AdventistPastors

Dick Updates Adventist Education Study

Eugene Peterson Interview

This interview is a few years old now, but just as timely as ever.  I have a lot of respect for Peterson's philosophy of ministry.  Take a look for yourself

Who Stole My Church

Gordon MacDonald wrote a book last year.  Who Stole My Church.  I sat in the Christian bookstore for a while reading it today.  I kept wiping the tears out of my eyes as people were walking by, I didn't want them to stop and ask if I was OK.  I was OK.  I think.  But I was overwhelmed by Gordon's description of a fictional church somewhere in New England.  It starts with a meeting of the saints in the Commons room, a meeting where the old leaders come to complain to the pastor about all the changes that have taken place in their church.  And they want it back.

Gordon writes himself in as the pastor.  He and his wife are the only two people who are real in this story.  The rest are made up.  But as you read on, you know that they really exist.  In fact, in just a few paragraphs, you feel like you are sitting in Pastor Gordon's seat, listening to members complain and query as to what happened to Organ music or why you don't where a suit and tie to preach in anymore.

Pastor Gordon listens carefully, pastorally, but at the right moment, he tells them in clear but compassionate tones that it will not be the same, that they cannot go back and why that is so.

That is where I stopped.  I couldn't see very well at that point.  I've been there before.  How many times I've tried to explain why things were different and wee going to be different in the future.  It has called for the best part of me in my ministry, to speak in love with those who feel that their church has been hijacked.

Our church is still trying to enter into the 21st Century.  This book might help us do it with grace and care.

Communities Of Practice-CofPs

In times of confusion, fear and concern rise to new and threatening levels.  Out of the fog, new leaders emerge, using new ideas and new types of organization.  These leaders are loyal to the mission as they understand it.  They are faced with challenges and troubles and they realize that the old solutions are no longer entirely successful or valid.  They need a new way.

The new way emerges, slowly at first.  The new way receives little support at first, even receiving derision and attempts to sabotage it.  In the meantime, the challenges remain, the problems do not disappear.  The New Way Leader is painfully aware of this and does not lose focus.  In fact, the new leader turns to CofP's for encouragement.

They grow aloof in their parent organization, even distant and seemingly unmoved by traditional methods of stimulating productivity and success.  They find themselves out of the loop and less involved in the corporate process for fixing the problems.  They are drawn to the new and the innovative and they do not find much of that in their parent organizations.  Of course, there is a set of dangers that exist here.  Will they sever their relationship with the organization, move on to start something new, criticize the organization, cause trouble for it, learn new ways to work within it, etc?

All these questions bring about crisis in the New Leaders life.  Crisis is a crossroads of judgment or decision.  Once again, these CofPs are there to catch the New Leader from falling into the gap.  Have you found your CofPs?

Reading Margaret J. Wheatley led me to one called CompanyCommand.com, for Military leaders at the company level, usually led by a Captain.  Here you will find real time information and real time solutions to real time problems from men and women working the problems.  It is a phenomenal success  for junior officers in battle zones. You have to be a military officer to join, but check it out anyhow.  Then ask yourself, if you are innovative at least, ask yourself where and who are my CofPs?  Where am I getting help to make the needed changes in my pastoral life?

We'll see if we can list some of mine in the next post.

Mind Mapping

Mind Mapping this week.  Just a way to think visually.  Try it out.

Steel Memories-People Towers

Two Friends of Mine

We Grew Up Together

I Watched You Grow Tall

And Stronger Than Me

Now You Lay Low

Unable to Touch The Clouds

So Many Memories On So Many Floors

So Many Scenes No Longer Beheld

We Cannot Forget

But Memories Fade

Relief Is Difficult

But Change Is Sure

Again We Say Goodbye

Again We Say Hello

Some Recent Friends

Here's a little friend of mine on my last trip out to Glacier.

 

 

 

When you need to feel blue.

Parable and Judgment

The prophet Nathan was given a task to confront the King of Israel about his horrific actions.  We know the story well; David cheats, steals, lies and murders all in a short time.  Nathan has no weapons to protect himself, no shield to keep David at bay should he grow angry.  But Nathan accepts the task and delivers a parable.

