Parents are the Lead Actors; the Church is the Supporting Cast

If you have not read the past two weeks’ posts entitled “All in the Family” and “Jesus Doesn’t Care About Your Kid’s Batting Average,” then I encourage you to read those two posts before reading this week’s.

This week’s post is a continuation of last week’s exploration of the topic of returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next. Last week I wrote about how “the Hebrew model has always been that the family has centrality in the life of faith and in passing on the faith to children.” I made this case through exploring the topic in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and in the practice of contemporary observant Jewish families. Today we will bring this closer to home for us as Christians by getting some historical and theological perspective on the appropriate role for parents in “multi-generational Christian faithfulness,” an emphasis that has been lost in the lives of many Western Christians in recent history.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes to his protégé Timothy, “I have been reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.” Paul doesn’t take credit for building up Timothy in the faith; it was Timothy’s family who deserved the credit. Surely the early Christian worshiping community that Lois and Eunice were a part of played an important role in raising up young Timmy in the faith, but ultimately it was his family who fulfilled their responsibility to him. Part of a Christian parent’s responsibility is to involve their children in the life and worship of the local congregation, but that is only part of the responsibility. The (usually once a week) interaction between the children and the congregation should be seen as a necessary supplement to what is already going on at home. Sunday morning should be the cherry on top, not the whole dessert.

The 4th century pastor John Chrysostom once preached: “The family…is a cornerstone of faith, a household church and a foreshadowing of the eternal kingdom.” He also writes, “Raise up an athlete for Christ and teach him [or her] that, though he [or she] is living in the world, he [or she] is to be reverent from earliest youth.” For John Chrysostom, as for the Apostle Paul before him, the phrase “athlete for Christ” doesn’t have anything to do with a curveball. It is a metaphor for the life of faith. Like athletics, faith takes training; it doesn’t just happen. The training comes from the parents with additional help from the local congregation. About faith training, Dr. Voddie Baucham goes so far as to say, “If [Christian] parents have raised their children to be great doctors, lawyers, athletes, or musicians, but have not trained them to honor and obey God, they have failed.” Again, while I disagree with Dr. Baucham on many things, the centrality of family in the faith development of children is not one of them. After years of work in youth and children’s ministries, I believe that this is very counter to the contemporary culture of parenting, even amongst Christian parents. I know a lot of Christian parents who’ve raised kids that became good successful citizens. I know fewer Christian parents who’ve raised kids that became faithful mature Christians.

Along the same vein, the 16th Century reformer Martin Luther wasn’t all that concerned about experiencing the church as being a big family. He was actually more concerned about experiencing the family as a little church. He writes, “Most certainly father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel. In short, there is no greater or nobler authority on earth than that of the parents over their children, for this authority is both spiritual and temporal.” Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn expands on Luther’s emphasis on family by claiming that “Christianity is no longer the dominant culture in the United States. If we want our children to grow up with Christian convictions, capacities, and choices, we must much more deliberately nurture the faith and its concomitant lifestyle.” Am I making my point? Biblically and historically it is the parents’ responsibility to pass the faith on to their kids, not the church’s. The church has a great role in this, but it is a supporting role, not the lead role.

Whenever we stand up in the sanctuary in front of the gathered covenant community of faith to have our children baptized, we, as parents, are asked a few questions. One of the questions that I, as the pastor, ask the parents is this: “Do you promise, through prayer and example, to support and encourage [your child] to be a faithful Christian?” Every parent who has their child baptized in a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation, as well as in many other denominations, has stood in front of the congregation and God and promised, not "considered" but promised, covenanted with God and the church, to raise their children up to be faithful Christians. After the parents make that promise, I ask the congregation a similar question: “Do you, as members of the church of Jesus Christ, promise to guide and nurture [this child] by word and deed, with love and prayer, encouraging [her/him] to know and follow Christ and to be a faithful member of his church?” We’re all in this together!—the parents, the local congregation, and the Church universal. But again, the parents take the lead role, the congregation is the supporting cast.

As a child, I attended church every Sunday. Every Sunday I was in Sunday school and every Sunday I was in worship at Yeamans Park Presbyterian Church. My parents were very adamant about the importance of our participation in the life of the church on Sunday morning. However, there was a very significant disconnect in our family—-nothing was ever said about the Christian faith except for on Sunday mornings and a brief table grace each night. We went to church (endured it is more accurate) but we weren’t being trained in the Christian faith at home. Church was just some place we went to do something we were supposed to do (the definition of empty religious ritual). It wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I realized there was a different way.

As many of you know, just before my seventeenth birthday, I moved in with my best friend’s family. His parents were the volunteer youth sponsors at the small Southern Baptist Church in town. It took some adjustment but I started to have fun in youth group and eventually came to claim my own faith in Jesus Christ instead of just going through the motions. But it wasn’t the instruction I was getting at the church that made the real difference. Remember, I’d been getting weekly instruction at church my whole life. It was the instruction that I was now getting at home that made the difference. My friend’s parents modeled Christian faith every single day. Often times, through a partially opened door, I would see one or both of my friend’s parents praying or reading the Bible. “The Lord” came up in conversation all the time. Every conversation we had took place within a Christian worldview. It wasn’t close-minded; it was faithful. Prayer wasn’t just something we did before we devoured our supper. Discipleship in Jesus was a way of life in the home. The ministry of the local church supplemented that, but the church didn’t carry the brunt of the weight in our Christian upbringing.

For example, there were a few of us among the church’s youth who were light years ahead of the others in the maturity of our Christian faith. Even I, after just months of active involvement, found myself on a different level of discussion than many of the other kids. I’m not bragging, just stating an easily observable fact. How could this be? After all, we were all smart kids who attended the same public high school, the same Sunday school class, the same worship service, the same youth fellowship gathering, and the same summer camp. So what was the only difference between the kids who seemed to “get it” and the kids who didn’t? Those who “got it” were getting instruction from their parents at home and those who didn't weren't. That’s the only difference. Presbyterian pastor and youth ministry author Mark Devries writes, “Parents play a role second only to that of the Holy Spirit in building the spiritual foundation of their children’s lives.” He goes on to remember his own training, “In my childhood, my faith was formed as much around the dinner table as it was in the pew.”

In his book Family Based Youth Ministry Mark Devries also discusses a large study about the role of parents in multi-generational Christian faithfulness. He writes, “The Search Institute’s National Study of Protestant Congregations indicated that the first predictor of adolescent faith maturity was the level of ‘family religiousness.’ The particular family experiences most tied to greater faith maturity were the frequency with which an adolescent talked with mother and father about faith, the frequency of family devotions and the frequency with which parents and children together were involved in efforts, formal or informal, to help other people. As might be expected, the Search study’s first recommendation for change in Christian education was to ‘equip mothers and fathers to play a more active role in the religious education of their children, by means of conversation, family devotions and family helping projects.”

It is my personal opinion that if our kids are only getting Christian training in Sunday school, fifteen minutes of Sunday worship, and then in Junior Church, then we are failing as Christian parents and not fulfilling the promise we made at their baptism. Please don’t get me wrong, I love my parents dearly, but I have seen the negative result of the disconnect between Sunday mornings and the rest of the week. I have seen that it generally produces adults who are either a nominal Christian with little involvement in the church or who are not even Christian at all. Because I have seen the results of this way of raising kids hundreds of times in my short ministry career (as well as my own family), I have chosen a different path in raising Wyatt and Josselyn. The path that I am leading my family in is a path closer to that of my best friend’s parents, but actually I am committed to being even more intentional about it than they were. In other words, I’m building upon their faithful example.

Next week we will explore: “What is Family Worship and Why Should We be Doing it in Our Home?” In the weeks following I will write about resources for family worship, about the ways that a local congregation has often inappropriately taken the lead in raising Christian kids instead of a supporting role, and I will eventually write about why I wholeheartedly believe that it is paramount to “multi-generational Christian faithfulness” that children (at least children of school age) participate fully in the main Sunday morning worship gathering of the congregation instead of leaving the sanctuary after only a portion of the service.

I hope everyone who had kids at the Christmas Eve service took home the Story of Jesus book that had been provided by Jennifer Shaw and actually took the ten minutes to read it as a family on Christmas day. I encourage you to make a point to pray with your family today, not just over your food but for other areas of life as well. Sing songs of praise to God today. Read the Scriptures together today. Take the time you were gathering for the Advent stickers and keep on doing something worshipful during that time. Not sure of the best way to do this? We’ll get into that next week.

Have a wonderful Christmas week and enjoy the snow! I’m headed home to pull my kids around on the new sled that Santa brought them yesterday.

