Emerging Pastor

I'm currently working feverously to complete my four assignment on biblical ethics. As I'm completing the reference list for my major assignment about the doctrine of Just War (which I'll post soon) I realize that two of my primary sources are Osama Bin Laden and the CIA.

Never did I expect theological training would take me there :)

I've reached way back into the archives, May 2002, almost before the interwebs were born in a cosmic collision between a rouge datacenter and the sun to bring you this article on the book of Romans.

It explores the reasons for Paul writing the letter as well as Paul's gospel. It was the first article I ever wrote so be nice :)

I want to spend a little time talking about a practical problem with all those involved in ministry (although it can be applied to anyone). This is the power of triangulation.

 

It’s important for a pastor to be aware of triangulation because of the impact it can have on their relationship with the congregation, it’s also pretty important that the pastors wife gets to understand it as well because people will certainly try to put her in one.

 

Basically, triangulation is when someone tries to influence the relationship of two other parties be it two people or a person and an object.

 

Triangles are formed when any two parts of the system become uncomfortable with the third.

 

Try this on for size. A wife has an alcoholic husband and after years of worry she decides to do something about it, she tips all his alcohol out! When she does this, she is trying to affect the relationship between the husband and alcohol as seen in this nifty diagram.

 

 

 

Like stop signs and reindeers, red means bad!!!

 

You could change the labels to read something like Pastor, Pastors wife and congregant. Does this sound familiar, a congregant doesn’t like something the pastor has done so they tell the wife in order to make a change.

 

In both of these situations all that’s going to happen is somebody will get hurt.

 

So what do we do with all of this? Learn that you can only change the part of the relationship that you are apart of.

 

In our pretty picture, the wife is not in the relationship between the husband and alcohol but she is in a relationship with the husband. If she wants to affect the alcoholism she needs to strengthen the relationship with her husband. Or she can strengthen her relationship with the alcohol by joining a spouse support group and understanding more about alcoholism.

 

There is a difference between triangulation and mediation. If Y comes to you saying that X owes him money, don’t go to X but offer to go with Y to X. This is empowering Y to confront X. Don’t go to X on Y’s behalf!

 

Remember, if you try to change the other two parts of the triangle you will not only be ineffective, but will end up with the stress of the conflict.

It’s hard to even know were to begin with this post! Thursday night I arrived home, said a quick hello and goodbye to my wife then I was whisked away to a conference centre past Kurrajong, I’m still not exactly sure where! (Not that it was a secret; I’m just bad with directions).

 

You leave your watch, phone and blackberry at the door and just allow yourself to be immersed in an environment that is full to the brim with God’s love.

 

The Walk to Emmaus is a ridged program but I didn’t have a problem with that. By ridged I probably mean structured, it uses a time proven template to lead you deeper into God’s arms and deeper into a knowledge of his grace.

 

One person articulated that on his first walk he soon had the program figured it out, the program is there to break you, and he’s right. Have you ever seen one of those war movies like “Band of Brothers” or “Full Metal Jacket”? The latter particularly shows how the U.S. Marine corps has designed their regimen to crack every single recruit and then rebuild them in their image.

 

Emmaus is sort of like the Marine Corps, only much better and with a lot more food! (I think I have gone off lollies). The talks and times of Spiritual devotion are all designed to break the crusty shell of self hate, sin, pride, false conviction, whatever is in the way of us and God, and allow God to minister directly to our spirit.

 

This breaking is done in an atmosphere far from the Marine Corps, it is done with the lavishing of God’s love on the participants. From the table leaders, the Spiritual and Lay directors to those who faithfully wait on you during your meal times, so when you do find yourself broken before God (as I did) you are not cold and alone but surrounded by examples of His grace.

 

All in all, it was an intensely personal experience that left me confronted, sometimes in a state of shock (in awe of God’s love shown through others) but most of all, closer to God. May I remain broken in his presence.

