From Sampler to Sower

I will admit: I love the Psalms.

OK, so maybe that isn’t so shocking of an admission.  It’s about as unexpected as a Miss America candidate announcing she is against poverty and for world peace.  But my love for the Psalms rises from deep inside of me.  I find them most helpful in guiding my prayer.  I love it when I open this centuries old document and find my voice in its pages, crying to God out of the depths.

One of my favorite moments in my devotions each week is when I open the Psalms to see what Psalm I will be living in for the next seven days.  Both of my favorite devotional guides, Job and Shawchucks A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants and Benson and Benson’s Disciplines for the Inner Life feature one Psalm per week.  It exciting to come each Monday morning and see what Psalm it will be this week, because it is always surprising to see the way God speaks into my life through that song.

Well, it usually is. (more…)

It’s been a bittersweet day today.

It’s Sunday, January 31 as I write this.  Unusual I know.  I don’t normally write on Sunday.  (Of course, I guess you could say lately, I don’t normally write.)

But I’ve got some time on my hands now.  I’m sitting in the food court at the mall while my son and a bunch of his friends watch To Save A Life with about 100 others from our church.  I went to the first showing with about 200 of my closest friends.  And as good as it was, I didn’t feel like sitting through a second round so soon.  So while he watches, I’m writing.

The movie is a big part of the sweetness of the day.  (I should probably be posting this in my “Why I Love My Church” series, but instead it’s here.)  We really felt like this movie was something God wanted to use to speak to our youth ministry and church.

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At the risk of sounding like a complete Tim Sanders fanboy, I want to send you to his blog Sanders Says again.

Earlier this month I linked to an outline of a talk he gave about what it takes to lead your business out of the recession and suggested there might be some important implications for those of us in ministry.  This week, he’s is at it again, expanding on his thoughts about what it takes to find yourself on the leading edge of the recovery.

You really need to head over to Sanders Says to read the whole post for yourself.

But I’d like to reflect on some of his points from the perspective of ministry here.  (more…)

OK, so maybe he’s not talking specifically about youth ministry, but I think there might be some applications we can draw.

Yesterday, Tim Sanders, author, speaker and former Chief Solutions Officer for Yahoo!, published a post on his blog entitled The Recovery is On!  In it he summarizes a speech he delivered recently to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s CEO Forum.  During that speech he gave advice to business leaders about how to lead their companies out of the recession, based on research on what made the difference between successful and average companies coming out of previous recessions.

Granted, it’s not your typical youth ministry blog fare, but I strongly suggest you head on over and check it out.

I couldn’t help but wonder what applications his advice has for churches in general and youth ministry in particular.

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(Recently, one of my students texted me a question that I couldn’t answer.  Not so much that I didn’t know what to say, but rather that every time I got ready to say something, I said to myself, “Yeah, but what about…”  After spending some time wrestling with it, here’s where I landed.  Below you’ll find my response, posted with the student’s permission.)

*****

You asked me “Is it possible to ‘do everything right’ according to the Bible, as far as living a Christlike life and be unhappy?”

I don’t know if you realize just how hard a question that is to answer, though if you manage to read all of this you might get a sense of it.

It’s difficult on two levels.  First it’s difficult because one has to wonder if it’s even possible to do everything right. Phrases like “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” “No one’s perfect,” and “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” come immediately to mind. Fortunately our acceptance in the eyes of God does not rest on perfect performance.

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The Shane I Remember

I spend five years teaching Shane.  He wasn’t part of our youth ministry when I first started.  Born in 1986, he was still to young in 1995 when I first began youth ministry at the Decatur Trinity Church of the Nazarene.  But when I left Decatur in 2002, he was a long time member of our youth group and one of the kids I could count on to be at every event.  By then, I could hardly imagine a youth ministry without Shane in it.

Now almost seven years later I find I’m going to have to start imagining a world without Shane in it.

It’s still not really clear what really happened, at least not to me.  Apparently on Friday night January 16, Shane (22) went to the hospital with some breathing problems.  By 7:30 the next morning this young man was dead.

And so last Friday I climbed in my car and headed back to Decatur, IL to attend his funeral.  This was a new experience for me.  I’ve been fortunate.  After 14 years in youth ministry, this is my first funeral for someone who was or is a part of my youth ministry.  I realize that many of my colleagues have had to face tragedies like this before.  But up until now, I had not.

And so, as I made the four hour drive back to Illinois, I did a lot of  thinking and, understandably, a lot of it about Shane.  I began to realize that while I had spent five years teaching Shane, Shane had been teaching me.  Here’s what I learned:

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I was back in my old stomping grounds in Illinois last weekend. And it was nice to be back.  I spent my first seven years of ministry in Decatur, in the very heart of Illinois.  Prior to that I spent three years at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais earning on my undergraduate degree in ministry.  Ten years creates some strong connections with a state.

Chicago's 50,000 Watt Blowtorch

During those years I fell in love with talk radio. It was before the age of iPods and podcasts.  It was before I discovered the beauty of audiobooks.  Talk radio was the easiest way to keep my mind engaged when doing otherwise mindless tasks.  Yes, I fell in love with talk radio.

