StretchyChurch

Another FYI…

I just added some pictures to the About Me page.

FYI…

I just updated my About Me page to include a list of “Great books I recently read” as well as what “I’m currently reading.”

Check it out here.

It’s hard to believe, but today was my last day at Union Presbyterian Church.

It’s been a good three and (almost) a half years. In my time at Union, I’ve grown as a pastor. As a leader. As a preacher. And as a servant of God.

I’ve learned to trust God through difficult times. To relax and enjoy the good times. And to push through the challenging times.

This has been a place for me to meet new people. New friends. New colleagues. New mentors.

Though Union is 2000 miles from what we think of as home (Southern California), I’ve never doubted that this was the place to which God called us. This is where God wanted us to be during this season of our life. And God has used this place to shape me and sharpen me.

And now it’s time to go on to the next thing.

In two months, I’ll become the pastor of Northminster Presbyterian Church in San Diego. Robin and I are happy to be going back to Southern California. Close to friends. Close to family. Close to the beach!

I’m excited about where God is leading us next. I’m excited to be a part of what God is doing at Northminster and in San Diego.

I just want to go where God goes. So far, I’ve only experienced the beginning of that journey. The next stage of the journey starts … now.

Today I found out that Clark Cowden is going to be the new Executive Presbyter for San Diego Presbytery. Clark is currently the Evangelist Presbyter for San Joaquin Presbytery and will be starting in San Diego in the fall. Here’s why this is kinda cool…

Last fall, I had an e-mail conversation with Clark about the possibility of planting a church in Fresno, CA. That didn’t end up happening due to lack of funds in the San Joaquin Presbytery.

With that in mind, let me share with you what I know about Clark Cowden:

1) He seems like a nice guy in his e-mails.
2) He wrote one of the blurbs on the back of The Missional Leader, which I’ve been referring to a lot lately.
3) He’s younger than I imagined.
4) He seems pretty focused on helping the church become missional.

Anyway, not knowing a whole lot about Clark, I did a Google search and found this article that he wrote in May for the PGF Outbox (PGF = Presbyterian Global Fellowship).

In a nutshell, he compares the church with an airport terminal. An airport terminal is not designed to be anyone’s final destination. Likewise, the church should never be a person’s final destination–people should always be moving through the church and out into ministry. Unfortunately, the church is always counting how many people show up inside our walls. It would be silly if an airport terminal prided itself on how many people came and stayed at the terminal!

Anyway, a neat metaphor for the missional church. Read his article here.

(By the way, Russell Smith, a friend of mine here in Cincinnati, also writes for the PGF Outbox. He’s got some good stuff on there, too, if you’re interested…)

I read an entire book yesterday! Granted, it was only 67 pages long, but I’m still pretty proud of myself!

Let’s see… the last time I read an entire book in one day was in 3rd or 4th grade and the book was Henry and Ribsy by Beverly Cleary. Anyone remember Henry Huggins? One of my favorites as a kid….

Anyway, the book I read yesterday was The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan Roxburgh. Terrific little book!

I just wanted to share one of the best insights this book gave me. Here it is:

The church has not been marginalized!

But that’s our mindset in the church. We act as though we were once in the center of the culture, but have now been relegated to the margins of our culture. We’re on the outside.

Part of our understanding is true–we were once in the center. It was a time called Christendom and it lasted from the time of Constantine (when he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire) until a couple hundred years ago.

We think that since we’re no longer at the center of culture, we must be at the margins of culture. And we think that we have to find a way back to the center of culture.

That’s where we go wrong. The religious right thinks that by getting the right laws passed, we can return to the center. The seeker-sensitive movement thinks that by being cool, we can return to the center. The traditionalists think that by upgrading the organ, we can return to the center. The liberals think that if we can get the culture to see how open we are, we can return to the center.

The problem is that there is no longer a center to return to. Here’s how Roxburgh puts it:

Put in the language of postmodernity, there are no longer any grand theories of the whole; metanarratives have been uncovered as collections of context, value-bound positions. There is no longer a consensus about meaning and purpose, values and directions. Without this there can be no center.

So, you see, it’s not that we’ve been pushed to the margins, it’s that there is no longer a center. There are so many perspectives, world-views, spiritualities, that Christianity has simply become one world-view among many.

The challenge for the church, then, is not to try to get back to the center of culture–which, simply put, is impossible–but to figure out how to be the church in a world without a center. This will be hard, but I believe that if we follow the Holy Spirit, we’ll get there.

