Kanye West Feat Daft Punk Kaolin Kaori Muraji

A vision of Tom Cruise angrily declaring, “You can’t handle the truth!” in a crowded courtroom enters my mind as I write this piece.

Because, in my mind, this is what the world declares to the church.

Isn’t this the other way around? Isn’t the evangelical church today the last vestige of absolute truth in a world clouded in relativism and pluralism?

I guess so.

However, does it matter? In the words of Pontius Pilate to Jesus “What is truth?” Is truth a series of propositions that we agree to that have no bearing on how we live and conduct our lives? Or is truth something that we live and move and breathe in?

The answer to this question, in my view, is “Yes” and “Yes”.

However, it is the latter yes that carries infinitely more weight than the former. In the context of the church today, this has been completely ignored. Churches throughout America are littered with people raising their hands sings hymns such as “Come Now Long-Expected Jesus”, while forgetting to realize that he ‘s already here.

He’s that homeless guy begging for a nickel in downtown Chicago.

He’s that single mother whose loosing her mind trying to take care of her kids in crime infested inner city Baltimore.

Didn’t Jesus say something about the way you treat the least of these is equivalent to the way you treat me?

Yet many of us inside the church turn a blind eye to the suffering and hurting that is going on in the inner cities of our country and we think the truth is something that is tidy, looks nice, and drives a decent car. We fail to realize that, if Jesus were in the U.S. today, he would gravitate to those areas of our country that take the full brunt of the truth of reality: our inner cities. He would face the truth head on much unlike the way his delusional “body” acts today.

He would face the truth because He is Truth. He sees things for what they are.

And until we follow Christ in this regard we will all continue to blindly sing and raises our hands singing hymns like “Blessed be Your Name”, while many inhabitants of our inner cities are patiently waiting for their turn.

We at Not The Average Ministries wanted to give you, the readers, a look into who we are as people. You read the articles and at times work up the courage to comment and start a dialogue with us, all the while knowing nothing about who we are as people.

This being said, we offer you this video as an opportunity to come along with Matt Addington and David Miller to Catalyst as they work the Relevant Magazine booth. Enjoy this inside look at some of the people that pour into you every week.

Upon my bookshelf sit two Hot Wheels cars still within their packaging. Now these aren’t the crazy cars with the three wheels or the rocket thruster engines, these are the scaled down versions of cars you could actually buy, had you the money. One of them, is a 2006 Series 350Z. It’s mat black with red and grey company endorsements all over the front and sides. One of my particular favorites is the “Rotora,” endorsement positioned on the hood above the Nissan emblem. It just makes the car look fierce.

The other car however is my favorite.

This one has less pizzazz, yet strikes my fancy the most. This car is a 2007 Series Volkswagon Golf GTI. It has a shiny dark blue finish accompanied with a black hood. There isn’t a single endorsement on it. It’s straight car, chrome, two-prong five spoke wheels, sunroof, dual exhaust and it’s even lowered, that is, as much lowered as a Hot wheels car can get. Yet, there upon my bookshelf, my two favorite cars collect dust.

I began to ask myself why I have them. There they sit in their packages glistening with all their tiny car might with no nicks or scratches. They’ve never been touched by another human hand outside the factory. Their little wheels have never touch another surface or even been fully rotated, not once. One might easily argue in my favor saying that I’m a collector and I wouldn’t want to depreciate their value but the truth is that I’m not. So why do I have these? The answer started to come to me as I looked at them and pondered a while.

They’re my dream cars.

The fact of the matter is that I may never experience what it’s like to drive either in my lifetime. As a college student right now just trying to get by, it’s hard to see myself with anything other than what I already have and I highly doubt anyone reading this is filling a bucket of money to send to me. (By the way ladies my car is a black 00’ Cavalier, “mer-ow”) These cars are something for me to dream about, they’re a goal, something to push me. They serve as a reminder of the American dream. There. That answer didn’t seem so hard to come up with. But it wasn’t enough for me. There was more lurking in the depths of my heart that I continued to examine.