Grace and Peace,
Everett

All in the Family

Last week I wrote about it being the responsibility of Christian parents to make the worship of God and fellowship with the covenant community of faith a priority for our families. I am sure that I ruffled more than a few feathers, but I stand by every word I wrote. My role as pastor is not to tell people what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. As Rev. David Rohrer wisely writes, “The temptation is strong for us as pastors to settle for providing people with the religion they want rather than the truth they need. Yet prophets have nothing to sell. Our job is not to get people to buy Jesus as if he were some product. Our job is to give witness to the truth. What folks do with that truth is a matter between them and God…Truth may hurt, but it also liberates.”

Had I planned this out instead of just going with the flow I would have probably written last week’s post second and this week’s post first. Here’s how I would have organized this series of posts had I really thought about it beforehand:

Topic 1: Returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next.

Topic 2: Making the Lord’s Day worship and fellowship of the covenant community of the church a priority. As I mentioned, I already covered this in last week’s post entitled, “Jesus Doesn’t Care About Your Kid’s Batting Average.”

Topic 3: Having children, at least those of school age, present throughout Lord’s Day worship is a must for any congregation that is serious about passing the faith on to the kids.

So this week I will actually be addressing what should have been Topic 1: Returning the family (instead of the church) to centrality in the passing on of the Christian faith from one generation to the next. This topic may actually take more than one week, several weeks actually.

Before I begin, let me say something important. Some people don’t have families or have been cast out from their families. For many of these folks, the covenant community of the church has become their primary family. That is wonderful and biblical, and we should strive to bring in more and more people who have no other family so that we can love them with the love we’ve received from God. A family did that for me once and through doing that for me they taught me what the gospel looks like when it is lived out. The Church is a family of families and individuals who become one big family through baptism. That being said, however, for those who do live in families, especially those who have children at home, the family at home is the primary vehicle for bringing children to faith and helping to form them into mature disciples of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Voddie Baucham, an avid proponent of both “family driven faith” and fully “family-integrated churches” in response to the statistics that show that between 75-85% of young people have ceased active participation in a local church by the end of their freshman year in college (and very few of them are returning as they used to) writes, “I believe we are looking for answers in all the wrong places. Our children are not falling away because the church is doing a poor job—although that is undoubtedly a factor. Our children are falling away because we are asking the church to do what God designed the family to accomplish. Discipleship and multi-generational faithfulness begins and ends at home. At best, the church is to play a supporting role as it ‘equips the saints for the work of ministry’ (Ephesians 4:12, ESV).”

Although there are a lot of things that I don’t agree with Dr. Baucham on, the overall thesis of his work is something with which I agree wholeheartedly. I really do feel that “we are asking the church to do what God designed the family to accomplish. Discipleship and multi-generational faithfulness begins and ends at home.” It isn’t Dr. Baucham’s work (or anyone else’s work), though, that brought me to that opinion; it has been my own experience over the past decade in youth and children’s ministries. Once I started feeling this way I went out looking for resources to see if anyone else was thinking the same thing. I found that there are quite a few folks who, based on their ministry experience, have come to the same conclusion. So that’s what I’ll be spending the next few weeks on. I hope that even if you don’t have kids at home that you’ll read these posts anyway. Just maybe you will be blessed through something that may seem irrelevant to you on the surface but may either convict or comfort you at a deeper level.

In the overall epic narrative of Scripture, God has always worked through families. The promises to Abraham were family promises. It wasn’t that only he would be a blessing; his family was going to bless the whole world. It was Moses’ family that saved his life, and when it came time for Moses to live into God’s call on his life, God didn’t expect him to do it alone. God brought him back together with his family and they did it together. When the Israelites were about to enter into the Promised Land after 40 years in the wilderness, God commanded Moses to review the Law with the people so that they’d know how to live once they were surrounded by other people who did not care about their faith or way of life. “These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God.” The purpose of the Law being recorded and reviewed is so that one generation can pass it on to the next and to the next and to the next. How is this supposed to happen? Moses says, “Hear O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door

frames of your houses and on your gates.” The faith is to be passed on by parents who love God and God’s Word teaching their children to love God and God’s Word. This will happen by having the faith present in all aspects of family life, even in the way their houses are set up.

Not long after Moses reviewed the Law with the people and commanded them to pass it on to their children, Moses died. Joshua, who took over for him, gathered the people together before they went into the land and said, “If you refuse to serve the LORD, then choose today whom you will serve. Would you prefer the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates? Or will it be the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live? But as for me and my family, we will serve the LORD.” In other words, Joshua was telling the people that they needed to make an intentional choice as to who they are going to follow because it is of utmost importance and because it is going to be hard work to keep up the faith in a surrounding culture that is filled with elements that are contrary to the Hebrews’ faith in God. Just “seeing where the journey takes you” isn’t going to cut it, Joshua is saying. As Dr. Baucham writes, “Raising Godly children is not a matter of luck; it is a matter of work.” Joshua’s family, not just Joshua, is going to follow the one true God because faith is a family affair, especially when living in the midst of a culture that doesn’t care what your faith is or is even hostile towards it.

The Hebrew model has always been that the family has centrality in the life of faith and in passing on the faith to children. The institutions of the faith exist for communal worship and to assist the family in fulfilling their central role. To this day, the observant Jewish family will both prepare for and celebrate the Sabbath together as a family.

The entire family prepares together for the festive family meal held in the Jewish home on Friday night, and the children are very much involved in the celebration itself. Also, children take roles of leadership in the celebrations of religious holidays like Purim and Passover. The family is the center of faith; the synagogue supplements what is done in the family. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of my favorite authors, writes “It is important to me that [my children] have a solid grounding in their Jewish heritage and customs, and that they live by the Jewish values of holiness, community, charity, hospitality, and humanity. Within the great tradition of Orthodox Jewry come many smaller traditions that are an intrinsic part of our lives: we study the Bible daily, pray three times a day, observe biblical festivals, have mezuzahs on our doors, and keep a strictly kosher home.”

Jesus was, of course, Jewish during his years as “the Word of God made flesh.” All of his first followers were Jewish. The Apostle Paul, who spread the faith and wrote a great number of the documents in our New Testament, was Jewish. Therefore, it is not a stretch to say that the model for Christian families should be very much the same as the Hebrew model. It is true that Jesus said some things about the family that might not seem to point toward the centrality of the family in the life of faith, but when we read those sayings of Jesus in context we see that Jesus’ point was that if your family stands between you and discipleship in Jesus then you must choose Jesus over family. However, if your family is fulfilling its role as building one another up in your discipleship then this is as it should be.

This will have to be continued next week on December 26...

Keep doing those Advent sticker books together each day as a family, read the biblical Christmas story to the kids, and take time to pray together as a family, even on Christmas morning before the gifts begin. Over the coming weeks I will share with you a lot of resources for "family driven" faith and I will even promise to help you obtain those resources. You will never have a pastor who cares more about families and kids growing in faith than you do now. I promise you that.

Jesus Doesn't Care about Your Kid's Batting Average

Spending all of last week with Malachi, Director of Prophetic Ministries, (listen to my sermon from December 9 if you don’t know why I’m calling him that) really got me thinking. I’m going to warn you: I’m about to get on my soapbox.

I remembered how a few years ago I was at a large museum that had a little town inside of it to show you what it might have looked like in a frontier town in the Old West. The group I was with looked inside the train depot, the jail, the doctor’s office, and then the school house. On the blackboard was the Pledge of Allegiance.

Someone at the museum hadn’t done their research because even if we assume the frontier town represented a settlement after 1892 when the pledge was composed, the pledge as it was written on the blackboard was still an anachronism because it included the phrase “under God.” As many of you know, the phrase “under God” was not a part of the pledge for the first sixty-two years of its existence. A grassroots campaign to add “under God” to the pledge started in Illinois after World War II and the addition wasn’t passed into law until 1954 during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Presbyterian by the way.

That little history tidbit isn’t really the point, however. The point is that someone who was with me, someone I had known for decades, said to me, “That’s when everything went downhill, when they took God out of the schools.” I understood what this person was saying, but I had a little trouble swallowing it coming from this person. While only God can know the heart of a person, I knew that this person had not stepped foot in a church in at least fifteen years, never read the Bible, didn’t raise their own kids in the church or with any recognition of God, had no prayer life, did no charitable service of any kind, and didn’t even say grace before meals. I turned to the person and said, “I can’t really speak to that since there’s never been prayer in any of my schools since I’ve been alive, but I think the bigger problem is that we’ve taken God out of our own families.”

We’re willing to blame anyone and everyone besides ourselves for the deterioration of Christian faith and values. My friend, who was surprised that I (a pastor!) didn’t agree with the statement about the schools, blamed it completely on the schools, which really means the courts that have made rulings are at fault, which in turn means that the government the courts serve are at fault. Others will say that it is the liberal pro-violence, pro-sex media that is to blame. While I do think that we’ve allowed our entertainment industry to produce massive amounts of filth, really we’re the ones who are at fault for consuming it. They wouldn’t make shows, movies, books, and music like that if nobody bought them.

