Category Archives: Church and ministry

7 quick takes, 2/13/09

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7 Quick Takes Friday is hosted by Jen F. over at Conversion Diary; I haven’t participated to this point, but it seemed like a good day for it.

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I love being a pastor, but there are many days I couldn’t rationally tell you why.  Today would be one of those days . . . in fact, this week would be one of those weeks.  Our poor congregation is dealing with multiple major health issues (most of them in key people or families), on top of the economic issues that are hitting everyone, on top of some other issues in particular people’s lives, at the same time as we’re trying to develop a plan to revitalize the congregation and its ministry.  Suffice it to say, things are a bit overwhelming around here just at the moment.

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My hope is that we’re dealing with all these stresses because we’re moving forward in our efforts to revitalize the church—that we’re under deliberate spiritual attack to keep those efforts from bearing fruit.  We want to be faithful to do what Christ calls us to do, and we’re praying that he will work through us to draw people into his kingdom, and to raise up mature, godly followers of Christ; if we’re truly beginning to make progress in that direction, one would expect the enemy to try to nip it in the bud.  So, from an optimistic point of view, this might be evidence that we’re doing things that will ultimately bring new life to our congregation.

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Of course, it isn’t really our effort that will make that happen, if it does.  You’ve no doubt heard it said that “God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called”; that is, I think, truer in pastoral ministry than in most places, because there’s simply no such thing as being qualified for this job.  As David Hansen put it in his book The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All the Answers, being a pastor is impossible—except by the grace of God.  If we’re trying to do this in our own strength, we will fail.  True, there are those who will appear to succeed, because those who have the gifts to build great businesses can do that just as well in the church as on Wall Street; but they won’t be pastors.

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The corollary to that is that we can only pastor well when God’s the one making everything happen.  I sometimes think that pastoral ministry is like the plot of The Phantom Menace.  The remarkable thing about that movie—I don’t say good, just remarkable—is that everything that happens on screen (aside from the emergence of young Anakin Skywalker) is diversion and subplot; the real plot, Palpatine’s deep-laid scheme to seize power, all takes place off screen.  It’s somewhat the same way being a pastor; we put all this effort into sermons, meeting with people, administration, planning, and the like, and all our work is just scaffolding for the Holy Spirit to do his work—and it’s his work that builds the church.

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I respect my friends who are ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ within the Catholic church, and I understand the logic behind a celibate clergy; but I don’t see how they do it.  Leaving the whole issue of sex all the way aside, I couldn’t survive in pastoral ministry without my wife.  I don’t say that she always gives me exactly the help that I need, and still less that she gives me everything I need; she’s not up to that standard any more than any other human being is.  But she’s an incredible source of strength and support and wisdom and love, and I really couldn’t live this life without her.

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One thing about being a pastor is that it’s taught me a certain new respect for politicians.  That might seem strange, but it goes like this.  I have long been of the school of thought that I wouldn’t trust anyone to be president who actually wanted the office.  Then one day it occurred to me that I could really say the same thing about pastors—I wouldn’t trust anyone to be a pastor who wants the job.  By that I don’t mean that you should only seek to be a pastor if you really don’t want to do it; but someone who’s just doing it because they like the idea and find it appealing either will be fried by it, or will like it for all the wrong reasons and probably be all the wrong kind of success.  The only intelligible reason to be a pastor is because God is calling you to this ministry and you can do no other; it’s the only thing that can make it worthwhile to be a real pastor.

And then it hit me:  our nation needs political leaders, and especially a president, the same way that the church needs pastors; and therefore, it logically follows that God calls people to political life, and ultimately to the presidency.  And if God calls you to run for president, then by cracky, you’d better run—and that can make it worthwhile, when nothing else I can possibly imagine could.

