What Not to Do

I haven't posted in quite a while, and for a very simple reason. I am not really sure if I am qualified to give advice at the moment. Since my last post we have moved to a different state, and most of what I have worked on has not worked out that well. So instead of posting about what to do, ideas and insights like that, I thought I'd spend some time posting things I know far better, what not to do.

So in honor of so many of my friends getting engages, here are some ideas on what NOT to do when you're going to propose.

1. Put the ring in your pocket, fill the ring box with toothpicks and at the end of dinner open the box with both hands and offer her a tootpick.
2. Follow behind her and when she stops, get down on one knee... to tie your shoe.. repeatedly.
3. Ask her to hold your phone because you told your buddies you'd put them on speakerphone when you proposed.
4. Anything involving Crackerjacks or Secret Codes.
5. Order alchohal and say anything like "I need a stiff drink before I do this."
6. Place the stone anywhere she can swallow it, hoping that she'll find it. She won't, the ER guys will.
7. Begin every statement with "I love you so much, will you..." and then saying whatever you want.
8. Spend time with your future in-laws, unless you really don't want to get married.
9. Have an ex-girlfriend there to hand you the ring so you can propose.
10. Break her leg so your friends at ER can slip the ring into her IV bag.
11. Using smoke signals from a forest fire, that you set to show your love.
12. Say anything along the lines of "this is where I always propose."

As for the right way? I have no idea.

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Help For Shepherds

I realize that for the last month I have not posted on this site at all. This last month has been a whirlwind, to say the least. In addition to pastoring, I am currently continuing my master's program. This summer I am also attending 5-7 sports games a week, editing the film from 20 sports games a week, and launching a pastoral help website.

It is that site which is the subject of this post. For several years, a few pastors and I have been planning this site and the launch is approaching. We're calling it "Help For Shepherds" because pastors often take a shepherding role with their parishoners, guiding and teaching them. And yet those same shepherds are often left alone in the field without much to go on.

Ask any pastor and they will tell you that there are always more needs than they have skills, and that we often simply come up blank when we really need an idea. And as time goes on, every pastor encounters situations that we are not trained for and have no idea how to approach.

This site is designed to be edited and filled by pastors, sharing their favorite books and links, best ideas, best research, best message ideas, and teaching moments. It is based on a wiki format, where every pastor can add whatever they have, and use whatever they find. We are hoping that this can be a way of giving shepherds what they need to better shepherd and lead others. If you are reading this and are a pastor, come check it out. We could use your help, and hopefully we can help you out too. And if you're a layperson, please pray for us. This is a big step, a big gamble, and we're just madly hoping and praying that it pays off in some way.

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Faith

I am not usually very poetic, and there is a reason for it. I am not very good. However, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that I just want to put down on paper. I wrote this a few weeks ago but have not posted it for a variety of reasons. Ok, mainly because I didn't think it was that good and wanted to "refine" it a bit. Well I can't seem to refine it any more (surprise surprise) so here you go. It expresses well, I think, what faith is like for me


A wall of deepest nothingness
I’m falling ever deeper
Spending my days searching for light
Trying to strike a match in darkness
Fumbling for light without seeing
Catch fire to the night?
Afraid to be burned
by the flames
terrified of being consumed
by what I attempt to bring forth.
Hating the old.
Hating the cold.
Afraid of the light.
Afraid of the heat.
Afraid of the change.

A wall of deepest nothingness
I’m falling ever deeper
Spending my days searching for light
Trying to strike a match in darkness
Fumbling for light without seeing
Catch fire to the night?
Afraid to be burned
by the flames
terrified of being consumed
by what I attempt to bring forth.
Hating the old.
Hating the cold.
Afraid of the light.
Afraid of the heat.
Afraid of the change.

A pinprick of light.
A match finally caught.
Slowly growing?
Our brightest lights
Still so little heat.
Like artic sun
Reflecting on snowy tundra
So bright
So light
So cold
Where is the heat?
Where is the burn?
Where are the flames to scorch the dark?
I want the light
My fear wants the cold
Snow melts slowly
Without fire.

The untamed flame of change
I convince myself I don’t need
Try to get by on light alone
Glowing without burning
My match kept under glass
Never touching my life
Never touching the world
Just looking good
Glowing softly
Burn away the dark
Melt my life
Kindle the flame
Burn it all away
Start with my fear
End where you want
I don’t want the night
I want light
Your light
Your fire
Now your life
In me.

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Poetry and Faith

Sometimes normal words don't say enough and something more is needed to really express what is going on. This is something I wrote last week in the middle of the night. It isn't the best, but that's part of the point. We need to be able to express what we are feeling and thinking. Whether it is five star quality or not, it is very important that we express what is going on inside of us.

A wall of deepest nothingness
I’m falling ever deeper
Spending my days searching for light
Trying to strike a match in darkness
Fumbling for light without seeing
Catch fire to the night?
Afraid to be burned
by the flames
terrified of being consumed
by what I attempt to bring forth.
Hating the old.
Hating the cold.
Afraid of the light.
Afraid of the heat.
Afraid of the change.

A pinprick of light.
A match finally caught.
Slowly growing?
Our brightest lights
Still so little heat.
Like artic sun
Reflecting on snowy tundra
So bright
So light
So cold
Where is the heat?
Where is the burn?
Where are the flames to scorch the dark?
I want the light
My fear wants the cold
Snow melts slowly
Without fire.

