Psalm 119:105 & 114
105 Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light for my path.
114 You are my refuge and my shield;
I have put my hope in your word.
Filed under: Bible Thought | Tags: Bible Thought, Psalm 37, Three Eighteen Ministries
Psalm 37:4-8
4 Delight yourself in the LORD
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
5 Commit your way to the LORD;
trust in him and he will do this:
6 He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn,
the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.
7 Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when men succeed in their ways,
when they carry out their wicked schemes.
8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
do not fret—it leads only to evil.
Filed under: Bible Thought
PSALM 111:7-9
7 The works of his hands are faithful and just;
all his precepts are trustworthy.
8 They are steadfast for ever and ever,
done in faithfulness and uprightness.
9 He provided redemption for his people;
he ordained his covenant forever—
holy and awesome is his name.
Filed under: Christianity, Relevant Christian | Tags: 1 John, jesus, love, Love God, Love one another
Letting Love
“We are created by love, to live in love, for the sake of love…By worshiping efficiency, the human race has achieved the highest left of efficiency in history, but how much have we grown in love?” (Gerald May, quoted in John Eldredge, Waking the Dead, 48)
I’m thinking about this love—and especially as this love relates to the church; to Christians. Commenting on 1 John 5:1, author Morris Womack writes:
“If love is one of the familial traits in God’s family, then each of his children will love God and love the brothers and the sisters in God’s family. You cannot love God without loving your brother. You cannot have one without the other. John reminds us that the way for us to become children of God is (1) by loving God; and (2) by carrying out his commands…[T]he conclusion we expect is: therefore if you love God you will love your fellow Christian.” (College Press NIV Commentary, Morris Womack, 1, 2, &; 3 John, 116-117)
And yet…and yet…Eldredge asks, “Why is it so easy to get angry at, or to resent, or simply to grow indifferent toward the very people we once loved?” (Waking the Dead, 113). John made it perfectly clear in his letter, “…everyone who loves the father loves his child as well…This is how we know that we love the children of God of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands” (1 John 5:1b-2).
Why is love so difficult for us? I mean, as I read blogs and the comment sections of blogs I am led to believe that the family of God is one great big, gigantic dysfunctional family. Why? Because we can’t and don’t and won’t love our brothers in Christ—no matter that we are commanded to. But it is one thing to lament the lack of love and quite another to offer solutions. It is one thing to see others as the stumbling block (“I can’t love them”) and quite another to see ourselves as the stumbling block (“I won’t love them.”) I wonder which is worse.
Ah, therein is my problem. I have no solutions. I don’t know how to convince people that they not only should love their brothers and sisters but that they can. That seems to be what grace does in our lives. That is, enables us to do something, love, that previously we could not do and would not do. I don’t know how to convince myself that I should love. Hey, sometimes it is hard to get over hurt. It is one thing to want love to win and quite another to go out of my way to make certain that is a reality.
Someone else wrote: “Brotherly love is proof of love of God; but the reverse is also true.” (Smalley, 268) Ouch. That hurts. Brotherly love, love God, love people. It makes my head hurt thinking about the various peoples that God calls me to love and the various peoples that God, by virtue of his command, calls to love even me. I can’t imagine the horror some people experience when they read in the Scripture that they are, by virtue of their new birth in Christ, obligated to love so-and-so; or me. I am probably more amazed at the people who have willingly, sacrificially, unconditionally, without an agenda loved me; warts and all that is. Yet I complain when I am commanded to love so-and-so.
Eugene Peterson wrote in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places:
“A primary task of the community of Jesus is to maintain this lifelong cultivation of love in all the messiness of its families, neighborhoods, congregations, and missions. Love is intricate, demanding, glorious, deeply human, and God-honoring, but—and here’s the thing—never a finished product, never an accomplishment, always flawed in some degree or other. So why define our identity in terms that can never be satisfied? There are so many easier ways to give meaning and significance to our human condition: giving assent to a creed or keeping a prescribed moral code are the most common in congregations.” (313)
Don’t you think that is too much pressure? Quite frankly it would be much easier if we did have a set of rules that would measure our success; indeed, many think we do. But the Scripture is rather clear that the measure of our success is determined by our love for one another and in no other way. There’s an easy way and the right way. The easy way is rules; the right way is love. And Peterson is right: love is never a finished project or product. There is always some obstacle we have to overcome along the way. Love always wins when we are brave enough to love.
I don’t think I’m searching for anything out of the ordinary, although, to be sure, love is out of the ordinary. It is not what we are accustomed to in this life. So when we get involved with the Jesus life we are shocked that this is what we are called to do. Love one another. Love one another. A new command I give you, Love one another. Jesus said it three times on the night he was betrayed. Three times! I suppose that shocked his disciples that night. Love one another. Pshaw! What sort of kingdom is going to grow, overcome the world, and remain when the cornerstone of that kingdom is love for another?
I’m not looking for anything out of the ordinary, although love does not come naturally to us. To love the people of God causes us all sorts of revulsion and convulsions and indigestion. Yet that command is not rescinded: Love one another is what Jesus left us with. He could have said any of a billion different things is the ‘new command’ he was giving us. And yet…and yet…our story, his story, is defined by love. No matter how complicated it becomes the command never changes: Love one another. Jesus either had a sense of humor or he was serious. Could be both. But while not excluding the former, I am inclined toward the latter.
“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another. If anyone one of you has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in you? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:16-18).
