the Eclectic Soul

Do We Still Believe that God can Change a Life?

I've been mulling about this idea for a little while now, and thought I'd through it out there for some friendly conversation. As Christians, a central tenant of our religious and spiritual understanding is that we as human beings are broken and fragmented people. 

Now I know what some of you might be thinking, "here we go, another chucklehead whose just going to bash the human race again and talk about how 'unworthy' we are, blah, blah, blah."

Well that's not exactly where I'm going, but I think that if you truly look around long and hard enough, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that we've been beating one another over the head with clubs (and the more advanced we've become, the more sophisticated the club) for eons in hopes of fulfilling our on personal endeavors, however twisted they might be.

You see, when as followers of Jesus, we fail to embrace the notion that we are flawed individuals that create flawed communities, that create flawed governments, that create flawed world-views, that even, and here's the kicker, create flawed churches, why then do we think that we really need Jesus anyway?

I mean, if we're really OK, then, well, we really don't need a savior do we?

I'm not suggesting that we adopt a pessimistic stance and cluck our tongues at "how bad the world is," but what I am suggesting is that understanding that we are bent and broken social creatures is part of the mystery that makes us, well, human, beautiful, and worth redeeming.

News flash:  you don't always get it right.  I don't always get it right.  Sometimes you live for your own desires in a way that says, "forget you world."  Sometimes I live for my own desires in a way that says, "forget you world."

When we fail to remember and embrace our brokenness, then by definition we fail to remember and embrace the need for personal transformation.  We then become, sanctimonious, pharisaical, legalistic, and judgmental.  Everyone else has a problem, except us of course.

From there we move to easily categorizing people into neat little boxes:  conservative/liberal, gay/straight, rich/poor, male/female, in/out, married/divorced, addict/sober, sinner/saint.

I can't tell you how many times I have heard as a pastor something like the following, "well, that's just the way (insert name here) is.  They've always been like that, and they're probably not going to change." 

Really!?

Never!?

If we, as people who bear the name "Christian" fail to carry the standard that declares that not only is real change necessary, but perhaps more importantly, real change is possible, then we might as well throw in the towel.

I'm broken.  I'm a forty-year-old, overweight, child of God, husband, father, friend, and pastor, who cares waaaay too much what people think of him, who gets it wrong probably more than he gets it right, but believes and hopes, beyond all belief and hope that God can change even me.

God can and still does change lives!

So how 'bout you?  Are you perhaps willing to admit and embrace your brokenness and allow God to move you towards wholeness?  Because until you do, you really have no business pretending you need a savior.

Birthing Hope...

Over the last several months, Lisa and I have been on a journey, pursuing embryo adoption. We had been in the process for a standard adoption for almost two years, when we were made aware of the possibility that we could adopt several embryos in hopes that Lisa would be able to carry a child to term. These embryos are not our own, biologically speaking, but have been graciously offered to us by couples who had had successful invitro processes and have grown their families to their desired size. In just a little over an hour, Lisa will undergo a procedure in which two embryos will be implanted in her uterus in hopes that at least one of them will take root (yes we could have twins, pray for us!) Below is what I had written for the front page my church's newsletter for the month of December, and I thought maybe you my faithful reader(s) my appreciate it. So here it is...

I sit at a desk this morning, November 19th, some 950+ miles from my home.  In just two short hours, my wife and I will make our way to the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, in hopes that one of the embryos that we have adopted will take root in her womb, and allow my wife the gift of birthing a child into this world.

It seems somewhat fitting to me that this is the context out of which I write this morning for this edition of the Trumpeter.  For the month of December is all about hope isn’t it?

Hope that salvation is coming.

Hope that God will truly fulfill his plan for a broken, twisted and fragmented humanity in Jesus.

Hope that what happened that cold dark evening so long ago, in the little burro of Bethlehem, just may in fact be true.

I thought about Mary and Joseph a lot over the last several days.  Now, let me be clear, I am in no way comparing myself to them; my wife is not carrying in her womb the Son of God.  But I did think about what they must have went through.

Although Lisa and I, like Mary and Joseph, have traveled a great distance, we did it largely in comfort and ease.  To be sure the car was cramped and the two days getting here were long, but at least my wife didn’t have to travel on the back of a donkey, as I slowly lead it along.

