The Catch Ministry was incorporated in 2012 as a CyberChurch when very few recognized the digital dimension could provide faith-based experiences. But people like Peter Herschend, George Barna, JD Schlieman, and Michael McCausland recognized the need to focus on the church. Not the church as it often is, but the church as it originally was. The church as it can be. And yes, they said, “the church as it must be again.”
This is not a church.
The church is God’s design for completing the work He sent His Son to earth to accomplish. It is the expression of His love and compassion for the world. It was begun by Jesus — He is its founder and foundation — and it is most clearly represented by being His body — His physical presence in the world. Christ is currently not physically present here, but the church, collectively, is His eyes, ears, voice, hands and feet in the world, and mostly … His heart. At the outset of Christ’s ministry here on earth, He announced that He had come “to proclaim good news to the poor … freedom for the prisoners … recovery of sight for the blind, [and] to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18). These things were both physically and spiritually fulfilled while He was here, and through the church in the world — the total body of believers — that work is continuing.
No king is saved by the multitude of an army;
A mighty man is not delivered by great strength.
A horse is a vain hope for safety;
Neither shall it deliver any by its great strength.
Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him,
On those who hope in His mercy,
To deliver their soul from death,
And to keep them alive in famine.
Psalm 33:16-19
These are truly unprecedented times. There is so much to fear. The pandemic is on us and not going away any time soon. Social unrest is smoldering in our cities waiting to erupt into rioting and chaos at the slightest provocation. Citizens and police are at odds with each other. And a seriously divided country is going to try to hold an election with rumors of fraud and election distrust. It feels like extremes on either side are ready to get violent no matter what the outcome.
Los Angeles has its own rock star. Now I know there are a lot of rock stars this city has produced in its history, but none like this one. That’s because this one is a rock — a real rock — a 340-ton granite rock that has taken up permanent residence at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a piece of modern innovative sculpture the artist, Michael Heizer, calls “Levitated Mass.” The imaginative display for this piece of rock includes a 456-foot-long passageway cut into the ground and back out on the other side beneath the 21-foot-high boulder, making it possible for visitors to walk completely under the rock and view it from the bottom against the usually blue southern California sky.
Marti’s birthday was last Sunday, but she hasn’t opened any gifts yet. That’s because she was in bed most of the day feeling under the weather, due most likely to a high degree of pollen in the air from a huge tree in our back yard that sprouts clusters of tiny yellow pollen balls at the end of every branch, and then the bees crawling through those clusters send down yellow rain on our patio floor, covering it with a layer of yellow pollen. (Thousands of bees work this tree from pre-dawn to dusk creating a loud hum you can hear all day. I especially like watching the bees that ignore the clusters on the tree and simply roll around in the yellow stuff on the ground.)
When Jesus made His triumphal entry into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey’s colt (that was a far cry from what the Jews were expecting in their Messiah, even though Zechariah 9:9 had prophesied it 500 years earlier), and the people and the disciples were proclaiming the mighty acts of God through the many miracles and healings He had performed over the last two and a half years, the Jewish leaders and Pharisees demanded that Jesus stop them, to which Jesus replied, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40). Meaning, that if we don’t proclaim the mighty works of God through Jesus Christ, the stones will, and though hearing the stones cry out would be a very remarkable thing, they would not do a very adequate job of conveying a message, because stones don’t talk very well.
They call him by the “Prince Of Peace”
And they call him by “The Savior”
And they pray to him upon the sea
And in every bold endeavor
And they fill his churches with their pride and gold
As their faith in him increases
But they’ve turned the nature that I worship in
From a temple to a robber’s den
In the words of the rebel Jesus
– Jackson Browne from the song The Rebel Jesus
Follow Jesus and you will soon realize you are, and will always be, a rebel.
The early Jesus people were rebels. Truth is rebellious. It upsets the applecart and the status quo. You can look at the Jesus Movement and see when it died. It died when followers of Christ stopped being rebels.
“I think it’s wonderful we have the free will and the ability to have a relationship with God. When I read the Gospel I hear the Lord talking to me and teaching me, and it’s not all that difficult to understand what He’s saying.” – Mark Spoelstra
If you don’t know who Mark Spoelstra is and you’ve missed the Catch so far this week, you can “Catch up” by reading about him below, and then, most importantly, by reading his words which have been compiled from an extensive interview by Joy Ward, who is skilled at getting a person out of their head and into their heart.
“I certainly didn’t create the talent. It was something that was given to me like a piece of clay that I had to discover and mold.”
Mark Spoelstra had a pretty simple philosophy of life. God gives us incredible gifts and talents; it’s up to us to open those gifts and do something with them.
I love this interview with Mark Spoelstra (below) that captures the heart and soul of an artist — an artist who supported his family with sixteen different jobs throughout his life and still managed to remain an artist, and remain a real honest-to-goodness believer in Christ. Mark works through a lot in this interview — how he avoided a formula expression of his faith, how he fought against making a living off the gospel, how he kept his faith alive when many were watching it go stale, how he refrained from hypocrisy and phoniness, and how, in the end, it all came down to love. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Because when all is said and done, only that which is done in love will last.
John Fischer The Catch 