Yeah, right. That’s going to work.
Filed under: Christian, Christianity, leadership | Tags: 1 Corinthians 9, Acts 6, christian service, Christianity, Church, discipleship, every member ministry, paid ministry, pastor, preacher, service, Spiritual gifts
Confessions of a Frustrated (Christian) Preacher, pt 5 (1 of 2)
“In the same way, the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel. But I have not used any of these rights. And I am not writing this in the hope that you will do such things for me. I would rather die than have anyone deprive me of this boast. Yet when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, for I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! If I preach voluntarily, I have a reward; if not voluntarily, I am simply discharging the trust committed to me. What then is my reward? Just this: that in preaching the gospel I may offer it free of charge, and so not make use of my rights in preaching it” (1 Corinthians 9:7-18).
“ ‘I’ve had it with the church. I think that I should go back to school and become a psychotherapist.’
“That’s what a lot of disillusioned clergy do. They still want to help people, but they can’t seem to do it within the church.” (Charles Irish, Back to the Upper Room, 9)
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My second full-time, paid ministry position began when I was 27 and ended when I was 29 and 5 months. I was too young. Someone told me that, a respected person, when I was at a weekend retreat. Ah, sure. Who at the age of 27 wants to be told, let alone admit, that they are too young for something? Many professional athletes are in their prime at 27, it shouldn’t be any different for a paid preacher. I confess that I was not fully prepared for the level of politics that has to be played in a local congregation and in that sense I was too young. I was naive, easily manipulated, impulsive, defensive, and stubborn. There was yet to be developed in me the spirit of faith, the sustenance of grace, and the humility of defenselessness. Those things are developed in the crucible of turmoil.
I have said, on more than one occasion, that paid ministry is a different animal altogether. The local paid preacher, at least in my own denomination, carries a great deal of responsibility—far more than is biblically mandated or professionally reasonable. If the preacher is part of a multi-person staff, that responsibility is lessened; if he is solo, it is heightened. In all of the churches I have served, I have been solo with no other paid staff. (Please don’t misinterpret me here: I assure you this is not a complaint, just reality.) This means, ultimately, that the bulk of the work falls on the paid preacher’s shoulders. I was young enough to expect the church to work and encouraged the church to be an ‘every member ministry’. Every member ministry is a myth of epic proportions. The American way is easier: Let’s just pay someone to do it.
The paid preacher is chained, literally, to the expectations of those who write his job description and sign his paycheck. He is only relatively free to pursue his gifts and passions. He is on-call 24/7 and is paid for 40. Again, there is no whining here, just brutal facts. The sad truth is that in my experience paid ministry is neither ‘paid’ nor ‘ministry.’ It is something akin to indentured servitude or serfdom if he lives in a parsonage. I don’t think that is an exaggeration. There is the unwritten rule that the preacher can be bothered at any time, for any reason, and by any person. His home phone is published under the words ‘parsonage’ unless he owns his own house.
I believe there is a place for our modern concept of ministry and I believe there are some people who are made for it. It and they are called, collectively, The Church, The Body of Christ, The Congregation. The worker, yes, is worth his wage, but I have grown to believe more and more that our modern model for paid ministry is downright unbiblical and unnecessary when the Church functions according to the biblical descriptions and prescriptions. The Bible describes the church as a place where everyone is gifted by God (e.g., 1 Corinthians 12) to accomplish the work He has prepared in advance for us to do (cf. Ephesians).
The problem, as I see it, is that congregations end up believing they have paid for services—therefore, they do not have to do anything but show up on Sundays—that is, admittedly, a terribly vague generalization and not true in all cases. “It” is the preacher’s job. And if it is done properly, the paid preacher will spend the majority of his time planning, administrating, attending meetings, taking phone calls, or visiting the parishioners in their houses among other things. Most preachers will not be lost in their study of the Scripture or hunkering down in the prayer closet. Yet this doesn’t seem to jive with what Scripture says. Consider Acts 6 where we can clearly see that the responsibilities of the church have clear lines of delineation:
“In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Brothers, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.
“This proposal pleased the whole group. They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit; also Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas from Antioch, a convert to Judaism. They presented these men to the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them. So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.”
In the absence of apostles dedicated to the preaching and praying, I believe that some are specifically called to such ministry. As Paul wrote in Ephesians Jesus himself apportioned such gifts (such people!): “It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up…” Some people are specifically called and gifted for ‘pastoral’ (visitation) ministry; others are not. Some are specifically called to preaching ministry; most are not. Since very few churches are willing (or able) to pay someone simply for their involvement in the Word and Prayer, the line gets blurred and ‘paid’ preachers become hirelings to do all the work that those gifted in the congregation should do—a truly every member ministry. Instead of all of us taking care of one another, it is the ‘pastor’s’ job.
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I think there is a better way to do church, a better way to be church—a better way to be a minister of Christ. I also believe that this is precisely the place where my disillusionment with the church and with ‘paid ministry’ comes into the picture. I know it is not the same for every single preacher on the planet. I know my experience is and is not unique. I know that making one person, effectively, the CEO/Pastor/Preacher/Planner/Etc., is the American way to do things. I know there is not a biblical prohibition against paid ministry per se. (Although I don’t know that the modern version is what the apostles had in mind.)
