General Assembly, Orlando FL 14.0 (GS recaps and videos)

Stan Toler was elected GS yesterday.

Some of you have asked for videos showing the elections of our GSs. I could only find one for Eugenio Duarte on YouTube. Here is the link (just click on the name and it will take you to video):

Eugenio Duarte

General Assembly, Orlando FL 13.0 (Change of plans)

Breaking News

Woke up this morning and found out that Dr. John Bowling (he was elected GS a couple days ago) rescinded. He woke up about 3am this morning and felt no peace about his decision. So, now the General Assembly is in the process again of electing a new GS. I told you this was a historic GA.

General Assembly, Orlando FL 12.0 (Headed Home!)

General Assembly is over for me and I’m headed home (with my dad). When all is said and done we will have traveled over 2,000 miles in a Chevy Impala.

It was neat to be a part of the global NYI Convention and watch and observe the General Assembly. The COTN values people and you can tell that by the way we govern and do business.

Here are some other notable moments from General Assembly:
- Being in Global NYI Convention and having 9 other countries present via Skype. Delegates from these other countries could vote, ask questions, wave at us, talk to us, it was awesome! That was a job well done by the NYI tech crew.
- The worship services were full of energy and encouraging.
- Praying with other Nazarenes from around the world in small groups.
- Seeing and hanging out with old friends (good to see ya again Jon!).
- The service Friday night with Dr. Porter reinforcing the importance of discipleship and mentoring and that it must first start at home.
- Taking communion with 22,000 Christians from all around the world.
- Seeing how missional the Church of the Nazarene is and will continue to be.

On a completely unrelated note, we ate at a little joint called Zaxby’s tonight after a quick run into the Bass Pro Shops. Zaxby’s is a chicken place. It was awesome! I gotta find one of these when I get back to Indiana. They have some finger-lickin sweet-and-spicy chicken wings.

General Assembly, Orlando FL 11.0 (3rd GS elected!)

Just elected our third GS. Dr. David Graves. Here's a pic of him. The GS elections are now over. This GA was a historic moment for us in many ways. Exciting times!

General Assembly, Orlando FL 10.0 (New GS #2)

We have elected another new General Superintendent. It took a little while longer for this individual to accept, but he did. Who is it? ONU President John Bowling. Here's a pic.

General Assembly, Orlando FL 9.0 (New GS!)

We have a new General Superintendent!!! He is from Africa. What a great time to be a member of the Church of the Nazarene. Here's a pic of Eugenio Duarte:

General Assembly, Orlando FL 8.0 (live from the floor)

I’m sitting in a General Assembly plenary session right now as an observer. Four individuals from the NEI District were nominated for General Superintendent (wow!).

Saturday I had a chance to go fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. Fishing is a favorite hobby of mine. I don’t think I’ve ever blogged on it. We were fishing at the Cocoa Beach Pier. It was a great deal if you have your own pole (otherwise you have to rent). Five dollars to fish from the pier for the whole day too. The good about fishing this way is that you don’t have to worry about getting any type of out-of-state fishing license or anything like that (they can be pretty salty too! J).

So, how did the fishing go? Well, it’s the ocean. You never know what you will get. I caught a stingray, two sheepshead, and a saltwater catfish (that’s right, a catfish!). It was a blast! While we were fishing NASA launched a rocket with a satellite on it. I think we were five miles away. It took several seconds for the sound to hit us, but when it did it was awesome! Here are some fishing pics for you. The black and white fish is the sheepshead. Sorry, no pic of the stingray.

General Assembly, Orlando FL 7.0 (Last worship service)

It’s such an honor to be a part of a denomination that ordains women as ministers. During tonight’s service (this was the last worship service) we listened to G.S. Nina Gunter. She can preach! We closed the service with the march of the flags. All the nations where the Nazarene Church is, even the ones we can’t mention because of persecution (they were termed “Creative Access Areas”) were represented by their countrie's flag. People really liked it when the republic of Iraq was mentioned.

We were all given a small manila envelope at the beginning of the service and told to wait until we were told to open it. What was it? A rock with the scripture reference Joshua 3:5 on it. This passage reads,

Joshua told the people, "Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do amazing things among you."

From here we were challenged to go forward with our rocks if we would consecrate ourselves to the Lord and the official mission of the Church of the Nazarene (Mission = Go and make Christlike disciples of all the nations).

General Assembly, Orlando FL 6.0 (Sunday Morning Service)

A good Sunday morning service. I think there were over 25,000 people in attendance (I thought there were more). It was pretty full! The Orlando Convention Center is interesting because the place where we have our services is flat. Thankfully they have giant screens up to help you see. The 11 big screens help make all the seats pretty good seats. There was quite a bit of echo where I was sitting.

