Two Ways to Pray for Your Children When Life Is Messy
So, always.
Little tip, they won’t be hidden for too long.
4 Lies That Cause Pastors to Neglect Their Families
I think that fourth one is especially tempting in a revitalization effort.
And it needs to die.
Oh, I’m using this one.
Good observation.
Celebrate Sexual Ethics. Don’t Apologize For Them.
I tend to agree.
Or nine things you don’t want to do.
Mr. Thompsons and the Vicar Rebrand (Gotta love Lutheran Satire):
Ten Principles for Personal Productivity
This kind of gets to the heart of things.
Seven Massive Changes Where Churches Must Respond
I’ll say that a couple of these (like multi movement) I think our best response is to not jump on board and to stay the course.
I’ve erred on #4 the most.
How to Make a Theological Argument
This seems far more difficult than just yelling at someone.
The 9 Best-Worst Sermon Illustrations Ever Used
I’ve got a pretty big list of these.
The Power of Christian Publishing We’ve Given to Amazon
Yep.
3 Questions D.A. Carson Asks Potential Apostates
More times than not it’s that second question where the problem lies. Unconfessed, buried, suppressed sin will slowly kill faith.
I might be missing a couple of these.
In honor of football season beginning:
“…their nominal faith in God was supported and accredited by a closed system of mutual human honoring which made the need for any honor from God superfluous.”
In other words the Pharisees faith was buttressed not by the good news of God’s Kingdom but rather by their own religious culture that they had created. If they had Together for the Law conferences back then the same dudes would have likely headlined each conference. They had effectively created an echo chamber and eventually the voice of God grew dimmer and dimmer.
This almost feels too painful to write about. And maybe some of the events are too raw for us to talk about. But I think God is doing something here and I don’t want to be silent or refuse to learn from pain.
Ten years ago. That wasn’t so long ago was it? But I went back in my mind to 2009 when I was bumping Lecrae and turned to my wife, with tears in my eyes, excited at how God was speaking such biblical truth through this medium. I was a kid who grew up listening to 2Pac and I never thought I’d be able to see God so deeply glorified through this same medium. In 2009, Time magazine considered New Calvinism one of the 10 Ideas Changing the World. And that was my tribe. It felt like God was really moving within Reformed Evangelicalism.
But that was ten years ago…
Ten years ago. I was reading CJ Mahaney’s book on Humility and giving Joshua Harris’ book, Dug Down Deep, to some folks to help with discipleship. (Okay, that was actually 2010).
Ten years ago. I was defending Mark Driscoll and trying to learn from some of his missional strategies in Seattle. Only eight years ago I was an associate pastor at a church where we were going through Tullian Tchvidijian’s Jesus + Nothing book. We appreciated it’s gospel-centeredness.
Ten years ago there wasn’t a massive fracture over issues of social justice. The Gospel Coalition and Founders seemed to be on the same page. Christian Hip-Hop wasn’t fractured.
Seven years ago, Paul Tripp wrote a great book for pastors called Dangerous Calling. Three of the four men who had blurbs on the back of that book either are out of ministry or should be. We’ve blown up.
What do I do with all this? How does my faith respond when the echo chamber that I was part of ugly explodes? What is God doing in the midst of Reformed Evangelicalism? Why is He allowing such fractures?
These things hurt. And I’m not even all that closely tied to them. I’m a distant follower to many of these things. But it is (was?) my tribe and it hurts to no longer have a home. It hurts to have lost that place of “mutual human honoring”. It leaves me feeling raw and homeless and discouraged and questioning.
But God is doing something good here. It’s good for me to doubt a faith whose hope was tethered more to Reformed Evangelicalism than to Jesus Christ. It’s good for us that our echo chamber has blown up. But what do we do with all the pieces?
Again, Os Guinness is incredibly helpful. He encourages us to go back to square one:
Life can proceed with deceptive ease on the basis of a faith which was once vital but has become so taken for granted that it is no longer authentic. At that stage any pressure may be such a test for faith that the believer is faced with a choice: Give up or go back to square one. If we give up, then we abandon faith altogether. But if we go back to square one (and so back to our roots, back to our foundations, back to our beginning), we will find a faith which is solid and secure. The lesson of the Square One Principle is this: The person who has the courage to go back when necessary is the one who goes on in the end. (Guinness, 19)
We’ve blown up. Are we going to go back to square one, dig in and keep pretending, try to carve out a new place of ‘mutual human honoring’, or abandon our faith altogether?
I’m convinced the Lord is calling us into a more authentic faith and that he has graciously blown up our little tribe for the sake of the gospel. Maybe as we pick up the pieces we’ll hand them to the Lord instead of use them to build another house for ourselves. He’s building a kingdom that will never falter—and somehow it includes our broken pieces redeemed.
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Just as you never step in the same river twice, you’re never married to the same person from one day to the next. Stanley Hauerwas has said this perhaps better than anyone:
Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.
We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
Sound advice for marriage. But I wonder if it might also work for the pastorate as well. You’re never the same pastor that the church hired. And the church is never the same as they were on day one. And that’s a good thing.
Hauerwas’ encouragement to “learn to love the stranger” is absolutely vital. It’s a daily opportunity to believe and apply the gospel. After all, such hospitality—of loving one another as we are and as we are becoming—is a reflection of how much we’ve actually grasped the gospel.
Where pastors and churches get in trouble is when we start to think this world—even the churchified bubble we’ve created—has become our home to settle into. That mindset will blow up in the face of both the pastor and the flock. It’s what Bonhoeffer called “human love”. Such human love desires ownership—for the pastor it’s a desire for this to be his church and for the congregation it’s a desire for the pastor to be theirs.
Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desire to be irresistible, to rule. (Bonhoeffer, 24)
There is something beautiful in ministering in the ordinary. But there is something devastating when we minister in the predictable. One is love and the other is contempt. We must learn, both sheep and shepherds, how to love one another as who we are in that very moment in which we find ourselves–those unpredictable ordinary Christ-gifted moments.
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Photo source: here