Let’s say there are basically two kinds of evangelism: effective and ineffective. Some evangelism really helps people discover God and enter into a relationship with Jesus. Some evangelism doesn’t really do anything–and sometimes even hurts people.

Effective evangelism cares about the other person. Effective evangelism listens to the other person’s story. Effective evangelism knows when to stop, or at least slow down, so as not to push the other person further away.

Ineffective evangelism, on the other hand, doesn’t really care about the other person. Ineffective evangelism doesn’t listen to the other person’s story. Ineffective evangelism doesn’t know when to stop, and usually ends up pushing the other person further away from Christ.

So here are a couple videos I found.

The first video is an example of effective evangelism. Some would say it’s not really evangelism; it’s an interview. I’m not so sure….

Jim Henderson is a pastor and author whose passion is to help Christians better listen to those who are “lost”–to help Christians better understand the mindset of non-Christians. Last year I read his book, A.K.A. Lost (retitled Evangelism Without Additives), and heard him speak at the Revolution Conference (you can read about that here, here, here, and here).

The second video is an example of ineffective evangelism. Notice how no one stays to listen. Notice that the evangelist doesn’t seem to care. Does it matter to him that no one stays to hear his message? And notice that the final text at the end of the video is focused on the how good the evangelist is, not on the needs of those who need to hear the message.

Here are those videos:

3 Minutes with 3 Lost People (Effective)

Patrick Preaches to Lost People in Manchester, England (Ineffective)

(By the way, I just saw the end of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence on TV. Man, what totally depressing movie. I think it’s a good movie, but soooo depressing…)

Hey, sorry about being offline for four days (or was it five?). StretchyChurch is hosted on one of my brother’s servers and he told me that the server was “brute force attacked.” You’d think that meant that a couple of guys started smashing the server with baseball bats.

But, no.

The simple explanation (if the wikipedia entry doesn’t make sense) is that someone was trying to hack the server by bombarding it with data. The server couldn’t handle it, so it crashed.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back online and will hopefully have some new stuff posted in the next day or so.

Every now and then, Ed McNulty (who publishes a film review journal for ministry leaders called Visual Parables) will ask me to review a movie for him. I used to review a lot more than I do now, but having a baby kinda changes things. In fact, it’s been about a year since my last movie review.

Just thought I’d share my review of Transformers with you. I’ve also included two videos: 1) a video of the old Transformers cartoon that I used to watch every day after school (Ah, the good ol’ days…), and 2) another Transformers video that’s just really cool–you gotta check that one out!

Anyway, here’s the review…

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If the theme of Transformers, directed by Michael Bay, were to be distilled into a single statement, it would be this: There is “more than meets the eye” to the human race. The pun throughout the film, of course, is the fact that this quote comes directly from the old Transformers theme song—“Transformers, more than meets the eye…. Transformers, robots in disguise!”

Unfortunately, this theme is communicated only a couple of times in a few lines of dialogue. Other than that, the movie is little more than giant robots smashing each other.

Don’t get me wrong. As a 34-year-old white male—and having spent countless hours playing with Transformers as a Jr. Higher in the mid-80’s—I’m more than happy to watch Optimus Prime and Megatron duke it out in the streets of downtown Los Angeles! In that sense, the movie definitely delivers!

But in terms of depth—well, there really isn’t any. And the few attempts at thematic substance only sound hokey and preachy. I’m talking about such lines as Optimus Prime referring to humans as a “young race” that has a lot of potential. Or the exchange in which Megatron says that humans deserve to die and Optimus Prime says that humans deserve the choice whether or not to die. It was during those scenes that I found myself thinking, “Less talking; more smashing, please.”

In a nutshell, the film is about a young man named Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) who buys a car that turns out to be an Autobot. He and Mikaela (Megan Fox), his high school crush, are then thrown into the middle of the war between the benevolent Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, and the evil Decepticons, led by the brutal and power-hungry Megatron.

In the end, the good guys win, of course, with just enough open-endedness to leave room for Transformers 2.

The cast also includes Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson as soldiers who survive a Decepticon attack while stationed in Qatar, Jon Voight as the U.S. Secretary of Defense, John Turturro as Agent Simmons, Anthony Anderson as computer hacker Glen Whitmann, and Bernie Mac as used car salesman Bobby Bolivia.