I’m not talking about the bile and vitriol of nationally syndicated programs like Limbaugh, Colmes and Schlessinger (at least those were the big names back then).  I’m talking about local talk. Don Wade and Roma in the morning, Roe Conn and Garry Meier during the afternoon drive, and especially Jay Marvin’s late nights – the local lineup back in the day for Chicago’s “50,000 watt blowtorch” WLS 890 AM.

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich

During my recent return to the state I left seven years ago, I was thrilled to discover that WLS hasn’t gone the way of so much talk radio, trading local talk for the glitz, glamor and low production costs of syndicated blather.  (Or at least, not completely.  I did run into a rebroadcast of Sean Hannity’s show around 7 pm) and quickly fired the iPod back up.)  Roe Conn wasn’t on air that Friday but his spot was being filled by another local voice and even better, they then rebroadcast that morning’s 40-some minute Don Wade and Roma interview with embattled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich whose impeachment trial on corruption charges is slated to begin today.

Now, while I myself may be a bit of a political junkie, and I am known to twitter about politics from time to time, I don’t intend this to be a political blog.  I normally wouldn’t write about this interview here.  But one part of the interview in particular caught my attention.

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August Gottleib Spangenberg (1704-1792)

It started again yesterday.

About once a year I teach a course entitled “Exploring John Wesley’s Theology” for the Northeastern Indiana Church of the Nazarene’s School of Ministry.  And it’s that time of year.  My fifth session of that class started last night.

I’m not complaining.  I really enjoy the class, far more than the ethics class they made me teach last year.  And the students are great.

But as I worked my way back through the story of John Wesley’s early life something stood out to me.

Anyone who is familiar with Wesley’s biography understands that the young Wesley was constantly torn apart by fear and doubt, particularly about the status of his soul.

These feelings of despair only deepened when in late 1735 he left England to come to Georgia (the American colony) to serve as a missionary.  During their winter crossing of the Atlantic, about one week before their arrival in the colony, the  ship in which they traveled was caught in a severe storm – or at least it seemed severe to Wesley who appears to have had an incredible fear of the ocean up until that time.

When the storm struck, Wesley – who served as the ship’s chaplain – was worshipping with a group of Moravians, German Christians who were followers of the teachings of Ludwig von Zinzendorf.  In his journal, Wesley recounts what happened.

In the midst of the psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up.  A terrible screaming began among the English.  The Germans calmly sang on.  I asked one of them afterward, “Was you not afraid?’  He answered, “I thank God, no.”  I asked, “But were not your women and children afraid?”  He replied mildly, “No; our women and children are not afraid to die.”

But while even the Moravian children were not afraid of death, Wesley was.  And that fact troubled him given his doubts about his own salvation.

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The answer is 42.  But unlike Douglas Adams, I know not only the elusive answer, but also the question.  Are you ready?  The question is, “How many times, while laying on cold, wet concrete under an old, rusty bus blooding one’s knuckles on the cold, hard frame, will a youth pastor think to himself ‘This isn’t in my job description‘?”  And it didn’t even take me 10 million years to come up with the question.  Just three hours one slightly snowy November morning, lying underneath the aforementioned bus.

Why, you might wonder, was I under said bus?  I was attempting to remove the seats from the bus, so that one of our parishioners who owns a metal fabrication business can replace the rotting floor.  The bolts which held down the seats pass through the floor.  And the nuts which had to be held stationary while the bolts were loosened, were accessible only to someone lying underneath the bus — a job which unfortunately fell to me because my considerable girth is slightly less considerable than the guy helping me accomplish the task.  (In other words, while wide, I am not too wide to get under the bus.  But J-Dubs is.)

Every time my knuckles were scraped along the “rust proofing” (note the quotation marks, employed to denote just how rust-proof that rust proofing was) I found myself muttering under my breath something to the effect of  “They don’t pay me enough for this.”  Or “There’s a reason I didn’t go to school to become an automechanic.”  Or more often than not “This isn’t in my job description.”  It really isn’t.  If you don’t believe me, you can see for yourself here.)

I find myself thinking that a lot as a youth pastor.  Anyone who’s been in this position can tell you, there are a lot of things that I do that don’t fall into the neat categories laid out in my job description.  From cleaning the youth center, to fixing networking problems, to hanging out with K-Reb.  Oh wait, that last part is in my job description.  I just wish it wasn’t.  (Just kidding Caleb!)

There’s nothing that can poison one’s job satisfaction more than dwelling in the land of “It’s not my job.”  And while we cannot ever fully control the things we are asked or expected to do, we can control the way in which we respond to those things and the attitude we have while doing them.  I suppose it’s also true that we can control what we are expected to do by simply delegating all those things that we’d prefer to pass off to someone else (like, say, crawling around on cold, wet cement, underneath an old, rusty bus).

And while from a managerial viewpoint delegating would probably be the smart thing to do, I’m not sure that from a ministerial viewpoint that is always the case.  I’ll tell you why after the jump. (more…)