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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