 

De colores!

If your reading this, pre-post thingy is working properly and I am on the walk to Emmaus.

I'm not quite sure what to expect on the walk except for a lot of teaching and a lot of being loved on. My wife tells me that the people running the walk are there to serve you and minister to you and I guess that's going to be quite a change for me. I'm used to doing the ministering.

So pray for me that I'll be encouraged, renewed and walking stronger with God when I get home.

Also on the train this morning this song really stuck out for me so I'm adding it to God's iPod. It's called Burn Away by the Foo Fighers. I really like if for the chorus more than anything which is something like a prayer I often pray. When I get too caught up in my brilliance God reminds me that "pride comes before the fall" (it's in the bible somewhere, I can't remember where exactly). And so I pray, keep me humble, or as the song puts it, burn away my pride! Here's the full lyrics, enjoy. I have spent a lifetime Waiting for the chance To save you my confession Save the one last dance

On the train this morning I was finishing off one of my ethics assignments, this one is about the validity of cohabitation as a pathway to marriage.

It's a very difficult question to answer because of the crossover between sacred and secular views of marriage. The Catholic church insist that marriage has to be performed by a member of the clergy in from to at least two witnesses (the council of Trent) while Martin Luther said that marriage is a secular issue and the church should just stay out of it.

The underlying question for me is how much say can the church have in a secular society. We can not be legislators of all morality (mostly because we abdicated the moral high ground long ago) but at the same time we can be a positive influence on our society guiding them towards a Godly way of living.

After all the foundation of our societies laws are based in Judeo-Christian thought and no one argues that "don't kill" and "don't steal", while going somewhat against our nature are beneficial to society.

That's not the path I went down in my assignment though, I think once people cohabitate they have entered into marriage with each other. Australian law at least recognizes that after a certain amount of time living together you are in a de facto marriage. What we can add to society and people who are considering cohabitating is give them access to pre-marital counseling! And encourage them to make a public commitment of their relationship to their friends and family so they can feel invited to support their relationship together.

When Sally and I were married we could have eloped, had the minimum witnesses and excluded our friends, but by inviting everyone to our wedding ceremony we were saying, join with us on this journey and I think that is something that the cohabitating couples I know are missing out on, the society of friends and family invited to help strengthen a relationship.

This weekend past my wife and I (along with a whole lot of others from my church) attended my denominations state conference. This is the second year I've been and the second year I have walked away refreshed and energized with new ideas for ministry.

The conference typically grabs a ring in from the U.S. to deliver a series of messages and this year it was Dr Peter Steinke, a fairly unimpressive man to look at but one who has a real heart to see churches moving past conflict and into new life.

I want to share a few of the thoughts and ideas he shared with us because they really can impact your ministry.

Peter set the scene for the church and it's ministry as being something like the state of the Jewish nation in exile to Babylon. As the influence of the church declines (I guess I mean politically and socially) we are increasingly finding ourselves as strangers in a strange land. We are living in a land of believers not belongers and the challenge for us today is to communicate our story, the Christian meta-narrative, to this world that holds us in exile.

Barak Obama recently caught flack for saying that some people in the U.S. were bitter and as a result, cling to guns and religion. As ineloquent as his words are, he is fundamentally right. When people do not embrace change they turn to the tried and true. If the church fails to embrace the enormous change of the world around us we will sink into fundamentalism so fast your head will spin.

That's enough for one post, I'll keep going tomorrow.

I guess what we can take out of this is this is not the world of our parents, it has fundamentally changed and if we do not change along with it we will become fundamentalist in our thinking. And that's no way to remove ourselves from exile.

In my travels around the interwebs I found this cool blog post with a list of biblical Greek terms. Like the author I thought there are some potentially great ministry names in there. I had to give Greek a miss this year although I am busting to learn it properly, there is just too much else going on to add "learn a new language" to the list.