The untamed flame of change
I convince myself I don’t need
Try to get by on light alone
Glowing without burning
My match kept under glass
Never touching my life
Never touching the world
Just looking good
Glowing softly
Burn away the dark
Melt my life
Kindle the flame
Burn it all away
Start with my fear
End where you want
I don’t want the night
I want light
Your light
Your fire
Now your life
In me..

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McMunnion

I had one of the most bizarre religious experiences of my life today. As I sat in District Assembly we were given communion. Now I love communion. I love the way we can gather together and drink from one cup, eat from one loaf, and know that while we each taste and experience God slightly differently in the end everything everyone ate came from the same source. I like that what we have together in communion was given to us by another person, even if it was just to put the wafers on the tray.

But the communion experience I had today was very different. I think I was the first human hands to touch this food in its’ entire existence. This communion came prepackaged with a measured amount of juice sealed into a plastic cup by foil. On top of that foil was a plastic sealed piece of bread. It was all hermetically sealed and individually processed.

I know I am old fashioned, but there is something disturbing about hearing “you may now remove the foil” and “open the plastic, take and eat” as part of the communion liturgy. I felt completely separated from all other believers as I had my own McMunnion. It was perfectly American, and to me it signified not only American consumerism, but also American Christianity’s individualism.

Instead of sharing from the same bread, the same Lord, we all have our own. Instead of receiving God from someone else, we open it up all by ourselves. We are reliant on no one for our communion, or our faith if the analogy holds. And what does it mean when the most important repeated ceremony in the Christian faith is fake? What does it mean when the juice and bread are artificial and fake in a ceremony we claim to be real?

It isn’t the end of the world by any means. But we need to think about what we are saying not just with our words, but with our actions and our priorities. If we are more interested in saving ten minutes and fifty cents than we are in making communion a meaningful experience that says something horrible about us and our faith. It says that the bottom line and convenience are more important than worshiping and serving God in meaningful ways. That is a scary concept, and it doesn’t come through just in communion. What we do, where we spend our money and our time scream out what we really believe is important, and whether our people realize it or not they’re learning from those things just as much as from our words.

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When is a religion Dead?

I apologize for not posting for the last several weeks. I wish I had a wonderful reason, but I don’t. I’ve been thinking a lot, working on my master’s, being a father, and everything has just caught up to me the past couple of weeks. A few months ago I posted a blog about what I saw as the death of Christianity in America. Since then I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about how to really define when a religion is dead.

Is a religion dead when there aren’t any people claiming it anymore? That’s the simplest explanation, but doesn’t really fit. I can claim to be Zoroastrian and yet not practice anything that the ancient Zoroastrians did. In that case, the ancient religion would still be dead and instead of rebirthing it, I would be practicing something completely different. Perhaps we could say that a religion is dead when it is no longer growing, but while that is a good indication of health it doesn’t equate with true death as the group could grow again.

Perhaps we could talk about whether the early beliefs of the religion are still being practiced. But then we have to find a cut-off point that defines “early”. In Christian circles, we have abandoned much that defined the early Church. We no longer sell everything we have and live communally. We no longer practice love feasts, or the Sabbath, or live in such radical faith. We are not persecuted either, which was a huge part of the early Church’s faith. And even if much of what we believe is different, there is always the chance that it will come back full circle. So while a difference in belief and practice are good indicators, they don’t seem to completely define the death of a religion. It needs something else. What about if we talked about a religion being dead when it no longer changes people like it did in the beginning? A religion catches on with people because it brings change into their lives, change for the better presumably. But when that change no longer comes, what drove that religion is gone. The faith is dead, even if people still claim to be a part of it. Individual ideas, beliefs, and actions can change in a religion as the times change, but if that change in their lives does not appear, or significantly changes, then the religion is dead, or is no longer the same religion it once was.

So is Christianity dead or alive in America by this criterion? I would say it’s pretty well dead. When people come into the Church today, we ask them to change their behavior, but not in ways that the ancient Church would have understood. The most strident ways we urge people to change are in their dress, their language, and their voting habits. There are many churches that are faithfully leading people to God and seeing people changed to serve others, to give sacrificially, to study and care for people together. But the dominant view of Christianity in America today is one of ethics and politics. That is not a change the early Christians would have understood. So if not dead, I would say that Christianity in America has kept the name, but changed into a new religion for many of the believers here, one that is more about “being good’ than showing love in service.

But there is always hope. Christianity is founded on rebirth, and that includes not only the individual but the Church as well. I only pray I help to keep the faith alive and lives changing, instead of stagnating and dying.

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Roman Christianity

I am a student of history, and especially medieval and Roman history. A few weeks ago I posted a blog about similarities between Britain under the Roman Empire and American Christianity. Today I wanted to take that comparison a bit further and look at comparisons of Rome right before the fall of the empire and America today, especially where it comes to religion. Much of this comes from “How the Irish Saved Civilization” page 29.

The Roman Empire was being pressed by floods of immigrants who were largely staying in their own groups and not being integrated, or welcomed, into Roman society (Mexico?). The Bureaucracy of the government focused on keeping themselves in office and afloat more than helping people. Military service became avoided by the elite (Clinton, Bush, etc) and shunned as a lower job by the rest (if you can’t go to college you can always join the army).

The army became mainly immigrants and not Romans (our army is disproportionately minority) and the standards for acceptance in the army were reduced (we have lowered our standards several times just since invading Iraq). Also, towards the end the army became dominated by hired mercenaries (Blackwater Company in Iraq anyone?). The amount that the government was spending on defense increased dramatically until the government could not sustain the infrastructure and taking care of its people (we spend over 50% of our taxes on defense I believe, and have cut schooling, and infrastructure to do so).

