Somewhere along the road, the office of Pastor became just like any other profession. A Seminary education nowadays has more clout in most places than the a divine call - and even divine calls are no longer something that the church recognizes, but rather have been personalized - as though God calls you, but tells no one else about it. The end result is that most men who become a pastor do not do so because everyone in their congregation recognizes that they have a gift and a calling, but rather because they themselves have thought that being a pastor would be pretty sweet.

So they go to Seminary with a bunch of other young men, and they get certified by a group of established academics with a degree, or two. Now they are "qualified" by man to be pastors, and the job search begins. Soon they are being interviewed by churches full of people they don't know by elders they do not know, and often the answers to all their questions can be had from the churches' published statement of faith. The "candidate" has to have that good pastoral feeling if he wants to get the job - he has to come off as both gentle and full of conviction, intelligent, but warm - and above all, he better be entertaining in the pulpit. If he has enough sparkle, he will be in a pulpit sooner than his less bubbly counterparts.

But, as often happens, hiring a perfect stranger to be an elder in your church sometimes ends up being a mistake. As a man who has preached in several churches suffering the fall out of this syndrome, sometimes more than once, it breaks my heart, especially in those places where I have preached often, and formed relationships.

In comes Mr. Pastor - oh he is just the right age, not dodderingly old, but with enough gray hair to get respect. He is so well spoken, and interesting in the pulpit - never a dull sermon, and best of all, he has big ideas for the church. Sure he is a perfect stranger that we met two weeks ago, but hey! We all prayed about it and besides, we have been without a pastor now for two years!

Yet two years later, Mr. Pastor isn't working out. His "vision" for the church is cut and pasted from the latest church growth propaganda, and he himself, however educated, never seems to preach anything deep - it's all shallow this, and shallow that. The older sheep are starving, and the younger sheep are just coming to be entertained. The other elders in the church - the ones who have been commit ed to this body for decades - they do not fit in with this pastor's vision, and there is strife. The immature outnumber the mature in the church five to one, and so the pastor is "well loved" and the elders begin to look like "old school" grumps, the pastor feels his hands are being tied - he can't implement the latest Saddleback methodology with these guys hovering over him - and sooner than later, there is a power struggle, and the guys with the greater investment in the body are not going anywhere soon.

So Pastor leaves.

And those who were coming to church with our modern day "consumer" mindset, they leave too. Why? They leave because the pastor was the only reason they were coming to the church. He was like the movie, and the church was the theatre - when the movie ends, you don't hang around in the building. So too, when their reason for being there leaves, they stop coming.

Sometimes these same lambs follow the shepherd and a new work is started - other times they disperse and find other preachers who can tickle their ears.

When I was more immature in the faith it happened to me too, so I know what I speak of. I was attending what seemed to be a great church: nice people, awesome preaching. It was my church, and I was glad to be a member. But when the pastor resigned suddenly, I likewise "suddenly" felt entirely disconnected to that body. The truth was that I hadn't really connected with that body in the way I had connected with that pastor - and so when he left, I felt no connection to the church, and left that assembly because one of the remaining elders was using his office corruptly. It was a good enough reason to leave, really, but had I been more mature, more connected to the body - I would have stayed behind and worked at fixing what was broken rather than use it as an excuse to leave.

The lesson here is this: First, make sure you are not connecting with just your pastor, but with the whole body of believers. Second, when new people come into your assembly understand what love looks like - it looks like going and connecting with them as often as possible, and encouraging others to invest in their lives too. If your heart isn't in it, talk to God until it is. It may be practical advice, but doing it without a heart to do it is like building a house on sand. Thirdly, stop hiring pastors as though pastoring was a job you could be qualified for by academics and experience - you are qualified to be a pastor when God in the person of the Holy Spirit selects you to shepherd a particular body of believers. There were itinerant preachers in the NT, but this pastoring here for a few years then being "called" someone else once the water gets tepid, that's pure bunk.

