As we set out into the new year and the second year of the pandemic, we here at Rock Creek Church in Portland, Oregon have been asking ourselves the question, “Who are we becoming?”. We know that if you’re not intentionally becoming something, you’re unintentionally becoming something else. The surest way to become what you don’t want to be is to live unintentionally, accidentally falling into tomorrow. We’ve seen a lot of growth online in the last year and we wanted to do some work towards describing the ship our new friends and neighbors are jumping on board. I figured, since many people who read this blog aren’t attending our Sunday morning live stream, I’d adapt my recent preach for the blog in hopes that these values will spur hunger and vision within you to intentionally become who you were always made to be: you. Fair warning, these values I’m going to attempt to articulate are not laws. If I express value for something in one direction, that doesn’t necessarily mean I have no value for the opposite direction at the same time. So much of a life lived by faith requires tension to thrive. The goal of articulating this vision for this culture is to empower authentic, deep connection and authentic vulnerable community and to partner with what Love Himself is doing: warring against and tearing down everything that stands between us and love. This is just a start on the conversation of our core values and what we’re building here.
The first aspect of the culture that we’re endeavoring to produce here is normalizing kindness to oneself. Probably the singular thing that has caused the most radical breakthrough in my life was when I was given permission to be kind to myself. Isn’t it crazy that I had never even been introduced to the idea before I was 33 years old? I had lived well into adulthood before coming across the notion that all of my discipline, all of my self-criticism, all of my warring against myself was actually counter intuitive to producing the fruit of the Spirit in me. It just had never occurred to me that alignment with the nature of God towards me could be allowed. God was allowed to like me because He’s so much more good than me but surely I wasn’t allowed to like myself or especially not allowed to ever think I’d done a good job at something. I certainly wasn’t allowed to have compassion for myself towards my past “failings”. I came to realize through exposure to this idea that truly, the only way forward into my destiny in God, into my identity in God, into the life and life more abundantly that Jesus talked about was to align myself with the love of God towards me and to agree with God’s opinion of me that I am worthy of being loved and therefore, my duty to myself is to champion myself, protect myself and yes, love myself well. It became the great core value in my life that I was going to do my best to never withhold love from myself again. If I could learn to love myself unconditionally like God loves me, I will better be able to understand and receive that unconditional love that He is always, always, always lavishing out on me and for me and to me. So, the culture that we’re trying to produce here at RCC is one where we, as a community, normalize kindness to the self and make it abnormal to be down on ourselves or believe that we’re unlovable. We are kind to ourselves.
The second cultural phenomenon we’re trying to produce here is a community whose highest allegiance is to Heaven. In the first century when the Romans took over the world, the occupied towns were required to normalize people saying the phrase, “Ceasar is Lord” to show their submission to their new subjugators. Shortly after Jesus’ resurrection, the first Christians began using the phrase, “Jesus is Lord”, to articulate that they had a higher allegiance than to the greatest political power in the world. Their allegiance was to Jesus before it was to Rome. That distinction put them in mortal danger. That’s part of the reason the early church grew so explosively. They were a cultural phenomenon, allegiant to something grander and greater, something that far surpassed the glory of Rome. This value is more applicable in certain geographical regions than others these days where radicalized nationalism has hijacked faith. But we reject the notion of a blonde haired, blue eyed Jesus firing two M16 machine guns into the air while riding a bald eagle that’s got it’s talons controlling a Harley Davidson motorcycle all while wearing a tunic made from the Stars and Stripes. We recognize that Jesus was and is no more for our democracy than He was for Rome’s empire or Jewish independence. Neither the favor nor judgement of God can be produced through radical nationalism any more than one can produce orange juice from an apple. You can’t get the kingdom of heaven out of an earthly throne. With that said, the kingdom of Heaven is advancing all the time gaining momentum. So we pay attention to where we see reversion or decay and we recognize that the kingdom of Heaven does not revert or decay. I’m really not trying to criticize or decry anybody else’s faith. I’m just saying that for me and my house, our highest allegiance is to Heaven and we don’t believe any nation on the earth or any political party anywhere is truly in line with the heart of God for how humanity should be ruled. I want to be like the early church in their fear of the Lord which when you boil it down is really easy to articulate in one word: integrity. I know God has deep value for obedience in the secret place where nobody else will ever see or know. That’s how you build a history with God and history with God is where spiritual authority comes from.
The third core value in the Barkman household is that true freedom only exists within responsibility. There’s been this idea propagated in the West that freedom means being able to do whatever might come into your mind. This is a counterfeit version of freedom and actually leads people into bondage. In 1 Corinthians 6:12 Paul says everything is permissible but not everything is helpful. He goes on to say that his line of delineation is that he won’t be mastered by anything. When we submit ourselves to the notion that freedom is shirking off responsibility to our fellow man, we actually create a state of bondage, disconnection and chaos within our lives and community. Calling something freedom when it’s outside of responsibility isn’t freedom. It’s rebellion. So we have immense value for freedom and we recognize that freedom requires responsibility.