But what I have experienced has led me to a place where I can no longer do ministry precisely because of the paycheck that comes along with it. The paycheck hasn’t freed me for ministry, it has shackled me to the expectations of others and it has prevented the full expenditure of whatever gifts and passions I might have (and probably stagnated my congregation since I seem unable to motivate them at any level). In other words, it has limited ministry. What’s better? Preaching to a few people on Sunday mornings, once per week, for about 30 minutes and hoping that the church building will be the primary place for ‘salt and light’ type of evangelism, and being beholden to the whims of the paycheck? Or being out and about among the ‘lost’ all day, every day, doing good deeds, influencing people directly who are without Christ, preaching as we go, wherever we go, wherever we are led, and being free to do ministry out of love and not obligation?
This is the struggle I have been having for a number of years now and it has come to a head in my current ministry. The frustration is born out of the problems I noted above and out of the desire to be free to serve Christ in a more meaningful way because I love and not because I am obligated.
_____________________
“How can they fathom that half the world is too poor to feed its kids when their church just spent two years raising money to build an addition to their building? They gather, they sing, they hear a talk from the pastor, and then they get back in the car with their parent and they go home; the garage door opens up, the car goes in, and the garage door goes down. This is the revolution? This is what Jesus had in mind?” (Rob Bell and Don Golden, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, 138)
I don’t believe it is. Christ has called us to something more as ministers of his Gospel.
Filed under: Christian, Christianity, Relevant Christian | Tags: bride of Christ, Christianity, Church, church membership, Ephesians 4:16, interviews, local churches, parsonage, preacher, preaching, Rob Bell
Confessions of a Frustrated (Christian) Preacher, pt 4
“From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Ephesians 4:16)
“A Church is the new humanity on display.” (Jesus Wants to Save Christians, Rob Bell, 155)
I believe this is true, but if it is I think it is scarcely a compliment to the new humanity. As this series continues, and as I draw closer to telling the story of my current ministry experience, you will see that I am not kidding at all. One caveat. Please don’t misinterpret my point. Don’t mistake ministry for Christianity. I love being a Christian and wouldn’t change it for the world. I’m just finding it more and more difficult to live it out while being paid to preach. That said, there’s a lot that needs to be said about the way preachers are treated within the church by other Christians.
The key to this post is to remember this: Preachers are Christians too.
Pulpit Supply
While I was in college, still learning to preach and still developing a theological perspective, I volunteered for the school to do what is called pulpit supply. Simply put, a church would call the college if they needed a preacher for the weekend (perhaps the preacher was on vacation or had been fired), the school would call upon its pool of volunteer student-preachers, and we would go. Some of my best times at college were doing pulpit supply. I traveled all over Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio preaching. At one point, a church asked me to stay on for several consecutive weeks preaching. I loved it because I knew after the morning worship, I could leave. Freedom.
Pulpit supply was also some of my worst times. Two times in particular come to mind. The first instance occurred once when I was preaching in a church down around Detroit. My wife and I arrived early and went into the auditorium and selected a seat in a pew down near the front. After a while, an older lady came in and was looking rather glum. My wife, tactfully asked her if everything was alright. The woman responded, shaking her head, “Oh, not so good.” My wife asked, “Oh, what’s wrong?” And the woman responded, and I kid you not, “Well, it’s just that you are in my seat.”
We were 24 years old. I was the guest preacher.
A second incident was about as bad. I will say this, most of the churches I preached in as a pulpit supply preacher paid well. Among those of us who did supply preaching, there were a couple we really hoped for on any given Sunday. One was in Michigan and the other in Indiana. Both were decent trips, requiring several hours of travel, and paid $250 per week. For college students, this was amazing money. It was motivation to preach well and get invited back the next Sunday (incidentally, when I was hired at my first church in West Virginia, I made, you guessed it, $250 per week).
I visited a church in Ohio as the pulpit supply preacher. It was easily a 3-4 hour trip. It was as close to my parents as it was to me because I distinctly remember my mother and grandmother making the trip to listen to me preach. It was no small church hurting for cash, but at the end of the day, I received a paltry $30. It was not even an official check from the church treasurer. It was a personal check from one of the members.
Even back then, that barely covered the expense of the fuel required to get there (and there was no lunch afterward). It sounds petty, but these two experiences were the mere beginning of my experiences as a ‘professional’ preacher of the Gospel. I learned early that some things in the church are sacred and it is not the things one might expect.
Interviews
I didn’t learn my lessons well during pulpit supply. I didn’t get any smarter when it came to interviews. The interview is where a preacher ought to decide if he is going to a church not if the church is going to call the preacher. Sadly, however, not many preachers are afforded the luxury of being so picky. To be honest, I was just plain stupid when it came to interviews, and young. I’ll share a couple of examples.
I interviewed at a small church in West Virginia for my first paid position. Admittedly, it was a small church and I should have listened to my wife’s concerns, but I wanted to preach and I was graduating soon. I needed to work, I wanted to work; I wanted to preach. So I hurried the process along. I don’t remember too much about the interview except for one particular question that came from one of the ‘elders’ of the church. I was not yet 25, my wife was just barely 24. We were about one and half months from graduation. We had one son.
The question? “Are you planning on having any more children?” I should have known at that point, but I wanted to preach so I answered that we weren’t planning on it (my second son was born less than a year later). I learned later what that question meant. My wife had gone home for a visit one weekend. My son was only about 2. We started the worship: singing, praying, and then the preaching. While I was preaching my son, about 2, grew restless as he sat by himself in the front row. He started talking and wiggling and clowning. I was stared at by the congregation while I preached by eyes that seemed to be saying, “What are you going to do about your son?” No one lifted a finger to help. Not one.