It’s true that the main purpose of the cars are to serve as a reminder to me, though they are yet to serve the purpose they were intended for. Cars like these are meant to glide around a track bigger than the room containing it. Cars like these should be scratched and dirty. Cars like these should be sent through the Hot Wheels Car Wash and slammed up against the wall of the “hand drier,” at the end of it (They never stand in the slot). Cars like these should be in the pocket of an excited youngster on his way to grandma’s house. Cars like these should be kept in a special box ready to be played with. Cars like these should reveal who Grandpa was and what it truly meant to be a child, young and free, where imagination took you across the stars and back again.

These cars are apparently capable of so much more. They have the potential to be joy for someone, a type of kinetic joy.
All of this, yet “upon my bookshelf sit two Hot Wheels cars still within their packaging.”

As you look at your own life, are you doing what you were meant for? Have you allowed God to strip you of your packaging or do you sit upon a shelf collecting dust? Have you let God take that potential joy you contain and make it kinetic joy? In my short lifetime I’ve learned that what God really desires is for us to be taken out of our plastic mold and played with. When was the last time you’ve touch another surface or human hand? When’s the last time you’ve been scratched and gotten dirty being what you were made for? We were made for kinetic joy and to bring joy to others. We were made to experience freedom from our man-made housing. We were made to experience the gifts of the Father’s hands.

What were you made for?

Upon my bookshelf sit two Hot Wheels cars….

Steven Mesanko
Not The Average Ministries

I have this issue with slowing down. My friends and family are constantly on me about it. The thing is, I am easily impassioned. If I see a need or a cause, I want to be right in the mix to try and meet the need. I am never satisfied just having a supporting roll.

As of now I have found about 5 causes I believe need me.

Unfortunately, I cannot effectively, truly commit to all five causes. I know I am not the exception, and that this is a common problem for people in ministry. We over commit. I believe this is the reason that so many amazing causes are dropped to the side. Their key players get burned out. If you’re in any sort of ministry you know exactly what I’m talking about. You feel obligated to get involved in every good cause that comes your way.

STOP!

God has called us to specific things and given us specific talents.

I work at a school for kids that have been kicked out of public school and or arrested. Every morning we have staff devotions. One of the teachers that has been there for over 10 years, encouraged us one morning not to over commit ourselves. She told us about how bad she feels when her church small group is going to do something and she has to tell them that she cannot be apart. It’s not that the cause is not good enough for her, but that she needs to focus on the ministry that God has her in, the kids He has placed in her classroom.

She told us this as an encouragement. I could see that the other teachers took it as just that, but I was convicted. I knew that I was not as affective with those kids as I could be because of how thin I spread myself.

As God was working on my heart this week about taking the time to slow down and let Him sort through the things I was involved, stripping away the things He had not called me to, I got sick. God could see that this was the only way to get my attention. So I find myself stuck in bed with no television, my friends are at the beach and the Internet keeps going in and out.

Normally, this would drive me crazy.

Rather than go crazy, I’ve been taking this time to talk with God. It took Him confining me to bed with no distractions to get me to talk with Him. I guess He knows me better than I do. I’ve heard that in the past, but God loves to remind me of it.

So, here I sit with my chicken noodle soup to my right and tea to my left, trying to remind you to slow down and reevaluate the things that are taking your time before God slows you down.

You’ll thank me later.

-David Miller
Not The Average Ministries

“Work is the simple prayer of our hands”

Sounds like a fortune cookie phrase, doesn’t it?

I thought so too the moment a close friend of mine uttered those words during a pretty intense conversation. However, during the past couple of weeks, this quote has been floating around in my brain, and I haven’t been able to shake it. So, since shaking this phrase has proved itself futile, I decide to try to unpack it.

