Presby-Musings

This week we are continuing the sermon series that we started last week--a series that is going to take us all the way through the month of May.  The series is entitled, Deep & Wide.   We need to be the kind of church that is both deep and wide.  We want to be deep in our faith, and our love of Scripture, but we also want to have a wide embrace, welcoming everyone to journey with us.   Over the last two weeks we've discovered the two biggest reasons people give as to why they don't attend church:  They feel judged, and they feel lectured.   We've also learned that the best way we can overcome those objections is by practicing Radical Hospitality (welcoming people just as they are) and having Fearless Conversations (not being afraid to listen, engage and be open to people with real issues).  Today we're going to take a step further and discuss the third biggest reason that people have shared as to why they don't want to attend church--th...

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been attending some of the Festival of Homiletics, a preaching conference that is being held in San Antonio this week.   Being in a room full of a couple thousand pastors and church leaders has been a great experience, but it also has been a sharp reminder of the very real issues facing the Church right now.  The Church is going through a reformation, and reformations are painful.   Not all followers of Jesus who call the Church home, receive the evidence of that reformation with the same enthusiasm.  It's pretty clear that the Church is sharply divided over many of the same issues that divide our society.   I read something today by E. Stanley Jones that spoke to me.  He wrote, [The Church] must be held together by a single-minded devotion [to Christ]; otherwise we begin to disintegrate."   I've been watching the news lately, and it's disturbing on so many levels. Our society is seemingly being torn apart by c...

In Acts 20:28 (the Scripture I preached from yesterday), the Apostle Paul said the following: "Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. "  Sometimes we need to be reminded that God allows us to serve, and to be a part of the ongoing Story of how God is saving the world--not necessarily because he needs  us but because he wants  us to be a part of it.   Yesterday was a bittersweet day.   It was my last official day as the pastor of the church I've been serving for the past eight years, and the end of a long week of "lasts" and goodbyes.  I have been overwhelmed by the touching things that people shared with my wife and I about how our ministry had a positive impact on their lives.   One of the things that made parting yesterday bittersweet is the way so many people in our new congregation have expressed their...

We are in the middle of a sermon series for the month of May, entitled Jesus and We.  The basic idea behind this series is pretty simple.  We're wrestling with what it means to be a community of faith that lives into the hope of the Resurrection.  Christianity in America has become decidedly self-centered.  Christian book stores are filled with all kinds of self-help books on all of the things you can do to become a better Christian.  Far too many churches in America espouse a Jesus and Me kind of theology.   But what we know from Scripture, from the teachings of Jesus and from experience itself is that it's not all about Jesus and Me.  The Church is about Jesus and We.  Church is more than just a place you go, it's who we are.   Today is Pentecost Sunday, which marks the end of the season of Easter, but most certainly not the end of our series.  Today we are going to be learning about the unexpected way that God launched the Ch...

I was reading some minister's sunny blog post the other day about how the Presbyterian Church (USA) wasn't really  dying, and that all of the other mainline denominations like the Episcopals , Methodists , Lutherans , etc. weren't really dying either. The gist of the post essentially came down to this: it depends on what you mean  when you say that mainline denominations are dying.  If by dying you mean that they are dwindling in number, closing churches , losing congregations to other denominations, not attracting young people/families/younger ministers, and becoming increasingly political and divisive---that's not really dying.  But if you mean dying to orthodoxy, creeds, biblical authority, Christocentric theology and the like---then yes, they are dying.  Which, in this sunny author's view, was not really  dying, but living. Huh? Here's what I would like to offer as a rebuttal: Hogwash. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if there are...

I took this photo outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem .  The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the most famous Christian site in all of the city.   It is said to be built over the sites where Jesus was crucified, and buried. In the years 326-328 Empress Helena , the mother of Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, was given unlimited resources by her son to locate all of the Holy Relics and sites related to Jesus life, ministry, death, burial and resurrection. According to Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem , the site of the true cross of Jesus was discovered when the remains of the cross healed a woman who was near death.  It seems that Helena arranged for the woman to be brought to the site in order to "test" whether it was really the cross of Jesus.  After this miracle, Constantine ordered a church to be built on the spot where it was discovered. The original church was destroyed by the Persians in the 5th century, rebuilt in the Byza...

My Facebook feed is an interesting place. It's full of conservatives and liberals and odd folks like me who have ideas about things that are all over the map. And pastors and church leaders. I have lots of Facebook friends who are pastors and church leaders (although I may have a few less after this post), and I used to love engaging my colleagues in all sorts of interesting conversations---most of which would devolve into theological disagreements and even carefully worded insults and digs. How very Christian of us. Then I heard a pastor that I really admire say something that has changed the way that I interact with people on social media.  Since this pastor has successfully grown his church from like 12 people to over 40,000 in a little over fifteen years, and is literally one of the smartest leaders I know... I listen to what he has to say when he talks about leadership, and specifically leadership in the church. This is what he said: " Don't lose your...