There was a big emphasis on the past instead of the future, they kept claiming old values as being alive today (sounds like the moral stuff we’re dealing with now by calling on what the founding fathers did like we practice it today) and legislating that while living in complete opposition to what they are claiming (think governor Spitzer, chasing prostitution rings but in reality using them).

The population was losing its middle class and either being extremely rich or extremely poor (middle class is dying off here too, think inner city). Those rich became the true deciding people in making things happen (Bill Gates recently approached congress with an idea and got it passed basically that day, while most things take months or years to go through). The people passed lots of laws that didn’t really effect anyone but sounded great (think making marriage one man and one woman only).

Order became the thing to keep, not justice (like renovating inner cities without helping those who live there but just kicking them out, CIA interrogation, or ignoring Darfour because it isn’t us). Religiously, the people had been Christian for centuries and it was assumed that people were believers just because they were Roman (ding). Attendance in church diminished, and involvement in church became the role of the pastor only (we are seeing the same thing right now).

The priesthood was raking in money at the expense of their people (prosperity preachers, televangelists, etc). The Church had become a political entity as much or more than a spiritual one (think James Dobson, the Christian Coalition and special interest groups). The Church became linked with the state, with priests preaching about the Roman Empire and preserving its’ glory more than the preaching the gospel (see most Fourth of July services in most churches here, or September Eleventh remembrances. The Church began to rely on the state for its’ support, purpose, and guidance (the big thing right now is making sure we follow the State’s guidelines in order to not have to pay our taxes).

The Church also became very turned inward, looking towards the Christians in its’ country as being the true church and everyone else around the world was a second class Christian (why else would we consider all other places in the world “missionary” work except here if we didn’t honestly consider America the heartland and center of Christianity). Preserving the Church in Rome became more pressing than getting more Christians outside of its’ realm (think about how much more money we spend on “church growth” books and plans for locally sustaining ministry than we spend on people outside of our nation).

There are many more analogies that can be made, and it’s scary. But I don’t have time, and you don’t have patience to read it I’m sure. Suffice to say, Christianity in America is in trouble, America is in trouble, if the analogies hold up in the long haul. I don’t know if there is a simple solution to it, but there is a first step. We are acting like Rome, thinking that Christian and American are the same thing, and being American means we’re a better Christian. We need to get over ourselves. I love my nation, but my God is bigger than any nation. Christianity flourishes where the people live it out, not where it is legislated, or where it is politically powerful, or even where it is allowed. We don’t need our nation to be Christian, and we need to start acting like that, like we are Christian first, American second, not the other way around.

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Passing on Grace

Easter has come and gone, and it was a blast to experience for me even though it was so hard to get everything done and prepared on time with school and baby. I can’t say everything went smoothly, but what happened was very meaningful, at least for me. We had a mock Ash Wednesday service (mock because it’s the right service on the wrong day), a Good Friday service, a baptismal service Sunday, and then Easter itself. Partway through the week, as I was meeting with the people about to be baptized and planning Sunday I really realized something.

I am not worthy of what I have been given. Not only has grace been given to me for forgiveness of sins, but even my position is grace. I was baptizing people who I had not led to Jesus. But I was still given the honor of ushering them into the faith. Somehow I have been allowed to give communion and pass out God’s grace to people who barely even know me. I watched people’s sins literally burned to ash and then placed that same ash on their foreheads, telling them that all that’s left of their past is the cross marking their lives. I don’t deserve that. I am not worthy of administering grace like that. But as I assure people of God’s grace in their lives I am experiencing it myself.

It is so powerful to administer the sacraments, to make the cross on someone’s forehead with their ashen sins, knowing they are seeking forgiveness and knowing that they take this sign as evidence that God forgives and as proof that they are Christian. It is amazing to be able to mark a believer as a Christian in a physical way and have them accept it. It is powerful to dip someone under, knowing that your arms are God’s arms to them as you bring them out of the water and into their new life. I am so humbled by what I am called to do, so thankful.

I have never before experienced so fully how amazing grace is, how awesome faith is, as I did this Holy Week. In a very real sense we experience grace most when we give it to others, and we can sense our own faith when we are sharing in the ancient symbols with others. I know this is usually a pastoral duty, but I really want to share this feeling with others. I want to create experiences where all Christians can take the grace we have all been given, and pass it on to another, while at the same thing receiving it from someone else as well.

When everyone was administering the ashes to another, and receiving them as well, I could see how each person was passing on the assurance of God’s forgiveness to another, and was bowing expectantly as another assures then that their sins are gone as well. I was very moved as I watched the ashes pass through the crowd. But that is such a rare experience for Christian laypeople. It is so rare for us to be able to assure each other of grace in practical, physical ways. None of us are worthy to do that, none of us. But someone has to, and it is one of the most powerful and humbling experiences any of us can ever have. That is what I want to do with all believers in my church, make grace real, make faith physical and universal. .

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Britain and the Death of Christianity

I am a student of history, and the more I study the more I realize that situations in the past can shine a very bright light on what is going on today, and even on what will happen in the future. Take Christianity in Britain for example.

The Roman Empire became Christian, and everyone who was Roman was assumed to be Christian. Fairly soon, it infiltrated the culture on every level. That included the culture of Britain. As the Roman Empire took over Britain, the people naturally assumed that being Christian and being Roman were the same thing.