I have seen a separation between prayer and work in my life and I have no idea where it came from. Upon hearing about friends that have needs I’ve realized that I am way more apt to say some phrase like “I’ll pray for you” rather than “How can I help you?” Admittedly, I do this because to don’t want to have any of the blame if my friends need isn’t met. I want to be able to say, “I prayed for you, (which is code for “I did my part”) and I hope your situation gets better” (which is also code for “God needs to hurry up and do His part”).

See a problem?

If we are followers of Christ in the sense that we partner with him to bring about his kingdom, work and prayer should overlap at some point. Along with a fervent prayer on our lips they should be an ardent work of our hands to passionately show the reality of God in our lives AND in the lives our fellow man. So, when we pray for those in need without working to meet those needs, we demonstrate that God is a reality to us but we fail to translate this reality to our fellow man. To put this in another way, we fail to show that God is working to meet their needs and that he is using US to do so.

Therefore prayer without work is incomplete prayer.

Work, in this sense, acts as the final punctuation on our prayers with God. We can pray all day for the homeless in our community, for the single moms who are having a tough time raising their kids, or for the college student who’s having a rough time making their ends meet. But until we off our knees to meet those needs, our prayers will always be lacking. This is not taking anything away from the power of God to meet needs. This is a testimony to the fact that he has empowered Christians everywhere to be the conduits of this power. The work of servanthood unleashes it.

There comes a time where we all need to get off of our knees and go do something about the prayers that we’ve been praying about for some time now. And, if you’re anything like me, this has been long overdue.

I would love some discussion on this, so leave a comment and lets talk….

Eric Saunders
NotTheAverage Ministries

I recently came upon an article of particular interest to me. The heading of this essay would have baited even the most cautious of readers: The Fall of the Godmongers.

What did it say? You read it right. It said The Fall of the Godmongers. Now we have all heard words like “whoremonger” and “warmonger”, but only if you attended a church that read from the KJV of the bible or you were at an anti-war rally with people who frequent such diction. So, like the overly curious and opinionated person I am, I clicked on the link that bread-crumbed me to the article. Here is an excerpt:

“Do you know this clenched and panicky group? Of course you do. They’re the throngs of mega-church lemmings Karl Rove masterfully manipulated and rallied and whored to Bush’s very narrow advantage in two elections.

They’re the ones who’ve made all the headlines and influenced all sorts of laws and national policy changes lo, this past half-decade concerning everything from stem cell research to gay marriage to evolution, sanitized school textbooks to failed abstinence programs to RU-486 restrictions to silly anti-science rhetoric, the ones who gasped in horror at a woman’s bare nipple and made a disgusting mockery of Terri Schiavo and actually applauded when John Ashcroft spent $8,000 of taxpayer money to throw some heavy drapery over the shamefully exposed breasts of the bronze (female) Spirit of Justice statue in the Hall of Justice. And so on.”

I can hear conservative teeth gritting right now.

While he does sound a bit pretentious and bitter, he goes on in his article to specifically clarify who these “religious zealots” are and just what societal and governmental problems they have caused. Among the grievances he lists against this group of people, two stuck out to me:

1. The fact that many churches support and are involved with political leaders and movements.
2. The audacity of political figures impressing their values and morals upon the general public.

Now, this article was posted on Newsvine (www.newsvine.com, link this Colin, please) and after each seeded post, there is a discussion board where people weigh in, state their opinions, and often times end up birthing interesting and informative debates. Now usually I prepare myself for the onslaught of neo-liberal tongue lashing for religion that would typically ensue; but this time I was in for an unexpected change. Here are some of the comments posted:

“…The decline of right wing Christianity is due to only one thing: the hypocrisy of the followers and leaders of that sect of Christianity.”

“I too was once a neo-con Republican, and a jingo to boot. I also voted for Bush the first time around. I guess you could call us Republican apostates. I have since become more humanistic and much less nationalistic in my views, and I consider it wisdom. The destruction on such a massive scale that we’re witnessing these days cannot be justified by any belief system I know of that makes any claim of being beneficent.”