It shouldn't be that when the latest pastor exits after two short years in the pulpit that 60% of the congregation leave the church! Unity doesn't just happen, those who are strong in the faith come along those who are weak in the faith. Grrrrr. This stuff gets me excited in a bad way.

Anyway, wherever you find yourself this Sunday, seek to be glue there.

Labels: Advice for pastors, pastoring

He had been born to a middle class family in Tennessee early one September morning in 1971. He had heard the gospel twenty times growing up, but mostly it was the "say this prayer and you will be saved" sort of tract gospel - the kind where repentance is just a word, and you do what you have to do in order to secure heaven for yourself. He had said the prayer many times, but even he knew that didn't make him a Christian.

At 30 he heard the gospel for the first time with his heart engaged, and suddenly sin was real, and hell was real, and Christ was real, and he knew deep down inside that he loved his sin, and that was why he hated Christ so. He knew in his head that it was madness and death to deny Christ's rule in his life, and yet that knowledge wasn't enough to pry the love of sin out of his heart, and in a despairing moment he knew that sin owned him, and yet in the bleakness of that crushing certainty, in the utterness of his certain damnation - in the very moment that he was certain that he was lost - suddenly the message of Christ was more than a message, it was life itself. What only moments ago was unthinkable - an act of surrender so alien to all he had ever been suddenly poured itself out from the deadness of his heart - life where once there was death, beauty replacing ashes, and belief, hope, and joy gushed into his being as he surrendered the entirety of his life to Christ.

That was in 2001.

For the next eleven years he labored tirelessly in faith. His walk was steady, methodical, paced out by the silent rhythm that rises from that tension between what we know we should be in our faith, and what our faith allows. Slowly the house was being cleaned, and with the cleaning, new light, freedom, and grace. Whether the path lead through the valley of the shadow of death, through wilderness, or rich fruitful and easy fields - the pace was steady, and every step worked with each previous step to bring him to wherever he happened to be.

He had studied as an architect, but particle physics was his real joy. Though only an online layman, his interests and his untutored brilliance began to cause seasoned trend setters in the trade to take notice. Some of his ideas - rough and even outrageous - they were nevertheless, plausible, and even solid. His faith was not something that got in the way of these things - it was all part of his personality. He wasn't one of those "quack" Christians who harmlessly invites you to dinner then suddenly snaps and tells that you vote wrong, and that you're going to hell, and that its the devil who makes you smoke. Naw, he was just a very serious thinker, and though it seems impossible an unlikely combination, he a wit that was at once warm and caustic - which while being magnificently hilarious, never made anyone feel bad.

So it was interesting when he began to study time. Now, in reality, the past and the future do not exist, all that exists is the present. The past is something we remember in the present, and the future is something we anticipate in the present, but what is gone by cannot be touched, nor what is to come. We see evidence that things have happened before this moment, our own memories testify to this - and our experience in the present, tells us that a future is immanent; but we only have the present.

Time travel, or so the theory went, was really a matter of relative space/time. In order to move through space, we must move through time, but because time and space are relative to where you are, you can only really measure it according to one observer's observation of another - and either time is going to seem faster or slower but never backwards. Which is why when he began to speak of the possibility of sending information backwards in time it would have been laughable, had any one else mentioned it.

He had this idea, a theory really, about "inverted space" I never really understood it, and it sounded bizarre. His premise was that sub atomic particles were not fully "tuned" to this reality, having only one or more "phases" that passed through this reality to give them the semblance of presence in this reality. But he theorized that these phases were part of a hyper dimensional state that could only be fully understood if one graphed the whole object across both space, and "inverted space".

I didn't see the point, and he took a lot of flack in the community - that would have all started, I suppose, round the winter of 2011. There were a couple of guys who stuck with him, but he started to withdraw a bit and in a few years, most of the regulars had moved on, and I seldom hung in those circles, having finished my PhD, not in physics but in Maths.