When the Roman Empire was doing great, people in Britain flocked to the Christian banner, and Christianity reigned in southern England for several hundred years (200 CE at it was already there). It looked like it had really taken hold and would last. But as soon as the Roman Empire started to crumble, so did Christianity. The locals saw the two as identical and so as Roman culture crumbled, so did Christianity. Within a terribly small space of time Christianity was gone from almost all of Britain (post 400 CE with the legions leaving), and would remain missing for about hundreds of years. People had not accepted Christianity, they had accepted Roman culture, and without the Roman culture there was no reason for anyone to be a Christian. Some pockets remained, but the majority was gone.

I think we see the same thing happening in America today. American ideals have been founded on Puritan work practices and Christian ethical systems. It has been expected for 200 years that if you are American you are Christian. To be one is to be the other. Christian leaders have encouraged this by trying to bring about legislative change in the name of Christianity. We also celebrate secular holiday’s more than religious ones (how many times have you celebrated the fourth of July in church, and when was the last time you remembered Pentecost, or ascension Sunday?) and rely on people’s patriotism to bring them into church. We have made Christianity and American culture synonymous.

But now the culture is changing. It is no longer based on the same ethical, political, or economic system as it once was. Postmodernism has changed the very definition of truth in our culture. So what should be the Christian response? Some believers have been trying to reclaim the old culture in order to reclaim the prestige and the power that Christianity had in years past. But if we look at Britain I think we see that is a bad idea.

Christianity is more than a political idea. It is more than an ethical system, and it is more than any one country or culture. That includes America. We do not need to reclaim the lost “glory years” of American Christianity. What we need to do is to make sure that people know Christianity is not American and vice versa. Only if we can show that our God is real no matter what is going on in the world do we have a chance of surviving the cultural storms.

Unfortunately, many Christians are living like the Romans in Britain, and cannot see that there is a difference between their culture, their nation, and their faith. But the more we try and make those two different things the same the more likely it is that Christianity in America will go the way of Christianity in Britain so long ago, and die out as the culture and politics change. And that is not something I am willing to see happen.

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My Daughter and My Finger

Sorry about not posting now, but I became a father last week, a very odd, wonderful, tiring, frustrating, exhilarating feeling. Some of what my little girl does I was told to expect, and some of it completely catches me off guard. Her first day in the world I was holding her on my lap and just went to stroke her face. Instead of rubbing against my finger, or moving away, she rolled into it, grabbed my finger tip in her little mouth and started sucking like mad. I was so surprised I didn’t do anything for a little bit, I just sat there.

I knew babies breast fed, of course, but I had no idea how instinctive their latching and sucking instincts were. I was completely caught off guard. In a moment I got my bearings and tried to pull my finger out of her mouth. It was actually hard to do. She had such a grip on my finger that I was a little worried about hurting her to be honest. I couldn’t easily remove that finger, it really took a bit of effort. I thought that once she understood she wasn’t getting anything from my finger she would let go, but no luck. She didn’t care if she was getting anything from it, she just knew she needed to be sucking on something and was hoping that if she sucked on everything coming her way she would get something from it. I just sat and marveled at how naïve my daughter is. But then I started thinking about my job as pastor and realized that the Church often does the exact same thing. We grab at whatever fad is coming our way, whatever idea has the label “Christian” on it, and hope that it fills our needs.

But most of the time those things don’t really help at all. Or they help for a time, but they don’t feed us in the long haul. But do we get rid of them? Of course not. We just suck harder, trying to get some food from something that simply does not feed us. And so we are sometimes left with service ideas, songs, rituals, and entire ministries in the Church that do not feed us at all, but we’re like my little daughter, still sucking away at my finger, not even knowing if it gives us food or not.

Unlike my daughter, though, we should be able to know what feeds us and what doesn’t, at least after we try it for a while. We need to take a long look at what we do, both as individuals, and as churches, and think about what actually feeds us and what does nothing more than fill our mouths without giving us any spiritual food in return. I can pull out my finger from my baby daughter, but no one except us will stop part of the church that doesn’t feed us. We have to release the fingers in our lives and try and find where God is really giving us food, emphasize that, spend time with those things.

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Holy Days

Easter is almost upon us again, and I have no idea what we’re doing about it. Easter is the holiest day of the year, more holy than even Christmas to believers. It is the day when our salvation was made real, when our lord came back from the dead to guide us into true life. It is sacred. However, throughout my life I have rarely experienced the holy on Easter Sunday.

I want to change that. I want to find a way to make the holy relevant to my people, and find some way we can grasp how special Easter is. The problem is that I have no idea how to do that. When I went looking for ideas of Easter services, I found something very disturbing. Almost all of the ideas I found were about how to get people to show up at church. They were about mass mailings, signs, handouts, and gimmicks. Many of the ideas revolved around giving out gifts and promotions, raffles even and drawings, to bribe people into coming to church on Easter. Nearly every site I looked at talked about how to use giving gifts as an effective way of getting people to attend church and return. Most sites also included ways of making the service more “seeker sensitive,” removing all elements of the holy in an effort to get more people in the church.

I understand being sensitive to others, but Easter, our holiest day of the year, should be the one day where we are unapologetically Christian. It should be the day where we should that our roots are deep in history and our branches touch heaven itself. Easter should be the last day that we sell out on, not the first.

If there is something real about what we do, then this is the day we show it. Easter is holy. How can we convince anyone that there is anything sacred about our faith if we profane the holiest day of our year.

If we put getting more people in the pews at a greater priority than God we have a problem. We say God comes first, but quite often it is numbers that we worship. But if there is one day where we need to show that we are not just putting on a show but giving thanks to our God it is Easter.

The problem is I am not really sure how, because almost all I know is the show.

