Indefinite Hiatus

I’m taking a break, possibly a permanent break, from the blog. Increasingly I’m becoming convinced that television, most of the Internet, and particularly blogs, are a waste of time. Forgive me if you find that offensive, but I’ve wasted good time thinking about what to write on a blog. Granted, I could always find some way of dumping some thought onto this page. But isn’t it strange how eager we are to share our intimate thoughts on these electronic forums, and yet we are reluctant to speak to people face to face? So, for a while, maybe forever, I’m done with this blog. The Lord bless you and keep you, brothers and sisters.

The Call to Pastor

Several years ago, in 2004, I was ordained to the gospel ministry. Previous to that time, I sensed a strong call to be a shepherd in some sense. I wouldn’t have said the sense was to be a senior pastor; that was too far-fetched. There were too many things I didn’t know, too many characteristics I lacked. After ordination, I sensed a strong urge to study and teach God’s Word. I had had a desire to do this for some time, but I’d suppressed it for the sake of doing my “day job” well, which was worship leadership. I’m not saying worship leaders can’t be knowledgeable students of Scripture, but this tends to be the exception rather than the rule. A few months after my ordination I became burdened that I needed further training for the ministry to which God was calling me. When people asked me to articulate this calling, I simply said it was possibly to some teaching ministry. Perhaps I would be an academic, a theologian, a college professor. Perhaps I stepped back to this option for two reasons: 1, I was extremely discouraged about my own abilities, which were at the time being squelched for myriad reasons, and 2, I didn’t understand what pastoral ministry could or should be. Now, having spent three years at Beeson, I am looking toward a new horizon for ministry. People have asked me, “What are you going to do after graduation in May?” Too many times I would give the safe answer: Oh, I dunno, maybe I’ll apply for an associate pastor or college pastor position. Now, please understand, there’s nothing wrong with either of those positions. I may still end up pursuing one of them. But I’ve not seriously been considering the call to pastor. I’ve told myself, “You’re not ready. A few more years and you should be ready, perhaps.” Fortunately, a good friend of mine had the nerve the other night to tell me, “Brian, you’re ready. You just need to do it.” And suddenly my fear became apparent. I am called to be a pastor and I will never in a million years be ready to do it. I was not ready to be a father or a husband. But God called me to be those things and I do them with all my heart. Plus, I accept that I have made and will make mistakes as a husband and father, but I cannot take myself out of these roles. I love my children and my wife too much. My roles as father and husband are irreversible, just as my calling to be a shepherd to God’s flock. I cannot back away from it because my Lord loves me too much. The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, Paul said. So, as I begin this anxiety-ridden search for a pastorate, I humbly submit to whatever the Lord has. I am thankful for good mentors, good minister friends, and superb spiritual directors, who remind me of a God who calls into being the things that are not, and brings to naught the things that are. For the time left until graduation, I plan on reading everything I can by Douglas Webster, William Willimon, and Eugene Peterson. They’ve been the most helpful in defining my own call to ministry, and they seem to be some of the few pastors who have the guts to tell other pastors what they’re doing wrong.

Please pray for me, my brothers and sisters, Sarah and I have a long road ahead. I can’t imagine what place would be crazy enough to call me to be their pastor, but I also can’t understand a God who calls such people as us into a relationship of intimate, painful, eternal joy. Peace be with you! Peace in the Spirit of Christ!

Mind-Weary

Do you remember your senior year in high school? Or perhaps you can remember your last year of college? Maybe neither of those images works for you, so perhaps you can identify with the last few reps on a workout or the last leg of a jog. In any of these cases, when we near the end of something, something in our minds tells us that we can’t go any further. Now, I can’t tell you what part of my triune brain is telling me this. The other day my pastor relayed something his baseball coach used to tell him: if your heart is beating, your legs will move. Well, academically my legs are moving, but my intellectual heart doesn’t seem to be beating.

I hear new students sitting around the commons discussing theology. When one of our professors delivers an excellent message in chapel, and says something that we should take to heart, I often see students sniggering at each other, as though everything they’re hearing is for someone else. Our professors aren’t just showing off they’re brilliance. They’re serious!

These are just symptoms of that aforementioned exhaustion that accompanies the end of a long journey. I love theology, but I’m about flat sick of hearing discussions about Luther, Calvin, etc., and I’m sick of talking about theoretical situations in ministry. I’m sick of hearing people come up with solutions to church problems as though the problems are not complicated. I’ve been in full-time ministry. When people are involved, buying a can of paint is complicated. And if you ever do anything, make any decision, try and get along with anyone, without humility everything falls apart.