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Which is why, in the end, though I often couldn’t rationally tell you why, I love being a pastor.  The price is high, some days, and some days the return for your efforts seems pretty low; some days, you have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place, and the hurrier you go, the behinder you get, and that’s just how it is.  But we have this assurance, that this is God’s church, and as solid and forbidding as the gates of Hell often look, they will not prevail against it—and that God has called us to play a particular part in their defeat; and if our part often looks improbable, well, we worship a God who specializes in improbable victories.

Marketing the gospel?

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There are some real disagreements in the church over the whole question of marketing and advertising.  On the one hand, you have the folks who are firm believers in marketing the church just like any other business, who are completely comfortable in talking about the church in terms of “product,” and “customers,” and “market share”; on the other, you have the skeptics and those who don’t believe the real work of the church is advanced by marketing.In a lot of ways, you can put me down with the skeptics; in particular, as Tyler Wigg-Stevenson recently articulated well in Christianity Today, I think there’s a real and significant theological danger to our understanding of the church in treating “church” as just another product to be marketed to consumers.  This is a road we go down at our peril.  On the other hand, though, we have the responsibility to communicate the gospel message—and in this day and age, with so many competing voices, if we don’t use the media for that purpose, we’ll probably find ourselves drowned out by all the noise.  In a sense, then, we have to use the tools of marketing and advertising just to make ourselves heard.The question is, then, how do we do that without allowing the medium to distort our message?  There are a lot of bright people thinking about that question these days, and I can’t claim to be an expert on the subject; but I recently ran across this post by a fellow named Seth Godin that I think sheds some light on this.  He’s writing about the Super Bowl ads, but I think this applies to the church, too; in particular, I think it helps us understand marketing in a way that’s actually constructive for the mission of the church.

Putting on a show is expensive, time-consuming and quite fun. And it rarely works. . . .Marketing is telling a story that sticks, that spreads and that changes the way people act. The story you tell is far more important than the way you tell it. Don’t worry so much about being cool, and worry a lot more about resonating your story with my worldview. If you don’t have a story, then a great show isn’t going to help much.(And yes, every successful organization has a story, even if they’ve never considered running an ad, during the Super Bowl or anywhere else.)

Certainly, the church does; we have the greatest story of all.  Telling that story, by whatever means are available, is what we’re supposed to be on about.

Is the Crystal Cathedral about to shatter?

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Maybe, if the AP story has it right:

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, he implored the Eagle’s Club members—who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue—for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

Robert H. Schuller, who is of course the church’s founder, handed over the senior position at the Crystal Cathedral to his son Robert A. Schuller a few years ago; after a while, though, it appears he decided he didn’t like what his son was doing, because last fall he removed his son from the television broadcast.  After that, the younger Schuller’s resignation as senior pastor (which was announced last November 29) was inevitable, merely a matter of time.  The resulting upheaval, of course, has badly damaged the organization.  I was particularly struck by this comment:

Melody Mook, a 58-year-old medical transcriptionist from El Paso, Texas, said she stopped her $25 monthly donation and is looking elsewhere for her spiritual needs. She said she dislikes the guest pastors.  “I feel hurt and confused, and I’m not sure that I want to sit and watch when I know there’s problems beneath the surface,” she said. “You feel like you’re in somebody else’s church every Sunday.”