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Waiting for Birth

Right now I am anxiously awaiting the birth of my first child, a daughter. In fact, I have been waiting expectantly for weeks now. My wife was having preterm labor for months now, and when we finally got her off the anti-labor medication we naturally assumed the end would come soon. That was two and a half weeks ago. My wife has been having frequent and painful contractions ever since then, but no baby. After two weeks of pain, turmoil, waiting, and anxiety, we are both so ready for this baby to be born that we could, and periodically do, scream.

You’d think that as the time continues to draw closer to our daughter being born we would be getting more and more excited in anticipation. But with all of the pain and false starts we are just getting more and more jaded and frustrated and willing to give up one it all. We know that our daughter has to come sometime. There is a definite maximum date that she can stay unborn, but because we have been waiting so long and expecting so often we are getting frustrated instead of excited.

I think many Christians are like my wife and I right now, waiting for a new birth and getting frustrated because they don’t see if fully yet. We want to be changed, want to be reborn in the image of God, but the longer it takes, the more pain and hassle it causes, the more false starts we have, the harder it is to be excited for it. Our patience dies away and we are just annoyed that it hasn’t happened yet, or even lose faith that it will happen at all.

There are little changes in my wife that continually show us that change is coming, just coming slowly. And with our little one kicking away inside of her it is hard to forget that something is happening. That isn’t in question. What we so often have a problem with is the timing. We want it now, not later.

Don’t lose hope that change is coming. Look at your life and if you are walking with God you will be able to see little changes happening all throughout your life that points to a new life coming out in you. Little kicks and jabs that you never felt before, evidence that God is working in us. The problem is that we take our eyes off what is going on now and can only see what we want to happen in the future.

My daughter will be born. We are being changed. But what is happening in us now is what needs to happen before God can work the next step in our change. We cannot rush it anymore than my wife and I can encourage our daughter to come early. Instead, if we want to avoid being frustrated and giving up, we need to focus on the changes happening right now in our lives, and encourage those changes to continue and grow so that we can move on to the next step in our new birth with Christ. This step might not be as glorious as we want, and it might be more painful than we would like, but it is necessary, and it is changing us into Christ’s image.

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Counting the Numbers

When I first started training for the pastorate I thought it would be spending time with people every minute, glorious time of prayer with God, and lots of deep spiritual conversations with people until 2 in the morning. I never envisioned the paperwork. I never thought about the numbers I would have to deal with. As a pastor I have to report to my DS (a good man, which I am ever so grateful for) how many conversions, baptisms, church memberships, and sanctification experiences happened in our church. I also need to keep track of monthly finances (though only in the loosest of senses here, we have an awesome treasurer), monthly attendance, how many times I preach, how many visitations I made, and everything else I do.

Everything, from the number of people in bible studies to the amount of money we gave to missions is recorded and tabulated. And that’s just for the district. How the district thinks I am doing as a pastor and what they expect from the church are dependent on those numbers I give them. And then there are all the numbers that count online. I keep track of how many people view the wiki each day, what edits happen, who visits my facebook, who visits my myspace, how many people viewed my video, how our church is doing on goodsearch, and everything else you can imagine. There are more numbers running through my head any given day than I can count. And the fact that I am trying to count only reinforces how much numbers affect my life.

And here’s the thing, by the time I am done counting all of the numbers I need to, the first ones I counted have changed again and can be counted again. I can spend my entire day just keeping track of numbers without actually doing anything. But I’ll be quite busy. And because numbers are one way of knowing how different things are doing I could even justify an entire day spent counting as being necessary. But I wouldn’t actually get anything done, I would only be understanding what has already happened or what is happening. I would not be making a single thing happen.

In a more abstract sense I think a lot of us are in that place with our Christian walk. It’s really easy to learn about it, and we can spend our entire lives learning about what God did in the past, can do in the future, and is doing now, without doing a single thing ourselves. But the stories are so compelling, the numbers so important, surely aren’t we are justified if we don’t actually add to those numbers ourselves, but just marvel at them as they go by? Aren’t we allowed to learn about what God has been doing? Yes, of course, but at some point we have to take a break from learning and actually do. Do something worthy of someone else wanting to count it, and then encourage that person to act as well.

But why are numbers so important to begin with? What is the draw that keeps us watching for God and not acting with God? What is going on where I could spend several hours refreshing different web pages and feel justified in doing so?

I think there are two things that hold me back personally; and perhaps you as well. First, there is a deep but hidden insecurity that is seeking to try and justify my existence. I am constantly finding myself trying to discover if I was successful at something, if something worked, it people care about what I have been working on. And so I try and justify my existence with numbers instead of with my worth as a child of God. The second thing that prompts me to look and not act is that I am afraid. I am afraid I will fail, afraid I don’t know enough, afraid I will miss what God wants me to do. And so I don’t do anything, but try to learn more and more until the fear is gone.

But here is the truth. The fear will always be there. Every time we act it is scary, no matter how much we know. And every time we try to find ourselves in what we do and not in how God sees us we will always be insecure. No amount of training or numbers will fix that. I can have the best numbers in the world, and it won’t change who I am. I can have the most training anyone has ever had and it won’t mean I am unafraid of acting. Faith is when we step out and act anyway. Faith is when we trust that God’s vision of us is the right one and step away from the numbers, away from our fears and insecurities and act.

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Follow the King

Well I finally posted it I've been working on an animation for well over a year and while the audio isn't anywhere near done the video is completed. I've been delaying posting it because I was hoping to get the audio done but that doesn't look like it'll happen.