Paul Cunningham, retiring G.S., gave the sermon which was followed by communion. I think this was the largest crowd I have ever taken communion with. It's a special thing to take communion with such a large body of Christians. A little later I'll post some pics of our fishing trip we took last night to the Atlantic Ocean. It was a blast, literally! I'll explain more later.

Here's a pic I forgot to put in last time. Me and my good buddy John Wesley.

General Assembly, Orlando FL 5.0 (Great Friday service!)

(This post has been updated. See below.)

Last night at the worship service I listened to our G.S. Dr. Jerry Porter share his heart about discipleship. I like him the best out of our 6 GSs. Some say he is liberal, but I have not heard or read anything by him that suggests that. I think he's just aggressive and open to new and creative ways to reach and disciple people for Christ.

He is a big advocate of each person discipling someone and being discipled by someone. The best part of his message was the ending. He had several local pastors come up and asked if they were discipling someone. They said they were, so he had their disciples stand and come up with them. This was so we could see the difference one person can make when they disciple someone. There were at least a hundred people who came up with them. It was neat to see. We also broke into small groups and prayed for one another. I was prayed for and prayed with a couple of guys from the Caribbean Region. It was an awesome service!

As I reflect on the service last night one thing sticks in my mind. Dr. Porter asserted that discipling starts at home with the family. That will be something I will be thinking more and more about as a proud dad of two daughters. I'm not sure of how good of a job I'm doing at discipling my family. My wife does an incredible job at discipling our children. She knows how to communicate and teach truths to children in a way that is exciting for them. This is something she is really passionate about (Actually, right now at my home church she has a Childrens Ministries workshop going on that deals with how to disciple your children at home). What do I do? I read our girls Bible stories using various picture books and pray before meals and bedtime. I wonder if there is more I can do?

*Updated: On a strange sidenote: We had someone drown in our pool this morning between 5-6am. Our pool is right outside our room. The person was a 21 yr old male that worked at the hotel.

General Assembly, Orlando FL 4.0 (More from NYI Convention)

Here is your new Global NYI President (Mark Holcomb) in action.

Here's the view from where I was sitting at this Global Celebration service that followed our business session this morning.

They have 11 huge screens so you feel like you are sitting in the front row no matter where you sit. The picture is in HD too!

General Assembly, Orlando FL 3.0 (New location for NYC 2011)

Can you guess what city this is?

Hint: This is where the next NYC is?

Starts with an "L" and ends with a "ouisville".

General Assembly, Orlando FL 2.0 (New NYI President)

NYI just elected a new global NYI president this morning, Mark Holcomb.

General Assembly, Orlando FL 1.0

Been in meetings down here at Orlando, FL. The Church of the Nazarene is having General Assembly down here (it actually starts next week) and I'm a NYI delegate to the NYI Convention (started Wednesday). It's been fun and a learning experience for me. I've been to General Assembly before, but not as a delegate and not to NYI Convention.

Our NYI meetings are quite unique in that we have several different countries (e.g., India, Germany) present with us during these meeting via Skype. Every once in a while we cut to a shot of them using the big screens and we all wave hello to each other. It's pretty neat technonology but I think there are some things they need to work out, and I'm sure they will, for next Assembly.

I'll update more tomorrow with pics.

Entire Sanctification Part 2

Part 2
I apologize to those of you who would like to read this article. I tried finding it online to put in a link to it and couldn’t. If you are interested in reading it I can email it to you. Below is part 2 to the article. In this section Dr. Leth covers holiness and “secondness,” holiness and love, and responsible grace.

4) Holiness and “Secondness”
We should understand entire sanctification as “theologically normative rather than experientially normative.” Theologically normative means this is what happens. Experientially normative explains how we may experience it. The problem with the latter, as Dr. Leth points out, is that people make their experiences the norm for everyone else. If someone didn’t experience it in the way you did then they didn’t really experience it at all. This should be avoided and we should have some room to wiggle around within the various ways a person can experience entire sanctification. Because we don’t all experience it in the same way.

5) Holiness and Love
Really being able to love means first of all that we love God. This is what we were primarily created for. I would agree.

This section was where I felt a little confused. I don’t think Augustine had it right when he said the fundamental human problem is that our love is misdirected. Isn’t the fundamental human problem the lack, or loss, of love in us that vanished after the Fall? I’m not one to argue with Augustine (because our mere human love is misdirected from God and others to only ourselves), but isn’t it hard to misdirect something you don’t possess?