Others blame our communities for putting children’s sports and public school activities on Sundays and at other times that used to be reserved for worship, prayer, and rest. My question in response to this one is: “Who’s forcing you to participate?” The answer is no one. What would happen if Christian families “went on strike?” Could athletics in our community survive if all the Christian families refused to participate until Sundays and Wednesday evenings were reclaimed? I doubt it, but we just continue to acquiesce passively. Maybe we should form a Fellowship of Christian Parents in Fayette County that will serve like a Christian families union that can put pressure on the schools and leagues in town. We aren't going to participate until it is changed. Even if that didn’t work, and a coach wouldn’t let a kid play on the team because they’d miss some practices or some games because of worship, eventually we have to set our priorities in ways that reflect our Christian faith. The ministerial association doesn't have any pull here. Everybody expects us to be opposed to anything that conflicts with Sundays. That's our job. It has to be parents who take a stand. I promise you, if you take a stand the ministerial association will be there with you to support you but we can't do it for you.

You all know me. I played baseball for twelve years, I’m a huge baseball fan, and Wyatt and I play in the backyard whenever the weather is nice. But what is more important—playing baseball or worshipping God? Oftentimes the parents of my youth at my former church would complain in ways like, “I’m so mad at that cheer coach for requiring a practice on Sunday. This is out of control! But what’re you going to do?” Then they would shrug in resignation. “That’s just the way the world is these days,” they’d say. Let me ask this: if the coach scheduled practice for 2 am would we allow our kids to go? No, I don't think so. We'd say, "2 am is time for sleeping. My kid won't be there." So why can't we say, "9:00 am until 11:30 am on Sunday is for Bible study and worship. My kid won't be there."

I don’t buy it that we are slaves to the way the wind is blowing in our culture. The Apostle Paul didn’t buy it either. In Romans 12:2 he writes, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.” When we are transformed by the renewing of our minds we will very often find ourselves at odds with "this world" (read "our culture"). When will we stop blaming everyone around us for setting our priorities? It may be “the pattern of this world” to place Christian worship and fellowship as a lower priority than sports, academics, fundraisers, or a teenager working a part-time job but is it God’s “good, pleasing, and perfect will” to place Christian worship and fellowship as a lower priority than those things? I believe, based upon the Scriptures and the witness of the Church, that the answer for a Christian family must be a resounding “NO.”

Many Christians seem to say, “How could we ever live as Christians in a culture that doesn’t pander to us? I’m sorry, Everett. It just can’t be done.” To that I say, “Open your Bible and read it. Then read the writings of the early Church fathers.” As far as we can tell, Jesus, the apostles, and the early church never lobbied for discipleship in Jesus to be the cultural milieu. To me, it appears that the assumption is that the government and culture will always be either hostile or apathetic toward the gospel. We’ve simply lived in a fairy tale land in the West for centuries, but the fairy tale is ending. The government, the schools, the community organizations, and the sports leagues are not going to hold our hands anymore. We now actually have to grow backbones and live out our faith in ways that swim against the current. This is nothing new. Jesus was rejected and ended up on a cross. The apostles ministered in hostile cultures and all but one ended up being martyred. Read about Irenaeus of Lyons, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, Perpetua and Felicitas of Carthage.

Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to be eaten by wild animals as a spectacle in Rome, wrote, “Christianity is greatest when it is hated by the world.” In other words, Christianity is at its greatest when Christians actually have to make our own decisions instead of having our decisions made for us. True Christian faith only flourishes when we have true convictions and we act on them in ways that are both charitable and unswerving in our commitment to God. Read about Arabic Christians in Palestine or Iraq, or about Christians in China or Indonesia. Paul wrote to the Romans, “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” Our Christian brothers and sisters of past times, as well as in other lands in present times, faced and continue to face, mortal danger for our shared faith and we can’t even be bothered to face not having our kid start on the volleyball team? What are we teaching our kids by acting like this? What we’re teaching them is that everything is more important than worshiping God and being in fellowship with the family of believers. How can we be surprised that they’re leaving the church and never coming back? Why would they care about something that they’ve been taught doesn’t matter even as much as practice for middle school wrestling or bagging groceries at Community Market to earn gas money?

Unlike a lot of my Christian brothers and sisters, I actually don’t think we should have public prayers in government funded schools. Groups of Christian students (or students of other faiths or no faith) should be able to assemble voluntarily in their free time; students must be allowed to read their Bible just as they’d be allowed to read any other book during reading periods or study hall (when their work is done); and a student or teacher must be allowed to pray silently whenever they’re not supposed to be doing something else. I don’t buy it that the problem is our government, our schools, or our culture. I wholeheartedly believe that the problem is Christian parents, which includes me. We’re not fulfilling our biblical responsibilities. We’re not fulfilling the promises we made at our children’s baptisms. We’re not being good examples for our kids. I believe that we parents aren’t getting the job done. George Barna writes, “Everyday the Church is becoming more like the world it allegedly seeks to change.” That is the tragic reality and we have no one to blame but ourselves. We’re being guided around like the groups of little kids I used to see walking around the daycare centers in Norman holding on to a long rope, going wherever they were led.

Don’t get me wrong, sports are of value. Academic success is of value. A part-time job is of value. Raising funds for an organization is of value. These things are of value, but not of enough value to keep us from worshipping God and being in fellowship with the covenant community. It is time for us to stop blaming everybody else and to start living out our convictions. As I read recently, "Do not fear failure. Fear wasting your life suceeding at things that don't matter."

Another great quote comes from the book of Joshua. "Choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." I ask you to pray for me as a parent that I might live that out and I will pray the same for you.

We really do reap what we sow. When we plant corn, corn grows. When we plant tomatoes, we shouldn't be surprised when tomatoes grow. So if what we sow is kids who think everything else is more important than worship and fellowship with the community of faith then what we will reap is adults who think everything else is more important than worship and fellowship with the community of faith. That is much more of a concern in regard to the future life of our congregation than how much money remains in the investment accounts.

There is so much more to say about the role of parents in setting priorities and passing the faith on to their kids, so this will be continued next week…

From the Cutting Room Floor

I remember a conversation we had during a short story workshop I was in once. We were talking about how quite often we will begin writing a story and then realize about five or ten pages in that this story is just actually beginning, that really those first five or ten pages are prologue; they aren't really necessary. So they end up on the "cutting room floor." Our professor called it "writing your way into the story." That happens with sermons too. Very often I will cut a good five minutes worth of material from my sermon each week after realizing that, while it might be interesting (at least to me), it is really more like scaffolding on the outside of the sermon. Now that the sermon is done, that scaffolding should be taken down. I usually realize that when a little voice in my head on Friday or Saturday says, "You don't need that; so cut it." Strangely enough that voice sounds a lot like Paul Johnson!

Anyway, this past week (late on Saturday night) I cut a good bit of material from the beginning of my sermon. It just didn't need to be there and the sermon was tighter and more powerful without it. But its still interesting and edifying information about early church history. So I want to share it with you. When you read it you'll know why I cut it. It's not sermon worthy. But it's still worth reading. Here it is:

The earliest church did not have the New Testament. This makes sense because you cannot have something until it exists. The New Testament is a collection of scriptural documents that came out of the life of the early church. Over the decades as letters were written and accounts of Jesus’ life authored, some of those new documents came to be viewed, for many reasons, as more important than the others, even as important as the Hebrew Bible. But, while the earliest churches surely utilized the new writings from Paul and the others in worship in different ways, for the first several generations Christians had only the Hebrew Bible (in its Greek form which was called the Septuagint), what we call the Old Testament. And that, interestingly enough, was in many ways sufficient for those first generations. The original apostles were passing on the stories of Jesus and then after the apostles died those who had known and learned from the apostles continued to pass on those stories. But those stories of Jesus were always viewed through the lens of what we call the Old Testament. In fact, the Old Testament is quoted by the New Testament writers around seven hundred times, and the trend continues as you read the documents written by the leaders that came after the deaths of the apostles and even for the first few hundred years of the Church. In their writings, they rarely quote what came to be known as the New Testament, but there is one passage after another from the Hebrew Bible quoted in their letters and sermons. In fact, the first use of the term New Testament is found in the writings of the early theologian Tertullian who lived from the year 155 to the year 220. So never think that the Old Testament is unimportant—-Jesus and the apostles certainly did not.