So here it is, a modern day parable in lego. It's the story of a king who hs to reclaim his people from a terror they don't even recognize. Check out the Youtube link on the left, or download the better quality version at the link at the top of this post. Hope you all like it, let me know what you think. Oh, and make sure to watch it all the way through, even after the credits.

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Confessions of a Preacher

I am in the middle of a preaching class right now and while it is nothing particularly new, it is definitely reminding me that how a message is prepared by a pastor is a mystery to many Christians. In fact, we pastors have shrouded the entire process in mystery, trying to make ourselves look better. So today I want to take a brief moment and talk about what it takes to get a sermon ready, and hopefully dispel a few myths in the process. Consider it a pastor’s confession.

Many Christians seem to have an exaggerated notion of their pastor’s spiritual connection with God and a degraded notion of their own ability to hear from God. These people honestly assume that pastors have a more direct connection with God than the average Christian. This leads these people to assume that pastors either spend most of our time in prayer while creating a sermon, and then directly write it down as God inspired us, or that we spend very little time preparing because God gives it to us. Either way, these well-meaning Christians assume that every word from their pastor is inspired in a way that their words never could be.

I wish I could say that God stirs over my blank notepad like God stirred over the waters of the deep in Genesis and that form divinely comes from the nothingness that is there. But I would be lying if I did. Pastors don’t have a special connection to God. We have simply been asked by God vocationally to be pastors. Our ability to connect with God is the same as everyone else’s. What that means practically is two things. First, please don’t accept everything a pastor says as the perfect word of God. Sometimes we really miss the mark, sometimes we confuse God with us, and sometimes we even forget to listen to God in the first place. Second, it means that the forming of a sermon is not an instant or even fun process. It takes many hours of thought, work, and worry.

Because pastors don’t have a superhuman connection with God it also means we have to spend a great deal of time studying what we do know contains God’s word, the Bible. We spend hours looking at a single passage of scripture, until we feel confident we can see how God is moving through that passage. From there it is fairly easy to compare how God moved in the Bible with our world and find where God is moving, or wants to move, in us today.

I wish I could tell you that every sermon I’ve ever given has been God’s word to the people, but I know that isn’t true. I spend a dozen or more hours researching a passage each week, and I still miss the point sometimes. And just like you pray and seek direction, but don’t always seem to find it, I also try to find how a passage best applies to our church, and yet often get no insight I recognize as divine. The truth is that a sermon is always a starting point, not an ending one. Pastors create it through hours of research, and prayer, but that does not mean it is ready to just believe and apply without thought.

To truly be the word of God to a community, it needs to be thought about, discussed, and digested by that community and not just by one or two people up front. We do most of the research, but the true value of a message comes from the people discussing the passage themselves. Think about it, the services that have mattered to you the most are probably the ones you talked about with other people soon after you heard them. It takes that discussion and thought on your part to absorb the truth and discard the garbage that all pastors bring with them. Because like everyone else, we start out with an empty page on our desk, and work from there. God rarely puts words on the page for us.

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Silence

Walking to get the church’s mail today, listening to music on my Zune, I began to think about what my day had looked like. I got up, and turned on the music on my computer. Then I went downstairs to the office and listened to air1 radio online. At lunch I watched TV on my computer, and then went back to listening to music. I only stopped listening to plug in my Zune and start back up with music.

It struck me as I was planning my “quiet time” that my entire day, and almost every day, has been spent with constant noise. I surround myself with music, shows, talking, noise. And even when those things are silent I still have the hum of electronics, the noise of the street, people coming by, washing machines, and dishwashers. I think most of us live like that.

We don’t even have silence if we want it, and most of the time we don’t want it. We seek out anything to distract us from silence and fill the void. But here’s the thing, we usually hear God the best when we still ourselves and listen into the silence for the Holy Spirit’s small voice. But when was the last time living in the city any of us have gotten true silence?

The people in the Bible lived before iPods and electronics. They didn’t have cars and lived outside of cities for the most part. They could go outside and within a few minutes could get true silence. In the desert they did not even have the rustling of trees or the calls of animals. And it was to these deserts that the early Christians retreated to when they wanted to hear from God.

True silence. We run from that, don’t we? If there is quiet in our lives we will do almost anything to fill it with noise. Even with God, we try to fill any silence with our own conversations. We fear silence, are terrified of it, but historically that true silence is where we hear God the best, removed from all distractions.

Can we face that sort of terror? Can we face silence to hear God? Do we even care enough to try? It goes against so much of how we live our lives, how our lives are built. But for centuries that is how people have heard God the best, in silence. Perhaps we have changed enough that silence is no longer the primary way we hear God, but it certainly is an important one.

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The Nail we Make

I have heard about Jesus’ sacrifice my entire life. I grew up hearing people talk about how Jesus died for us, and everything that went along with it. I have seen the movies, heard the stories, and read the accounts of how Jesus died. But it never really tied together for me until a few months ago. Let me tell you the story.

I love to work with my hands, and forging metal has been a hobby of mine for almost ten years. One of the simplest things to make, in fact the first thing anyone learns to make, is a nail. In older times, an apprentice would make 10, 20 thousand nails before they would be allowed to move on to anything else.

Somehow I skipped making nails when I was beginning to learn to forge. But three months ago, I finally got a chance again. I heated up the steel, hammered it out hot, and continued to reheat it until I had made a nail. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, I was just glad I got the chance to forge again.

But when I got home and was holding it in my hand I began to feel a little funny about it. Something about the nail I had made was very familiar to me. I did some research, and I was right. The nail I made is nearly an exact copy of a Roman crucifixion nail.