“…He is not talking about all Christians just the far right ones.”

While this was part of along discussion, do you see what people (mostly non-Christian) are saying? They are making a distinction between right-wing-ultra-conservative-republicans and true “Christians”.

My mind immediately went to these two questions:

1. Should we as Christians involve ourselves in the promotion of political candidates and political ideals?
2. If the rest of the world is making a distinction between “false Christians” and “true Christians”, then what must we do to rise above this negative perception that has tainted our culture’s view of Christ?

This article is meant to spur on thought and discussion and to help us see that the good being done by the remnant of Christians has not gone unnoticed, and that maybe the damage done by those who have used the platform of Christianity to further their agendas is not irreparable.

Matthew Addington
NotTheAverage Ministries

Since moving to Orlando, I’ve had the opportunity to serve with a ministry called “Home Sweet Homeless”. You may remember reading about my encounter with a man named Rick a few articles ago; that life-changing meeting took place with this ministry at one of their monthly potlucks. To be honest with you, I was sort of guilted into attending my first Home Sweet Homeless event. I was checking out my friend Matt Mackey at an open mic and walked into a conversation Matt was having with Mitchell. Turns out Jordan-17 and two friends, David Blackwell-19 and Ben Kuykendall-19, were organizing their first HSH event and invited Matt and I to come.

I was amazed by the response of young people who came to feed the homeless that first day. I met men and women in high school, college and a few of us in our twenties to thirties. As I talked to the people who came, I found that not all of them were Christians, just people who desired to help their fellow man. Little by little we invited the homeless we encountered to sit and join us for a meal. I can’t tell you how amazing it was to see upper and middleclass young people serving the local homeless.

If you ever want to be broken, watch a 19 year-old in $150 jeans make a plate of food for a homeless man.

Over the last few months we have been to the same park twice for our potlucks and groups have made their way back to simply talk with the friends they’ve made. David was telling me about a man he was walking with that said, “there are places to get food, and anyone can do that. The difference is you kids spend the day with us and talk with us. That’s what the adults don’t get.”

To be honest, that’s what I didn’t get. A man or woman wants food and shelter, sure, but it turns out they crave interaction even more.

I sat down recently in an interview with Jordan, David, and Ben to ask why they started this ministry.

“[We’d] never really talked to a homeless person before and wanted to hear their stories,” said David. Jordan interjects, “People are walking past these people without even another thought and even worse, treating like crap people that have stories that may change their lives.” “What better place than Orlando, having the 3rd largest homeless population in all of Florida?”, Ben says.

In looking at these three I see the difference between them and myself: they put their passion for the homeless in this community to action and I am sitting at my computer writing about them.

I made the mistake of calling HSH a homeless ministry, and was promptly corrected, “We look at it as a ministry to upper and middle class young people as much, if not more, than to the homeless. Our desire is to ultimately become a bridge to the homeless. It is time that we went to them.”

My prayer is that the story of Jordan, David and Ben, founders of HSH, will cause the rest of us to search out our passions and become active in implementing them in our society. I have no intention of you reading this and starting a homeless ministry in your community (unless that ends up being your passion). But I do desire to see you spark change in your own way and have a reaching impact that the world will notice.

For those of you that are interested in hearing more about Home Sweet Homeless, check out their Myspace by clicking here. They have high school and college campus clubs starting in local Orlando schools and will be branching out into other communities soon. Who knows, maybe you can be the catalyst for that to happen in your hometown? There are also opportunities to donate and become more involved in what HSH is doing right now.

-David Miller
NotTheAverage Ministries

Intro: Recap and Reframing

Having it made

Was it worth it?

The cost of our own direction (Genesis 3.8-9)

Playing Hide and Seek

Lost: Finding your way back home

Transition

The Lost and Looking

My own interactions with “the lost”

Why I would suck at being God (Genesis 3. 8-9)

The Psalmist (Psalm 139.1-10)

Conclusion: What would you say?