In the gospels, Jesus speaks about his own ministry and identity in terms of being the fulfillment, the natural fruit born from the promises made by God to God’s people, promises that are recorded in the Hebrew Bible. During his temptation in the desert, Jesus counters Satan by quoting from Deuteronomy. He stands up in the synagogue in Nazareth and introduces himself through reading from the prophet Isaiah. He rides a donkey into Jerusalem because hundreds of years earlier the prophet Zechariah said that a great peaceful king would do that. As he is dying on the cross, he quotes Psalm 22. These are just a few examples, and he surely spent time with his inner group of disciples searching the scriptures with them, showing them the promises that had been made which had pointed to him all along. He does this after his resurrection even, with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. And then after Jesus is gone and the Holy Spirit has come, the apostles and other early church leaders, in trying to explain to people what happened in Jesus, feel the need to dig even deeper into the Hebrew Bible. But reading the Hebrew Bible is different for them now that they are on this side of the incarnation of Jesus. They see things in the scriptures now that they didn’t see before, although those words were always there. It is like when you watch a movie with a lot of plot twists. Then when the surprising ending is revealed, you think, “Wow, I never saw that coming.” So you watch the movie over again, but already knowing the ending this time, and all of a sudden you realize during this second, third, or fourth viewing that all the clues were there. You just didn’t know what to look for the first time you watched it. The way that Jesus lived through teaching and healing, how he died on the cross, the earth shattering reality of his resurrection from the dead, and his eventual ascension to heaven made a lot of people, even the apostles I believe, say, “Wow, we never saw that coming!” So after it was over they went back to the scriptures again, but already knowing the ending this time, and they realized that all the clues were there. They just didn’t know what to look for before they’d experienced Jesus.

When the apostles and other early Christians read of the ancient hope of the people of God throughout the Hebrew Scriptures they saw all those prophetic hopes wrapped up in the person of Jesus. So before the gospels were ever even written, and even before Paul may have written any of his letters, it is believed that the first documents (none have survived) produced by the earliest Christians were lists of prophecies from the Hebrew Bible that the church believed had been fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. These lists would be copied and then carried around by early Christian evangelists who would use these lists, known to scholars as testimonia, to “give specific examples to support their claim that Jesus had fulfilled the traditional expectations concerning the Messiah.” Those prophecies then made their way into the documents that would later make up our New Testament. Our New Testament is very much a collection of inspired writings that proclaim that Jesus is, through some strange, unexpected, God ordained way, the fulfillment of the hopes not only of the ancient Israelites, but of the world.

We take the New Testament for granted. It is essential and priceless to us. It is hard to imagine that the faith of the earliest Christians was supported by the Hebrew Bible, the oral traditions of the apostles' stories of Jesus, and letters that occasionally showed up, which they would read over and over again when they met together on Sundays. Maybe that will give us a little more sympathy for those early Christians that writers like Paul, Peter, James, and Jude were writing to because they kept screwing up. Also, it helps us to understand why there were so many letters being exchanged (surely far more than we know of) and why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, finally thought, "It's probably time to write some of this down." But knowing this about the early church should also help us to remember the immeasurable value of the Old Testament for growing us in our faith and even in pointing us toward our Lord Jesus.

I hope that was worth picking up off the cutting room floor. Enjoy this first week of Advent. Take some time to be quiet. Christmas is still several weeks away. It will be there when we get there; I promise. Just be quiet. God just might meet you in the silence.

In the love of the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Everett

The Grumpy Servant

I have to admit that on the morning of Thanksgiving Day I was in a bad mood. To start things off I was homesick. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and we always went to my beloved aunt and uncle’s house for the day. This was the first Thanksgiving in my entire thirty-four years that I haven’t been with some part of my (or Danielle’s) extended family on Turkey Day. Also, Danielle had agreed to be on mashed potato duty as a part of our church’s “Thanksgiving Miracle Part IV,” which consisted of making and delivering about 85 hot Thanksgiving meals to anyone, mostly shut-ins, who had requested a meal. The only questions we asked when someone requested a meal were to get a name, address, phone number, and how many meals. As the good Lord said, “Freely you have received; now freely give.”

So Danielle’s shift starts at 8:00 am, which means that I have the kids by myself from the moment I wake up. Wyatt is pretty good, but demons have possessed Josselyn and no matter how many times I scream, “The power of Christ compels you!” they will not be exorcised. So she throws fit after fit, but, alas, I think, Danielle just needs to go make some instant potatoes then she’ll be back to share in the bliss of parenthood with me any moment now. Nearly three hours later I get a call from Danielle, “Have you gotten the kids dressed yet? It’s time to go deliver the meals.” By that time I have a pounding headache, Wyatt is upstairs making a ton of noise, and Josselyn is running around without a thread of clothes on. “I thought you’d be coming back home,” I say in a defeated tone. “Oh…I didn’t tell you?” she responds. “That was never the plan.”

George Bernard Shaw was right when he said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

So I send Wyatt over to the church building while Josselyn and I negotiate (i.e. she refuses to wear anything and ends up pounding her fists on the ground while I give up and tell her that I am going to watch TV until she’s done acting like a baby). Finally Josselyn and I make it over to the church—a journey of only forty yards or so which involves her not paying attention where she’s going and falling into mud and leaves after I finally got her dressed. We hang out in Persinger Hall for a little bit, get our food, and then the whole family piles into the car to deliver meals to six homes. As we pull out of the church parking lot, my head is about to explode and Wyatt asks, “Do I have to go? This is going to be boring.”

The first delivery is unsuccessful as the person isn’t even at home. “Ugh! Why ask for a meal if you aren’t even going to be home?” I grumble. The next house is across the street. As the couple opens the door a cloud of cigarette smoke engulfs my family. “Quit spending all your money on cancer sticks and maybe you’d be able to afford your own food!” I think to myself as I hurry the kids toward the car. “I’m hungry,” Josselyn yells from the backseat. “I want to go home,” Wyatt complains. Danielle is noticeably agitated by her beloved family. As we drive up the street, trying to figure out where the next house is, Wyatt asks me, “Dad, why are you so sad? Or mad? What’s wrong with you?” That delivery goes just fine—uneventful. When we get back in the car Danielle says, “Maybe you should just drop us off at the house. Or maybe we should drop you off at the house.” I refuse. No, we're doing the Lord's work here! Can't you tell!

The next two deliveries go well. We meet some nice, appreciative ladies who may not have seen another person that day had we not come by. At the last house, nobody is home. Once again I think, “Ugh! Waste of time!” At that house Josselyn announces to Danielle that she has to pee—not soon, but at this very moment. There’s nowhere to take her so she ends up peeing in the grass on the side of this person’s house. Wyatt and I are watching from the car, mortified. “I think we should just go home,” Wyatt announces, with wisdom beyond his years. After trying to call the two deliveries that weren’t home (to no avail) we did just that—we went home. “Boy, that was a real joy!” we said sarcastically as we got out of the car. Then we ate two of the meals that we’d brought home (they were extras) and realized how good the meals were that we’d delivered to the shut-ins. This was a top notch Thanksgiving meal. After we got some food in our bellies, peace was a lot easier to come by. Then a few hours later, when we were all in good moods, we shared a wonderful Thanksgiving meal with the Glasses and Prestons.

So what happened that morning? Should I have just not delivered meals since I was in such a crummy mood? After all, the Apostle Paul does write in 2 Corinthians 9:7, “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” While I didn’t deliver meals under compulsion, I certainly did it reluctantly (simply because of my bad mood) and it was most certainly not done in a cheerful manner. Does the fact that my family delivered the meals in a less than joyful way (we were nice and smiled to each delivery then stared daggers at each other in the car) mean we shouldn’t have done it at all? Maybe I should just speak for myself here. When I signed up to deliver meals I was looking forward to it, but I didn’t feel joyful about doing it when the time came. So should I have not done it because I couldn’t do it joyfully? And does the fact that I did it with a bad attitude negate the value of the act of delivering meals to shut-ins?

To answer these questions we turn to that wise old Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity, perhaps the most influential book in my Christian walk besides the Good Book itself, Lewis writes, “Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will.” I did not have the emotion of love for any of the people I delivered food to but I had made an agreement that I would deliver those meals. I needed to fulfill my commitment. The meals were hot. It was time sensitive. I couldn’t afford to wait until the feelings returned. The meals would have been cold (and maybe moldy) by the time those warm fuzzy feelings returned. I had to keep my commitment and keep it on time. I guess I could have been rude to the people I delivered the meals to, you know, take it out on them. While I did that a little bit in my head, it wasn't their fault so I was quite nice to each person.

I am convinced that a great problem in our culture is that we’ve made a grand idol out of emotions. Don’t get me wrong—emotions are extremely important, we should never manipulate or harm others’ emotions, and we should all have the opportunity to express our emotions in healthy way—but emotions are not the end-all-be-all when it comes to life. But our culture often acts as though they are. Here’s one example: a married couple falling “out of love” with one another. “I just don’t feel like I love her anymore. But I have such strong emotions for this new woman.” News flash! If your emotions ran dry for one person they’ll run dry for the next one too. As I heard a wise pastor say once to a couple on their wedding day, “Love will not always hold your marriage together. Quite often, the marriage will hold your love together.” He meant that their commitment would carry them through places where their emotions couldn’t. Love is a choice, an act of the will.