I had made a nail that could have killed Christ with my own hands, and for fun. That is exactly what we do, but I had never seen it so physically before. I do that every day with my sins. I casually do something because it seems fun at the moment, but in the end we are really making something that will kill. And suddenly we look down and realize it. We press the nail against our wrist and realize that we made it just for that purpose. Our deeds have killed us.

But instead of letting what we made do us in, Christ takes it and lets our sins kill him. I have known that for years, but when you have held the nail you made in your own hand, and felt it pressed against your wrist, and imagine in piercing through Jesus’ this whole salvation thing becomes so much more real.

What we made without even thinking about it, what should have killed us, Jesus took on himself. It’s as real as the nail I made, and even more deadly.

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Slowing Down the Current

A few weeks ago I was at retreat with my church. It was a wonderful time of worship, conversation, games, and the forest. I am a woods nut and the times I spent hiking around where some of the best. The places where I hiked weren’t exactly secluded, but they were nice. It was odd to hear trucks roar by just out of sight, or see a cabin through the trees, or a street sign.

And if I slowed down and looked around I could see beer cans, water bottles, scraps of cloth and paper scattered all around. I found myself walking faster when all of these distractions were the worst. And it worked. If I walked fast enough I only saw the creek running past me, and the lovely trees around me. I didn’t hear all of the cars through my heavy breathing, or see the things that were blemishes on the land around me. Everything was shooting past me too fast for me to see the details.

As I sat by the side of the creek for a while I noticed that it did the same thing. I sat watching a single piece of water and leaves just floated by me, pure untainted water. Then a bottle floated down the water and into my view. But it almost seemed like the water was embarrassed or offended by the bottle and it picked up speed to carry the bottle past its human admirer as quickly as possible.

I realized that’s how I often live my Christian life, and how I have even encouraged people to do that in their lives as well. We live in a screwed up world, and there is trash all around us, both literally and figuratively. We have struggles with co-workers, there is poverty on the streets, someone died, drugs are coming into our neighborhood, we’re depressed, a friend killed themselves, we’re questioning aspects of our faith, whatever it is there is garbage all around us. And so often the Christian response is not to pick it up, but to fill our lives even fuller with “Christian” stuff so that we’re moving so quickly through life we only see the good things.

I’ve done that. I’ve encouraged people who are struggling to get involved in a couple more programs, listen to specific music, read more of the Bible and more books, and go to more services and programs. In short, I tell them to make their life rush past them so fast that they don’t have time to notice what is going on in and around it. Make it so that they only have just enough time in their day to survive, and if everything that sucks up their time is Christian, then we’ve succeeded, and the trash is gone.

But the trash isn’t gone, we just swept past it. And when we’re not talking about a trail we can leave but are talking about our lives that means the trash is just piling up somewhere out of sight until no matter how fast we run we’ll have no choice but to face it. And when that day comes, there will be so much garbage from so many years that we can’t do anything but crack under the weight of years of personal neglect. Like the stream rushing its garbage past anyone watching, we push our junk out of our lives by sheer quantity of other stuff we fill its place with. But also like the stream, the garbage never really leaves

So what happens when we stop? What happens if we slow our lives down enough that the garbage can hang around long enough for us to pick it up? Well, first if will hurt. We’ll have to deal with our flaws, our imperfections, our troubles, instead of pretending we’re perfect. We’ll actually have to admit that we aren’t perfect, that our lives aren’t perfect. And that hurts, because we’ll have to also admit that all of the filling up of our lives and running at full tilt haven’t done what we were hoping it would.

But it would also mean we can deal with this stuff. It means that instead of running fast, avoiding our troubles, and thanking God for helping us, we can actually let God work in our lives and help us not just to avoid seeing what is keeping us down, but to actually fix it. It means we can be healed, but we have to slow down enough that we can see what is around us and in us.

I stopped that weekend, just for a moment, and the first thing I wanted to do is start running again. I don’t like having to see the garbage that is in my life, my relationships, my block, my town, my world. I want to pretend it’s all been taken care of. I want to fill up my life with so full of good things I can convince myself there isn’t anything bad in me anymore.

But if we just stop, and let God work in the garbage we find around us as we slow down, we can stop pretending we’re whole and truly become whole. We can stop trying to sweep bottles down our river and instead take them out. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big thing to you, but it is. When we are not afraid of our own lives, when we are so caught up on our baggage that we can deal with things as they come up instead of running, it makes all the difference in the world. We were made to be pristine environments for God to dwell in. we were not meant to push all our junk behind us or pretend we’re perfect when in reality the rivers of our life are poisoned downstream from all our pollution.

But it means we have to stop, and that is scary. It is scary to actually trust God instead of just claiming we trust God. It is scary to deal with our past instead of pretending that we have. But it’s worth it. I encourage you to slow down, and let your garbage catch up with you for a little while, so God and you can pick up that trash together and make you clean.

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To be scared. To be Christian.

This has been an interesting and stressful week. Our ant problem came back, and apparently some mice came in from the storm and are sheltering in our house now. On top of that, I had to take my wife into the hospital last night for premature contractions. I’m worried. I’m worried we won’t be able to afford to live if my wife can’t work for a while. I am worried that we won’t get this place healthy and safe before the baby comes. I am worried that I won’t be a good dad. I’m terrified something will happen to my wife or our child. I’m scared I’ll fail as a pastor, that I’ll miss an event or a crisis in someone’s life I’m worried that I will just be teaching people to lie about their faith and no one will come to God through my service. And all of that is a problem, because I’ve been told as a Christian, and especially as a pastor, I shouldn’t ever be afraid. Somehow to have fears is not to have faith to many believers today.

