A little music and a laugh

Just so my blog won't close up on me from lack of use, I submit these videos for your viewing pleasure:

First up, guitarist and singer Bruce Cockburn. Here he just plays guitar:


And now, a little comedy music:

Love Of My Life

Well, I'm in the second week of schooling here at Duke Divinity School and I must admit it's not gotten any easier. Don't worry, I'll spare you all the "there's too much reading, there's too many papers to be written, I can't remember it all" statements. I'll simply say, "ditto."

I've discovered another problem, though, one that has been ever growing over the last several years and I find it harder to work through, and that's missing my wife. Call me a sap, call me a wuss, call me wimp, the fact is, I really miss my wife!

Now, before you roll your eyes and mumble under your breath, let me just say that I am very capable of going away for periods of time from my wife and, though missing her, can get along pretty well without her. That's not what's at issue here. What's at issue is that, in most things, I would rather not "get along" without her because, when I am without her, there is a piece of me missing. I feel incomplete.

As of tomorrow, Wednesday, July 14th, Heather and I will have been married 9 years. I messed up last year's anniversary pretty royally and for this year, here I sit at Duke and she in Lancaster. But I'm not messing this one up, no sirie.

Nine years. It's hard to believe. Not that it's hard to believe that we have been married for 9 years but to realize what we have been through over those last 9 years, with major job changes, health issues, near death experiences (just one that I know of), major moves, living in a new country (seemed like it at first), being away from our family, it's been a journey of curves, pot holes, mountains, valley's, and even floods. But I can't even imagine going through it all without having Heather by my side. In fact, I've made it along this road in large part because of her (the other "part" is due to God, who, by the way, brought Heather into my life, so one could say it was all his doing and leading and helping and that would be true but then, you're missing my point, aren't you?). 

It wasn't my intention to fall in love with her. I just wanted to date her, have a "fine" lady friend I could hang out with when I was down from Nashville visiting family in Birmingham.

Didn't quite work out that way, as you can tell. And I'm very thankful for that.

I am here at Duke to "strengthen my mind and spirit," as they say, but the truth is, my greatest source of strength has come from my wife. I continue to learn, to be taught, through her words and by her love. When all confidence is gone within me, she steps in and covers me with hers.

Ours isn't a perfect love nor do I claim that we have a perfect marriage. I'm not perfect. But we work hard at it. We came together out of and from brokenness and we know how delicate marriage is and that it is, in fact, an unending journey towards a mysterious union of heart, body and mind. Such fragile things must not be taken for granted. So we try to walk carefully, not running but walking. As the song goes (sort of), we are one person (joined), we are two alone (individuals), we are three together (God, her and I), we are for each other.  (Crosby, Still & Nash - Helplessly Hoping)

So, as we begin our 10th year together, I am excited about what lies ahead; and anxious; and uncertain; but I know that I don't walk alone and I know that we walk together with God, always trying to keep our eyes on the Author and Perfecter of our faith.

Heather, thank you for marrying me.
Thank you for staying with me.
Thank you for being my Anam Cara.
Thank you for sharing in this Great Big Love we have been given from God.

Wish you were here, hon. I sure do miss you.
Happy anniversary!

Pete and Repeat

You know the old joke. Pete and Repeat were sitting in a boat and Pete fell out. Who was left? It's been told in various variations (on a fence and Pete fell off, walking in the street and Pete got run over, on a wall and Pete jumped down). In each variation the correct answer is "Repeat" and you're off again retelling the joke until your unsuspecting listener gets the joke. 

I have a teacher who has, in essence, been repeating a variation of that joke but it's not the joke and it isn't meant to be funny. Every day so far, in class and by email, he has made it clear that if we aren't rereading the books for this class three or four times, we don't "have a chance in passing the class."

"Student 1 and Repeat are attending my class and Student 1 doesn't do the rereading of his books. Who passes my class. Repeat. Student 1 and Repeat are attending this class and Student 1 doesn't do the rereading...."

So, filled with fear and anxiety, I sit down to read a book that I skimmed through last month and I discovered something that I never noticed before. It's missing 32 pages. 32! How did I miss that? Even more, in their place is a repeat of pages 97-128. I never caught it, never noticed it, and when I read it again last night, it made perfect sense to me. That's when you know you have been reading too long and too much.

Now, the real kicker is that it is specifically 20 some pages in those missing 32 that I need to do a paper for next week. One or two pages you can probably do with out and still do a paper, but not 20.