I won’t say I am somehow less spiritual now that I am almost done with seminary, or that seminary necessarily kills your spirituality. But I will say that getting a good seminary education will often square off on your meekness. Even when you are taught by some of the humblest men I’ve ever met, the sheer nature of receiving so much information without immediate, practical testing can easily make someone an academic-religious prig.

I asked my mentor group to pray for me today. I’m mentally worn out. My legs are still moving. I just want my academic heart to start beating again. I’m thankful for my brothers and sisters at Beeson. I would never mean any harm toward them. This is just a mood. It’ll pass. Maybe it’ll go away when The Office starts its new episodes…

Back to School…

Hello there, we are back in the academic jungle at Beeson. Fortunately, this is my last tour of duty. I am taking Pastoral Counseling, C. S. Lewis, Spiritual Formation Mentoring, Ministry Leadership Development III and my last Ministry Leadership Practicum. Next semester, I’ll only have nine hours and three courses. Then, we’re going to throw the wildest party that won’t get anyone put in jail! Sarah and I are of course struggling right now to get back on schedule, with kids, with work, with school, with Lindley in school, exercise, grocery shopping, family time, etc. Then, in the thick of all that, we’ll need to begin looking somewhere at the turn of the year for a church staff position. We are excited about starting a new ministry sometime next year, but we have to keep our heads down and focused right now. I have tons of stuff I’d like to discuss, but unfortunately time won’t allow. I’ve got boat loads of pages to read and deadlines to meet. I wish you all well. Until then, remember, “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, His mercy is over all that he has made” (Ps. 147:7-8).

Good Stuff

Hey everyone who’s interested in good web resources for theology and pastoral ministry, Beeson has updated its site to provide a list of web sites that have lectures, interviews, articles, etc. For those of you who spend more time on here than you should, you probably have all these places bookmarked already. But for those of you who are still discovering these nooks and crannies of cyberspace, here you go!

Fighting Cynicism and Despair

“Not that I have already obtained this (resurrection) or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.”

Philippians 3:12-16

It’s been a rough day, one where you constantly question if you can go a step further, a day where you are barely hanging on to your sanity. It has been a day of the Lord’s conviction, correction, even chastisement, and at the end of one of these kinds of days you start to reevaluate your previous behavior. One thing I notice in myself and in what I write is how quick I am to critique how wrong others are in their theology, their methodology, and even in their manners, and how they simply do not glorify Christ in what they do. But I notice the grave error when I fail to give glory to Christ myself. Today’s difficulties and challenges have shown me the fragility of my own walk with God. He has shattered my “grip” on him and all that’s left is his unchanging grip on me. And then I come to this passage in Philippians, where an imprisoned Paul is talking about straining forward, laying hold of the one who has laid hold of him. This is the kind of thinking that repels the darkness. The light of the glory of Christ explodes the devil’s lies and magnifies all that is good as coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no shadow of turning. But I must be honest, my thinking today has been mostly dark, full of dwelling on lies, dwelling on self, seeking escape and not refuge in the Father.

Yet I am encouraged yet again to turn the page and find our brother Paul speaking under the inspiration of the Spirit: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which surpassses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:4-8)

Father, for the sake of your Son forgive me for failing in this regard: failing to rejoice, to surrender my anxieties to you, and for failing to dwell on what gives you honor. Thank you for the assurance we have in Your Son, our Lord, who died for us, atoned for our sin, intercedes for us, and has made us one with you in Himself. Thank you that we are inseparable from you. Lord, that truth is a symphony of good news. Thank you, Lord, for laying hold of us, particularly when we lose our hold on you.

Musings in Belize

My pastor and I went to Belize this past weekend to put on a pastors conference for about twenty Belizian ministers. For the record, I am done with international travel for a while, and I might be done permanently if my wife can’t come with me. Anyway, I took two books with me to read on the plane: The Shack (I saw those eye rolls!) and Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. While I have nothing noteworthy to mention about The Shack, except some mild heresy and crappy prose, Bonhoeffer gave me quite a bit to chew on. I’ll quote just a couple of those passages here.

“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what life together should be and try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves… By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world.”

“Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive.”

“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of the brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.”

Amen.