Do you think Danielle has strong feelings of longing for me every day? Ha! Fat chance! But, thank God, she chooses to love me every day, not just on the days when she feels the emotion of love toward me. So we do acts of love, like delivering a hot meal to a lonely person on Thanksgiving, even when we don’t want to at that particular moment. In fact, in another C.S. Lewis classic, The Screwtape Letters, the high ranking demon, Wormwood, says to the low ranking demon, Screwtape, that they know they have lost their “subject” (person) that they’ve been trying to lead to damnation when the subject gets to a point where he or she doesn’t want to do what God commands, but does it anyway. That's when they know God's won that person.

I’m not trying to hold myself up as an example of saintly behavior. “Never make yourself the hero of your own sermon,” my preaching professor warned us in seminary, and that probably applies to blog posts as well when they’re written as a pastoral act. I’m just trying to illustrate that all of us (even people who seem happy all the time) get in bad moods sometimes; we all have times when the emotions of love and joy are absent. This even happens with worship. “I just didn’t feel like worshiping today” is a poor excuse for not showing up at worship. I don’t even buy, “I just don’t feel like I believe anymore,” as a reason not to show up at worship. Sometimes I don’t feel like worshiping and sometimes I don’t feel like I believe anymore, and I’m the one leading worship! That happens to all of us, but the commitment to God in Jesus Christ carries us through those places where we don't have any emotions toward God. As one of my seminary professors told us that he said to a man who told him that he wasn’t coming to worship anymore because he just didn’t feel like he believed in the faith presented in the Apostles’ Creed anymore, “Keep coming to worship. Let the Church say the creed for you. We’ll profess our faith, the faith of the Church, for you… until you can do it again for yourself.”

“Not feeling it” neither excuses us nor excludes us from doing acts of worship toward God and acts of love and kindness toward others in Christ’s name. It is a problem, however, if we never feel joyful about it, if we always feel like we’re just doing our duty. Then there are deeper issues at play that may or may not include ingratitude and/or an unhealthy condemnation toward others (or in more extreme cases even clinical depression). But to put it bluntly, sometimes we just can’t muster the warm fuzzies. In those moments, we have to suck it up and serve anyway. Sometimes the warm fuzzies come during or after we serve instead of before. As our buddy C.S. Lewis writes, “Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”

I’ll leave you with this extended quote, once again from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:

“On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as our right. But the great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”

Amen to that!

Read for God's Sake!

I am a reader. I absolutely love reading. I read all the time. Most nights it is very difficult for me to finally stop reading to go to sleep. That wise sage Dr. Seuss once wrote, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” I whole heartedly agree. Danielle also loves to read, granted we read very different kinds of books. She absolutely loves a good murder mystery. In our love for reading, we are modeling this literate lifestyle for our kids. Each Monday we go to the children’s section at the Carnegie Library and pick out around 30 children’s books for the week to read with the kids at naptime and bedtime. Now that Wyatt is able to read on his own, we keep finding him behind the recliner in the living room sneaking in a few pages of a book before dinner and he reads on his own for fifteen minutes every night after we are finished reading with him. It just warms my heart to see him devouring book after book.

In regard to reading to children, the organization “Reading is Fundamental” writes, “Reading books aloud to children stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. It helps them develop language and listening skills and prepares them to understand the written word. When the rhythm and melody of language become a part of a child's life, learning to read will be as natural as learning to walk and talk.”

Too many families do not read with their kids. It is so sad to me. Sometimes, though, the problem is much deeper than just not making the time to read with your child. Sometimes the problem is that the adults in the house can’t read either.

There is quite a connection, actually, between being an avid reader and being Presbyterian. That doesn’t mean that if you don’t care for reading that you don’t fit in this church. There is simply a connection that is undeniable. Presbyterians and other Reformed Christians have emphasized literacy since the 1500’s. While the dominant church in Europe had no problem, and may have even preferred, keeping the general populace ignorant and illiterate, John Calvin set to educating the population of the Swiss city of Geneva where he was reforming the church. He believed that willful ignorance was an affront to God as was allowing others to remain that way. Also, he and other reformers believed that each person should be able to read the Scriptures themselves (that was one of the controversial hallmarks of the Protestant Reformation).

Well, it is hard to read the Scriptures if you can’t read. So there was a very high literacy rate in Calvin’s Geneva. Teaching people to read was seen by the Presbyterians as a spiritual work, an act of discipleship. The same thing happened when the Presbyterians took the reins in Scotland. Europe’s most backward nation became a bastion of education and literacy. Presbyterians have been very influential over the centuries in the United States as well through advocating for better public education. One of the reasons that it is very rare to find Presbyterian schools below the college level is that Presbyterians, traditionally, put our efforts into providing better education for all, not just for the privileged few who can afford to go to a private church school.

I was so proud of the congregation I served in Newkirk, Oklahoma, when one year they devoted the entire week prior to the beginning of school in August to holding a “Reading Camp” for any child in the community who wanted to come. We had about 40 kids show up every day to read one-on-one for hours with a church member. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen a congregation do—and it wasn't my idea. That came from the congregation and they saw it as an act of discipleship.

Charles William Eliot once said, “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” I have found that to be true in my own experience. Pretty much everything I’ve been reading lately is in some way connected to my pastoral work. I haven’t read any novels lately, and I need to free myself up to do that. But I wanted to share with you the books I’ve read over the past month and then one quote from each book without comment.

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin, SJ

“The maxim of ‘illusory religion’ is as follows: ‘Fear not; trust in God and He will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you.’ ‘Real religion,’ said Macmurray, has a different maxim: ‘Fear not; the things you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.’”

The Sacred Wilderness of Pastoral Ministry by David Rohrer

“Our [pastoral] office calls us to the simple act of giving off the scent of Jesus (2 Cor 2:15-16) as we live among a particular people at a particular time. In the course of going about this work, there will be times when the smell of Jesus makes people mad and times when their response to this scent bears the fruit of gratitude and approval.”

The Courage to Grieve by Judy Tatelbaum

“Since pain unexpressed does not dissolve spontaneously, we may suffer severe consequences from pretending to be super-human.”

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John M. Gottman, Phd.

“In the strongest marriages, husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning. They don’t just ‘get along’—they also support each other’s hopes and aspirations and build a sense of purpose into their lives together.”

101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married by Linda & Charlie Bloom

“If you can’t do something without expecting something in return, you’re probably better off not doing it at all. A marriage is not a business deal. Keeping score may work in sports and finances, but it’s folly in a relationship. Rather than keeping track of whether or not the ledger is balanced, work instead to cultivate trust and a spirit of goodwill. That which is given from a selfless intention is always rewarded.”

In a minute, click on this link: "Melody's Dream." It will take you to the "Stewardship" portion of our church website. Within that "New Fruits. Deep Roots." stewardship section click on the tab in the upper right hand corner of that window that says "Videos." Then you can watch the video entitled "Melody's Dream," which has a connection to this blog post.

Happy reading!

Grace and Peace,
Everett

People Are the Heart of a Building

Here at First Presbyterian Church we are in the midst of our stewardship season entitled “New Fruit, Deep Roots.” So I believe it is only fitting for me to touch on a major aspect of our stewardship as a congregation—the usage of our building. As usual, in doing this I’m going to tell you more than you ever wanted to know. But my justification for this is that just because we didn’t want to know it, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know it.

Contrary to the way we use the word “church,” as in “Do you want to go to church with me?” or “Meet me at the church,” the church is not a building at all. The Church is the people. What we often call the church is really just the building where the Church meets. That’s why I really like how many Church of Christ congregations, at least in Oklahoma, will have on their sign, “The Church of Christ Meets Here.” That’s really more biblical than the idea of the building being a church. Think of 1 Peter 2:5-6, “As you come to [Jesus Christ], the living Stone--rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him--you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

The English word “church” has evolved from the Middle English word “chirche,” which can be traced back through the centuries to coming from the Greek word “kuriakos,” which means “belonging to the Lord.” So the literal meaning of “church” is “belonging to the Lord.” So when English speaking people were looking for a way to render the Greek word “ekklesia,” meaning “called out [people],” which is the word that the Bible uses to refer to Christian believers collectively, they used the word that would eventually become “church,” which gave the sense that this people belonged to the Lord. So ekklesia (called out by God) was translated as church (belonging to the Lord). Again, whether we use “ekklesia” or “church,” it still is all about people—the people who have been called by and belong to God in Jesus Christ. Over the years, although it covers up the original and more powerful (and empowering) meaning of the word “church,” the building where the church meets started being referred to as a church. This is so ingrained in our culture that, in my opinion, it takes constant reminding that we don’t go to church; we are the church.

