Lost Pencils

‘Commit your way to the Lord; trust him God and he will act.’—Psalm 37:5

About once a year my pencil cup comes up empty. Normally there are at least a couple of pens or a stray pencil. The rest rotate in and out of the cup from my shirt pocket to my suit coat to my briefcase to the pulpit and back again to the cup. But when the moon and the stars are aligned and the spirits of the four winds begin to blow none of them make it back into the cup on my desk. A lead vortex perhaps or an inky Bermuda Triangle? This is the work of the devil!

Is your cup empty? As a church leader God has equipped you with a cup full of talent. But over time we end up misplacing, misusing and misappropriating our talents. We misplace them in activities and organizations outside the Church, giving more allegiance to secular organizations than we do the body of Christ.


We misuse them in the church when our ego becomes the driving motivation for our work. Here is a ‘misuse test’: Did you get your feelings hurt when on one recognized your hard work or creativity? Are you mad at the pastor because she did not send you a thank you note or recognize you on Sunday morning?

We misappropriate our talents when we keep doing jobs in the church for which God no longer calls us or we are ill-suited. It may look like bravery and self-sacrifice, but in reality you are getting in the way of another person’s calling because you are taking their place.


Over time the misplacing, misusing and misappropriating of our talents leaves us empty inside. We are not doing what God designed us for and this is a real drain.


This week, gather up your pens and pencils and put them in God’s hands.

Useless Beauty

‘In your presence there is fullness of joy.’—Psalm 16:11

Sunday night we worshipped at the Marion County Jail with the inmates from cell blocks 4D and 4W. During the prayer requests one of the inmates asked for ‘God’s presence to be felt in this place.’ Instead of requesting prayers for his family or his court date, he asked for something less practical—and yet far more profound and transformative.

Too often our prayers and worship focus on fulfilling a particular need. We pray for healing, strength, peace, guidance and a slew of lesser pious stuff. We want worship to be relevant and inspiring so we can ‘get something out of it’ and recruit new members. Regardless of how worthy our desires may be, we reduce prayer and worship to spiritual technology that we use to get what we want or need.

Church leaders often act like technicians when the only reason we pray is in order to cajole God to ‘bless’ our work. Don’t get me wrong: We should ask for God’s help and pray for divine intervention. But this should not be the primary reason we get down on our knees.

The most important prayer request and the only goal of worship is for ‘God’s presence to be felt in this place.’ How often is this our goal, to simply be engulfed by the Spirit? Rarely. We have our agendas and our wish lists when we pray. Prayer becomes a business meeting with the Boss. Several days a week I walk around Eagle Creek Park as a part of my prayer time, but too often I am a spiritual hunter-gatherer foraging for the next sermon illustration.

When you get caught up in God’s beauty it is an end itself. It is not for something else. It is not a means to a greater end. In that sense, it is ‘useless’; the experience is not ‘used’ to achieve something else. Or as Elvis Costello once asked, ‘What shall we do with all this useless beauty?’ The goal of the Christian life is to be taken up in the presence of God which by the world’s standards is a ‘useless beauty.”

The goal of all our ministries is to assist others in coming into God’s presence—this ‘useless beauty’. So, as church leaders, God gives us these moments to feel and see and taste what we are working for.

At best we can say there is a byproduct. After we have had these temporary moments of being in God’s beautiful presence we will have greater focus and peace and stamina for doing the mission of Christ. But as soon as we try to conjure up or manipulate these spiritual moments they evaporate because we are turning God’s gift into a tool.

At the end of the worship service the guards did not come on time. We filled the time with taking requests from the inmates and singing. Someone shouted, ‘Play ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ but we only had one hymnal that had it. I lined out the words as the pianist played. The chapel roared with the most beautiful tenor and bass voices like a cascade of sound. The guards came. The music ended. The bars locked back in place. But for a few moments we felt the ‘useless’ beautiful presence of God in that place.

Stop scrounging around for answers to your prayers and just enter into God’s presence. When we let go of our agendas we can see the beauty of God’s love and power. Sometimes God overwhelms us with divine beauty through nature or music, but it is found even in the ugly places like a jail because the cross is the reflection of God’s beautiful grace.

Crazy Prophets and Honest Shepherds

'"I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice....a bruised reed he will not break." --Isaiah 42.1-3

Yesterday Rev. Lisa Marchal and I gave a presentation on advocacy ministries at the Indiana Conference convocation for pastors. One of our major points was that advocacy and social justice ministry is at its best when it comes out of the passion of the laity, and the role of the pastor is to cultivate their calling to work for peace and justice.

During our presentation, our friend Greg asked a great question, ‘What do you do when the only people in your congregation who have a passion for social justice are crazy? They are the folks who annoy everyone else and are so dysfunctional that they hurt the causes that they are passionate about.’ Whether it is nuclear disarmament or foster children, the cause is noble but the messenger is a wing-nut.

The first temptation for the pastor is to not deal with that person. Be nice to them, humor them, but don’t give them a platform. Quarantine them from the rest of the congregation and keep working on the other stuff that pastors do. This is a prudent and effective strategy.