Questions for Discussion:
1) Is it true that there is “more than meets the eye” to the human race? What kind of a first impression would we make on a race of alien robots? What kind of an impression do we make on God?
2) Do you think the human race tends toward evil or toward good? Why? What evidence do you have for your conclusion?
3) Do you think God sees potential in the human race? What kind of potential?
4) What do you think is God’s greatest hope for humanity?

My friend Ted at Stragglingband tells a really neat story of a 91-year-old missionary he talked with on the 4th of July.

Read it. It’s short and to the point. And it’s a beautiful picture of what it means to be missional.

Every now and then, it seems like everything I’ve been hearing and reading and experiencing seems to come together for me. And just this week, I had one of those moments of clarity. Let me try to explain it in three parts:

1. McDowell County, West Virginia

First, let me tell you about McDowell County, West Virginia, where we had our mission trip this past week (and it was a great trip by the way; we really saw God do some neat things both in the community and in our high school group!). Until about 1968, McDowell County’s population was over 100,000 and it was the wealthiest county in West Virginia. Why? Because of the coal industry. One coal mine would employ 500 people, all of them making a good living.

Today, the population of McDowell County is about 18,000, most of those people living below the poverty level.

What happened? As technology increased, mines started laying off miners–to the point where a typical coal mine now employs about 30 people–in three shifts! That’s only 10 people working per shift.

As this change occured, those with education or ambition moved away, leaving behind many who now had no way to support themselves. That leads to my next thought.

2. Knowledge Workers

I’m currently listening to a book on CD called Managing in a Time of Great Change by Peter Drucker. In this book (which originally came out in 1995), Drucker discusses the cultural shift from skill workers to what he calls “knowledge workers.” A skill worker would be someone who has been, for instance, an apprentice and has learned everything that he or she will ever need to know for that work.

My grandfather was a hairdresser and sold toupees when I was a kid. He was a skill worker because everything he’d ever need to know he learned when he was an apprentice as a teenager in Germany.

The many factory workers of past decades were skill workers because they knew the skills to do their job and would never need to add to their body of knowledge to continue doing their jobs effectively. Obviously, the coal miners of West Virginia were (and are) skill workers.

But today, the shift is towards professionals who Drucker calls “knowledge workers.” These are people who have been educated and are using their education in their work, but who must continue to learn in order to continue to be able to do their jobs.

An X-ray technician is a knowledge worker–he or she must continue to learn new x-ray technologies and equipment, and has to keep up with new knowledge about the human body.

A stockbroker is a knowledge worker–he or she must continue to keep up with the economy and the market.

A market researcher is a knowledge worker–he or she must keep up with new ways of doing research and continue to learn to provide the most accurate information possible to clients.

And that brings me to my epiphany…

3. Is a pastor a skill worker or a knowledge worker?

I think there was a time when a pastor was basically a skill worker. All a pastor needed was a seminary education (sometimes not even that) and some skills in sermon preparation, counseling, and pastoral care. A pastor could gain all the knowledge necessary for a successful ministry within a few years of seminary education.

But I don’t think that works anymore. I think the culture’s shift towards the knowledge worker is true also for pastors. A pastor today absolutely must continue to learn and to grow in order to continue to lead a church in ministry.

Why?

Because the culture is changing so rapidly. In The Missional Leader, Roxburgh and Romanuk talk about two kinds of change: “continuous change” and “discontinuous change.”

Continuous change is the kind of change that is expected–people get married, babies are born, people get sick, people die, people move away, etc. We expect these changes to happen.

But discontinuous change is different. Discontinuous change is change that is unexpected. Here’s how they describe it:

Discontinuous change is disruptive and unanticipated; it creates situations that challenge our assumptions. The skills we have learned aren’t helpful in this kind of change.

Our culture today is in a period of discontinuous change. Technology is changing faster than most of us even realize. The typical family is changing. Forms of communication are changing. What is considered acceptable and unacceptable is changing. People’s understanding of religion and spirituality is changing.

With all these changes happening–and these are not changes that will one day revert to what used to be–pastors have to do their best to keep up with all these changes in the culture. Roxburgh and Romanuk put it this way:

In a period of discontinuous change, leaders suddenly find that the skills and capacities in which they were trained are of little use in addressing a new situation and environment.

And that’s why pastors have to be knowledge workers. Pastors have to continue to add to their body of knowledge in order to effectively reach out to our culture.