The original Christians did not meet in a building that was specifically set aside for use as a place for worship. It appears that the church in Jerusalem may have met, at least occasionally, at the Jerusalem Temple, but most of the time the gatherings of Christians met, often secretly, in private homes for worship, fellowship, and for a shared meal. As far as we can tell, these early gatherings of the church often met in a private home before dawn on Sundays, shared the Lord’s Supper every time they met, and then went to work. The idea of Sunday as a day dedicated to worship and rest was still a long way off. The first evidence that archaeologists can find of a structure devoted specifically to Christian worship is from about the year 240 AD, around 210 years after Jesus' death and resurrection. It was unearthed near the Euphrates River in an ancient city very near the current border between Syria and Iraq. Even this structure, however, is appended to a house. It appears that someone built a gathering place for the church onto the side of a house. It is unclear if a family lived in the other part of the building or if the entire structure was used by the church. Two rooms were combined to form an assembly room and there was a separate room with a baptismal pool in it. In the baptistry room there were murals painted on the walls—of Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Jesus healing a paralytic, Jesus and Peter walking on water, the Good Shepherd image of Jesus, and the Marys coming to the empty tomb on Easter morning. It wasn't until after 313 AD that church buildings became more popular.

There is a movement right now within the wider church, and there have been many similar movements over the centuries, to return church gatherings to private homes. There are many reasons for this, but the main two are that many believe church buildings breed complacency and cause congregations to become insular, not reaching out but expecting others to come to us instead of going out to them. The second reason is that many feel that the amount of money that is invested into building and/or maintaining a church building could go to better use in ministry and mission. In these congregations there are many networks of house church gatherings of about four or five families that meet together weekly for worship and a meal, and then all of the gatherings meet together once a month or so for worship and the Lord’s Supper in a rented space like a school auditorium. I have to admit that I am very sympathetic toward these views, as I was very good friends with folks involved in this movement back in Oklahoma. For them there was no such thing as a committee meeting or a budget—just Bible study, worship, shared meals, and lots of mission and outreach. They were all involved in mission and nearly 100% of the offerings went to mission. But as you will see in a moment, I also firmly believe that when we do have a building it can be put to good use for the glory of God.

Here at First Presbyterian Church, we have inherited a beautiful historic sanctuary built around 1890. Our educational wing was built sometime in the 1960’s. These are the buildings that over the years this congregation built and dedicated to God. In essence, these buildings belong to God, and we are the stewards of these buildings. So how are we doing as stewards of these buildings?

I have been around too many congregations that only allow their building to be utilized on Sunday morning by their specific congregation. Usually, when people are honest about it, the reasoning goes something like this: “We don’t know what other people would do to our building. They might mess it up. Really, do we want those people in our building?” Here’s where this reasoning breaks down for Christians: (1) more than it is our building, it is God’s building, (2) those people quite often happen to be those whom Jesus identifies himself with in Matthew 25 and to whom Jesus calls his church to care for in his name. Congregations who think like this have buildings that sit vacant all week. Granted, they save money on utilities and custodial pay, but the church isn't called to austerity; the church is called to the ministry and mission of Jesus. Remember Jesus’ parable of the talents. When God gives you something, don’t hoard it; let it grow!

Thankfully our congregation is not like this. One of the reasons I was drawn to this congregation was that I believe we are on the right track when it comes to stewardship of the buildings with which we have been entrusted. Not only do we meet for study and worship on Sunday mornings as well as holding office hours Monday through Friday, but our building is utilized almost every single day. Our building provides space for Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, the Fayette County Food Pantry, our Wednesday Night Soup Supper, Choral Society, the community children’s choral society, a community women’s Bible study, a group that resources teen mothers, all of our various music ministries, and many other groups that meet here occasionally. I truly applaud us as a congregation for being faithful, generous stewards of this building. We might ask, "But what about all that money we’re spending on utilities?" To that I will answer that hospitality is rarely free. If it was, then it wouldn't be so highly valued. Christian hospitality is a sacrifice on behalf of the other in Christ’s name.

Buildings were meant to be used. Buildings have no inherent worth. They only have functional worth. An empty building is worthless. A building that teems with life gains its worth from that which takes place within its walls. The heart of a building is the people inside it. Because of what happens here, this building on the corner of Market and Hinde Streets has great worth, it has a great heart.

Make sure that this week you stop by www.fpcwcho.org to click on the stewardship tab to explore all the resources that the Stewardship Council has provided for us as a congregation. And as we think about stewardship during this specific season in the life of this congregation, let us think of our building usage as a model for all areas of our lives. It is not our own, but it has been given to us as a blessing. It has been given to us not merely to bless us but to bless others as well. That is true of everything in our lives. Like our building, our time, our talents, our passions, our possessions, our financial resources, and our love and compassion, have been granted to us as generous gifts from our loving God. They are blessings to us and are to be blessings to others as well.

Here is the ultimate question of stewardship: How will we use all that we have been given to give glory to God and to bless others in Christ's name?

In Service to the Gospel,
Everett

The Vocation We Share

Almost a decade ago now, when I was trying to determine if I was, indeed, being called to be a pastor, the presbytery required me to meet with the Committee on Preparation for Ministry. For months I had been hearing from family, friends, and coworkers how wonderful it was that I was considering “a higher calling.” However, as I sat down with the committee, a wise pastor who had been around the block a few times started out by saying to me, “Don’t you ever give in to the talk about you having a higher calling. All Christians have the same calling. We just live it out in different ways.”

Of all the scriptures about the vocation of the Christian, there are three that I find most helpful. The first is Matthew 9:9, “Jesus said to [Matthew], ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.” The second is Matthew 22:37-39, “Jesus said to [the expert in the Law] ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind… You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The third is Colossians 3:17, “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Although there is certainly a lot more that goes into filling out these verses, this is what we are basically called to do: Follow Jesus, loving God and others with our entire being in everything we do. This is Christian vocation. That’s the vocation that is placed on each and every one of us by the waters of our baptisms. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “I could pump gas in Idaho or dig latrines in Pago Pago, as far as God was concerned, as long as I remembered whose I was.”
About 500 years ago, Martin Luther was the main proponent of this way of thinking about Christian vocation. Monks and priests were no holier than anyone else, he said, which was pretty surprising coming from the pen of a monk/priest. Luther writes, "What seem to be secular works are actually the praise of God and represent an obedience which is well–pleasing to him." Luther even wrote of the faith significance of housework by saying, "it has no obvious appearance of holiness, yet these very household chores are more to be valued than all the works of monks and nuns." Luther wrote that every tool of work, whether at a job or at home, calls out to us, “My dear, use me toward your neighbor as you would want your neighbor to act toward you with that which is his.”

Oxford Scholar Alistar McGrath, in writing about the views of Christian vocation held by both Martin Luther and John Calvin wrote,

“Whereas monastic spirituality regarded vocation as a calling out of the world into the desert or the monastery, Luther and Calvin regarded vocation as a calling into the everyday world. The idea of a calling or vocation is first and foremost about being called by God, to serve Him within his world. Work was thus seen as an activity by which Christians could deepen their faith, leading it on to new qualities of commitment to God. Activity within the world, motivated, informed, and sanctioned by Christian faith, was the supreme means by which the believer could demonstrate his or her commitment and thankfulness to God. To do anything for God, and to do it well, was the fundamental hallmark of authentic Christian faith. Diligence and dedication in one’s everyday life are, Calvin thought, a proper response to God.”

Personally, I have met many people who have lived out our shared Christian vocation in their daily lives. I have been blessed by real estate agents, car mechanics, attorneys, teachers, stay-at-home moms, soldiers, retired people, doctors, gas station attendants, and even a couple of pastors along the way who follow Jesus, loving God and others through their lives, whatever their work may be. I love being a pastor and I love preaching sermons from the pulpit on Sundays, but some of the most important sermons preached every week are those that are lived out by disciples who are following Jesus in the midst of, and through, their work in the world. A cashier at Wal-Mart or Kroger has far more opportunities to bless many more people in a week than I ever will. A hospice nurse does the sacred work of caring for body and soul, sharing God’s life with the dying. A stay-at-home mom has the sacred duty of raising up children in a way that will draw them into following Jesus, loving God and others through their lives, in every word or deed.

So don’t every give in to the talk about some having “a higher calling.” As long as you follow Jesus, loving God and neighbor with all you are, then whatever you do in His name is the highest calling there is. But always remember, none of us can do this on our own. Firstly, and most importantly, we can only do this if God is working through us. Secondly, it's a lot easier to do if we are a part of a community of faith--a congregation in which we uphold one another in living out the God given vocation we share in our baptisms.

My hope is that you have a week in which you are able to see God's presence and the spread of God's Kingdom in the midst of your everyday life. God is at work all around you. I promise you! Just open the eyes of your heart to see it.

Grace and Peace,
Everett

When Cliches Become Destructive

Warning: the content of this week’s post may have some material that is difficult for some people to handle, but this is done in order to make what I believe to be a very important point.

Cliché:
a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase,usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse. Example, “I’m taking it one day at a time.”

Platitude:
a flat, dull, or trite remark, especially one uttered as if it were fresh or profound. Example, “Anything that doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger!”

