From Sampler to Sower

“Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man.” (Nehemiah 1:11b, NIV)

As you’re probably aware, the Book of Nehemiah opens with a surprising revelation for Nehemiah.  Despite the return led by Zerubbabel and the decrees of Cyrus and Darius, the Jerusalem remains a city disgraced.  It’s wall lies in ruins, and it’s precincts are exposed and defenseless.

And as you’re probably also aware, when Nehemiah hears a report of this situation from his brother Hanani, his first response is one of prayer.  It’s a natural response for a man of faith, nothing surprising here.

But what is surprising is how, exactly, Nehemiah prays:

LORD, the God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s family, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses.

Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations,  but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.’

They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand. Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man. (Nehemiah 1:5-11, NIV)

Notice what Nehemiah says.

And notice what he doesn’t.

Nehemiah receives devastating news, yet when he prays, he’s far more interested in whom he prays to than what he is praying about.  His focus, first and foremost, is on God and his promises.  His problems aren’t even mentioned until the very last sentence of his prayer.

And when he finally does mention them, notice what he says: “Grant me favor in the presence of this man.”  You do remember who “this man” is, right?  This man is none other than Artaxerxes, self proclaimed king of kings, emperor of all Persia, hailed by his people as the god of heaven, the one who, at least according to his name, is the one true ruler.  He is the one who has the power to issue the incontrovertible decree.  He is the one who holds Nehemiah’s very life in his hands, who, with a word, can order him struck down for having the insolence to suggest he change his mind regarding Jerusalem.

Or at least, that’s how it looks to those who see with eyes of flesh.

Nehemiah, however, knows better.

YHWH, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and who through Nehemiah’s own name promises comfort, YHWH is the God of Heaven and Earth.  Despite claims to the contrary, YHWH is the King of Kings, and he alone holds life and death in his hands. No decree of man is ever incontrovertible when YHWH is involved.

And so in comparison to the greatness of his God, Nehemiah’s king is nothing but this man.

When Nehemiah prays, he keeps things in perspective.

How about you?

Is your focus on His power or your problems?

Just was asked to approve the most extensive attempt at comment spam I’ve ever seen over on our church’s website.  I add it here for your reading enjoyment:

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What was the life-changing, career-saving information?  An announcement that a month ago we were going to have a sermon on the subject of Baptism at our church…

I never knew that my now-past preaching schedule had such far reaching effects.

The future God has planned for you is far better than any you could ever imagine for yourself.

In 15 and a half years of youth ministry, I’ve told my teens this truth countless times.  It is the thesis statement of my ministry, the one thing I hope they will take away from our time together.

Today, I’m being reminded of that truth myself.

Moments ago I tendered my resignation to the board of the Middletown Church of the Nazarene, my family’s church home for the last eight years. And while there was a little sadness in doing that, there was far more excitement, both for myself, and for our church.

It was exciting for me because, on Sunday, I accepted the call to pastor the Anderson Southdale Church of the Nazarene.  I am excited about the opportunity to lead these people of God in service to their community and world as together we share the good news about Jesus Christ.  I am excited about being able to continue to work closely with my friends and colleagues at the Middletown Church and the others on our zone so together our churches, as part of His Church, can take hold of God’s Kingdom and move it powerfully forward. I am excited because it is always exciting to follow faithfully after the call of God.

And I am excited for the Middletown Church.  Something that has come up frequently in the conversations between my Pastor and I as we moved toward this transition is that if it is God’s will for me to serve the people of Southdale, it’s also God’s will for the Middletown Church to make a transition as well.  His plans are perfect, and His plan for me doesn’t in any way jeopardize His plans for the church.

I can’t tell you how many times in my ministry I have come back to John 14:12. In it Jesus tells his disciples (who were themselves facing a significant transition):

Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.

When following God, the future is always brighter. Jesus repeatedly promises “greater things than these” to his people who do his work.  And despite how great these years in Middletown have been, there are greater things than these in store for me.  And there are greater things than these in store for the great people of the Middletown Church.

So to my friends and family who are the Middletown Church of the Nazarene, I want to say thank you.  Thank you for what has been 3213 of the best days of my life so far. Thank you for the opportunity and honor of being able to serve alongside you for these years.  Thank you for the love, encouragement and support you have given us and our ministry. Thank you for letting us become a part of your lives, and thank you for continuing to make room for us even after this transition.  We love you.

And to the people of both the Middletown and Southdale congregations, I can’t wait to see what God has in store for us in the future, because His future is always better.

Monday I shared a survey I prepared to help me get a grasp on how well my teens understood some of the most basic tenets of Christianity.

Yesterday we started looking at the five questions in which student’s responses diverged the most from my own.

Today I’d like to continue looking the results from our beliefs survey, continuing to move from the questions where student opinion diverged the most, to those in which they were most aligned with my own.

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Note: If you’re from MCON and have any interest in taking the survey yourself, please don’t read any farther until after you take the survey to avoid skewing your responses.

Yesterday I shared the Basic Beliefs survey that I asked students in our youth ministry to complete in order to investigate their understanding of some central tenets of Christianity.  The purpose was one part evaluative (has anything I’ve taught stuck?) and three parts prescriptive (going forward, what topics need special attention?).