Paul writes in Romans 5, “God has poured out his love (agape) into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” This love is not from us, it is from God. Isn’t this why the writers of the New Testament used the noun agape to describe Godly love? They had to come up with a totally different word for God’s love. Isn’t there a distinction between human love and the love of God? Isn’t this what entire sanctification is all about? Our love does become ‘perfect love’ (to borrow from Wesley) in entire sanctification because God fills us with His love. Harald Lindstrom points out that this is the chief mark of John Wesley’s view of entire sanctification (from his book Wesley & Sanctification, p 139). This is how we fulfill Jesus’ words to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect (Matt 5:48).

This section was fuzzy and confusing. Maybe I was misinterpreting the message here, my ignorance makes that a frequent occurrence, but there was no talk at all about the distinctiveness of God’s love and the role it plays in entire sanctification. On a similar side note there isn’t really any mention in the 2005-2009 Nazarene Manual of entire sanctification being all about God filling us with His love. Why is that? How could we change and communicate that better?

6) Responsible grace
Dr. Leth believes in the believer working with the Holy Spirit but he affirms that spiritual formation is, “first and finally, God’s work.” I don’t believe practicing the spiritual disciplines will entirely sanctify us (neither does Leth) but they may help a person get closer to that crisis moment. I think Dr. Leth agreed with this. This is the amazing thing about grace. If God’s Spirit is working in us, all things will be worked together for the good of those who love Him.

What are your thoughts on this?

New Baby & Entire Sanctification part 1

Thursday Thinking is back! My wife and I had our second child this week. What a beautiful thing! This was my first time to experience a C-section (hers too!). We both survived. A beautiful baby girl was the result; she was a bit on the heavy side, 9 lbs. 1oz.

This summer Nazarenes from around the world will be gathering for General Assembly in Orlando, FL. One of the big issues to be discussed will be Article X on entire sanctification. Comments and whispers have been popping up over the possible changes to this second work of grace that might or might not happen. Dean of the School of Theology at Olivet Nazarene University, Dr. Carl Leth, has written an article to prepare us for what’s possibly in store at General Assembly.

So, here is one measly little associate pastor’s thoughts on Carl M. Leth’s article titled Trajectories: Identifying Key Issues for Article X (Article 10 which is Entire Sanctification). This paper was emailed out to all pastors on my District (NEI). As I read through it several times some thoughts came to my head. There will be two parts to this, so come back next week for part 2.

Overall, Dr. Leth made some great points. Here’s a recap:

Intro and why language matters
- Language matters. Language does matter and Dr. Leth was right on the money when he said, “language conveys meaning and, inescapably, values.” I think Nietzsche himself said the only way we could ever get rid of God in our society is to get rid of language. Language sets boundaries and helps us explain truths. We need it! I agree.

Section 1) Our distinct Understanding of Holiness
- I would agree that our understanding of what entire sanctification does in a person is crucial and the place to start. If we are not clear here, we will have all kinds of problems. Though we may explain to each other in different terms (e.g., sanctified, entirely sanctified, filled with the Spirit, baptized with the Spirit, fully surrendered, etc.) we have to be crystal clear in our understanding of just what it is we are talking about. We need a solid, consistent, and precise definition to help us understand entire sanctification. We need something in place we can keep coming back to that is unique and distinct in its definition of entire sanctification. What do you mean when you tell me you were, “filled with the Spirit”? Is that the same thing as “entirely sanctified,” or “baptized with the Spirit”? Is your understanding the same as my understanding? If so, we can move forward. I think this was the point Dr. Leth was making.

2) Baptism of the Holy Spirit
- Entire sanctification is not the starting point for when we receive the Spirit. This happened when we began our life with the Spirit, when we first confessed, repented, and believed in Jesus Christ as God’s Son and Savior.
- Entire sanctification is the point where we have the fullness of the Holy Spirit in us.

3) Trinitarian Language
- I think Dr. Leth makes a good argument for why we need to talk about the Holy Spirit’s role in the sanctification process and not refer to it in generic Trinitarian language. It seems most people have a hard enough time believing in the Person Jesus Christ who took on human flesh and dwelt among us. How much harder it is to believe in a Person like the Holy Spirit whom we cannot see. We do not want to diminish the role of the third Person of the Trinity by excluding Him in our conversations about His work in our lives. If we talk of the process of sanctification in terms of the work of the Trinity as a whole, we diminish the role of the Spirit and His personhood.

Any thoughts on this?

Parts 4, 5, 6 will be next week.