Pastors should really examine whether their “vision” for their congregation is truly the Lord’s or their own, since the word “vision” is thrown around with about as much weight as confetti. Most of the time the “vision” looks vastly different from a church where Jesus is truly its King. In support of their “vision,” pastors love to quote Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The NIV butchered this verse, and most pastors don’t even quote the whole verse. The vision referred to here is “prophetic vision,” which centers on what the Lord says, on how the Lord says things should be. And when this is absent, the people cast off restraint, they run into chaos and destroy themselves. But here’s the oft missing piece: But blessed is he who keeps the Law (Torah, the Instruction of the Lord).” Again, Bonhoeffer saw that Hitler had a “vision” for the German institutional church, a vision that originated in the mind of Satan and bore fruit in Hitler’s evil heart. Hitler’s vision seemed reasonable, good, a proper structure for Utopian society; if people hadn’t believed this, Hitler wouldn’t have been Hitler. However, Christ and the Gospel was not his foundation. Any edifice without Christ as its foundation is a house of cards, which is what many churches that stand entirely on a pastor and his personal Utopian, Christ-less “vision,” are.

Sorry for such a dismal entry, but I did a lot of thinking on the trip to and from Belize. Blame the delays in Houston.

A Troubling Survey of American Christianity

I feel like I should say a few words about a book I’m currently reading: Above All Earthly Pow’rs by David F. Wells. I began reading the book during the spring semester, but when finals came I couldn’t get much further with it. So this summer I bought it and have been taking in its content very deeply. The chapter “Megachurches, Paradigm Shifts, and the New Spiritual Quest” is so salient it’s worth the price of the book. I’ll include some quotes from Wells and you can see what you think. (Piper and Bethlehem Baptist held a conference based on the book; I think it would be worthwhile for ministers to hold a discussion group on the ideas presented in it.)

Interestingly enough, Wells opens the chapter with a quote from Bonohoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship on “cheap grace.” Then Wells goes on to say, “What I shall argue is that in this area, the lure of success is the very means by which success is actually disappearing and, in the next generation, we will see the bitter fruit appearing more evidently than we can see it now. And the irony which today is almost completely lost on evangelicals is that in this new quest, this new way of ‘doing church,’ those who once stood aloof from the older liberalism are now unwittingly producing a close cousin to it. By the time this becomes so evident that it will be incontrovertible, it will be too late.”

In his analysis of Willow Creek (some hisses from the crowd) and followers of its model, he says, “That common element lies in the fact that they [megachurches] are all operating off methodologies for succeeding in which that success requires little or no theology. It is an attempt to respond to the spiritual yearnings of Boomers and Xers while creating an experience of the church which is compatible with their habits, likes, dislikes, wants, expectations, and sounds.” In regard to megachurches in general, he writes, “Their methodology is peculiarly adapted to this moment because to those who seek spirituality without religion, a so many in the postmodern world do, these churches are offering spirituality without theology. It is, most often, spirituality of a therapeutic kind, which assumes that the most pressing issues that should be addressed in church are those with which most people are preoccupied: how to sustain relationships, how to handle stress, what to do about recurring financial problems, how to handle conflicts in the workplace, and how to raise children.”

Wells goes on to comment extensively about how today’s “successful” churches are situating their methodology and preaching around the aforementioned “felt needs,” and thus their sermons become merely “practical,” offering gold nuggets of Scripture yet missing the gospel. Theology becomes important only insofar as it works; that is, it addresses these felt needs, which is more like continuing to treat a fever with ibuprofen without bothering to figure out what is causing the fever in the first place.

American Christianity is a “market,” and like American economy it is a “buyer’s market.” Wells writes, “This creates an entirely different context for ministry from what prevailed only a few decades ago. This market today is competitive. And increasingly what pastors are up against are churchgoers’ preferences. This is a buyer’s market and what the buyer wants has become as large a consideration as what the church wants to give. And what churches have discovered is that these preferences are significantly affected by deep therapeutic longings, by fallacious assumptions about human potential, by a sense of entitlement to wholeness, by an almost sacrosanct assumption about consumer sovereignty, by the entertainment industry, and perhaps even by a desire to be cocooned from society as much as possible.”

Wells gives a good summary of his ideas on Mark Dever’s radio show: www.ninemarks.com, and the conference sessions can be downloaded at http://theologica.blogspot.com/2006/10/above-all-earthly-powrs-conference.html .

Today’s ministers must reckon with the problems Wells is addressing. If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to get the book and start wrestling.

Cheers.