So I picked him up in my arms and preached the sermon with him on my hip. I learned that day what they meant by, “Do you plan on having any more children?”
In a second interview, at a different, yet another, church in West Virginia, I was asked an equally astounding question. I had been ‘out of ministry’ for about 10 months or so but I had started working myself back into shape by serving in my home church in a variety of ways and by doing some pulpit supply at a nearby church in West Virginia. At some point, ‘they’ decided they liked me well enough to begin conducting some rather informal interviews. One such informal interview was with one of the elders who, probably not incidentally, had been the mayor of the town at one point in his career.
Don’t get me wrong. He was a great friend and my closest ally while in the church. (I’ll have more to say about this congregation in my next post.) Yet it was during one of these informal interviews that he asked me a question that I should have listened to more closely. The question? “How do you feel about the gays?” Honestly, I had no idea what I thought about ‘the gays.’ It wasn’t something I thought I needed to put a lot of thought into and, to be sure, I’m not really sure how I even answered. I must have answered well enough because I was hired less than a month later.
_______________________
Back then, I was too young to know better because all I really wanted to do was preach. Preaching is what I do, it is what I love. What I learned, though, is that no one can enter into a church with the assumption that all he will do is preach-even if that is what he knows in his heart he is called to do. There is, without a doubt, an agenda in most established churches that is incomprehensible to the outsider looking in. The agenda is spoken in one way, “We want the church to grow.” But it is fleshed out in another way, “We want it to grow on our terms and you must conform to our ways in order for that to happen.”
Please don’t misunderstand me: I love the church because it is the bride of Christ and because I belong to it. My criticism is not of every church, nor of every Christian. What I am saying is that a large part of my reason for making plans to leave the paid ministry is because of the way I have been treated as a preacher.
There is a simple way to look at this: The preacher is not a member of the local church despite his confession to the contrary. He is never a member who is paid. (The paycheck always, always, dictates and controls.) This is the only explanation I can come up with for why local churches treat preachers the way they do. I’m writing from experience: I know this to be true. I am willing to bet there are many more preachers in the church who know exactly what I am talking about and until the local church accepts preachers as equal members, and not as mere itinerants or transients, they will continue to do so.
You see, it is not the responsibility of the local congregation, so goes the logic, to do what Paul said in Ephesians 4:16 for the preacher they have hired. It is assumed, however, that this is the preacher’s job to do this for the congregation who hired him. He has a responsibility to the local congregation, but they have none to him. The hired preacher is always expendable (hence the evils of the parsonage and the pay).
It’s almost like churches are saying: Preachers aren’t Christians so we can treat them however we want. And if this is how they treat preachers who are Christians then just imagine how they treat those who truly are not Christians.
Imagine.
Things referenced in this post:
Rob Bell
Michigan
Indiana
Church Elders
Ohio
Previous Posts in this Series:
Confessions of a Frustrated (Christian) Preacher, 1
Confessions of a Frustrated (Christian) Preacher, 2
Confessions of a Frustrated (Christian) Preacher, 3
Filed under: Christianity, Relevant Christian, Relevant Life | Tags: cab driving, evangelism, Frederick Buechner, grace, jesus, Mark 2:13-17, paid ministry, pulpit, Rich Mullins, strippers, West Virginia
“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.” (1 Corinthians 15:10)
“I am thinking of grace. I am thinking of the power beyond all power, the power that holds all things in manifestation, and I am thinking of this power as ultimately a Christ-making power, which is to say a power that makes Christs, which is to say a power that works through the drab and hubbub of our lives to make Christs of us before we’re done or else, for our sakes, graciously to destroy us. In neither case, needless to say, is the process to be thought of as painless” (Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 11).
I’m taking a slight risk with this post, but I believe in order for you, the reader, to fully understand why I have arrived at my current understanding of Christian faith that it is necessary for you understand a little bit of the journey that I have taken in ‘ministry.’ At the end of the last post, I told you I would be taking a short detour in this series of posts. (Actually, I said I was going to share with you about my last paid position in this installment. I’ll save that four part 4.)
____________________
My first paid position, after graduation in 1995, was in a small town in the hills of West Virginia. The church was small, and very family oriented. By that I hardly mean they were interested in ‘families’ (I should have figured that out when one of the elders asked me during my interview, “Do you plan on having any more children?”) What I means is that if you weren’t a member of the 4 or 5 families that owned that church, you really had no chance of surviving life in that town, let alone the church.
The church, comprised of 25-35 people were more loyal to the grumpy old man from Maryland who owned a house next door to the parsonage and another next to the church building. He was, after all, a far bigger contributor of cash to the church than I was—as that same elder told me in a board meeting one time, “He has no say so in this church but if he wants to give us his money we are darn well gonna take it.” He could afford to buy loyalty; I could not.
Well, it didn’t take long for a 25 year old man who thought he could save the world with the Gospel to get bored of preaching to 20 people a week, visiting them every other day and being blamed for the ‘lack of church growth.’ So to supplement my ambition and income (I was raking in a stellar $250 per week back then; we also had another baby on the way) I took a job with the local ‘committee on aging’ and served as a ‘homemaker’ to elderly people (most of whom were not affiliated with any church at all). In this position, I helped clean houses, prepare meals, grocery shop, run errands, give baths, change adult diapers, shave grown men, and clean up everything imaginable among other things. It was a challenging work, but, and here’s the kicker, I could do it. I never would have thought I could do such a thing, but I did. When I left that church after a year and a half or so, I was more distraught about leaving my clients.