While Mary was great with child, my wife is great with the hopes of finally knowing what it is to feel a baby kick within her, perhaps much the same way Mary felt when Jesus leapt inside her when she was greeted by her cousin Elizabeth, who’s womb bore the forerunner of Jesus: John the Baptist.

Lisa and I are in Knoxville out of our own free will; no tyrannical dictator demanded that we come to be counted.  Yet there is a purpose for us, just as there was a purpose for them.

Yet much like Mary and Joseph, hope births within us this morning.  Not just the hope of having a baby, although that is a powerful pull on both of us. But, rather, the hope that we as a people might realize we are part of a magnificent story.  A story in which we, human beings, who are the grand antagonists, destined to have our on way and be our own gods, are pursued by a divine love that is strong enough to demonstrate itself in weakness; to allow love to seep in, instead of cramming it down our throats, demanding that we respond.

Whether Lisa and I are able to have a baby or not, we this day, sit, saturated in the presence of this amazing, strong, powerful, all-consuming love, that demonstrated itself most fully in the frailty of a child, a baby, an embryo infused with divinity and humanity.

So won’t you hope with us this Christmas too?  Hope that this year, we might truly allow ourselves to be embraced by the powerful weakness of this birth of divine love in Jesus.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only, flesh and bone, soul and spirit, that we might have hope.  This is our peace.  Amen.

Why I Love This Man...

Back in the early nineties I was introduced to the writings of Brennan Manning when someone gave me a copy of the Ragamuffin Gospel.  Needless to say, that book transformed my life to such a degree that when my first son was born, I named him Brennan.

If you haven't ever read anything by Brennan Manning, I suggest with everything that I am that you go and buy everything that he's ever read!

Listen to what he writes in his latest book, The Furious Longing of God:

"Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will probably lead to the bloody, anguished gift of yourself; a love that forgives seventy times seven, that keeps no score of wrongdoing. Jesus said this, this love, is the one criterion, the sole norm, the standard of discipleship in the New Israel of God.  He said you're going to be identified as his disciples, not because of your church-going, Bible-toting, or song-singing.  No, you'll be identified as his by one sign only: the deep and delicate respect for one another, the cordial love impregnated with reverence for the sacred dimension of the human personality of the mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian...if we as a Christian community took seriously that the sign of our love for Jesus is our love for one another, I am convinced it would change the world.  We're denying to the world the one witness Jesus asked for: Love  one another as I've loved  you (John 15.12)."

--Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God, pp. 86, 89

Great Article...

Great article from presby pastor and church leader Bruces Reyes-Chow.  

Check it out here.

The Plight of the Rural Church

Out of Ur, Christianity Today's blog in a piece called the Hansen Report, a post drafted by one of their Editors at Large named Collin Hansen, reports on the plight of churches in rural America.

In it Hansen reports of the effect that rural flight is having on small town churches who desperately need qualified and gifted, and he even suggests "young" pastors, who are willing to relocate to what some might feel to be remote areas.  To make matters worse, he suggests, the financial viability of small local rural churches often puts a significant strain on their ability to hire or support a full time, seminary trained, credentialed pastor.

"Even $35,000, the average starting salary for seminary graduates, overburdens churches whose members depend on Social Security checks."

I serve one of these churches of which Hansen speaks and all of which he says is indeed true.

To be able to sustain and ongoing vibrant ministry while paying a pastor even the minimum that her denominational tribe might require places a significant financial burden on the church.  This is a reality that my little tribe of about 275 is dealing with right now.

But it's not just clergy people who leave Mayberry for the big cities.  Hansen reports that:

"Plagued by severe “brain drain,” rural American towns have been grasping for ways to entice doctors and motivated teachers to return and settle. According to Time, pastors may be even less inclined to serve small towns than their college-educated counterparts."

Being a city boy, while I never imagined pastoring in a town the size that I am in now, and although I love the rattle and hum of an sub-urban/urban environment, pastoring in my current context has been a better experience than I could ever imagined.