However, it is not a faithful strategy. Advocacy and social justice are basic aspects of discipleship. They are as essential to the practice of the Christian faith as prayer, worship and Bible study because of Jesus. His ministry and message includes the transformation of the world, not just the conversion of individuals. The Jesus that we have in our hearts is also the Jesus who cleansed the Temple of money changers.

So if you are really, truly serious about refocusing your church on making disciples of Jesus Christ you must figure out ways to give your congregation opportunities to engage in social justice ministries. It is tempting to ignore this because no one is asking for it. They want vibrant worship services, quality Bible studies—and tasty potluck dinners! But no one is asking you to lead the church in addressing world hunger.

Except the wing-nuts. And that is the gift they bring to the church. They force us pastors to focus on it.

What does it say about our churches that the only persons who are concerned about issues of social justice are those on the margins of the congregation? Have our congregations become so completely indocrinated with American middle class selfishness that anyone who is concerned about the world looks odd?

Our task as pastors is to use their passion as an opportunity to confront their dysfunction. We must help them understand how they undermine what they love. And we must give them guidance because they lack the spiritual gift of discernment; the Holy Spirit has outsourced that gift to us.

This is a long, painful and exhausting process for the pastor—but that is the nature of making disciples. It is a messy and dangerous process because along the way they may mess it up and create a little havoc in the church. So be it. It wouldn’t be the first time the church weathered someone’s dysfunction. But it does make for more work for us pastors. And that is why we often ignore these people.

If we are committed to being shepherds then we will do this hard work because it is only through our honest shepherding that they stand a chance of healing and they learn how to lead the church in healing the world.

Why Invite People to Church?

"Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation." --Mark 16:15

In the early nineties, Bishop LeRoy Hodapp sent quarterly ‘Catch the Spirit’ reports to the pastors on which you were to record your average worship and Sunday school attendance and calculate the increase or decrease over the previous quarter. At the bottom, there was always a space for you to “Share the reasons for your growth.”

It was my first appointment and one of my churches was what Lyle Shaller calls ‘A Passive Congregation.” They were wonderful folks but they didn’t have pulse or a passion for church growth. I had tried everything to get them to increase their membership and nothing seemed to work. So every quarter these forms poured salt into my bruised ego.

One quarter I recorded astronomically inflated numbers and listed several ridiculous ‘reasons for growth’ which included: ‘Scratch off lotto on the back of the welcome cards in the pews’ and ‘topless ushers.’

A few weeks later I got a letter from the bishop. ‘Dear Darren, thank you for sharing with us your success. We should have you come to the cabinet meeting and share with us about these innovative church growth strategies!’ At least, the bishop had a sense of humor.

Church growth amounts to little more than bean counting when institutional anxiety is the primary motivation.

Why invite people to church? It is a simple question, so simple that we assume that we have the right answer. Yet, one of the chief obstacles to real evangelism is the wrong motivation. Rarely do church leaders have an explicit and clarifying conversation about it.

If you are a church leader ask yourself, Why do we want the church to grow with new people? You may be motivated by the wrong reasons, which include

‘We need to replace the old ones who are dying off’—This sounds crass but it comes from a genuine concern. You love the church but you are worn out. You want to retire from leadership but there is no one around to keep it going. It saddens you to realize that this place where you made friends and found faith years ago could come to an end. There are two variations on this motivation:

• The first type is the ‘old fart’ attitude who wants everything to be done exactly the way it has always been done. Do you want to make disciples or do you want to hire curators?
• The second type sounds like they have the right attitude because they are very willing for new members to make changes—as long as the church survives. However, the real motivation is for the perpetuation of the church, not the transformation of the individual. It does not matter whether a new member receives spiritual mentoring or biblical training; we don’t want to know whether they are having marital problems or a personal crisis. All we want to know is whether they are willing to chair the committee! Do you want to form Christians or do you want to hire managers?
  

‘We want cool people’—Pastors and young adults are often infected with this motivation. They look around on Sunday morning and realize that the congregation is made up of boring, old folks who do not understand or share their tastes and interests. They want new people to whom they can relate. They do not want a bunch of visitors who are needy and desperate. There are certain types of visitors who are a better catch than others. Young professionals are primo, but a recently widowed senior citizen is not a priority. Will you welcome seekers or do you hope for celebrities?


‘We like the thrill of it’—It is always exciting when there is a big crowd on Sunday morning. Inevitably, someone after the service will say to the pastor, ‘We really had church today!’ as if on those Sundays when the attendance is low and the choir stinks that we are not the body of Christ. We Americans measure success in numbers and too often we want newcomers to boost our attendance because we like worship to be a spectacle. Do you want believers or do you want fans?

There is only one right motive for inviting people to church. We do it because Christ cares for them. He longs for each individual to receive His unconditional acceptance and transforming presence. The Church is where He wants people to experience His grace. If we are possessed by His Spirit then we too will have a passion for their well-being, not the preservation or renovation of our institutions.

The right motive is very basic but it takes honesty and guts to abandon the wrong motivations. If our sole concern is truly offering them life in Christ, then we will not be hung up on numbers. In fact, the process of discipleship is long and exhausting and may not end in any kind of tangible results that you can record on a form.