No one in the church really had any problem with me doing that work but once I realized the church work was over I knew that I could not keep my family in that town. We were outsiders and always would be.
_______________________
After a ten month lay-off from ministry, during which time I worked as a general laborer and a restaurant manager and served in a variety of capacities at my home church, I was led back into ministry. Back to West Virginia, but a little closer to my home territory. I worked very hard at this church for about the first year and a half and then a friend who belonged to the church needed some help with his business. He owned a local cab service. He needed a driver. So in my spare time I decided to drive some cab for my friend, a member of the church.
I met all sorts of people doing this job from local drunks, to jockeys who worked at the local track, to homeless transients, to strippers who worked at the local clubs. It was after meeting one of these strippers, and making reference to her in a sermon preached the following Sunday, that the proverbial feces hit the fan. I distinctly remember the words of one of the board members, “This cab driving stuff has to stop.” Well, I certainly couldn’t see why. Most 28 year-olds do have trouble seeing beyond themselves. Still, it was my ‘spare’ time. I suspect, and I could be wrong (although I doubt I am), that much of the problem was the nature of the people I was cabbing from place to place. You know, the preacher of a reputable church shouldn’t be seen driving people from and to bars; he shouldn’t be seen with strippers in the front seat of his cab; and he shouldn’t be supplementing his income by hanging out with such shady characters. The children might see.
And good christian people of scruple and sensibilities don’t appreciate hearing the word ‘whore’ from the pulpit even if that is what Rahab and the stripper both were. I know what happened to Rahab and how her story ended. I have no idea what happened to the stripper because I was eventually forced to resign the church and the cab and never saw her again.
I loved the people I drove around in that beat-up old car. I doubt any of them cared a lick about my faith or the fact that I was a preacher. One guy, a fella I’ll call Chuck, was actually quite a theologian. He just wanted nothing to do with the church and everything to do with the bar. Seems he was treated better at the bar. I was treated better by the strippers and drunks and homeless. Go figure. They wanted me; the church did not. They don’t care if a preacher drives the cab that gets them home, but the church sure minded if the preacher did.
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It’s a funny thing about churches. We are very careful to protect our own interests. Don’t misunderstand me. I was younger then and far too easily provoked. When something happened that I didn’t think was just (like telling me what I could and could not do on my free time or telling me that the money of an angry old man was more important than my family) I complained, often loudly, about it. Patience is an acquired virtue. What I learned is that a preacher is always the outsider (unless he has started the church and grown it under his own leadership ideas) and never, I mean never, has any leg to stand on in such situations. The itinerant preacher who is hired by a local congregation is on his own.
He is shackled by a paycheck and by a parsonage. In these two ways, the local congregation holds all the power. The preacher is always expendable and, since he lives in a parsonage, can always leave ‘and find another church.’ It’s quite a lot more difficult than you might imagine—especially for preachers who are hired by locally independent congregations with no hierarchy or diocese to rely on in such situations. I have broken free from the shackle of the parsonage. It’s only a matter of time before I break free from the shackle of the paycheck.
What has happened though is rather simple: God’s grace got hold of me. It’s not that I don’t care about the people ‘in the church’; on the contrary, I do! What I do mean is that I have found that being among ‘those people’ is where I want to be. Helping. Serving. Loving. Sharing. Giving. Listening. Giving them rides. Changing their diapers. Giving them a bath. Cooking them a spam loaf. Feeding the 50 puppies that live under their front porch. Wiping blood, food, and puke off their face on Monday since they had spent the weekend drinking. Like Paul, God’s grace got hold of me and it was not without effect. In fact, the effects are still being fleshed out every single day, with each person I meet. If grace doesn’t change us, then it is not grace we have experienced. We might have gotten religion, but I doubt seriously we have encountered the same grace that Paul encountered, the grace that took hold of him.
What I have learned is this: my ministry is not in the church but in the world. While this has been happening, that is, while I have been realizing it, these words of Mark concerning the life of Jesus have been becoming more and more real to me:
Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.
While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the “sinners” and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and ’sinners’?”
On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:13-17)
Yes, there are a lot of sick people in the church, but there are even more in the world. Frankly, I’d rather spend my time with people who need and want help than with those who don’t want it and believe in their hearts they don’t need it.
“The whores all seem to love him, and the drunks propose a toast.”–Rich Mullins
Previous Posts in this Series:
Confessions of a Frustrated (Christian) Preacher, 1
Confessions of a Frustrated (Christian) Preacher, 2
People or things referenced in this post:
Frederick Buechner
Strippers
West Virginia
Rich Mullins
Filed under: Christian, Christianity, Real Life, Relevant Christian | Tags: christian service, Christianity, local church, paid ministry, preacher, preaching
Confessions of a Frustrated (Christian) Preacher, pt 2
“So Christ himself gave the…evangelists, pastors, and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up…”—Paul, to the Ephesian Church, 4:11-12
“Preachers must be willing to risk conflict, resistance, and rejection by the church in order to be faithful to the church’s peculiar vocation: joyful subservience to the Word. Preachers are to serve the Word, not be acquiescent to the congregation. In a day when pastoral care for and caring about the needs of the congregation has virtually overwhelmed much of Christian ministry, Barth reminds us that the best and most loving service that we clergy can render to our people is utter subservience to the Word.” (William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching, 245)
In this installment of my exercise in exorcising of pastoral demons, I’d like to share a little of the journey I have taken to get from there to here.