Yet Hansen names the tough realities that I was plagued with when I first arrived to my current ministry context almost 6 years ago:

"But it’s not like you can find a huge pool of pastors dying to serve in rural churches who can’t land a paying gig. It takes guts to seek out a rural placement after seminary when your classmates have dreams of planting urban churches. Shannon Jung tells Van Biema, “A town without a Starbucks scares [young pastors].” There may be some discomfort with forsaking suburban amenities. A bigger problem is peer support."

Can you believe it, "a town without a Starbucks!?!" [thankfully there's one in the larger city some 9 miles away, can I get an "amen.!"]  But all joking aside, things like a lack of peer support, and an unwillingness to embrace the changing culture around the church can serve as a significant deterrent to wooing young pastors to a geographic locale.

Yet there is something alluring about these small places that seem to, at first blush, be a decade or so behind their sub-urban counter parts.  As one who values relationships, pastoring in a rural setting enables any leader to be on a first name basis with anyone from the Mayor to the janitor at the local middle school.  Coffee and camaraderie is shared openly, even if you are the outsider. 

So ministry in small towns can't be just ignored.

In fact just this year I went to a conference, The Sticks Conference, whose entire focus was on developing a mission mindset in order to plant & redevelop churches in rural areas.  It was so refreshing!  So many of the conferences that I attend are put on by "big box" churches who have capital and resources that my congregation could never imagine.  Yet here, in a small town in central Ohio, Wooster to be exact, was a vibrant, cutting edge, large rural church that was making a impact for Jesus and reaching a whole new audience.

Hansen issues a challenge to the conventional notion that rural pastoring is somehow a step child to its sub-urban counterpart:

"They might even begin to enjoy rural America. They won’t be spending all their time administering programs such as those that engulf many suburban pastors. They might even find the small community strangely willing to incorporate a young pastor’s fresh ideas if they are tactfully implemented. And a pastor working in rural America can always count on church members willing to serve beyond the constraints of time and ability. Starbucks or not, that’s the kind of gig that God could use to cure a pastor’s soul."

Having ministry referred to as a "gig," although I realize that Hansen is simply using a hip term, reminds me of another important point:  While it may be true that as pastor's there are different geographic and cultural areas where we might not wish to go, as women and men called of God to the gift of ministry I'm not so sure that we can pick and choose depending upon if a given place has the amenities that we prefer.

It seems to me that beginning way back with the call of God to Abram, Abram was invited to leave everything that he knew to go to the land that God would show him.  Seems a pretty ludicrous idea doesn't, that kind of faith.  Yet we are pastor leaders are heirs of Abram's call, and we too must answer God and leave everything that we have to follow.

Do I envision being part of a vibrant sub-urban ministry someday, and even plant a church?  With everything that is in me.  But has God been using me in my current rural context in ways that I could have never imagined?  More that I could have even hoped.

So, hang in there Mayberry.  Help is coming!

Peace,

E

Something to Think About...

Great Story...

Hey thanks to Tim Keel over at his blog I came across the great story about a Christian tattoo artist named Whispering Danny.

Check out the video link to FOXKC and watch the clip.  Wait until Danny drops the bomb at the end of the clip.  It's enough to bring tears to your eyes.  Here's the link:

For those who might miss it, this is what he says:

He's basically asked by the reporter if he thinks that being a vocal witness to Jesus will hurt his business, he says that he really doesn't know and he doesn't care.  Then he says this:

"I get a lot of ridicule...but when I was a drunk and doing all kinds of stupid stuff I wasn't ashamed of those things, and I did them everyday openly.  Why am I going to be ashamed now."

Now that's beautiful!

Peace,

E

Thinking of Advent

As we approach Advent I came across this clip again.  As funny as it is I think it's parody hits so close to home.  We often prefer the Jesus we've created in our own minds, giving preferential treatment to the Jesus we most resonate with.

It's amazing how close to home a humorous Hollywood movie clip can hit.

Powerful Parable...

For anyone who leads a church here's a parable that proves to be packed with much food for thought:



Let's get the conversation started.

Out With the Old...In With the New

Just retired my second Moleskine journal of the year and cracked a fresh one.  Call me pretentious if you want but I love this little notebooks for the fine paper, durability and portability.  You should really check them out.  I tend to use the small pocket plain ones for my personal and creative journal.  I use the larger size for message prep and textual exegesis.  I purchase mine here.