I read that and I have to wonder, didn’t she realize it’s been “somebody else’s church” the whole time?  She lives in El Paso, for crying out loud—she’s not a part of that congregation, and never has been.I have mixed feelings about this situation.  On the one hand, this could have and should have been avoided; after all, it’s not as if no one saw it coming.  The transfer of power from elder to younger Schuller has been planned since 1997 or so, and for that whole time, people familiar with the situation have been saying it wasn’t going to work.  I remember being a part of a conversation in the summer of 1998 among folks from various parts of the Reformed Church in America in which people expressed two main concerns:  one, that Robert A. Schuller didn’t have the gifts for the position to which his father wanted him to succeed; and two, that Robert H. Schuller would never really be willing to let anyone else run the show independently, not even his son.  As a consequence, I doubt many close observers of the situation are surprised at how the transfer of authority has played out.  I realize there was no way that the RCA’s Classis of California was going to tell the elder Schuller “no,” but they should have.On the other hand, maybe it would be for the best if the Crystal Cathedral did shut down.  It’s generated a lot of money and a lot of publicity over the years, but to what real benefit to the kingdom of God?  Maybe it would be better to shut the doors, let the property revert to the Classis of California, and let the classis and the Synod of the Far West figure out how best to use it.  I know there’s been some discussion in the past about starting a new denominational seminary in the West; the campus could be used for that purpose, and you could probably cover a lot of the expenses of starting and running a new school by renting out the great glass sanctuary itself to some other church for Sunday services.  Or maybe it would be better just to sell the whole thing and use the money to fund church plants all over southern California.  I don’t know, but there would be lots of options.The bottom line here, I think, is that this is what happens when you build a church on a personality and a media strategy rather than on the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If the driving force in a church is anything other than the gospel, and if the congregation’s chief loyalty is to anyone but Jesus, that church is built on the sand, and it cannot and will not endure.Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.—Matthew 7:24-27 (ESV)

The work of the people is the work of the Holy Spirit

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Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”


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The most interesting part of my second day at the Worship Symposium at Calvin was Simon Chan’s workshop on the liturgy as the work of the Holy Spirit.  Dr. Chan is a Pentecostal who teaches at Trinity Theological College, an ecumenical Christian seminary in Singapore; from the title and the interview he gave Christianity Today last year, I knew him to be rather more liturgically-minded than most Pentecostals, but I didn’t expect him to ground his argument in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologians like John Zizioulas and Nikos Nissiotis—which is exactly what he did.  It was a fascinating argument and discussion about the way in which the Holy Spirit works on and in the church, and effectively takes on the shape of the church—the church, we might say, becomes the body of Christ by embodying the Holy Spirit.I’ll be a while processing what Dr. Chan had to say, I suspect; but I greatly appreciate his emphasis on the fact that the Spirit of God is always present with and at work in the church, and that it’s the Spirit’s ongoing work that constitutes the church.  That really drives home the point that we are entirely dependent on grace.

The importance of friendship in ministry

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The Worship Symposium began today at Calvin; this year, I started off by taking a seminar on “Developing Pastoral Excellence,” which turned out to be interesting in an unexpected way.  The presenter, the Rev. David Wood, is the director of Transition into Ministry, a program funded by the Lilly Foundation which seeks to aid and support pastors in the transition from the education process into the early years of their first call.  As such, he’s been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good pastor and what is necessary for pastors to minister well; in so doing, in looking at all the list that various authors have generated of what makes an excellent pastor, he noticed “the sound of something missing”:  he argued that an essential and unconsidered component of pastoral excellence is friendship.In brief, his argument runs like this.  To be a good pastor, one must be a person of character and integrity and moral habit; as Aristotle (whom he quoted repeatedly) says, “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”  To live in this way requires sustained moral effort; and to sustain moral effort, the Rev. Wood contends (following Aristotle), we need friends of character—deep, strong friendships with godly people whom we can trust implicitly.This is true for a number of reasons.  For one, central to our work as pastors is our ability to maintain a proper balance of intimacy and distance with the people in our congregations, something we can’t do if we’re starved for intimacy ourselves.  For another, this requires a degre of self-knowledge which we can’t manage on our own—we need people who know us well to reflect us back to ourselves, so that we can see them through their eyes.  For a third, we need support, reinforcement, encouragement, and sometimes a good swift kick or two from others if we’re to live lives of excellence of character—none of us have the resources in ourselves to do that alone.And fourth, we need friends to protect us from boredom.  The Rev. Wood argues that when you see a pastor in moral collapse, you’re probably seeing someone who was bored with their life.  It’s easy to grow bored with the things that matter most to us if we have no one with whom to share them; it’s easy to forget why they matter.  We need others to help us remember, and to help us stay excited about and invested in them.  As long as we stay interested in what we’re called to be doing, we stay energized about doing it, and invested in it.  When we get bored, we go looking for trouble—and usually find it.