Today I’d like to start looking at some of the results.

Methodological Concerns

Before diving into particular questions I would like to offer a couple of caveats.  First and foremost, let’s face it, taking tests isn’t most students’ idea of a fun night at youth group. Couple a students distaste for testing with the total lack of consequences for carelessness in taking this survey, and one must wonder “Did my students think through any of these questions carefully enough to answer what they really believe?”

Complicating that issue is the fact that in the interest of brevity, this survey lacks the kind of redundancy necessary to evaluate just how indicative of true beliefs the responses really are. I didn’t have time to ask each question three different ways so that I could compare how consistent any given respondent’s answers were.

And compounding all those concerns is the fact that I am by no means a trained pollster. I tried to be careful to make sure my responses did not reflect a bias one way or another, but the question remains just how effectively I accomplished that goal.

So, keeping in mind those weaknesses to this survey, let’s look at the results…

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Not long ago I was sitting in a sermon-slash-lecture presented by a local educator to a group of pastors from our community.  He was arguing that private Christian education is vitally important not only to the intellectual, but also to the spiritual development of our students. He mentioned some beliefs central to the Christian faith and cited research that showed such seemingly basic beliefs are no longer widely held among American youth.

And that got me thinking…

Just how well do my students understand the basic tenets of Christianity?

And so the survey was born.

Last Wednesday night I asked the students at our midweek service to take our Basic Beliefs survey.  I explained up front that this wasn’t a test.  Unlike tests, this obviously wasn’t for a grade.  And unlike tests, it wasn’t as if every question only had one right answer. That’s not to suggest there are no wrong answers on the survey, but in cases where there were more than one answer that could be correct, they were to choose the answer that best matched their understanding. The point was to help me understand how they viewed various aspects of theology, not to see if they could find the one right answer.

20 questions total. 16 drawn from topics covered by the Articles of Faith and the Agreed Statement of Belief for the Church of the Nazarene. (Incidentally, this school year I taught on each and every one of these subjects at Water’s Edge. So for those who have been a part of our program throughout the school year, these should be familiar subjects.) Four are demographic, dealing with age group, length of time involved in Water’s Edge, frequency of attendance, and the involvement in other religious activities at the church.

Today I’ll share the survey with you. Tomorrow we’ll begin looking at some of the results from my group, Wednesday we’ll wrap up the review of the results, and Thursday we’ll see if there’s anything we can learn from all this.

You can download a pdf version of the survey here, or check out the questions and answers after the jump.

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You may have noticed I suddenly went from a post every week day to a week and a half of nothing.  It was family vacation time.  Our oldest son is in eighth grade, so the Buhro academy took an extended field trip to Niagara Falls and Washington, DC.  I tried to work ahead a cue some posts for while I was gone, but there simply wasn’t enough time, so you got nothing. But we’re back, and I’m ready and eager to start writing again.  In case you’re interested, here’s a video of the photos from our trip.  Individual photos can be viewed on Flickr.  The video itself was made with Animoto, and I continue to strongly recommend it for those in ministry. It’s a great way to showcase photos from your church.

Two weeks ago I wrote about a new way we were seeking to help our students learn to pray. We’re encouraging students to learn to pray in much the same way they learned to speak, not by talking about prayer, but simply by praying.  We’ve passed out daily prayer cards which have a simple question or instruction for each day, designed to help them open up a conversation with God.

Here is the second set of 16 prayer cards: one daily prayer card and one weekly memory verse card for two weeks.

You know the feeling. Perhaps you just watched a coworker get all the credit for a project you worked together on. Perhaps the friend who always comes to you for help when finances are tight just went on an elaborate vacation while your financial situation kept you at home. Someone else just landed what you’ve been dreaming of, be it the dream job, the new home, the opportunity of a lifetime.  Whatever it is, you wanted it, they got it, and you’re left dealing with the disappointment and resentment that what you wanted just passed you by.

Welcome to envy.

So far in our series The Seven Deadly Sins of Youth Ministry we’ve looked at the ways gluttony and wrath can get in the way of our ministry.  By way of review, the traditional list of seven capital vices includes:

• superbia (pride)
• avaritia (greed)
• luxuria (lust)
• invidia (envy)
• gula (gluttony)
• ira (wrath)
• acedia (sloth?)

Today we’ll tackle invidia, also known as envy.
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I (along with I suspect a healthy number of fellow Christians thanks to some brilliant pre-release publicity from John Piper) recently read Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins.  Unlike some other prognosticators, who apparently understand Bell’s reasoning so well they can respond to it before it’s even published, I’ve decided to take some time to think, read, pray, eat and love before chiming in.

Having spent a decent amount of time the last two weeks doing those very things (especially eating…) I think I’m going to start here.

It’s probably an understatement to say that much of what Bell suggests run counter to the faith as it was handed down to me. While Bell isn’t the first to suggest things like the possibility of post-mortem repentance and the idea that maybe, just maybe, God is good enough to save all humanity through faith in Christ (not by at least 17 centuries), suffice it to say there haven’t been many voices in my ecclesial neck of the woods advocating such views.

And that’s what makes Bell’s book such a good thing.

Let me explain.
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