Now we get into core values that are a lot more fun and maybe less confrontational in their nature. We’re focused on the presence of God. In Acts 10, Peter says a profound thing. He says God is not a respecter of persons. That doesn’t mean that God’s orientation towards us each is disrespectful. It means that if you hear or read a story of God interacting with a human being in a certain way, you can be sure that God is willing and is actually desiring to interact with you in that way too. You just have to be willing to make the same decisions towards obedience in the secret place that those people did. Sounds easy right? It’s not. Moses spent years banished to some farm in the desert after being raised in the court of the Pharaoh of Egypt. Years before he ever encountered the burning bush and even harder stuff between the burning bush and the parting of the Red Sea. But it’s stories like we see in Exodus 20 where even though everyone around Moses chose to stand far off from how God was offering to encounter them, Moses approached the dark cloud where God was. This story and others birth a deep hunger pain inside of me to experience and know God more. Ezekiel saw the actual throne of God manifesting physically before him in the earth in Ezekiel 1. The language he uses is like the best he can come up with because Science hasn’t even contemplated the idea of a fourth spacial dimension yet so he’s just sitting there with his jaw on the floor writing, “Uhhhhh ok like I see a wheel like, inside of a wheel and they’re moving like into the inside and the outside of each other at the same time.” That’s the best way he could describe it! Hilarious! Try googling, “4th dimensional circle”, and check out what it looks like when a 4th dimensional circle is rolling. It’s mind boggling. But it’s these unfathomable encounters that I’m so hungry for. In Acts 9 Paul is knocked off his donkey and blinded and radically transformed by a dramatic encounter with King Jesus. Up to that day all of Paul’s zeal and effort had been pointed at a misunderstanding of God but God took that offering anyway and revealed the truth of who He really is to Paul. Even this encounter that cost Paul seemingly everything drives hunger within my soul to experience and encounter and know the King of Heaven to greater and greater degrees. We are ravenously, ferociously focused on His presence because the presence of God IS Him. We love His presence because His presence is Him. Everything we do is to the end of cultivating and attracting His presence and His will in the earth.
Another value that’s becoming one of our core values is Creating Healthy Family. So much heartache is caused through humans having awful relational tools and so we spend a lot of time focusing on just that. For me personally, I can easily recognize that I went to ministry school with awful communication tools. I lived all of my relationships largely through unspoken expectations and couldn’t figure out how to get my needs met and how to not get continuously hurt in every relationship. The ideas I was exposed to in ministry school and since in my pursuit of greater emotional health and intelligence have revolutionized my life and my relationships. Life is so much better with better relational tools that when we talk about what kind of community we want to build it just becomes extraordinarily necessary to spend a great deal of time giving our community powerful communication and relational tools. If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time you’ll know that many of my posts are all about exactly this. I’ve found that people who’ve been wounded in relationship can only be healed within relationship. I’m called to bring the lonely into a family like my Father and so part of what I’m going to do is teach the lonely how to do family healthily! So we value brave communication, vulnerability, acceptance and integrity! We’re creating healthy family.
Speaking of family and kind of in closing, here’s a value that became one of my core values that has allowed me to remain and covenant with the body of Christ in all its expressions and forms. We don’t gather around agreement. We gather around family. Gathering around agreement is the only form of religious community most people have ever seen. For some of us, our parents left certain churches because they had a disagreement on one point of theology. For some of us we’ve just been towing the company line, believing whatever the pastor of the church we grew up in told us to believe and then when we hit adulthood and surviving in the world required a more complex model of the universe than what we’d been given, we just threw the baby out with the bathwater and said, welp, I guess nothing’s true. That core value of gathering around agreement creates an environment where nobody can ever be truly known to any kind of depth. It creates an environment where every member of the community constantly needs to express how they’re in agreement with the community in so many different ways all the time. Otherwise, their friends may not feel safe to be friends with them. This is the expression of community I grew up in and I’m just never willing to do that again. It’s pointless. Human beings need attention, affection and significance and if they’re never safe enough to be truly seen by anyone, they won’t get any of that from what we’re building. So, we gather around family. That means we gather around fathers and mothers. It also means that as we mature we recognize that fathers and mothers are human beings too. There was a quote from a video game I played last year where the protagonist was very disappointed with his father figure. The father figure said, “Children expect perfection from their elders.” That blew my mind. Gathering around agreement requires perfection from everyone or else they’ll be ostracized or worse. Gathering around Fathers and Mothers makes room for disagreement to exist without necessarily causing disconnection. For this to even exist it requires brave communication and people who will covenant with each other. Connection like that creates community that isn’t easily shaken and that’s really what we’re going after with our lives. That’s what I’m going after with my life. I want to build a community of people who are free and responsible, radically in love with Jesus, authentically integrous. We’re here to connect people with God so deeply they’re transformed to thrive in relationships and positively influence the world.
Thanks for reading! If you like what you read here, feel free to join us for our Sunday Live Stream service every Sunday at 10am Pacific time! We’re on Facebook live on our page, we’re on YouTube or you can just go to http://www.rockcreek.church
Bless you!
The Weirdo Christian 