Speakers Corner

Above is a picture of a preacher at Speakers Corner during Free Speech Sunday in London. I’m not sure if it’s every Sunday, but on this particular Sunday people gathered in Hyde Park to hear different speakers, some Muslim, some Christian, one young man offering free hugs, one rep from the Catholic Guild, another from the Socialist Party of Great Britain… As you can imagine, it was total Bedlam. Typically, people shifted from queue to queue to hear what these “idle babblers” were saying, straining to hear something new. No one aroused more interest or anger than three speakers: two Muslim and one Christian. One Muslim man, who was more moderate and incorporated more humor, fielded questions well and actually listened to people’s questions. Next to him stood an older man in a more radical Muslim camp (I can’t remember if he was Sunni or Shi’ite). Some, upon hearing what he had to say, waved their hands and muttered “rubbish” and walked away. What was more interesting was seeing the Christians and Muslims having little “talks” scattered throughout the crowd. One black man, holding a Bible, was arguing with a Muslim man holding a copy of the Koran. Apparently, the black man was trying to question the speaker, but the Muslim man was trying to block his questions. The black man responded, “If he’s right, what does he have to be afraid of?” Next to this crowd was the speaker who aroused the most animosity in Hyde Park. All I could hear him saying was “Jesus Christ is God!” Then some Muslims responded in absolute disbelief, “Show me one place in the Bible where Jesus says He is God!” Although there was some talk about this man telling Muslims that God hated them, and that he refused to listen to people’s questions (who can listen amidst such chaos?), the idea of Jesus being a man and God repulsed the Muslim listeners. It was like seeing how the men of Athens responded to Paul’s assertion that Jesus was raised from the dead. One man, who was purely there to poke fun at all the other speakers, wore a shirt that read “God, save me from your followers.”

Once we were done with Speakers Corner, I wondered what could be accomplished in such an environment. There, the speakers only scream and rarely listen. But when you looked at the crowd, you saw people whose worldviews had collided talking with each other. I began to wonder how guarded we are against different worldviews, and how we can choose to live in isolation from the thoughts that disturb and unsettle us. We read blogs of people who agree with us. We listen to songs from people who are preaching to the choir. We make friends with people who will support our own ideas about God and who seldom challenge them. Of course, this is the nature of the person’s search for and need of compatibility and understanding. But there comes a point where someone has to shake us awake. In saying this, I certainly wouldn’t put myself above these accusations. Too often I choose the safety of my preconceived notions about God, but then God puts something in my way the forces me to hear something alien to my own thinking. Perhaps we would do well to every now and then put ourselves in the path of thinking that deeply disturbs us, even makes us sick, to teach us to listen and cling more firmly to what God has revealed in His Word. This process teaches us humility, I think, a quality greatly lacking in many of us American Christians.

Going to London

Well, as of next Friday I’m off to London, England, for a Cross Cultural Ministry Immersion. My wife and kids are off to Tulsa for the sixteen days I’ll be gone. Right now we’re preparing our packing lists, checking our itineraries, preparing ourselves for the rigor of traveling (domestic and international), wondering how in the world we’re going to stand being apart for so long. This raises a question that has often puzzled me: Why is it that people often see it as a “break” when their spouses go away to be with family, friends, etc.? I can understand the occasional weekend break from children, or a day of personal time away from your wife or husband, but it is always difficult for us to leave each other. Perhaps this is what God meant, and what Christ meant when He echoed it, “And so the man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Not sewn together like two pieces of cloth, but forged together the way the arm is connected to the torso. The stretching can be painful. Perhaps if there is little or no pain in separation there was never much of a connection in the first place, which is a sad testimony to many Christian people who throw personal parties when their spouses go away.

I am excited about going to the place I’ve always wanted to visit. I know the Lord has a lot to teach me there, as he has lots to teach Sarah while she’s in Tulsa. I don’t know where the Lord is leading us ministry-wise, but somehow I believe the next few weeks are a significant part of God making clear his calling to us both. As you might have guessed by now, the blog will be out of commission while I’m away. I’m beginning to question even the long-term benefits of writing and reading blogs. Much of the content of blogs is shooting-from-the-hip thinking, which often gets misinterpreted because many of the ideas are half-baked or works-in-progress. Nonetheless, when I have something to say, I’ll put it on here, if for no other reason than for me to argue with myself later once the Lord has reshaped my misshapen heart and mind.

I wish you all well until I return. Happy Father’s Day to all daddies!