thanksgiving

Here I am, sitting in the dark on my little macbook. not the cool silver one...the old white one. It's in amazingly good condition...I take care of my things! My tummy is full of home cooked food & my eyes are sore from looking online for Black Friday deals.

Today was great.

Small and quiet, but great. Aside from there being two cooks in the kitchen (if you get my drift) we had a very very nice Thanksgiving day together, just the three of us.

This time of year, I always remember the Thanksgivings when I didn't have anywhere to go. One year I volunteered at the Salvation Army and then ate dinner at wholefoods & I'd wonder, didn't anyone think to invite me over? Doesn't anyone hope I have a family to spend the holiday with. Have you ever been out of town for a holiday?  Have you ever invited people into your family for a day? What was that like?

Thankful,
Ashley

How Christian Consumers Ruin Pastors and Cheat the Mission of God

The following is from the QIdeas blog (www.qideas.org). It is a challenging and honest look at a common codependent relationship many pastors and parishioners are experiencing that causes the whole church to be ineffective ministers to their communities.  At One Church we are striving for healthy and strong collaborative efforts between churches so we may together serve our neighbors. For this to occur we must change our perspectives from "it's all about us," to "it's all about serving others."

Millions of Americans live in the shadow of churches that have become consumer Christian centers, but pastors are ruined and the mission of God is cheated when consumers enjoy goods and services from their local church. In their book, God is Back, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge described the state of the American church as the “Disneyfication of God” or “Christianity Lite – a bland and sanitized faith that is about as dramatic as the average shopping mall.”

Believers who think like customers contribute to the underachieving church in America. The damages move far beyond ineptness at engaging the mission of God. The incessant demands of a consumer congregation causes irreparable damage to those who lead such congregations. Some of the consumer demands are based on pastoral perception too. Pastors often experience chronic anxiety because they fear their flock.

Robin Swift is the Director of Health Programs for the Clergy Health Initiative at Duke Divinity School. She has been a part of extensive research by Duke to understand the challenge of being a pastor.  In a recent NPR interview, Swift talked about realities faced by pastors:  “Pastors, because of their calling, put everybody else first and have a difficult time naming their needs for self-care, and they also, like the Marines or emergency room staff, expect a level of high functioning from each other.”

Wayne Cordeiro, founding pastor of New Hope Christian Fellowship in Honolulu, Hawaii has experienced incredible popularity among Christian leaders worldwide.  His success is well chronicled through thousands of attendees at New Hope and planting over 100 churches in the Pacific Rim. Yet he was transparent about his near personal collapse in spite of his success in his book, Leading on Empty:

“I was out on a run on that balmy California evening. One minute I was jogging along the sidewalk, and the next minute I was sitting on the curb sobbing uncontrollably. I couldn't stop, and I did not have a clue what was happening to me . . . For over thirty years I had invested my life in Christian ministry . . . But now I wasn’t sure I could keep going.”

Such situations make one wonder if the damage (self-inflicted and from consumer Christians) is inevitable in a modern care-giving profession like the pastorate? Are pastors destined to be victims of their own calling? What do they contribute to the situation?

I believe the mentality in the pew (or cushioned chair) may have another contributing factor: pastoral codependency.

What is a codependent? It's "loosely defined as someone who exhibits too much, and often inappropriate, caring for persons who depend on him or her” (I got this from Wikipedia—because you can trust everything there.) A “codependent” is one side of a relationship between mutually needy people.

A codependent pastor needs a needy congregation. And we have too many of both.  But relishing the applause that comes from being the local church superstar often results in performance anxiety and utter disappointment in an underachieving church. It is a vicious cycle where everyone ends up disappointed—including God, I think.

The pastor who insists on being the focus of local ministry trains the body of Christ to sin; believers who demand all ministry to be done by “professionals” lead the pastor to sin. So who started all of this dysfunction? Was it the needy, consumer-driven congregation?  Or was it the pastor, hungry for significance? It’s hard to tell. But to break the cycle, the enablers must stop enabling. God cannot receive glory in the church when pastors are always up front receiving the credit and doing the things that their consumerist congregants should be doing.

We need to understand everyone’s role. When pastors do for people what God has called the people to do for themselves, everyone gets hurt and the mission of God is hindered.  God designed the church to act as the body of Christ, and bodies have more than one part. Here is what it should look like: “Based on the gift they have received, everyone should use it to serve others” (1 Peter 4:10). “A manifestation of the Spirit is given to each person to produce what is beneficial” (1 Corinthians 12:7). The church is most alive when every believer serves in God's mission where assigned by the Spirit.

Congregants should release their pastors to escape the madness by doing what they should have been doing already: caring for each other. Philip Yancey addressed the problem when he said, “I wonder how much more effective our churches would be if we made the pastor’s spiritual health – not the pastor’s efficiency – our number one priority.”

But ultimately the pastor’s spiritual health does not rest only with the congregation but ultimately on the shoulders of the pastor.  They should give themselves permission to release undue burdens, and learn to say “no” when necessary. They should visit their doctor for a check-up to get a professional opinion on where they are physically and emotionally. And by all means church leaders should continue this conversation with peers and church leadership. 

These are serious issues in our faith communities if we truly believe that God desires to work through His church. We risk more than the implementation of poor practices. The very mission of God is at stake.

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Other than pastoral codependency, how does a consumerist mentality affect churches? In your opinion, what can be done to curb this trend?
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Editor's note: The artwork above by Vrno is quoted from here.

Looking for Others Who Share a One Church Vision

Most believers would agree, I image, that the Body of Christ, the Church, is meant to serve our communities collaboratively. Yet, most congregations work and serve independently from the other churches in their communities. Even churches of the same denomination or persuasion seldom come together to seek out the concerns and needs of their commuinities and then plan together to serve those needs.