In the first chapter of the book of Joshua in the Hebrew Scriptures , God speaks to Joshua, who has been waiting for his mentor and leader Moses to return from talking with God about life, the universe and everything. And God says... "Moses, my servant is dead." God doesn't try to break it to Joshua gently.  He doesn't ask him to sit down and pour him a cup of tea before breaking the news to him.  He just tells him bluntly, "Moses is dead... now you need to get going."  There is no going back to search for Moses to make sure that he is truly dead. "Moses is dead.  Now go..." I made the graphic you see at the outset of this blog into a poster that hangs on the wall in front of my desk.  It reminds me of two things: 1)  The past is the past.  You can't go back there.  You can't live there.  God doesn't want you there.  When it's time to move forward into the future that God has in store for you---you better get moving.  ...

I was listening to the Catalyst podcast recently and one of the hosts told a story about how he saw a bunch of vultures eating a carcass on the side of the road and purposefully went out of his way to hit one of them. He recalled how the birds deliberately waited until the last minute to get out of the way, but as soon as he passed by they went right back to their grisly meal.  In fact, they went back much quicker than they left. He then remarked on how some organizations are plagued by a "Vulture Culture," where gossipers, malcontents and bitter folk can't wait for something to go wrong so they can start "picking the carcass," so to speak.  Even if these "vultures" are cleared off their picking, they often leave reluctantly and rush back as soon as they think the time is right. I resonated with this analogy. I live and breathe in the arena of Church and church-y people so that is the frame of reference from which I write.  But the truth of...

This is the second part of the blog post on some things I learned about business and leadership from my tenure as a "Sales Counsellor" at Circuit City (R.I.P.) 6.  Train Managers to Inspire, Not To Conspire CC managers were about as inspiring as an old shoe.  They were trained for one specific purpose:  to maximize profits.  We held them in fairly low esteem because not many of them could sell water to a man dying of thirst.  And even the ones who could, quickly became drones trying to keep their jobs and bonuses.  They seemed to conspire against us---making sure that we lived in the same kind of fear they were living in---rather than inspire us to greatness.  First of all, your business should not create toxic and ineffective managers.  The way you treat you mid-level staff is probably the way they will treat your front-line employees.  Secondly, there is always a fair amount of junk that managers will have to deal with that they sh...

I worked for Circuit City --a now defunct electronics chain---for two very long years.  I sold appliances mostly, but also was trained on selling small electronics, programming cellular phones (remember the Motorla "flip" phone?) and selling home audio equipment.  During my tenure at Circuit City I learned some invaluable lessons in organizational leadership that I have never forgotten.  Perhaps if these lessons had been evaluated by the Circuit City brass a few years ago, they would still have jobs. 1.  Care About Your Customers Needs, Not What You Need From Them .   As a Circuit City employee I quickly learned that my first priority was to sell products that paid the most commission  and that would make the company money.  Our desire was not to help the customer find what they needed, but to sell them something that had a higher "spiff," which was the slang for the commission sales people received.  We could see the spiff on every ...

One of the great tools that the Fellowship of Presbyterians is providing to churches and pastors is the Narrative On The Health Of Mission And Ministry . The foundation of this document was used by the Presbyterian Church in various settings until the 1920's to evaluate members, and fell into disuse because of various questions that were culturally bound. If a church is an official member of the Fellowship of Presbyterians it's part of the covenant it has with the Fellowship to complete the Narrative  each year for peer-to-peer review with the congregations they are together with in a mission affinity group. I think it's a good tool that could be adopted by any church in any denomination.  I commend the questions to you: 1. How has the Holy Spirit been evident in your congregation in the past year; through conversions, growth in the fruit of the Spirit, or other transformational experiences that make disciples of Jesus Christ?  2. How has your c...

I recently read an article by Scott Belsky entitled "Why You Should Be Optimizing " on Work-Smart Strategies that was posted on the99percent.com . [For clarification, the99percent.com is not connected in anyway to the Occupy movement---quite the contrary.  This site promotes creative, emergent leadership, art, culture, etc.] Belsky identifies three areas of reflection regarding organizational optimization that leaders should take up.     I thought that I would reflect on Belsky's article (which you can find here) in the light of church leadership.   1. Tinker With What Works Belsky writes,  "When you make an error, you are likely to persevere and keep trying until you get it right. But when you get it right – when you hit a home run – the human tendency is to rejoice and then move on to the next challenge. Despite research that encourages us to build on our strengths, we spend more time fixing what’s broken than optimizing what works. Why? Becaus...