It’s not a little like A Hobbit’s Tale. I was minding my own business, working, newly married and quite ready to progress on doing nothing for the rest of my life and I was interrupted by a knock on the door. Probably not a literal knock, but no less audible. It was my own fault for answering.
Three or four months later I was at college. I don’t know why I was drawn to the Christian College as opposed to, say, a more useful and secular version of higher education institutes. Don’t get me wrong: Christian college was a wonderful place to spend four years with my wife and to learn to dislike music majors and professors, but practically speaking, the degree I spent a lot of money to earn is worthless (unless the good grades are parlayed into a Master’s degree or higher). Outside of a local congregation within the highly regulated world of Restoration Movement churches (where having the right name means a great deal) there’s not much use for the highly coveted Bachelor’s of Religious Education with majors in Theology and Bible Teaching. Seriously.
Still, I went and I did well. I accomplished a lot in college and I am proud of that. Sadly, no one seems to have recognized it but me. Magna Cum Laude is nothing to scoff at especially when it was earned while failing at two youth ministries, having a child, going through 6 months of chemotherapy and 6 weeks of radiation with my wife, totaling a car, going through a 20+ day stay in the hospital with my wife, and wondering day after day where money would come from to buy food. (And my GPA would have been higher if not for the music department screwing me on two grades.)
Renee and I went on through four years and at the end I got a nice piece of paper and a shiny yellow ribbon (called a graduation stole), a pat on the back, a bill from the library for fines, and a truck loaded with stuff.
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I went there with hardly a plan. I know I should have had a plan, but I really didn’t have anyone guiding me even if I had this strange feeling that I should live in Michigan, go to a Bible College, and do something once I had the degree. Do what? I didn’t know. After the first year I was convinced that I was going to be a missionary and go to Vietnam to do so. (At the time I was helping a pastor friend who was working with Vietnamese refugees in Lansing.) I remember one time going to a missions dinner and hearing a missionary speaker talk about the great need for missionaries in the world. I went up to him after that speech ready to sign-up and go. His counsel deflated my enthusiasm. He said that I should stay in school and finish my degree. That was the best thing I could do, he said, that I needed to be prepared when I went out on the field.
2 years later I graduated with a degree in theology. 1 month later I was serving a small family church (literally) in West Virginia. Not quite my idea of ministry, but who was I to question the Lord’s leading? My wife was a little bolder to question my decision making and my choice to move to West Virginia (I may as well have gone to Vietnam.) I didn’t listen. All I wanted to do was preach. That’s what I was called to do. Preach. I needed to get on with it.
We went. We suffered. We failed. We left. And for nearly a year I was out of the paid ministry.
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I cannot even begin to tell you how horrifying it was to endure that year and a half of ministry. I was totally unprepared. There is a major, major difference between having a degree in theology, graduating Magna Cum Laude, and thinking that that necessarily qualifies one to be The minister of a local church. One ‘Introduction to Ministries’ and two classes in Homiletics does not prepare one for local church ministry. And in no way qualifies one for ministry in West Virginia.
During that year off I worked as a restaurant manager and I worked as a simple laborer at a plant my dad ran. The restaurant was fun but the hours were long and the pay sucked. The labor job was dirty, filthy dirty, but I saw my dad every day and I liked busting my ass for him. We also went back to church at my home church, the church that had ordained me into ministry. There we began to teach the youth a little, I taught an adult Bible school class, and I was involved in a major Easter production that involved some acting and singing. I was starting to get the itch again.
Then one day I heard about a local church that needed a preacher. I called. The preacher was still there and I was not a little embarrassed (he was leaving, but was still packing his office). But he was gracious and told me about another church, ‘just across the river,’ in West Virginia that needed a preacher. I called. I did some pulpit supply for them. And about two months later or so (I forget the exact timing) I was hired on as their full time paid Senior minister.
A nice, new, big parsonage. A bigger congregation with more resources and ambition. A significant salary increase over my restaurant job. Close to home so my parents and in-laws could see the children. What a dream job! Finally. All of this was mine. Finally, I can put those good grades to work and grow a mega-church which we were all, in Church Growth 101, led to believe was what God wanted from us as ministers, and which, many preachers along the way, assured us would happen with the right techniques in place.
After all, on field trip day in Church Growth class, these were the only sorts of churches we visited. We didn’t go to small rinky-dink, struggling, single-staff churches in the middle of cornfields. We went to thriving, metropolitan, multi-staff churches in Detroit and elsewhere. There, nicely dressed ministers who had it all together waxed eloquent about how God had blessed them with so much and had blessed their ministries and what nice buildings God had given and how they were expanding this and doing that. (Which was always, it seemed to me, nice ways of saying, “Look what I did!”)
My second ministry in West Virginia was two and a half years of pure, absolute, from the deepest, darkest, nastiest places of the pit, chaotic Hell.
If my education did nothing to prepare me for my first paid position, it did less to prepare me for my second.
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The thing is, I have no doubts that I am called to preach. What I do have doubts about is that I am called to preach in a paid local way. There are some, indeed many, who are called to such things and have the temperament to do so. What I am learning, some 15 years after my graduation and nearly 18 since my ordination, is that I am not one of them.
