectualized ones.

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org

Everytime I read the New Testament I see Jesus quoting the Old Testament quite a bit. As I learned in my Bible interpretation classes in seminary, parallel passages and repeat quotes are there to drive points home more directly. Maybe it’s just me, but for a while now I’ve wondered if Jesus quoted any one verse(s) more than others to really drive a certain point home?

So what I did was go back and read all of Jesus’ words and made a chart of every OT verse he quoted. As it turns out, it was recorded that Jesus quoted 49 different Old Testament verses (not including the repeats of the same verses throughout the different books). Of those 49, Jesus quoted three particular verses more than any other.

Jesus quoted different parts of the Ten Commandments on four separate occasions:

Matthew 5:21 – Exodus 20:13

Matthew 5:27 – Exodus 20:14

Matthew 15:4 & Mark 7:10 – Exodus 20:12, Deut 5:16

Matthew 19:19 & Mark 10:19 & Luke 18:20 - Exodus 20:12-16, Deut 5:16-20

But other than the Ten Commandments, Jesus quoted two individual verses on two separate occasions – more than any other he quoted in all of Scripture!

Hosea 6:6 – For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings. (Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7)

Leviticus 19:18 – Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD. (Matthew 5:43, Matthew 22:39 (with a repeat in Mark 12:31))

I don’t see how it is any coincidence that Jesus separately quoted the Ten Commandments, a subversion of the dogmatic religious institution of the day, and an expectation of love, more than any others in all of Scripture.

Let that sink in to your life! Jesus repeatedly gave us three very clear instructions on how to live a Jesus-shaped faith…

Much love.

www.themarinfoundation.org