I am hyper-sensitive to clichés and platitudes. Even though I catch myself using them every now and then I can’t stand them. In fact, I just used the same cliché about three times in a meeting, saying, “It all comes out in the wash.” There are two reasons for my deep aversion to all things trite.

The first reason comes from my background in creative writing. In creative writing workshops, let’s say short-story since that’s my favorite genre, we would hand out our story one week, everyone would read it and mark it up during the week, and then the next week in class the story would be dissected and reviewed. This process can be very brutal and the author doesn’t get to say anything. Just about the absolute worst thing you could hear about your story was, “It is filled with clichés,” or “this plot is so cliché.” This means that you are neither original nor talented. I learned to avoid cliché at all costs.

The second reason for my aversion to clichés comes from my ministry training. In areas of theology and especially in the area of pastoral care, we were warned repeatedly to avoid clichés. We were taught to be deeper and more real in our preaching than just filling it with clichés. When I hear a sermon filled with clichés I cringe and want to scream out, “Isn’t the Gospel more important than this!” A preacher should be above clichés in preaching and should always identify a cliché in a sermon as such. For instance, “This passage reminds me of that old cliché, ‘a bird in hand is better than two in the bush,’ but it means so much more than that.” While the avoidance of clichés and platitudes is extremely important in preaching, they are even more inappropriate in pastoral care situations. Professors taught us that we are never to use clichés in the service of being dismissive of someone else’s emotions.

Generally, in a pastoral care situation, clichés and platitudes are used by someone in order to avoid dealing with a difficult and often unexplainable situation. For instance, Darla says, “I can’t believe Bobby’s dead.” Steve responds, “He’s in a better place.” Now, it may be true that he’s in a better place, but that cliché used at that time is not helpful. In fact, it is dismissive, because Darla’s legitimate feelings are that the best place for Bobby is to be alive and to be by her side. Steve said, “He’s in a better place,” because Steve didn’t know what else to say. What Steve could have said that would have, perhaps, been more helpful is, “I can’t believe it either. I’m so sorry.” That statement validates Darla’s understandable emotions and shows empathy. We were told repeatedly never ever ever ever to say, “God needed him more than we did.” If the person who’s mourning wants to say that, then that’s their prerogative, but that cliché should never come out of someone else’s mouth. That’s the kind of stuff we were taught in regard to clichés.

Most of the time clichés are harmless, and we all use them frequently without even thinking about it. But there are times when clichés are not only inappropriate; they can be downright destructive. With some clichés, when you follow them to their eventual logical conclusions, you can see that this particular cliché is not so harmless, after all. For instance, I want to explore the possible results of using a cliché that is used all the time, very often in the church, almost always without bad intentions, but that can bring with it a whole world of negative consequences. Here it is: “Everything happens for a reason.” Most people love this cliché, but I absolutely abhor it. I hate it. Before you get mad at me and quit reading, let me explain.

An Olympic sprinter trips and finishes last. In the post-race interview, he says, “Hey, everything happens for a reason. This will make me better.” Whether he knows it or not, he’s using that as a crutch to help him ascribe some meaning to what just happened. He cannot fathom that after years of training, he just plain tripped. That’s harmless and it may actually make him a better sprinter in the future. Did God or an angel go out there and make him trip so that four years later he will set the World Record? Regardless of how he reacts to the fall—by working harder or giving up running altogether—he probably just tripped. This is similar to someone who loses her job and she says, “This is tough, but everything happens for a reason.”

Like I said, this kind of statement helps us to make some sense of the events, usually negative, that occur in our lives. Now this could be interpreted as simply a statement about the causal relationship between two events: “My shoe was loose so I tripped during the race. Everything happens for a reason.” That means that everything has a cause, which is true as far as we can tell. But that’s not how people use it. People use this phrase to mean, “What just happened occurred in order that I will reap some benefit or blessing from it in the future.” It puts the present at the service of the future. For those who think about it more deeply, it might be indicative of their view of something like karma, God’s providence, or even predestination. When a Christian says, “Everything happens for a reason,” it takes on the meaning of, “God caused this event to happen in order that there will be some future benefit or blessing, whether to me or someone else.” If people were to say, “Maybe this happened for a reason,” I wouldn’t have a problem with that. But to say, “Everything happens for a reason” is more problematic. Everything means everything. In my opinion, this platitude only works on a fairly superficial level. It may help us sleep at night and may even motivate us to greatness, but I think it is important for us at least to see how this platitude plays out as we try it in other areas, and see what it says about the character of God.

For instance, a couple has been trying for years to conceive a child. Finally they are able to conceive and they are so excited that they prepare the nursery and pick out a name. They have photos of the ultrasound on the fridge and folks can't wait to celebrate the birth of this child. What a miracle! But then there are complications and the baby is lost very late in the pregnancy. The couple is leveled. Everything happens for a reason! Really? Now, that couple may take that experience and, with God’s help, bring something good out of it by, let’s say, adopting a child from foster care who would have never had a home had that couple’s biological child survived. Yes, that can, and often does, happen. But did their baby die so that the foster child could have a home? Was there some cosmic trade? One lost baby for a foster child to-be-named later? Did God take the life of one child to offer a future benefit or blessing to another child?

Here’s another example: today on the front page of our local paper there is an article reporting a horrendous crime—that a man allegedly sexually abused a mentally handicappped man repeatedly. If that crime did happen, then a severely mentally disabled person was raped again and again. Everything happens for a reason! Really? This mentally disabled person was brutalized and violated repeatedly in order that he or someone else may reap some future benefit or blessing? From a Christian perspective, was this reprehensible act done by the will of God to help God fulfill God’s plan? What kind of God is it that needs this kind of thing to happen to work out His plan? Here’s another one: a ten year old girl in Thailand is lured from her home with the promise of work in the city. Her parents don’t know where she is. She is being held in a dank unsanitary basement with eleven other girls. Men take turns paying the girls’ “owners” to rape her. Everything happens for a reason! Really?

There have been a couple of things that I have witnessed in my life that have made it impossible for me to believe or to ever say the cliche “everything happens for a reason.” The first of them happened when I was in the sixth grade. I had just moved from one neighborhood to another. In my old neighborhood I had been very good friends with a girl who was a grade above me. We’d been friends since I was three years old. Not long after I moved, our family was watching the news and we couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw that this little girl was missing. Authorities and volunteers searched for a couple of days. We all hoped for the best. A couple of days later they found her twelve-year-old body naked and ravaged, and her underwear stuffed down her throat to the point of suffocation. Later it was found out that two teenage boys had decided to “have a little fun with her” and it “got out of hand.” Everything happens for a reason? That happened to her in order that other people might love their own kids more or so that some other benefit might be gleaned? God willed this to help fulfill God’s plan for the world? Do you get my point about how destructive a saying like, “Everything happens for a reason,” can be?

The second thing that I witnessed was during my internship at St. David’s Episcopal Hospital when I was in seminary. A baby was born with severe birth defects. It would only live for a couple of days. The young parents were completely devastated and inconsolable. They could not bring themselves to even visit the baby. As chaplain interns we took turns sitting by the baby until he died. In our debrief about the situation, one of the other interns started to talk about how everything happens for a reason so we just need to look for whatever lesson God wanted to teach the rest of us through this experience. I got absolutely irate. Our supervisor could see me about to explode so she asked me to speak. “Experience?!” I screamed. “Lessons? Who gives a rip about the rest of us? What about that baby? Who cares if the parents learn a lesson or the nurses learn a lesson or if you and I learn a lesson? Is that what it’s all about? What about that baby? Why would God sacrifice a baby and destroy a young couple so that you and I might appreciate our lives more. How egocentric of you! What about the baby?!” I started to cry. (I should also mention that at that time Danielle was pregnant with Wyatt). Afterwards, our main supervisor, who was a leather-skinned old Episcopal priest who rode her Harley Davidson to the hospital every day for thirty years, pulled me aside. I thought I was in trouble. All she said was, “When I’m dying, I want you as my chaplain.” I was surprised and validated by her statement. Platitudes and clichés are pure poison when the dark side of life and death is taken into account.

In the book What Not to Say: Avoiding the Common Mistakes That Can Sink Your Sermon, the authors write, “Many of the pastorally damaging messages we send from the pulpit are the result of our attempts to ascribe everything that happens, in the wider world and in our own little world, to the direct will and action of God.” A main example that is explored is our old friend, “Everything happens for a reason.” About this platitude and those like it, the authors exhort pastors by saying, “This kind of theological self-medication is what people are already administering to themselves. We need to confiscate it, not confirm it.” The authors offer this alternative theological viewpoint—“God’s ultimate purposes will be achieved, despite all obstacles.” This doesn’t blame God for the severely handicapped man’s savage rape, but it does say that this kind of act and the evil, sin, and godlessness that caused it will not win in the end.

