James MacDonald - Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs For. What Every Church Can Be.

To the people of

Harvest Bible Chapel

Past, present, and future

Who have given a season of their lives

To serve Christ among us.

And to Harvest Bible Chapel pastors

And their congregations around the world.

Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence.

Isaiah 64:1

Contents

READ THIS FIRST

Several years ago now, a personal friend and member of our church was a big star with Morgan Stanley. Expressing incredible generosity, he flew my wife, Kathy, and me with two other couples to Hawaii for his fortieth birthday celebration. If Christianity ever gets its own mecca, I would recommend this island paradise, because the beauty and majesty of our Creator God is over every shoulder every moment in Hawaii. I have friends who pastor in Hawaii, and I doubt they will get more than a shack in heaven having been so greatly rewarded here on earth.

One morning while we were there, birthday boy Al rushed us all out of bed at 4:15 a.m. so we could cram into a cold van and hurry to the top of a volcano on Maui. Our goal was to see the sun rise, then, raincoat-clad, ride our bicycles down through the clouds just in time for breakfast, served by those who got a whole nights sleep. Can I just have a root canal? I protested, bouncing along in the back of the van as the glory of creation hid behind the darkness of night.

With early morning still waiting for sunlight, we crawled carefully from our vehicles and inched toward the crater edge and a cauldron of boiling, flaming orange lava. I had no idea and was not prepared at all for what was coming. First, in a sliver, then in a spectacular display of deep-red sky, the sun, ninety-three million miles away, came into glorious view, illumining the hills far below, the beach on all sides, other islands in the distance, and the ocean endlessly in every direction. The crowd was hushed by the stunning revelation of awesome glory that left us gasping for air. For maybe thirty seconds, forty of us stood and stared with mouths gaping open at a beauty that left everyone speechless, except me. You know how preachers are. I had to ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name, so into the silence I shouted, Great is the Lord, the whole earth is full of His glory ! Even still, no one spoke as my voice echoed across the mouth of the volcano and the canyon below. Except one woman to my left, who in the perfect chipmunk voice continued the refrain and squeaked her agreement: Aaaaaameeeen! In that reality-revising moment, nothing mattered except the glory of God. I was engulfed by it, gladly reduced by it, wonderfully consumed by ita window-rattling, earth-shattering, life-altering encounter with the revealed glory of the God of the universe. And it stayed with me for the rest of the day, then the rest of the week. Even to this day, that experience is as clear to me as the moment it occurred almost fifteen years ago. God is massive, infinite, ineffable glory who dwells in unapproachable light, and I am happily the opposite.

A real encounter with the living God changes everything. First, it magnifies the Lord, and then it puts me and my ego and my sin and my burdens all in their rightful place.

That is what church is supposed to do and be. Not an encounter with the glory of God in creation but an encounter with God in a different, even more awesome way that only church can provide. However, church today as a weekly experience with the manifest glory of God is the greatest lack we face. The lost are not found because Gods glory is not revealed in church. Children wander because church is pathetically predictable or shamefully entertaining but hardly ever authentically God. Marriages flounder because arrogance grows unchecked in our hearts and is not weekly cut down by the pride-withering presence of almighty God. Church was never intended to be a place where we serve God to the exclusion of meeting with Him. What I felt that morning at the edge of the Hawaiian volcano is what we need to experience in church every week. We cannot survive spiritually without that corporate connection in heart, soul, mind, and strength with the One who made us. Thats what I mean by Vertical.

PEOPLE ARE DESPERATE

An emergency call, and I rush from my coziness into the dark community where the police have requested a chaplain. Arriving in minutes, I find the family imploding with grief, having just discovered their son hanging in the garage. In a moment of unshakable pain, he jumped off the ladder and into eternity. And I will never forget the look in their eyes when I asked why he hadnt called a church. Why would he do that?

Across town, tears pool on my kitchen table as an out-of-town guest feels the weight of his infidelity, despairing that his famished soul finds no refuge and that he had to board a plane to feel fellowship. Has your church tried to help you? And the Christian leader confesses he hasnt been to church in years.

Christians have a way of crouching in their own culture instead of penetrating the one they live in with the gospel. Too many migrate to a faith that elevates issue debate and substitutes a set of personal preferences for the glorious gospel. Even our evangelism can become winning people to our doctrinal persuasion or our denominational loyalty instead of reaching the people next door and on our street who have no direct access to what we know they need. I purposely chose to add this chaplaincy duty so I could stand frequently among those who are without God and without hope in this world. Looking into their eyes and seeing their blank-faced, numb despair is a reality check every church leader would benefit from. Our job is to get people to Jesus Christ and to get them back to Him in profound, life-altering ways every week. People need God desperately and not in drive-through-window doses or through disposable-diaper convenience. We need to be taken and shaken by the God who made us and forced to look up into the eternity racing upon us this moment. Deep within we long for the Father of all galaxies to fall on us weekly and take us to the mat with His full weight. Is that happening in your church? When was the last time you were gripped by the greatness of God?

Looking back to my younger years, I remember frequently suspending my expectation of fulfillment as I waited for what I believed to be optimal. Everything is going to be good when summer vacation arrives, or as soon as Christmas comes, when the family is back together, or when basketball season gets going, when I finally have a car that works, when I am sexually fulfilled in marriage, when I am out of college and into my calling, when I can when I get when I achieve when Life becomes a never-ending cyclical search for the missing piece that makes the picture perfect and ? We never quite know what is supposed to come next. Some of us are quicker than others to conclude with finality that no configuration of relationship, possession, or experience can give what only a Vertical experience with God can provide.

Church must be about helping people discover and experience that, fifty-two weeks a year, every year for the rest of their lives. No personal quiet time, no Christian book, no community or small group or service can substitute for the absence of God coming down to meet with His church corporately. And its about time that we stopped accepting substitutes. When God announced to Moses that He was abandoning His stubborn people on the path to the Promised Land, Moses highlighted something the church must come back to: Is it not in Your going with us that we are distinct among all the peoples of the earth? Apart from the revealed presence of God in the midst of the church, we are just the rotary club without music, or the boy scouts without fire.