My favorites from the site are probably:

• Ta Tou Theou -  the things of God
• En Kairo Therismou - in time of harvest
• Mathetas Autou - his disciples

Take a look for yourself... http://sphodra.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/whats-in-a-name/

The milestone has been reached and if I didn't have 5000 other things to do, I would sink quickly into a pit of exaustion.

I am of course refering to the church wide bible study, this is the biggest project I have ever undertaken by myself and it has certainly gone off well. At last count I'm at around 80% attendance which conventional wisdom seems to suggest is about the best you can aim for with small groups.

Our preaching pastor Lionel kicked it off with a bang, he absolutely nailed the sermon which gave people an introduction to thinking different about the beatitudes. Best of all it challenged me, one of the people so involved with all of the study material. We are polishing up the podcast at the moment so I'll keep you posted when it's available.

I was disapointed in myself with one thing though, I forgot to bring the video camera. I was planning to produce a DVD series and package it up for newcommers so they can get a feel for who we are and what we believe but it looks like audio only is the way to go.

It seems that Luther had quite a bee in his bonnet (if he wore a bonnet) about Christians living a Christ-centered life. The first three of his theses all focused on repentance and how it should effect our lives both inside and out.

The Catholic church (at the time as well as now) placed a heavy focus something called penance, it is a theological error stemming from a mistranslation of repentance which kind of stuck, as well as an incorrect belief that the Grace of God is not sufficient to bring us back into relationship with God. At its core, penance means that we have to do something apart from being repentant to get right with God.

Luther calls us to move past this faulty thinking and embrace the heart of Jesus' mission, message and life. We embrace it by cutting through the rubbish and living lives that are repentant. That means being in constant examination of our actions and motives and when we don't act in a way God would like, saying sorry to Him and show a change in attitude that really reflects that we are sorry.

Luthers (translated) words were:

   1. When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said "Repent", He called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

   2. The word cannot be properly understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, i.e. confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.

   3. Yet its meaning is not restricted to repentance in one's heart; for such repentance is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh.

These we may effectively paraphrase into:

   1. One's whole life should reflect repentance and a heart for the kingdom of God.

   2. The life of the kingdom cannot be administered by clergy, it's up to the individual.

   3. This inner change of heart must have an outward expression also.

The evidence of repentance, indeed the evidence of a Christian life is one that inside and out is loving God by their thoughts and actions. Being constantly on our guard examining our motives and actions isn't really as onerous as it sounds, when you practise a life of repentance you start to become more in-tune with how God want's you to live and it starts to become your default response in situations. In other words, the more you think like Jesus, you become more like Jesus.

Up till now I've been very careful not to speak to much about the emerging / emergent church. It is a deliberate act because while the site has the word emerging in the title it is not about either of these movements, it is about my ministry journey.

I have read quite a lot about the emerging church and love books by Brian McLaren and Mark Driscol. I certainly don't agree with everything they say but there is an important dialogue going on about what is church and it's a dialogue I want to be involved in.

Part of the emerging church movement is to take the post modern deconstructionist approach to doctrine and exegete it in light of how it’s historical context.

Quite apart from my theological studies I was challenged to read through Luther’s 95 theses and I was surprised to discover that this ye olde reformer was really a deconstructionist himself. The reforming and emerging concepts are close enough to call the same. It is the idea of growing closer to God through understanding and living in a right relationship with Him.

Being a devoted Protestant I've never actually read through all of Luthers 95 theses' and I'm betting that you haven't either, so I’m going to post a few every week until we get through them and allow you to offer commentary along with me.

I may paraphrase some of the theses' into more modern terminology but you can read something fairly authentic over at spurgen. Unless you can read German, your not going to get the original.

Some exciting news!!!

My grandmother, who has been coming to our church for a little over a year now has, after doing a Christianity Explained course, given her life to Jesus!!!

I am going to be baptising her next month! If then, she is born-again, that means I will be older than her :P