In the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) Jesus reveals his heart for his church as ones who see others in need, are moved with compassion for them, and then simply go to them and do whatever they can to help.

I'm convinced that an intentional effort to mobilize the local Church is needed. If you share this vision and would like to discuss some possibilities, please post your reply to this blog.

A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration with Christianity

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

My daughter gave me Pastor Pete Scazzero's, of New Life Fellowship in Queens, New York, little treasure Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: Unleash the Power of Life in Christ, two summers ago; right when I was going through a tremendous life change. I got about a third of the way through it when what little energy I had left ran out.

This week I met an acquaintance for coffee who is becoming a friend. He is dealing with some big issues in his life and mentioned that he is reading Pastor Pete's book. I found out today why the Lord brought this back into my life at this time. It's the chapter about our journey through the Wall. Pastor Pete says, "the ancients called it the dark night of the soul."

I have been searching and searching for an explanation for the confusion I've been experiencing lately. There is nothing wrong and life is the best it has been in a long time; but, I've been experiencing a nagging sense of confusion about God's specific will for me. If I've prayed once I've prayed a hundred times, "Lord, I ask for the knowledge of your will for me."

Pastor Pete's point here is that God's will for us all is that "we be made perfect in love, that Christ's love becomes our love both toward God and others." The purpose of the Wall is to strip away everything getting in the way of that. Thank you, Jesus, for confirming your love for me and your presence with me even though, as Pastor Pete says, sometimes "I cannot see in front of me."

We Need to Listen to Each Other

God is at work bringing the many and varied parts of his church together for doing the work of and being the people of the Kingdom of God in our communities. It is appearing in many authentic efforts to recapture what it means to be the Body of Christ in community. But, there is a palatable level of frustration on the part of church leaders who are grappling with how to engage their flocks in this movement.

The common approach is to appeal to pastors to get them "on board" so they will sell a particular effort to their churches. Educating and inspiring the leaders in the hopes that actions will be taken to motivate the masses seems to be the primary approach. As one recent speaker at just such a cause event said, "We blow in, blow up and blow out," but does any substantial change occur as a result? Not usually. These hype-events are like roman candles; they are fun and exciting but they are also short-lived with no lasting impact.

We need a process where the movement has "legs." This is much harder to achieve for this requires a lot of messy interactions ... conversations ... arguing and forgiving and "being" with one another until God is formed in us and in our faith communities.

The starting point for this kind of movement is listening to one another.

One Church: An Impossible Dream?

My dream is that Jesus' Church would live as one church in our communities. What would that look like? How would that experience be different from what we are experiencing now.

Today churches are typically buildings identified by the signs out front. I know there are people who are members of these churches and that "the church" is really the people; but you know what I'm talking about. It reminds me of high school when I was a kid. There were school rivalries and turf wars and sometimes, even brawls, to defend our school's honor. We had school pride and school colors and cliques, victories to celebrate and defeats to endure. What we didn't have was unity.

It may not be as obvious when it comes to churches but just have a conversation with a cross-town or cross-community church and the contest begins. How many go to your church? We had ten baptized last week, how many did you baptize? And so it goes. Is this the "oneness" Jesus prayed for in John 17:20:21, "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me."

We're in a perpetual state of competition with each other to grow our church no matter what that means to your church. After all, if people are drawn to our cool ministry stuff, your stuff must be missing the mark. All's fair, these days, in love and church-wars.

Imagine Jesus' prayer actually being answered. What would that look like? What would our experience be like if we were one "just as" the Father and Jesus were one? We would care a lot more about one another than we do about ourselves. We would trust each other as we got to know one another. We would want to help our brothers and sisters in Christ to achieve the dream that Jesus has for them. We would invest ourselves in each others lives even when, especially when, we disagreed with one another.

We would look a whole lot more like Jesus who did not come to be served, but to serve; to humble himself and wash his disciples feet. And then he said, "Do you understand what I have done for you?' he asked them. 'You call me 'Teacher' and 'Lord,' and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.'" John 13:12b-15

Growing churches are reaching many people for Jesus; and that is good. But, they are not reaching the world. To reach the world we must be one with each other as we are one with Christ. "May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me."

Being a With Church

I recently became a community partner with The Communities First Association. I am learning about community transformation and how the Church can partner with it's community for the better.

Communities First Association is a network of professional Christian colleagues with a common heart and role. Using Asset Based Community Development methods, the Communities First Association Transforms a growing number of communities and engages Christians and Churches in their community change story. (From: www.CommunitiesFirstAssociation.org)

What has come home to me is the differing types of churches in our communities. The first type of church is the "In" church. "In churches take up space in their communities and their ministry is centered on their members only. There is no interaction with the community and the gifts of the body are mostly for the body."

The second type of church is the "To" church. "To churches members want to do good things for their neighbors. They want to evangelize their neighbors. They have money and power to do what they want, so they decide what they are going to do to or for those neighbors, and they do it."

The third type of church is the "With" church. "With church members know God is already in the neighborhood where they occupy space. They want to discover what He is already doing. They listen to their neighbors. They learn to dream with their neighbors what this community might be – “on earth as it is in heaven.” Together they develop an agenda for change. They use members gifts and residents gifts (time, talent, treasures) to accomplish their shared dream for a better future."

In my reading of "Revolution," and "UnChristian" for example, there seems to be a growing awareness that our churches are not, for the most part, with-type churches. Although we mean well, we program for our own desires more so than for our communities needs even when we are trying to do good things for our communities.

Here's is an exercise to evaluate our church's efforts. 1. List the ministries of your church. 2. Decide for each if it is an In, a To/For, or a With ministry. 3. Do you see anything you might like to change?