There’s another side to these various ministries that I will tell you about in part 4 of this series. But first, there is part 3. In my next installment of this series, I’ll tell you a little about the two and a half years of pure hell I enjoyed at my second full-time paid position and I’ll also tell you what led to my current position (the one I still own).
“It’s a dangerous business going out your front door.” (Bilbo Baggins)
Indeed.
Things or People Referenced in this post:
Filed under: Christianity, Real Life, Relevant Christian | Tags: Christianity, Christianity Beyond Belief, following Jesus, Graham Cooke, preacher, preaching, Todd Hunter
“My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” (John 17:15)
I don’t know how many of you are ‘regular readers’ of the Relevant Christian blog and how many of you just happen to be tag surfing or accidentally googled us. I don’t know how you got here, but I am glad you are here.
I don’t know where you are, either. That is, maybe you are a Christian, maybe you are not; it doesn’t really matter. I don’t know, and I won’t presume to have all the answers to all your questions or concerns or problems. I don’t know where you are in life, but I am glad you are here. I hope you can and will engage us in conversation regardless of where you are.
There is a far better life that is the life of faith. It is a life that has decided to be done with religion and to get on living in Christ. It is a life that has decided, in the words of Graham Cooke, to ‘live in Christ and not in circumstances.’ It is a life that, again in the words of Graham Cooke, ‘loves his life more than [your] own.’ It’s a life that has decided to follow Jesus.
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My name is jerry. My friend Joe invited me to blog here and I’m glad he did. I love writing and blogging has afforded me an outlet to enjoy my habit and hobby unfettered by the chains of deadlines, budgets, and someone else’s vision of my work.
My name is jerry. I am a sinner saved by grace. I am also a preacher, by calling and not by choice. People ask me about my ‘calling’ and I tell them frankly, “I can’t explain how I know. I just know. I didn’t choose preaching, it chose me.” I can’t explain how I know I am a preacher, I just know.
But I’m a frustrated preacher; a terribly frustrated preacher. You see, I love preaching. I am never more alive as a christian than when I am standing in a pulpit, in the power of the Spirit, under the authority of the Word of God, and authorized by Jesus preaching the Gospel. When I get up to preach, however, I am a basket case, a bundle of nerves and anxiety, ready to throw-up at any minute, and weak. Then I get started and the Spirit of God gives me strength and the words start pouring out of my mouth and I wonder how it happens and where it comes from. Then it’s over. 30 minutes preaching is nothing like 30 minutes listening. When I go home on Sunday afternoon, I am exhausted.
I am a frustrated preacher and this has led me into an area of my life that I’m not yet fully understanding: I am a frustrated Christian. I can’t explain it yet, but I am working on it intensely. I will be sharing with you some of my history in a several post series blog entries. These post are aimed at serving two ends. First, they are cathartic. I need to share what I have been learning and the path that I believe the Lord has set before me in recent days. Not that my particular story is special but that, second, I know there are people in the world who have the exact same sense of frustration and anxiety over their faith walk. I hope to engage you in conversation or be an encouragement to you.
As such, I am writing from a particular point of view: the pulpit.
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I think it happened this past Thursday evening when I went to a conference where the speaker was Graham Cooke and the worship that led up to the speaker was decidedly Pentecostal in flavor. I’m from a traditionally conservative (read: boring) worship tradition so being involved in a Pentecostal worship service was rather like leaving the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and entering a mosh pit at an Anthrax concert. I spent most of my time trying to worship, but mostly sitting slack-jawed and observing the worshipers.
There were people barefoot dancing. There were old ladies with hands uplifted. People in wheelchairs. Old men. Young men. There were young people laying on their faces. There were open eyes, open mouths, open hands and open hearts. There were babies. There were people who desperately wanted to wave their banners and flags and bang on their tambourines (space considerations had driven the leadership to put a ban on such things that evening.) People had a joy in their eyes that I knew could only come from their hearts and from the Holy Spirit. I took in as much as I could. I was amazed.
But I was sad and a large part of me suffered mightily during that worship. I didn’t have that joy that literally everyone around the room had. I felt terribly out of place and alone. I texted my wife something to that effect. I told her that I hadn’t had that sort of joy for a long time. Then I texted her again and told her why: preaching in a local church had robbed me of joy. I thought about it through the next song only to have my suspicions confirmed: Even my preaching had recently been reduced to a mere religious exercise and not an act of Holy Spirit inspired Faith. It’s not that I needed the experience to validate or create the joy but that I think the joy will lead us into a fuller experience.
I have allowed, in one way or another, the Holy Spirit of God to be quenched in my life. And I can attribute that quenching to only one thing: Paid ministry.
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In the next installment of this series, I will give you a little bit of background on how I got from ‘there to here,’ that is, some of the journey I have taken into the dark cold world that is the paid ministry.
I have no illusions that everyone will agree with my conclusions. That’s OK. I’m giving voice to my journey because maybe there are others who feel trapped in paid ministry and maybe there are some who are considering paid ministry as a vocation. Todd D Hunter wrote, “We don’t need to add ’spiritual’ activities to our life as much as we need to make our actual, everyday life spiritual. What we typically think of as ’spiritual’ often ends up creating a false dualism” (Christianity Beyond Belief, 115).
My aim is to help prevent someone from creating such a false dualism in their own life.