What a story.  And David falls for it.  I sometimes wonder if he wanted to come clean and confess.  The load of guilt he must have been carrying was overwhelming.  He was about to be judged by God.  God gave him another chance and sent him a storyteller with a pre-judgment parable.

"Judge this case for me" Nathan said to King David as he began the parable about a rich man, a poor man and a small lamb.  David got it before the story got David.  But it did get him and David became his own judge in effect.  This is the pattern I think all judgment will inevitably follow.

If the parables of Jesus are any indication, before all judgment, there will be a story told.  Conclusion number two then, Jesus tells us stories to help us know the judge.  How do you plead?

Story That Upsets

Almost 24 years ago, I began as an intern pastor.  I spent a year with a senior pastor and an associate, learning a few things about being a pastor.  I was given the chance to preach on occasion, 4 times actually during that year.  I preached once on one of the Beatitudes.  I had to give a copy of my sermon to the senior pastor for him to look over.

After I preached the sermon, he gave me the copy back.  One of his comments in red, was "Too many windows".  Too many stories and illustrations for his taste.  He doesn't know it, but I took that as a compliment.  In fact, I feel nearly naked if I don't have a good story or two to go with my sermon.  On occasion I tell four or five of them.  Every now and then, I tell one long story for the whole sermon.

Why the emphasis on story?  Let me share a couple of paragraphs from Robert Farrar Capon, author of three of my favorite books on the parables. 

Speaking in comparisons and teaching by means of stories are, of course, two of the oldest instructional techniques in the world.  And in the hands of almost all instructors except Jesus, they are a relatively straightforward piece of business.  Take an example: a professor is trying to give his students some idea of what goes on inside the atom.  But because neither he nor they can actually see what he is talking about, he uses a comparison: the electrons, he tells them, are whirling around the nucleus as the planets whirl around the sun.  The students suddenly see light where there was only darkness before, and the professor retires from the classroom to grateful applause.

With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people's satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.  Had he been the professor in the illustration, he would probably have pushed the comparison to its ultimate, mind-boggling conclusion, namely, that as the solar system is mostly great tracts of empty space, so too is matter.  What they had previously thought of as solid stuff consists almost entirely of holes.  He would, in other words, have done more to upset his students' understanding than to give it a helping hand.

Page 5, Intro, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment.

Jesus used story to upset.  Do you realize that?  Whenever I go out to Glacier National Park in NW Montana I look forward to hearing a singer by the name of  Jack Gladstone.  He's a Blackfoot Indian who sings about the west from a Native American viewpoint.

Years ago, when I first heard him sing and tell stories, I was taken back by his viewpoint on Lewis and Clark and Jefferson and Manifest Destiny.  He really made me think.  I was uncomfortable with his music, its conclusions and its meaning.  To him, his songs and stories were a protest against Many of those things that supposedly make us a great nation.  He has a song about The Hudson's Bay Shopping Company that just decimates our material culture.  And to top it off, it's funny and deep all at the same time.  It is a great story.

For a while, his stories upset me.  But they also got through to me.  I think that is why Jesus told story as much as anything else He did.  As the title of Capon's book claims, Christ's stories are about:

• the Kingdom of God and our longing for it
• God's grace for all of us who have tasted so little of that kingdom and never will without complete grace from God
• and for those who resist that grace, final and total judgment of the most unpleasant kind.

Fortunately, God is persistent in pursuing us.  Christ's whole life on earth is the story of that pursuit, just read one of His greatest stories, the Prodigal Son.

Conclusion number one then, Story is there to upset us(at least the way Jesus used it), not to hurt us, but to help us claim the prize of the Kingdom of God.  Open the windows, let in the light, tell the story.

Stories, a series I'm thinking about.

Here are some upcoming titles on Story: got any topics to add?

• Story, its the way we live
• Easiest Stories to Tell, your own
• Finding Story
• Storing Story
• Sharing Story
• Jesus and Story

I'll start this series over the weekend.  Your invited to contribute to the topics and content.