But in the spring of 2015, I came across an article on trans-phased string theory that had all the marks of you-know-who, and it was sheer brilliance. He had gone to the woodshed and worked on his chops for a few years it seemed, because this article was both crazy and stunning. By tangling a phased string, he theorized, one could "twist" information round into "trans-phased" space - quarks and whatnot, he described as trans-phased spiral vectors that twisted in and out of phase in our time/space so that if one tangled a twist, one could pass information through the phase and it would appear again "simultaneously" when the twist again re-entered this side of the time-space continuum - tangle-twisting up the chain was impossible for some reason that though he explained well enough, I really couldn't understand, but one could twist the tangle downward - and that would drive the information encoded in the tangle, theoretically at least - backward in time.

On August 14th, 2019, in his own basement, he built a very rudimentary communication system, and as he was about to try it, a message from his future came to him telling him of their success. He then sent the message. He then received three more messages, one from the 15th one from the 17th, and one from the 23rd of August. The one from the seventeenth included lottery numbers for the 16th.

The numbers won, but he didn't play - he was, as you recall, still a very committed Christian, and the idea of depending upon his invention to supply his needs rather than God was a temptation he was unwilling to surrender too. But a thought came to him after that - why not send back hard earned Christian lessons - wouldn't it be better to learn up front what took years to know? He determined to do just that.

By 2030, he had streamlined his invention, and no longer needed a special "receiver" to receive messages, he could use the twist-tangled string to influence radio frequencies - and thereby, use wifi connections in the past to transmit data packets to their long ago networks. In fact, he could even send emails to people, and naturally he chose himself as the test subject.

His first email he sent to himself was received before he even came up with the idea of twist-tangling strings. He sent it to the time just after he was saved, and knowing all the struggles he was about to go through - he carefully and thoughtfully explained all that thirty or so years of Christian growth had taught him. It was perhaps, a doctrinal masterpiece that only he could truly understand, for he knew what questions and doubts had plagued him, and what struggles he had passed through to arrive at an illumined answer - and he documented it all and sent it back to himself.

What a profound gift (or so he reasoned) he was giving himself. All that struggle and hardship could be avoided, and who knew the heights his faith could reach if only he hadn't spent so long toiling in this mire then the next. Here was a road map through all the struggle, and sent to himself at the time he most would need it. When he finally sent it however, his heart went cold as a stone in his chest.

Time manipulation is funny like that. Because he suddenly remembered that he had received that same email so long ago, and how he relished it, and for a season had seemed to grow spiritually in leaps and bounds, only now he remembered that it was only a short while after that, that some small struggle had overcome his "faith" - and he had given up on Christianity. In fact, for the past twenty five years, he had been a great hater of the faith, a bitter atheist who only had contempt for Christ, and here he was, not happily married and content, but suffering burnout from two divorces, having three children, one who died of a drug overdose - and about as far from happy as you can be. In fact, if it weren't for the booze, he wouldn't have strength to face another day.

It was a strange thing to do, but hating Christ so much, he determined to send one more email - to warn himself of the ridiculous faith he was about to embark upon - and he poured all the venom pent up in his soul into that email - and when he had slandered Christ with a cold and satisfying wit, certain that this would save him the folly of a few years wasted in Christianity, he hit send.

Yet suddenly he remembered that too - he remembered getting that vitriolic email, and he remembered deleting it with disgust, and deleting the next days email from the same address. He remembered his struggle in the faith, and his perseverance, and suddenly understood that there was a point to his struggles, a point to his failures, a point to all his walk - that maturity and perseverance are not hindered by struggle, they are produced by it - and without struggle, without chastisement, if you will, one is not a legitimate child. It was then that he put away his invention, erased his notes, and prayed himself, with much thanksgiving, to sleep.

The end.

Labels: fictional fun.

Just kidding. I like provocative titles.

Really, today I would rather talk about how we often try to do what God wants us to do, rather than (or instead of) trying to be with God.