Steve Mesanko
NotTheAverage Ministries

Subscribe to this Podcast:(click below)

Click here to download “Framed: The Ultimate Seeker”

The other day I had a “Guess Who?’ moment.

(In case some of you all out there aren’t familiar with the movie “Guess Who?” it’s a movie about a black family who is not too thrilled when their daughter brings home a white boyfriend. The whole movie chronicled the clash between the daughter, father and her boyfriend)

While sitting around watching ESPN with some guys, we all got the same text message that a mutual friend of ours is cooking dinner on Sunday, so we better come ready to eat.

You should have heard the shouts of jubilation coming from our apartment!

Then she added a disclaimer: I invited some co-workers who are gay so be on your best behavior.

This, needless to say, sparked some good conversation and posed some thought provoking questions among us.

How are we to act around people who are much different than us?

Does one sacrifice personal convictions for the sake of tolerance and acceptance? If not, how does a Christian interact with the outside world?

Throughout history, Christians everywhere have answered these questions in a couple of ways. Some have said, “Yes, we should sacrifice our convictions so that others will feel accepted by us.” However, this attitude erases the distinction that we have as followers of Christ and, while you may have a new friend, you fail to make Christ attractive.

In reaction to this, many Christians have let the pendulum swing too wide in the opposite direction. In an effort of maintain a “Christian distinction” they say that we should wear our conviction on our sleeves and let the chips fall where they may. These people fail to realize that voicing convictions all the time is kind of like talking about your girlfriend non-stop: do it too much and people don’t want to hang out with you anymore. This attitude does give you a certain distinction; however in this case, you fail to make yourself attractive.

One of the key struggles to the Christian life is maintaining your convictions but still being approachable. We, being New Testament Christians who follow the example of Jesus Christ, should live our lives struggling with this last statement.

Jesus gives a great example in Matthew 9, “And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold many tax collectors and sinners CAME and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.

They came to Him.

Jesus had convictions, yet remained attractive to sinners.

Eric Saunders
NotTheAverage Ministries

In life there is a constant dichotomy between what you want and what you need. I wish I could explain the number of painstakingly dreary conversations that I have had with people I love this week (and a few people that I barely even know). “Rut” is the best word that comes to mind when I try to place diction on this seemingly pandemic circumstance of worry and anxiety.

I have whined to people, they have whined back. I have listened to sob story after sob story only to come to the cure-all solution that we as people need to suck it up.

Now that I have sufficiently prefaced my mood as of late, I shall continue my discourse on life currently and how we can make it better.

For the past two month since my initial departure from Lynchburg, Virginia and to the city of Orlando (which has more miserable humidity than anything I have ever experienced, but the people are quite nice) I have been working day after day at Relevant Media Group, trying to make a name for myself in photography on the side, and attempting to snag an ever so needed tan by the pool when feasible. The downside is that I feel worn thin.

Historically, I love to console and offer practical advice to friends and family (working in an acute psychiatric hospital will do that to you after two years). But recently I find myself seeking counsel more and more as the weeks drag on. Why is this? It is because the times when I need to get on my hands in knees in front of my Maker and thank Him for the countless blessings He has afforded to my life, I instead spend time conjecturing about “how life is so hard and there must be this mystical answers to all of my problems if I just think hard enough.”

I know some of you are in the same spot I am (job or not) and let me tell you something: if you want to understand where your place is in this world, walk outside your door and feed a homeless person.

Go to church and mean it when you sing those words.

Stop expecting God to take care of your physical needs when you cannot even take care of your own heart.

I only say any of these things because when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror I want to see a man with a purpose, and a man who is changed. I say these things out of love for the people who have poured their lives into me, and for the benefit of those who are hurting.

Your God has not placed greatness into your heart only to see you live in squalor. Be thankful, be steadfast, be graceful in all you do, and most importantly, be loving for no reason. It is the greatest purpose you have in life.

Matthew Addington
NotTheAverage Ministries