I know that most people never think about clichés on this level, but as Christians we need to be speakers of truth, and while sometimes things may happen for a reason, if we truly believe in a loving and merciful God then everything cannot happen for a reason. So we need to be careful in making that claim. I just want us to think about that… okay?

Well, now that I’ve ruined your day, I think I’ll stop and go have my afternoon can of Dr. Pepper 10. Have a good week. I can't wait to worship the Lord with you on this upcoming Lord's Day.

Grace and Peace,
Everett

Notes from a Week Off

This is my first post after being out of the office for about a week and a half. I had taken some time off because, frankly, I needed a break. I was stressed out, exhausted, and dealing with what is called “compassion fatigue,” which is not uncommon for pastors, counselors and social workers, health care providers, etc. After walking alongside three grieving families in less than two weeks along with the other stresses, pulls in different directions, and the persistent need for my attention both at the church and at home, I was just plain spent.

During that week one of the things I did was to drive up to Worthington to see a pastoral counselor at a place called The Wellness Institute. I had called our presbytery office and told our executive presbyter, Jeanne Harsh, “I need somebody to talk to.” Glad that I recognized the pastoral need for self-care, she made a referral and a week or so later I was sitting with a very experienced counselor (licensed medical social worker) who is also an ordained Presbyterian pastor. The issue was that so much grief and struggle was coming into me through walking alongside my parishioners during their struggles, but I had nowhere to express it. It was coming in but not coming back out. That’s a recipe for disaster. Talking about things that bother us is a major key to dealing with those aspects of life maturely and in healthy ways. However, as a pastor, I am really pretty limited in who I can talk to about these matters. For the most part, I cannot talk to parishioners because of confidentiality concerns, which is also the reason I have to stop short in discussing many situations with Danielle. While she is my best friend, she is also a member of this church. Plus, it wouldn’t be fair for me to dump it all on her either. Then who is she going to talk to about it? So that would really just be transferring the problem from me to Danielle. I also can’t really talk to other pastors here in town about many situations because this town is too small for me to talk to one member of the community about what is going on with another member of the community and because the other pastors are just as busy as I am. I take confidentiality very seriously. I do pray about the situations. I pray for the members of our congregation all the time, but sometimes a person just has to talk to another person. You “inhale” so much that eventually you have to “exhale” it or you just might quit breathing. Have you ever felt like that?

After spending a long time with the counselor he observed that (1) I was dealing with some acute compassion fatigue because of the difficult couple of weeks (2) I am not dealing well with the stresses of the pastoral vocation (3) I need to make sure that we’re developing lay leadership that can handle things like the children’s and youth Christian education programs and (4) I am going to have to come to grips with the fact that everything simply cannot happen right now. This fourth item is something that Wilma Dorn has been on me about for several months. “It’s okay if it takes a while,” she says. The counselor stated that if I keep up the pace I’ve been running at during my first ten months here that my motor is going to give out. “Slow down,” he said. “Set some boundaries on your time and attention, get some exercise, eat better, and realize that this is not your church, this is Christ’s church and through Christ this is this congregation’s church. You’re just their pastor.”

One church member told me the first time I ever met him, “If you feel a huge load of expectations on you, that’s coming from you, not from the congregation.” While, I don’t think that’s totally accurate (there were some very real expectations of improvement when I came), the fact of the matter is that I’m doing this to myself. I have such an ambitious drive, so many ideas, so much love for this congregation, that I’m working myself into the ground. You probably don’t notice this because I’m working at my house in the evenings or coming over to the church late at night or taking work with me to work on in the doctor’s waiting room and so on and so forth. That’s not healthy at all, and that is my fault, not yours. My hair has started thinning much faster than it was before, I have a bunch of white hairs growing in my beard at the age of 34 that I didn’t have ten months ago, and I have gained 16 pounds since I moved here, and I cannot blame all of those pounds on Arlene Thompson’s homemade pies. The pies are only responsible for a few of those pounds. The rest is my own fault.

I have been trying to carve exercise time out of my personal/family time like most people do. When I do that, however, Danielle is stuck with keeping the kids on her own for even more hours out of the day than she already does. Every time I have tried to do it before the kids wake up, the kids hear the door close when I leave and they wake up which causes Danielle to have to wake up that much earlier. That’s not fair to her. If I wait until the kids are in bed and the house is straightened up at the end of the day then I don't get any alone time with Danielle and I can’t work out until close to ten p.m., which doesn’t work because the YMCA is closed and that makes me stay up really late. Because of those scheduling difficulties, I completely quit working out and the pounds have been packing on and my body has been tensed up with stress. So the counselor suggested that I begin considering exercise as a part of my work, not as a part of my personal time. “The congregation will just have to understand that if you don’t start exercising to release some tension and to get healthier, you’re not going to be of any use to them.” Today was the first day (a week and a half after he said it) that I actually went to the YMCA and it felt great.

Now why am I telling you this? Firstly, when people find out later that you were stressed out and at your wit’s end, if they actually care about you, they tend to say, “You should have told us!” Well, I’m telling you. Not blaming you, just telling you. Secondly, I want you to know that I am taking appropriately mature steps to take care of myself. Being a pastor is incredibly rewarding, but it also carries with it inherent stress. Thomas W. Currie III writes, “Ministry calls one to proclaim, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ as a family is standing around an open grave. How successful is that? Ministry calls one to enter the darkness of other lives and even confront the darkness of one’s own life armed with nothing more than the rumor of Christ’s victory. That is no romantic quest but a journey where one fails and falls again and again, often looking ridiculous, able only to sigh for what one is unable to see.” That, along with needing to have some working knowledge in things as dissimilar as ancient Hebrew culture, marriage counseling, social services, budgeting, children’s learning styles, church history, and how to work a copier, can wear a person down if that person lets it happen. Just ten months in, I’ve let it happen.

There is a phrase that describes pastors who do not take care of themselves: people who used to be pastors. This congregation, perhaps better than any other, knows that the spiritual, mental, and physical health of the pastor and the health of the church are intricately connected with each other. Unfortunately, because we pastors are sinful human beings like everybody else, some pastors deal (or don’t deal) with these stresses through smoking like a freight train, drinking like a fish, or having failing marriages. I’ve seen some of my colleagues in ministry crack and generally it isn’t just the pastor and the pastor’s family who are hurt, but the congregation as well. I don’t smoke (I can’t even stand the smell of it), it takes me two weeks to go through a six pack of beer, and Danielle and I are in an extremely healthy place in our marriage. Those are not concerns right now, but they could be in the future if I don’t start taking better care of myself. So I’m going to take care of myself as I minister with you. Good habits need to start now, accompanied with a more mature, realistic, spiritual, and historically accurate view of who a pastor is and what a pastor does—the word "pastor" comes from the Latin word that literally means “shepherd.”

The third reason I’m telling you this is because I want you to know that you do not need to be embarrassed to go speak with someone when you are struggling. Going to speak with a counselor is not a failure on your part. It is not a failure of your faith because you couldn’t “pray your way through it.” It is a failure of your self-sufficiency,though, and that is OKAY. Whoever said that we’re supposed to be completely self-sufficient? In Genesis 2, when there is only Adam, we read, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’” Then God calls a people, Jesus calls disciples, and the church comes together as the covenant community. Here in America we have this false sense of the hero being a Lone Ranger, someone who rides into town, needs no one, takes care of problems herself or himself and then rides out of town alone. That’s just a myth, and a rather unhelpful one at that. It’s okay, wise in fact, to go talk to someone, perhaps a pastor (who has very minimal training in counseling) or a professional counselor, when you are grieving, confused, lonely, or frustrated. For some reason for many people there is a stigma involved with seeing a counselor. In fact, I was just reading a book about marriage counseling that says that most couples do not go see a counselor until it is already too late to save their marriage. They too often go “just so they can say they tried everything,” whereas if they would have gone early on they might not be getting a divorce.

I am here for you (within understandable and appropriate limits) and I can listen and counsel on some things (always on a short term basis), but more than anything I can help you figure out what kind of help you might need, while helping you to utilize the resources of your faith. You might need to have a conversation with someone about something that has plagued you for years. You might need to come to terms with a sinful behavior, repent of it, and ask for God’s help to move in God’s direction. You might need professional therapy and/or medication. You might need to go to AA. Most of the time you just need to get something of your chest and pray about it with your pastor. Or like me, you might just need to get some exercise, eat better, and stop working in bed until midnight.

I want this to be a long-term pastorate, which is commonly defined as seven or more years. As Glenn E. Ludwig writes in In It for the Long Haul: Building Effective Long-Term Pastorates, “long-term pastorates tend to lead to healthier congregations and healthier pastors.” I want that for our congregation, for our community, for my wife and kids, and for me. So let’s all work together to make that a possibility, praying to God through our hope that it will be more than a possibility, becoming a reality.

Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett