Some stuff I’ve enjoyed reading online recently…
Sum up your leadership in 6 words – blogs.harvardbusiness
What’s the best 1st question for worship leading/planning? - JD Walt
On the gap between curious vs. committed – Seth Godin
Give up on humility? – Copyblogger
The value of failing – blogs.harvardbusiness
Creativity under pressure – blogs.harvardbusiness
Nonprofits and learning – blogs.harvardbusiness
How a leader is like a mountain-climbing guide – John Maxwell
→ Leave a CommentCategories: blogging
Tagged: leadership, learning
So… I’m reading The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger for the first time right now. I really enjoy Salinger’s style; I can see how this book is so popular from that aspect alone. Early on (in ch 3), I ran into this quotation from the main character, one Holden Caufield, on how he evaluates the books he reads. It strikes me as an apt approach to Scripture and prayer as well.
What knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: culture · prayer
Tagged: good books, Holden Caufield, prayer, The Catcher in the Rye
I’ve been reading a good bit lately. Mostly some books on ministry skills, which is good. But it is important not to get too stuck in those.
So, I just in the past few days read Timothy Keller’s The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith. It is fantastic. He takes Jesus’ classic parable from Luke 15, which he reminds us ought to be called “the lost sons”, and helps us inhabit the text by interpreting both it and us well.
Both sons are lost, but only the younger knows he is. The older brother has been a faithful rule-keeper, but lacks love. In the words of Paul, he is a “resounding gong” and “clanging symbal” of a man. He does not know he is lost. Neither have chosen the true way of life, loving the Father for his own sake. Keller unpacks the parable, and with it the gospel, so wonderfully I felt engaged by the reconciliation of Christ once again.
On Tim Keller — If you don’t know who he is, he’s become more widely known in just the past couple of years. He’s had a couple of books published of which this is the second one. The first, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, is an apologetic work. I’ve got it, but haven’t read it yet. Keller is pastor of Redeember Presbyterian Church in NYC. Christianity Today recently ran a feature on him here.
Go ahead and pick up The Prodigal God… and read it sooner than later.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Luke · gospel
Tagged: The Prodigal God, Timothy Keller
How we say it is at least as important as what we say. I think that statement captures what Shane Hipps (former advertizing guy for Porche, current Mennonite pastor, and author of Flicking Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith), The Onion’s recent “story” (”Report: 90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles“), and an essay from last summer in The Atlantic that I originally linked here titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“
A new friend recently read Flickering Pixels and blogged some of the big points here, here, here, and here.
And here’s a short video of Rob Bell interviewing Shane Hipps at the National Pastor’s Convention.
For communicators of the gospel, this means that we need to work very hard at our preaching/teaching and invest what it takes to become very good. I think it is alright to utilize video, but we should exercise a lot of caution and be judicious in our frequency of use. Big, even oversized, props are better I think because of their ability to spur on imagination before, during, and after the message.
Another big take-away from all of this is: READ!
I’m glad I’ve become a reader as an adult (didn’t like it as much as a Jr High/HS student). Reading is better for our brains in lots of ways. One thing I’ve done to decrease my TV time (I still have a few shows I like) is not replace a show after the series finaly wraps it up.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: culture · gospel · spiritual formation
So, my friend Barb asks what I am reading this summer (while I’m not posting as often)…
Well, here’s some stuff that’s on my list. I hope I will read much of it this summer. I’m not a quick reader. I am pretty steady though, and I can go in spurts and read a good deal. I don’t know if that will be this summer or not; remains to be seen. However, I can share what I’m interested in reading this summer. I do think I’ll get to a fair share of these.
What I’m reading right now
What’s in my summer reading list pool – theology, history, fiction, self-reflection/improvement, etc.
Here are my recommendations for persons looking for good stuff to read this summer, one in each of three categories: ficiton, history, spirituality.
What’s on your summer reading list/pool of potentials?
What would you recommend to others?
→ 8 CommentsCategories: reading
I thought it appropriate to name the summer months as I know they will be — a slow season, for blogging here at least. I’ve got a few things I’m doing that will (have already) slow down posting. I’m working on a new blog/website idea, I’m trying to ramp up my reading (which I think will find its way into benefitting this blog in the fall), and I’ve already got a day job (and some nights… and some weekends…) as a pastor!
I will post here some over the summer, but I’ve decided to be intentional about a slower pace for the reasons above, and because a little summer rest will help me get ready for a more frequent posting schedule Sept-May here. If you’d like to keep up and haven’t already subscribed, go ahead and click one of the subscription options to the right. that way, you’ll know when I do post over Jun-Aug, and you’ll know when I’m ready to kick it back in full gear in the fall.
Have a great summer all! Thanks for reading — see you around here from time to time.
→ 1 CommentCategories: blogging
I’m thinking, in particular, about my area of the UMC, the South Central Jurisdiction. Last Wednesday, Bishop Mike Lowry of the Central Texas Conference led a room full of us from the Texas Conference in processing the “Episcopal Area Reduction” report. The General Conference (for non-United Methodists, the every-4-years meeting of clergy and lay persons that sets church law, among other things) voted to reduce the number of bishops in the US, thereby freeing up funds for other matters. We elect and appoint bishops regionally in jurisdictions, so each jurisdiction that is affected (most) must decide how to decrease the number of “episcopal areas,” or areas served by a single bishop.
So, we’re deliberating about how best to do this. I appreciated Bishop Lowry’s presentation of the data and the way that he framed it by exposing us to the idea that every conference may see changes to its boundaries as a result of decreasing the number of episcopal areas by one. It’s helpful to get people used to the idea early whether they like it or not, whether it affects them significantly or minorly. Surprises aren’t welcome, so good to put that potentiality on the table. He invited feedback as well (as did our bishop–Bishop Huie, who had facilitated the presentation and conversation in Bishop Lowry’s conference, Central Texas, not long ago).
One of the connections I made mentally was with the lead essay in the March 2009 Atlantic that I’ve blogged here earlier in the spring (yes, I know I still owe one or two posts to wrap it up, this should spur that on), “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” by Richard Florida.
Here are some of my thoughts, trying to bring Dr Florida’s essay into conversation with our process in the South Central Jurisdiction (SCJ). For reference, check out this pdf of the SCJ report, especially page 15, which has a color-coded projection for population trends in the next two decades.
Dr Florida’s essay is the first I’ve seen of analysis based on the potential impact of the recession and the collapses of the big companies back in the fall. Here’s the quick-and-dirty summary (online pages referenced):
The way this seems possible to impact our context in the South Central Jurisdiction relates to the projected population shifts by county slide in the Episcopal Area Reduction presentation. A quick look at that slide’s assessment of rate-of-growth seems to support some of Dr Florida’s projections. The mega-region trend and the shift from rust belt to sun belt were already known, but he relates those already existing trends to the relative ability to bounce back from the current crisis. The crisis, then, is interpreted as accelerating and entrenching those trends, as I read the essay.
The population shift slide generally shows population decline in the most rural areas and the most rapid increase in the already largest metro-centers. But the “mega-region” (named in the Atlantic essay) of Houston-San Antonio-Dallas/Metroplex (with Austin located within the triangle as a creative center), shows much stronger growth because each of those anchor cities show multiple adjacent counties with the highest growth projection, contra places like St. Louis, Kansas City, Fayetteville, El Paso, and Albuquerque. Only the Texas-Mexico border and some areas near New Orleans press against that observation, but those only moderately so. The other thing I notice is that the counties surrounding the Mississippi River are almost exclusively in decline or in the lowest growth-rate projection. This might suggest that areas of higher growth along the river (a plus in the older economy), like St. Louis and New Orleans may be looking at increased population but also at a challenging economic reality.
I’m not completely sure what I think of this idea, but it occurs to me that with contexts becoming increasingly different from one another demographically (socio-culturally, further emphasized by education-level homogenization—see this post’s quote from an April 2008 David Brooks column touching on population shifts according to education-level) and economically (urban growth in population and economy vs. rural stagnation and decline, mega-region increases in population and economic power vs. old-economy urban stagnation and challenges), some specialization in missional focus might be helpful. Would it make sense to create metro-center conferences and non-metro-area conferences? This would allow for bishops and cabinets (and clergy, of course) to concentrate the energy spent on the learning curves represented by myriad mission fields in their conferences toward a smaller number of contexts for ministry. Perhaps that would help the church better respond to the realities in each of those contexts. As for clergy development and deployment, perhaps the work of Marcus Buckingham, Gallup/Tom Rath, and others can help us best “fit” clergy, ministry role, and mission field context.
I would press back on this line of thought with the objection that it helps to have multiple types of contexts in order to help find the best “fit” for clergy’s gifts and passions, to help clergy discern their best context/s for service, and that clergy (or for that matter, bishops and cabinets) may appreciate serving different sorts of appointments over their career. These are important I think, but I wonder if there are other ways to address this than in the manner in which we’ve addressed them in our past and current model for drawing Annual Conference boundaries?
In some ways I like this way of thinking, in other ways I’m not yet convinced; either way, it seems to me that now is the time for ideas and divergent thinking. I trust the process will weed out the bad ideas and keep the best ones.
Thoughts?
→ 4 CommentsCategories: The Atlantic · United Methodist Church · mission
The first day of the Texas Annual Conference is in the books. Great times connecting with friends. I anticipate more of that too. It always refreshes me to spend time with some of my good pastor friends. Also, always good to bump into friends from churches I’ve served or been a part of, etc. You never know who you’ll sit down next to at a gathering like this.
As for business, we approved persons for the ordained ministry today and will actually ordain them in worship tomorrow night. The controversial stuff (UMC constitutional amendments) are tomorrow afternoon, so there is something of a hum of anticipation in the air. Folks sense it, and are curious about how it will turn out.
Dinner tonight with friends who’ve been out of the country in missions during the past 3 months and their stories is a good reminder of the power of God to reach people. We believe in the truth of Christ, in the truth of the Scripture, but it seems like most of us in the West have trouble really getting the raw power of the Spirit and the Word. Not so in other cultures.
That sort of relates to some thoughts upon reading the prologue to Nouwen’s classic In the Name of Jesus today. In it, Nouwen shares background info on his trip to DC to present the lectures that would eventually become the content for this book. He had spent a career (and a successful one at that) in the highest halls of academia: Notre Dame, Yale, Harvard. Then he received a call to become a priest for mentally handicapped people and their assistants in the L’Arche Daybreak community in Toronto. Convicted by Jesus’ sending the disciples out in pairs for ministry and not alone, Nouwen determined to take someone from Daybreak with him on the trip to DC. Upon consultation with persons in the community, a man with special needs with whom Nouwen shared a friendship was asked and accepted. Even though Nouwen had taught this friend–Bill–about his new vocation to proclaim the gospel of Jesus since he’d been baptized, Nouwen reflects, “while I was still thinking about Bill’s trip with me primarily as something that would be nice for him, Bill was, from the beginning, convinced that he was going to help me. I later came to realize that he knew better than I.”
Nouwen returns to this storyline after sharing the content of his reflections on Christian leadership in the body of the book. I’ll save any thoughts on it for later too. But for now I’ll simply acknowledge how much I participate in the thinking and speaking that we’ve gotten into concerning calling persons to consider ordained ministry, and help people discern their place in ministry (whether “representative ministry”–ordained, or “general ministry”–laity). Because we are looking for excellent leadership, we frequently use language like “gifted,” “best and brightest”, etc. There is certainly a need to recover a persistent culture of calling for persons with exceptional giftedness in talents and skills and intellect. But if the biblical story is more about God than about us (and it is), then we must acknowledge God’s habit of picking unusual, unexpected persons for powerful ministry while the “best and brightest” and “gifted” are wrapped up in supporting the status quo.
We too quickly make proclamation of texts in which we find Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Peter, Paul, John, etc. about them. Too often in our preaching, we preach the persons God calls and uses rather than preaching God himself. Yet Scripture itself is more consistent in witnessing to the power of God to save, to deliver, to heal, to conquer in spite of the person called or to work through them in spite of the past data of their lives that would certainly fail to recommend them for such a ministry as they have.
The point is that we try to control and predict while God is busy releasing and surprising. We struggle to hear, much less obey, the palpable power of the Holy Spirit.
Can we make it a point to include the “gifted” and “best and brightest” types in our calling people into ordained ministry without succumbing to human understandings of giftedness and without artificially stratifying “prospects” for ordained ministry into “best and brightest” and some who fall below that mark? Are we really open to the surprising power of God to use the “foolish” to shame the “wise”?
→ 1 CommentCategories: Henri Nouwen · Holy Spirit · In the Name of Jesus · United Methodist Church
An update on this Memorial Day weekend…
As many (all?) of you know, I’m a United Methodist pastor, which means round about now ’tis the season for Annual Conference, an yearly gathering (get it, annual… conference…) of clergy and lay persons in our area (for me, East Texas, Brazos Valley, and Houston region). We’ll check in on one another, take some votes, ordain some people, hook up pastors with churches and churches with pastors… all-in-all a pretty raucous occasion! Seriously, it is a good time and an important time as we, at our best, aim to hold ourselves accountable in love to doing ministry well.
I’ll continue what’s become an annual practice of reading Henri Nouwen’s short classic, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership. If you’ve never read it, I urge you to buy it and read it immediately. Then reread it regularly. If you haven’t read it in over a year, let me urge you to pick it back up and give it a fresh reading. I’m all about plenty of leadership books and whatnot. I love Jim Collins, Lovett Weems, Andy Stanley… the whole lot of them. I enjoy learning from business, non-profit, and church leadership guru types. But reading this little text from Nouwen each year during a gathering of leaders from across my region of United Methodism, aiming to “do the work of the church,” has been a remarkably grounding experience. With the controversial constitutional amendments this year, I expect to be wonderfully convicted by brother Nouwen again.
I’m looking forward to meeting and hearing from the new president, Dr Timothy Tennent, of my seminary, Asbury Theological Seminary, on Tuesday night at the Friends of Asbury Seminary dinner.
On a non-conference note, I’m now reading A Blueprint for Discipleship, by Kevin Watson, and really enjoying it. I’ll blog it sometime in the next week or so. So far, it is a wonderfully accessible primer on Wesley’s model of ministry for disciple-making. Like Wesley, it is most of all practical, placing biblical and theological foundations as close to living discipleship as they are actually meant to be. More on it in coming days.
I’m also blogging about Annual Conference each day for the conference. I’m so behind technologically (my only “notebook” is my Moleskine journal), I’ll have to post a few thoughts each night and some reflections at the end. Still, fun and interesting.
Finally, I’m preparing to preach this Sunday at my church. It it Pentecost Sunday and Confirmation Sunday for us. We will be receiving professions of faith in Christ and vows of church membership from young people who have spent the better part of the school year learning about the Christian faith and who are now ready to confess their sins, need for Christ, faith in him, and commitment to his church. Pretty thrilling stuff. I’m going with John 20:19-23, which I take to be John’s version of Pentecost. Whether or not you agree with that reading of John here, the focus will be on Jesus’ words and gift to the disciples in vv21-22, which express as much as any text a pentecostal commission and gifting for the church as followers of Jesus:
Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
→ 1 CommentCategories: Henri Nouwen · Holy Spirit · In the Name of Jesus · United Methodist Church · spiritual formation
Pastors and program staff members were on retreat the past two days—planning, assessing, having some strategic conversations. My Sr. Pastor opened our time together with a poem from Macrina Wiederkehr (from her collection, Seasons of Your Heart) titled “Tourist or Pilgrim”. It’s a reflection about finding one’s way to their true heart, their deep truth, their soul—whatever you want to call it. The images present a questing person who finds themself forever a tourist, but longing for home. The reality of journey cannot be avoided, however, and the truthful, life-giving, home-leading posture is to embrace a pilgrim experience. This is the way to the “holy ground of home” (italics original). A tourist is forever away from home but not necessarily on the way there. A pilgrim is traversing a foreign place at present, but is on a path that leads someplace. According to the poem, that place is home.
Of many lines that spoke to me, the one that resonated most deeply with me was one that repeated twice. Here’s the version that is at the close of the poem:
Do you want to go home?
There’s a road that runs
straight through your heart.
Walk on it.
This is the deep truth of calling, purpose, significance. This is the quest ever with me.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: calling · poetry
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