Sobering…
April 22, 2004
In my preparatory notes for this Sunday’s sermon, which will deal with the childhood of Jesus–frankly, it’s not really a sermon so much as a talk on what growing up Jewish in Jesus’ day was like for a child, and I drew heavily from Alfred Edersheim’s
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The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah
–I wrote the following; whether I have the guts to say it as I wrote it here on Sunday or not remains to be seen.
We are a shallow people, and I am a shallow person. The contrast between what we as “God’s people” do in trying to instruct our children in the ways of God and what the Jews did is so stark as to appear as almost another thing altogether. I am personally almost consumed by a sense of failure. I don’t know of any other way to put it. There is no way to sugar-coat it or dress it up. We live in a society that is intensively opposed to God’s righteousness, addicted to the banal and the ugly and the irrelevant, and our response as Christians is to try to make it to Sunday School when we can make it out of bed in time. I don’t have a punchy, witty thing to say here; my first thought is that we all ought to go out and grab some sackcloth and ashes and mourn over our abject failure. If this doesn’t apply to you, so be it, but I’d bet the house that it applies to all of us as parents. What does it say about us when our children are more acquainted with video games and Britney Spears and SpongeBob and softball and karate and MTV than they are with the faith once delivered to the saints?
Too strong? Maybe not strong enough…this whole emerging church thing, or the modern church, or the traditional church, or the contemporary church, or the fill-in-the-blank church, doesn’t mean jack squat if we remain shallow people. Maybe the first sign of actually getting a tad deeper is admitting that we are almost hopelessly surfacey.
Tony’s Adventure in Missing the Point: How the Culture Neutered a Popular Preacher
April 14, 2004
If there is a more gutsy, more passionate proclaimer of the gospel of Jesus than Tony Campolo, I’m not sure who it is. I’ve long appreciated his boldness to demonstrate that the gospel is good news for more than our eternal souls, but for all of God’s creation. I used to say, regarding his books, that about a third of his writing made me laugh, about a third made me angry, and the final third made me think for weeks. And some of that thinking has led to change in clear and indelible ways; for that, I’ll be forever grateful to Tony Campolo.
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Let No Man Despise Thy Youth (Pastor)
April 8, 2004
OK, see, I love youth pastors. I WAS one. Most of them are great people. On my personal list of the people who have most influenced my own life, one key youth pastor stands out, a guy who made Jesus come alive to me when I was at a very impressionable age. Though I currently have some misgivings about “traditional youth ministry” (reading Postmodern Youth Ministry by Tony Jones will do that to you), I know that many have done much good, and I’m living proof of that. Heck, I’d like to think that I did some good when I was in YM.
But you know that something else is coming, don’t you? OK, here ’tis: my dad said something to me years ago that I didn’t like, but now, well, I wonder if maybe it wasn’t truer than I wanted it to be. Dad asked, “why are all youth pastors flaky? And he didn’t mean it in a good, “zany” sort of way; he meant it, not in a tremendously negative way (he could have called them worse!), but certainly not in a flattering way, nor in a “it takes that to get close to the young people” kind of way. The older I get, the more I agree with my dad, and it frustrates me. I’ve worked with some great guys who did youth ministry, and I love them on a personal level and believe that they did some good things.
But here’s my case in point: I’ve had three “dealings” recently with “youthies”, and they’ve all been, well frankly, irresponsible. I’ve called two of the largest churches in the Atlanta Metro area, churches of which I’d heard in years past and whose ministry I trust, to try to ask a youthie to follow up on a young lady who came to Jesus here and was active in our ministry (but who was snatched suddenly away–legally–by a father she hadn’t seen in years) and who needsa Christian presence there. I can get neither to return my phone calls, and I put it down to…flakiness. Then, I had a guy win an eBay auction, and his “handle” identified him as a youth pastor (same denomination as these guys, by the way). I had two thoughts: one, I was relieved that he’d pay, since he was a Christian; two, I figured he’d be the slowest payer, and it’d drag on for several weeks, and that I might have to send him a reminder email. Well…I was a prophet on all counts.
I’m venting, I know, and I’ll probably regret posting this (although it might be a good test to see if anybody besides my one good buddy is reading it!), so let me reiterate; YP’s do a lot of good. I just wonder if we can’t work on the…flaky!
And yes, I know…pastors are sometimes pretty flaky too…
From “Stories of Emergence”
April 5, 2004
Spencer Burke said some things in “Stories of Emergence” that hit me right where I’m thinking right now. Lemme quote:
“Permeating much of my experience in ministry was the underlying assumption that bigger is better. I can remember going to conferences…the people with a platform–the ones everyone wanted to hear and shake hands with–were always the guys from the big churches. Pastoral credibility had everything to do with how big a budget they had and how many worshipers came to the Sunday event. If a church decreased in size, one could only assume thepastor wasn’t doing God’s will and his books were destined for the discount rack.
While the church growth movement encouraged people to become mor intentional about evangelism and to dream big dreams, it also fostered a kind of program-envy. The Christian community was quick to start shrink-wrapping strategies for success. As a pastor, I was expected to buy these ideas and implement them. There wasn’t a lot of room to say, “Yeah, but…” to the latest hot book or video series…Simply shepherding a church wasn’t enough. You wanted to have the fastest-growing congregationor a similar label attached. It was survival of the fittest with a thin spiritual veneer.“
Yeah, Spence, and know what I’m questioning? Why is it that the two denominations I’ve been most recently affiliated with, my current and my former, always have only the pastors of big churches at their conferences? I think I’d love to hear from a guy who has pastored 35 years at a little country church, which couldn’t grow to 1200 if it reached every person in the county, who stuck it out and ministered to people. I’d like to hear from the guy who drove people off because he challenged their materialism and envy and gossip and sin. I’m not dissing the “successes” so much as I’m asking if the correlation between “nickels and noses” and real Biblical success is particularly strong…
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