Guilt and fear make me want to try to do what every good Christian ought to do; to obey God. I think in terms of doing what is right, and that usually ends up being a matter of habit rather than conscious thought. More than this, it ends up being driven by sin rather than love, as I am not drawing near to God in love, rather I am trying not to sin in order to avoid making myself God's enemy. In this mindset I am driven whenever temptation comes upon me to act according to what I know is right, and it makes my walk with the Lord reactionary; that is, it becomes a passive thing. I react to temptation, because I want to avoid real or imagined consequences.

Love however, causes me to want to be with someone. I mean, that is what love produces isn't it? Remember when you first fell in love? You "moment by moment" day wasn't consumed by trying to avoid doing things he or she hated, and making sure you did a few things he or she liked. No, all you wanted was to phone that person up, and talk for hours, or to hang out, or anything - you just wanted to be with that person. Likewise with your children, siblings, parents or even just close friends - you just want to be with them don't you? I mean, that's the point of it all isn't it? To be with the ones you love and to enjoy their company?

God wants to be with us and enjoy our company, and we, when love is motivating us, want to be with God and in His company - and not just for a daily visit here and there when we are tempted or whatnot - but throughout the whole day. Love is like that.

The Christian, rightly motivated, is driven to seek God because love demands it of him or her. They want to be with God. They hate their sin because it mars their fellowship with God; and they obey and seek to obey because God cannot fellowship with disobedient children. They don't simply try and do good, they try and stay in fellowship, and there is a world of difference, motivationally speaking, between doing something to avoid or pacify God's wrath, and doing something because one doesn't want to be away from (in the sense of broken fellowship) their God.

Which sounds a little like a dichotomy, do one or the other. The truth is that if one seeks God for any other reason than love, that seeking will consist only of trying to do the right thing - and doing so will never satisfy the one who does it for long, because the joy of the Lord is our strength, and operating from a position of duty rather than joy offers no strength to anyone except what they can muster up from the well of their own resolution - which isn't much. But that isn't to say that one ought not to form good habits or deal with sin and temptation as it comes up - it will come up, and that part of our walk has to be reactionary to some extent - but it was never meant to be by itself, representative of that walk we are called to.

I think we are supposed to seek the Lord for our own joy, and when we do our disciplined habits work with our desire to be or remain in fellowship with God, rather than stand in the place of fellowship as though these things were by themselves the purpose of our walk. The purpose of our walk is joy in daily and living fellowship with our God.

I still liked the provocative title though.

Labels: sanctification

I will be waking up the kids in about ten minutes to start Greek, I just got back from a wonderful time of prayer at church, and its about 6:50 a.m. It was pouring rain last night - somewhere between one or two inches, and I go to work in about an hour.

Prayer time was awesome, and I look forward to teaching the kids - then riding my bike 10 miles to work in the cold (I live in Canada) September rain. In fact, I am sort of looking forward to the ride in, as I have rain gear, and can plow through the puddles and don't really care about getting wet or cold.

My thoughts this morning are about doing a good job at work - working to the best of my ability, that God might be glorified, and again, as my wife plans on entertaining a woman's group this evening, on coming home and spending some quality time with the kids.

My back is pretty sore too.

Well, pitter-patter, let's get at her.

Thanks to all the sappy love songs of previous decades gone by, most people think of a broken heart as that sad empty feeling we get when love goes sour, or something we really hoped to have is withheld or even lost to us.

A broken heart, in our culture, is a little red thing with a crack in it on an "I miss you" or a "forgive me" card.

I want you to consider the heart in Luke 6:45 where we read Here scripture paints the heart as more than the center of emotion; here the heart is the center of our driving desires. A man who desires good things will from those desires draw forth good out of his heart, and a man who desires wickedness will draw forth the same from his heart. No big surprise there, I suppose, as I think we all can see that plainly enough from the text.

Yet I want you to do your best in the next moment to set aside all your Hallmark™ pre-conditioned thought, and consider for a second what it really means to have a broken heart. Not an, "ouch, my emotions hurt" heart, but an, "Something is wrong with my heart" heart. Think past the clichés and think instead that your "heart" is supposed to be producing right desires and right thoughts all the time (not the muscle/blood pump, but the "you" that you are at your core).

How is your ability to love? How about forgiveness? Bitterness? Do you find yourself freely able to forgive others, yet crippled when it comes to gossiping about someone? Or maybe you are deeply empathetic, or even magnanimous, yet you can't seem to fight an underlying bitterness. I am not trying to be provide an exhaustive list of heart conditions - I just want to give some fodder to start the thought-ball rolling.

Is your heart whole and sound, or has sin broken it in some way? Many ways?

Allow me to be transparent for a bit. One of the reasons, I think, I am not ready for pastoral ministry, is because I lack empathy. If I hear that someone I am acquainted with is in the hospital dying, I accept (intellectually) that this is a difficult thing, yet my heart isn't moved to compassion as I believe it should - as I see others do. There seems to be something broken in me, and scripture says it is my heart.

Now, I want to face that head on; there are some things that we could fake - but doing so would be more dishonest to ourselves than to anyone else. It is wise to sit down and take inventory sometimes, to ask God why it is that you are so bitter, so gossipy, so depressed, so angry, so cold - whatever it is - then listen over the days, weeks and months to the rhythm of live God brings you through - listen to His answer as he unravels the knot for you, and perspective comes to you so that whatever your intellectual capacity happens to be, you will begin to note that you are broken, and you may even know or suspect in what way sin has broken what you were supposed to be.

When you are able to "own" the fact that the heart in you has been broken by sin, then there are some verses that may have profound meaning to you. Verses you may have skipped over as poetry or warm fuzzy, but for-all-intents empty. I hope that given this briefest of introductions to the thought, the Lord's Spirit will move to bring these passages to open up your hope in Him. I could post more like these, but all I want you to do is know that our God binds up the broken hearted. There is more there than putting a smile on a forlorn face, I think. We serve a God who is in the business of making crooked roads straight, sick bodies well, and wrong hearts right.

If you know yourself and your need, get to know your God, for He is able to do for you, abundantly above all you ask or think in this matter. In fact, the first step down this road, I think, is that God has opened your eyes to see it. That's what we call setting a path beneath your feet. You still have to walk it.

I could be mistaken of course - maybe it is all about feeling nice. But I suspect more.

Labels: sanctification

A quick survey to see if you are as sad a Geek as I am/have been. Give yourself zero points for every [A] answer, one for every [B] answer, two for every [C], and three for every [D].

1. When someone mentions the "fight music" from "Amok Time" you:
[A] Stare blankly at them as though they were speaking another language.
[B] You recognize "Amok Time" as being a Star Trek reference
[C] Like [B], but you know the music
[D] Like [C], but you have the music as the ring tone on your cell right now.

2. When someone asks "Mary-Anne or Ginger?" you:
[A] You wonder whether Mary-Anne is a spice.
[B] You recognize the reference to Gilligan's Island, but have no opinion
[C] Like [B] except you say, "Ginger!"
[D] Like [B] except you say, "Mary-Anne!"

3. Do you know how to "Safety Dance"?
[A] Like with work boots and a hard hat?
[B] I remember the tune, but that's it...
[C] Yeah, I can still do the weird, epileptic hand gestures to this day.
[D] Like [C], only I can do it to Weird Al's "Brady Bunch" and sing along.

4. I used to play a CN FTR-MU-TF:
[A] Is that some kind of musical instrument?
[B] Is that one of those role playing games?
[C] I played Dungeon's and Dragons too, back in the day...
[D] multiclass? Pfffft. Dual class first baby... Ranger to 10th, (for the HP) then Thief till like 16, (you want the quad back-stab; Magic-User till 18 (now that you have the HP), then settle down as a bard for even more HP.

5. 10 OPEN 2,1,0,"D"
[A] Is some cryptic thing I don't understand.
[B] Looks to be a computer instruction.
[C] That's Commodore Basic!
[D] ahhh, sweet memories. That OPENs the commodore 64's cassette drive for reading.

6. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"
[A] these words mean nothing to me. Is that a poem or something?
[B] hmmmm. I think I played a text game once....
[C] Zork - "Colossal Cave Adventure"... I remember it well.
[D] I typed in "Xyzzy" to teleport out of them.

7. Off the top of your head, the value of Pi is:
[A] approximately 3
[B] approximately 3.14
[C] approximately 3.1415
[D] approximately 3.243F (Hexadecimal)

8. True or False: I have used a wire to ground out a pay phone to make a free call
[A] I never ever heard of that.
[B] I didn't think that would work.
[C] I tried it, but never got it to work.
[C] Yeah, and I gave all my friends free phone calls too. Wretch that I was...

9. My favorite subject in High School was:
[A] Drama!
[B] English!
[C] Math!
[D] Physics!

10. Final year of Chemistry in High school:
[A] I didn't take Chemistry.
[B] I failed.
[C] I passed.
[D] I didn't do a stitch of work for the whole year, read the text book cover to cover the night before the exam, walked into exam room the next day and -aced- the exam to get an overall "50" in the course - passing with a "D", and felt quite smug about it afterward.

Now, if you scored 27 or higher, I would say you are pretty sad and geeky. If you scored between 20 and 26, you are probably still sad and geeky, just not as much. If you scored between 10 and 20, you're a little geeky, but really, not impressively so. If you scored less than ten, you probably were dating in high school, and if less than five, you were probably happy too.

Labels: silly.

When we get together for prayer, it happens that some are laboring in the strength of their sincerity, and in the hope of their piety, to move God to look upon their request with mercy.

Yet others come to prayer filled with joy in this act of worship and fellowship - not trusting in their own piety to open God's bowels of compassion as though they could encourage God to answer their prayers by being especially sincere, or especially pious, but these have learned that they are not calling God into their work, but have been called by Him into His work. They regard themselves as His ministers, working in His field, and trust that it is His work they are about, and not their own. They do not fret about whether or when God will do His work, for it is God's work, and they trust that He is a fit Manager.

I encourage you, especially when you come to pray for something that seems impossible or difficult, to consider whether this is God's work, or your own - and if you can say with certainty that this is God's work, and that you are His worker - then take courage brother, sister, for you are not laboring to move God, rather He is laboring to move you. Believe therefore that you are not calling down heaven to do your bidding, but heaven is calling you to do its bidding. Have the heart in you that is a servants heart, and not a beggars.

Do not imagine it a noble thing to beg of God, as though God were some tyrant who is withholding good - rather imagine yourself a soldier, and God your general, and know that your prayer is just your communication to your Commander explaining what you will need, or others will need, in order to see His plan completed.

You are not the Initiator of prayer, God knows already what you will pray, prayer is for -your- benefit, and you should enter into it with praise, because it is worship. Yes, there will be broken hearted prayers, yes, there will be tears, yes, you will feel alone on the battle field at times, and cry out in what seems to you to be intolerable isolation - but you are not alone, and you are not forsaken. No one said that the war was going to be easy, but you are promised victory, and promised to never be left to fend for yourself. You are a soldier in God's army - your battlefield is your own desires, which you are to make war upon daily - and prayer is given you as a means by which you may be edified, and edify others in the struggle. It is not something you do to make things happen, it is something God gives you so that you can be edified in longing for what He longs for, in sharing His deepest longings.

Pray therefore, not timidly wringing your hat in your hands and begging - but as a child of the King of kings, as one of royal blood, who comes into the royal palace seeking what is needed to carry out the will of Him who sits on the throne. You are not a beggar, you are a cherished son, a prince. Have you been asked to pray for something that seems impossible to you? Good gravy!

God doesn't hear you because you are pious, He hears you because you are His child, and if you think a thing is impossible, it is because you forget who God is, or you imagine that prayers are answered according to how well you have brokered your piety. Throw that in the trash heap today, and pray with that Spirit that cries out, "Abba, Father!" - and know that you are entering into His work when you do.

Labels: prayer