Should a Christian ever be afraid? Does being afraid mean we don't have faith? The Bible talks about not fearing, but most of those verses appear to be talking about when something amazing happens but people overreact to it, like the angels appearing throughout Jesus’ birth story. People are encouraged to fear God throughout the Old Testament. But the Psalms are pretty specific about not being afraid of anything that comes our way because God is on our side. Even so, Job mentions that he had been afraid and he was as near to perfect as someone can get. So which is it? We are fearful, or never afraid?

Part of the problem is that the Hebrew term for fear is such a vague word. It can be a wide range of stuff from outright terror to respect and reverence. But that doesn’t really solve everything. If anything, it just makes the problem more difficult. And am I seriously supposed to be able to walk into a gang fight in the Tenderloin without being worried? I don’t think so. An absence of fear doesn’t seem to be the issue. In fact, the Bible recognizes that we can even be afraid of God. We are worried about stuff all the time.

But to the early Hebrews everything was action oriented. Nothing was abstract. We can’t fear without it affecting our actions. If we are supposed to remember something it doesn’t just mean in our mind but with our actions. If we worship God it isn’t just with our mouths but with our actions too. The Bible, and especially the Old Testament, assume that our actions and our words are connected. If we say something then we’re also acting out of that, and vice versa. The idea that we can say something without it affecting us would be lost on them.

So perhaps what the Bible is saying is not that we should never experience fear, but that we should never act out of that fear. We act from our trust and fear of God, we don’t act based on our fear of what might happen. It’s like a bunch of sailors who throw out an anchor in the storm. They trust the anchor will keep them stable, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get scared when the storm comes. It just means that they don’t panic and try to sail out of it.

I am scared to death, but won’t change how I act. As a Christian, I have an anchor. Does that mean I won’t be freaked out? No. Does that mean I’m not freaked out already? No. But it means that I will trust that my anchor will hold. Not being afraid, in a very ancient sense, is a choice not to let your fear influence you, affect you, take over. That is a choice I have to make every day.

Too often we are told we are supposed to be super people, and if we have any negative emotion we have failed to be Christian, to have failed to have faith. If we think that, the guilt itself can overcome us because we all have emotions. Keeping them bottled up forever is not the answer. The answer is to permit ourselves to be worried, afraid, terrified even if the situation calls for it, but not let that terror dictate our actions. Our actions should be rooted in our anchor, Jesus.

Barbara Taylor Brown, in her book "Leaving Church" puts it very well when she says "I discovered that faith did not have the least thing to do with certainty. Insofar as I had any faith at all, that faith consisted of trusting God in the face of my vastly painful ignorance." Faith is not found in being certain of what will happen, or lost in the face of fear. Faith is found and kept when even though we are uncertain of the future and fearful of what may happen were are still choosing to trust God with our lives.

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Power and Ego

Well the subtext of this blog is “glimpses from a pastor’s journey” and so it’s only fair to live up to that title. I just got back from a retreat with my church and it was awesome. Check out this link to check out some of what people thought about it. I loved it, but it was a learning experience for me in a lot of ways. You see, I came on board with this church long after the retreat was already planned out and organized. So my role at the retreat was to pray occasionally and hang out with people. I was marginalized, and that’s ok. I have been preaching for years (months in this church) about wanting to bring equality to the church. And yet this retreat is really the first time I experienced it.

Sitting with everyone else as someone else spoke, helping serve communion instead of serving it myself, watching people choose to speak with others about spiritual matters before me, all of that was difficult to me on some level. I found out how much my ego is really tied into this church thing, and especially tied into being a pastor in the traditional sense. That needs to change.

It’s really easy to “give up” power to people as long as it’s temporary, or as long as I can grab it right back from them whenever I want. But if I am trying to give away power to the people of God and not holding all the power myself, then I need to be willing to let it go for good. I can’t hold onto it just enough that I can retain my ego, and retain most of my power.

What I learned this retreat was about putting myself in positions where I can be intentionally marginalized. Not forced into it, but choosing to be on the sidelines, choosing to let others lead and others direct, and submitting to that direction myself. That’s when my ego wants to rebel and say “but I’m the pastor.”

My ego doesn’t want to be a servant, it doesn’t want to be marginalized, even if I have been asking for others to take over and lead. It wants power, and I have a million ways to rationalize it too, so that I can hold onto enough of my power to stay in control. That’s really the root fear, losing control. But I wonder if that really isn’t the goal of the Christian life, to give control of our lives to God and to be a servant, intentionally marginalized.

In America, Christians have been seeking as much power as we can get. We’re trying to get music, money, movies, politics (especially politics) and we’re doing everything we can to hold onto that power. But Christians don’t tend to do well with a lot of power. It tends to corrupt us. Perhaps that is why the Beatitudes in Luke concentrate so much on the poor, the powerless, the weak. They are teaching us that God’s way is not to horde power, but to give it away.

That goes against so much of my training, and my culture, that it makes me shudder. But if I have been preaching and teaching that we are all equal with God then I truly do need to be able to let go of power completely, not just let it out on a leash and a loan. And that means that I won’t be center stage, I won’t get the spotlight and the attention. That’s tougher on my ego than I’d like to admit, but it’s important.

I don’t think we can truly claim to be following Christ if we are hoarding our power and clutching our leadership around us. We need to divest ourselves of whatever power we gather, investing it in others and in giving it back to God. Jesus did not even consider the power that is equality with God important enough to clutch tightly, but took on the very nature of a servant. If Christ was willing to be powerless and marginalized to serve others, how can we not be willing to do the same?

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