Links to things or people or other referenced in this post:
Preaching to the Dead
New York Philharmonic Orchestra
Anthrax (**content warning**)
Graham Cooke
Todd D Hunter
Google
Filed under: Christianity | Tags: grace, jesus, Jesus Christ, love of God, Romans 5
The Love of God in Christ
“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
“But Paul’s vision of God’s love, rising here like the sun on a clear summer’s morning, shines through all the detail that has gone before…God’s love has done everything we could need, everything we shall need. As Paul continued to explore the meaning of the reconciliation that has taken place between God and human beings, he delves down deep into the depths of what God had to do to bring it about….When we look at Jesus, the Messiah, we are looking at the one who embodies God’s own love, God’s love-in-action.” (NT Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, pt 1 chapters 1-8, 86)
Paul has spent a great deal of space telling the world, telling the church at Rome, telling anyone who would listen exactly how terrible is the predicament of man. It is bad. One might say that if it was bad in Paul’s day, it might be worse now. I doubt it. All bad such as Paul is speaking of is relative to the age. That’s not to say bad is relative, it is to say that the nature of the depravity is relative to the age. I agree with many who think that there is something terribly amiss in this world, in our culture, and in the church in general. I am not so pessimistic to think it is beyond redemption-in fact, I think that might have something to do with Jesus and why he came in the first place.
That’s what I love about Romans 5:6-11. If one were to read Romans and suddenly stop at the end of Romans 4, one might be left despairing and hopeless although, to be sure, Paul has dropped hints and given us glimpses of the beauty of what God has been planning for humanity such as chapter 3:23-24: “…for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” And perhaps also this in chapter 5:1-2: “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into the grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.” But these hints in these places are hints. Here in Romans 5:6-11, Paul blows the lid off the whole thing: Here’s what God did despite all that I have written about in the previous paragraphs! And we are stunned. We are stupefied. We are knocked down; thrown for a loop. Our entire world is shattered by these few sentences concerning God and his actions.
How can we not be bowled over by such statements? How can any single one of us, any of us, read such passages of Scripture as this and think that it means anything but what it says at face value? In the midst of all the wrath, in the midst of all the sin, in the midst of all the hate we have for God, in the midst of all the pride and boasting, in the midst of all the immorality, lying tongues, open grave throats, in the midst of all the convoluted ways we have chosen to live precisely because of our free-will-there is God. There is God! Standing at the dawn with his arms opened wide welcoming home all those who lived in the manner Paul described in chapter 1 is the God who loves. There is God! I don’t know about you, but when I read how God demonstrates his love (which leads me to understand how he really, truly feels about me) I am stunned into silence, humbled, humiliated; wrecked.
At just the right time God did the most inconceivable thing: No eye had seen, no ear had heard, no one could even imagine what God had planned for us; many still find it impossible to believe. Yet God was not even willing just to say ‘I love you.’ For God it was not enough to give lip-service to his great love for us: He demonstrated it. He made it visible. He made it concrete. He put his love on display for all to see. He so loved the world that he didn’t bother to ask anything of us. He so loved the world that he sent, essentially, himself. Paul will later express this love as such: “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all-how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (8:31-32)
Have any of us plumbed the depths of love this God has for his rebellious children? (Ephesians 3)
Is it possible to read Romans 5:6-11 and be anything but overwhelmed? Is it possible to read these verses and be anything but destroyed, thrown down, overwhelmed, unraveled and undone? Is it possible to consider that God loves us quite in spite of ourselves and be anything but humiliated and humbled? And so Paul can rightly ask in these verses: If God loved us this much while we were yet sinners, then ‘how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life?’ Or if God demonstrated his love for us while we were yet rebellious, then how much more ‘having been justified by his blood, shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!’
I’ve been thinking about these verses because it seems to me that this God is rather amazing. Paul hasn’t written, in these particular verses, about the pride of men. He has written about how utterly confounding is this God who loves and forgives and heals and justifies and resurrects despite the worst man has to offer. “You see at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.”
So there it is again: Hope! Forgiveness! Healing! The love of God towards a people who are decidedly against him. He continues, time and time again, to astound us and reverse all our conceptions of himself. We hate, and he loves us. We run away, he chases after us. We curse, he blesses us. We sin, he forgives us. We deny he exists, he shows Himself in Jesus. We kill him, he Resurrects! We can’t really make out this God can we? We cannot really, truly comprehend a God who goes out of his way to make himself real to us, who so desires that we be his people and that he be our God that he will be crucified to make the point and to make it possible, who is so wildly in love with us that he himself will deal with our sins instead of asking us to. He makes a way where no way exists. He creates a people where none is. He extends mercy where there is none.
I’ve been thinking about this God who loves us quite in spite of ourselves. I’ve been thinking about this God who loves us. I’ve been thinking about this God who thought it necessary to demonstrate his love to us, and did so in the flesh; in Jesus. If there is anything that dispels pride in humans, it is this amazing God who loves; the God of grace. This is the God we need to preach and share and adore. This is the God who saved us in Christ.
The best irony there is is that God loves us. In spite of all the worst that Paul wrote we are, in spite of all the devastation we manage to conjure up because of sin, in spite of our creative habit of inventing new ways to die and kill and run away from God-in spite of it all: He still loves us. The Hound of Heaven dogs our every step and won’t relent; pressing in on every side.
Dare we imagine a God, dare we submit to a God-this God of the Bible, fully come in Jesus Christ? Dare we love such a God who dared to love us?
Soli Deo Gloria!
