Have To Keep Reminding Myself

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches.

There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world.

The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them.


In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community.

The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God.

- Eugene Peterson from the introduction to Working the Angles

A Long Obedience In the Same Direction

Word came in tonight that there may have been some real spiritual activity among the youth we sent out on mission. You have to hope that is so. As a pastor, seeing people gripped by the awesomeness of God, their own sin, and the possibility of freedom in Christ - who then start following Jesus - -that is what fans the flame.

It's been almost 36 years since I became a follower of Jesus, and I've seen times when for me the trail has gone cold - when I chose my own way for a time. Following Jesus can be extremely hard. It's not natural for flawed human beings. Eugene Peterson wrote a book, really one of the first on the spiritual disciplines, called "A Long Obedience In the Same Direction." Ironic that the title comes from a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, "The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is. . . that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living."

Peterson takes the Psalms and uses them as a tool to keep us pointed in the right direction. As I think about my day today, the people I talked with, the Scripture I read, and the events both here and in Kentucky, I am grateful for this passage from his work.

“Important in any community of faith is an ever-renewed expectation of what God is doing with our brothers and sisters in the faith. We refuse to label the others as one thing or another. We refuse to predict our brother’s behavior, our sister’s growth. Each person in the community is unique; each is specially loved and particularly lead by the Spirit of God. How can I presume to make conclusions about anyone? How can I pretend to know your worth or your place? …. A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, in that one."

My prayer as I leave this day behind is that some of the people I love and care for at New Hope have made a few more steps in the right direction.

Amens all around

"The happy result of a theological understanding of people as sinners is that the pastor is saved from continual surprise that they are in fact sinners. It enables us to heed Bonhoeffer's admonition: 'A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.'"
- Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor (via Bob Hyatt and shamelessly posted here)

It's like... herding cats. :)

Hey Pastor, Will You Do My Heart Work?

"But prayer is not a work that most pastor are often asked to do except in ceremonial ways. Most pastoral work actually erodes prayer. The reason is obvious: people are not comfortable with God in their lives. They prefer something less awesome and more informal. Something, in fact, like the pastor. Reassuring, accessible, easygoing. People would rather talk to the pastor than to God. And so it happens that without anyone actually intending it, prayer is pushed to the sidelines.

And so pastors, instead of practicing prayer, which brings people into the presence of God, enter into the practice of messiah: we will do the work of God for God, fix people up, tell them what to do, conspire in finding the shortcuts by which the long journey to the Cross can be bypassed since we all have such crowded schedules right now. People love us when we do this. It is flattering to be put in the place of God. It feels wonderful to be treated in this godlike way. and it is work we are generally quite good at..."

- Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor (HT - Bobby Hyatt)

I keep reading this and rereading it. The more I read it, the harsher it gets. I respect Eugene Peterson greatly. Several of his books sit on my shelves. If his accusation is true then those pastors who practice such selfish behaviors should be ashamed.

There's no one who can heal a hurt or right a wrong but Jesus. A pastor has no power unless the Spirit of the Living God chooses to work through him.

No pastor can do someone else's heart work.

We can cry with you. We can call out to God for you. We can point you to Him - even beg you to call out to Him.

But each person must carry their own cross.

The Way of Jesus

We can't say Jesus is the way—"I'm going to follow Jesus"—and then use all the devil's ways. All the "I like to do" or "have a talent for" or "have an aptitude for" or "have a spiritual gift" language is popular in our churches, but we have to do it Jesus's way. The way Jesus did it is as important as the way Jesus is. I'm just trying to connect ways and means. The means by which we do something can destroy what we're doing if they're not appropriate. And I think the American Church is very conspicuous for destroying the way of Jesus in the ways we do church.

- Eugene Peterson from his book "The Jesus Way"

95% of pastors are losers

One of the blogs I read frequently is written by Darryl Dash. It's hard for me to assign labels to Darryl. If I did, it would probably be something like "does all things well". He's a great preacher, writer, and missional theologian. But recently he had provided a quote from a conference he attended in which he reported that a speaker said "95% of all pastors are losers."

Yeah. I know. Right away I wanted to have a Robert DeNiro moment - "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Are you seriously talkin' to me?"

Turns out the speaker Darryl quoted was talking about a test a group ran in California among declining churches. The idea was that the group recognized that only about 5% of pastors in that area were natural leaders, and they offered help making them more effective. Darryl corrected the post after a leader from the conference contacted him and offered the notes for correcting the context. See, Darryl's a good guy. Told you he did all things well.

But shoot.

What Am I going to do with all this righteous indignation?

I know, I'll look at what Eugene Peterson wrote about God's losers.

Basically, we simply have to get our identity from the Bible, from this Biblical story. And Americans are not very good at that. We assume we are living in a Christian country, and everybody’s on our side. So we let the culture shape what we’re doing because it seems so benign, and then we think, “We can Christianize it.” But we can’t. The church is a totally counter-cultural movement.

We are a marginal people. There is no way we can be a success in this culture on their terms.

American pastors don’t want to hear this, though. They want to know how they can grow
their church, as though if you have the right technique and enough water and fertilizer, it’s going to go. But here’s the thing: all the stories of spiritual leadership that we have in our scriptures are failures.

Every one.

I can’t think of one that in our terms we would call a “success.”

Look at Moses. He spent forty years taking his congregation through the wilderness, finally gets them to the Promised Land, summarizes all of God’s teaching, puts it all together in this incredible sermon called Deuteronomy, and then as he gives his last speech, God speaks to Moses and says, in effect, “Moses, these people can’t wait
until you die. They are itching to jump into this whole Canaanite, orgiastic, sex-and-religion stuff.

They can’t wait until you are out of here so they can just get to it. So here’s what I want you to do: teach them this song, and teach their children this song. Then when they have forgotten about you, their children will remember the song and they will have the story.” And he teaches them the “Song of Moses.” And as soon as he dies, that’s just what happens: everything is just a mess. How
would you like, at the end of your ministry, to have God say, “I just want you to know, pastor, they didn’t learn a thing from you.”

Isaiah, at the beginning of his ministry, gets this glorious call, with all the smoke and angels and holy, holy, holy stuff. But then God says, “You are going to preach to these people and they aren’t going to listen and they aren’t going to do a thing you say.” How would you like to hear that on your ordination day? Isaiah says, “How long, Lord?” and God says, in effect, “for the rest of your life. The country is going to get cut down, and just be a field of stumps—but there is a seed in the stump.” That’s not very hopeful.

So it goes in every story. As pastors, we have to be ready to be a failure in the eyes of the culture, and if we’re not, we’re seduced by the culture to “being religious” in the culture’s way. Of course, they reward us wonderfully when we do that!

I'm in way over my head in this job. I got mad skills, but still, the job is far too complex, the people far too resistant to change, and the culture (despite what Peterson says) too ambivalent about God for success to leap into my boat like a sturgeon on the Suwanee River.

My task then, above all, is to be God's man. To be faithful and true to what Jesus is. To live Him.

100% of pastors have sinned and fallen short. But God has blessed us with His presence and His mercy, and allowed us to work with Him in His vineyard and every now and then to see the fruit of His work.

Winner!

Telling the Story

"Do you think the way to tell the story of the Christian journey is to describe its trials and tribulations?

It is not.

It is to describe God who preserves, accompanies and rules us.

All the water in all the oceans cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside. Nor can all the trouble in the world harm us unless it gets within us.

'God guards you from every evil.'... None of the things that happen to you, none of the trouble you encounter, have any power to get between you and God, dilute His grace in you, divert His will from you."

-Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience In the Same Direction