Thanks, Hap

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The last couple weeks have been pretty crazy; I’m hoping that things will clear out a bit for the next couple.  We had a big meeting today at the church which took a lot of time and mental energy for preparation, and which I think went fairly well; we’re dealing with the big questions of identity and vision, working towards developing a ministry plan for the next 3-5 years, so there’s a lot on the line here, but I think we made a good start on it.  We just need to keep praying and thinking and trust God to lead us.If the pace does slow a little, one thing I want to do is catch back up with various blogs.  Hap, for instance, has been doing some interesting work on Psalm 119, working through the acrostic; and most recently, she has a remarkable post up titled “healing, community, and the poverty of availability.”  It’s a valuable rumination on the cost of being available to others, and why even ministry must be held in balance with the rest of life; as such, after a week like this, it’s just what I needed to read.  I commend it to your careful consideration.

How not to grow a big church

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I was bouncing around Kathy Escobar’s blog—now that she’s finished her series on what the church could and should be, I need to put up a post on that—and caught a link to a post on her congregation’s blog on “8 sure ways to shrink a church.”  I commend it to your reading.  No doubt, the principles they lay out are no way to create a big organization; but they are, I think, quite helpful in growing the people of God.

This is the day that the Lord has made

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let us rejoice and be glad in it. This has been a productive study leave so far; the most pressing item on the agenda was sermon planning, and I actually got farther than I had intended—I have all of 2009, not merely blocked out even, but laid out in detail. This is of course only prospective, since God reserves the right to upskittle all my plans; but still, if I have to deviate, I now have a base course to deviate from, which is quite satisfying (and more than a little reassuring, honestly).As noted, of course, that wasn’t the only objective I set myself for this week (just the one that needed to be accomplished first), so with that done, it’s on to other projects. At the moment, though, I could really use a brain break, so I’ll leave that for this evening; for now, it’s time to join the kids on the sledding hill.

Taking time for Advent

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Tomorrow is the first day of the Christian year, the first Sunday of Advent. For those not familiar with it, Advent is the season of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ; it’s a very different thing from what the world calls “the Christmas season,” though the two run together. As Joseph Bottum put it in First Things,

Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany.Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales. . . .Even for me, the endless roar of untethered Christmas anticipation is close to drowning out the disciplined anticipation of Advent. And when Christmas itself arrives, it has begun to seem a day not all that different from any other. Oh, yes, church and home to a big dinner. Presents for the children. A set of decorations. But nothing special, really.It is this that Advent, rightly kept, would prevent—the thing, in fact, it is designed to halt.

It’s an excellent meditation on the meaning and purpose of the discipline of Advent, and why we need it; I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Minor shameless plug

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I have a bit of a project going with regard to our church’s website, with which I’m still dissatisfied. One of the things I’ve decided to try is creating a sermon blog on which to put the texts of my messages and to link to that from the main website. It’s not my preferred option, since it sends traffic off the church site and over to Blogger; but unless we’re willing to expand the budget for our site by a considerable amount, it looks to me like it will work better than anything else I’ve come up with.In any case, that blog is now up and running, and has the entirety of my just-concluded sermon series on Philemon and Colossians posted (more will follow over time); I’ve called it Of a Sunday, playing off the huge role that Billy Sunday and his wife had in the founding and early growth of WLPC, and each sermon is “posted” under the date on which it was preached. These are the straight texts I took into the pulpit, so they don’t include whatever changes I made in the course of delivery, but the essentials are all there. A number of them have provided material for blog posts, so those who read this site with any sort of regularity will find some familiar thoughts and ideas.