No spiritual insight do I have about this. No worldly wise observation. No words of encouragement. Just a simple "oh, well" because sometimes, that is all we are left with - "oh, well."

And a book missing 32 important pages.

Now, for you visual folk, here are some phone/camera pictures of Duke so you will know where I am hanging my hat for the month.

Duke Chapel

Goodson Chapel 

(We meet here every day for worship)

Duke Garden

(Just a wee bit of it)

And, just for laughs...

I'm in one of those three.

Duke, Desperation, and the Divine

So, if you read Facebook you will know that for the month of July I will be at Duke Divinity School taking four courses to move me along the United Methodist track of course of study. You also know full well how I have come with both feet dragging and daily desperation as I have tackled, and not tackled early enough, the pre-work required before I got here. I'll spare you all of that agony again but let me just say, I am here now and there will be a whole new source of anguish rising from my soul during the next four weeks. I will try to keep that to a minimum, however (no promises, though).

Day one began yesterday (Sunday, July 4) with a three hour drive that turned into over four and a half. You know those gadgets that you use when you drive that help you get to your destination? Don't trust them!!! I ended up at three different locations, none of them Duke Divinity School. By the time I arrived, I was late, I was ticked, I was in an even sourer mood than I was when I left home. My thought was, "this does not bode well for me and my time here, dear God. I told you I didn't want to come and this testifies to that fact!"

God smiled and pushed me along.

Well, I got registered, had dinner with the newbies (which I was and let me tell you, I hate being a newbie because you're just not cool cos you don't know anything about where you are - like being lost for over an hour), and then took a tour of the inside of the Divinity School.

Let me stop here and tell you that the building that we are having our classes in and houses the course of study office and the Divinity School library and our mailboxes and the chapel and.... well, it's a little confusing. You know you're into something precarious when they refer to the building as the Bermuda Triangle. Actually, I'm not sure that's what they called it but the word "triangle" was in their description and I found that to be true because I walked the same "triangle" of halls twice before I found someone who pointed me down the stairs to the next triangle level. Today I dropped M&M's to find my way back to where I started.

I found my dorm without much trouble, unloaded and partially unpacked my room. I drove to a local grocery store (no problem - GPS got me there and I got myself back), parked in the right parking lot but the wrong level, loaded up my hands with ten bags of groceries and walked the short trek back to my dorm.

Well, short according to the map. For me, my self-GPS-mind got me lost and I wandered to three dorms before I stumbled upon some people to get directions. They pointed to "over there" and then said, and I quote: "I think." Now, when someone adds the words "I think" to the end of directions it is a very wise man who decids to ask someone else for confirmation of those directions.

I'm not so smart, I have learned.

Thirty minutes later, hands and fingers having lost all feeling, I arrived at my dorm but with no feelings in my hands and fingers and, holding all thses bags, I couldn't get my key to get in. It reminded me of a story about how some game wardens would capture monkeys by putting peanuts in a jar with a small opening and the monkeys would reach in, get the peanuts but then couldn't get their hands out because their clutch of nuts in their hand had formed a fist which couldn't get out of the jar, so the monkeys would get so upset that they were easily captured.

I didn't want to be captured so I put down one hand of bags and got my key. I was safe.

Day two. I won't go into all the details of this day but let me share just a couple of things. First, this place is beautiful. I'll post some pictures later but the campus is... inspiring. The church is breathtaking. Cathedral looking at it's best. When I bring my camera I'll get some really good pictures and show you.

Second, worship/chapel was inspirational and moving. The chapel where we meet, Goodson Chapel, is also very lovely but it was the service and especially the message that touched me. There was a lifting in my soul, a levitating of my mood (even after my classes I feel a little better...just a little). And it also was a little weird.

Here's what I mean by that, and I admit that you probably won't think it's weird and, well, it's not in the sense of being weird as far as feeling something weird goes. It was a visual weird. The speaker, as he talked, would stand at the very edge of the stage with half of his feet/shoes hanging over the edge. He would move around, most of the time with his half of each of his feet hanging over the edge of the stage. And from my angle, it made him look like he was floating just above the step that ran along the edge of the stage. I kept thinking of an episode of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" where these "demons' would float just above the ground as they moved about. Well, this just gave the whole thing this sort of mystical, divine quality.

And then I realized, that's what I'm here for. I'm ultimately here for the mystical and the divine.

In fact, isn't that what we all are here for, on this earth, going about our tasks of work, family, church, vacation, learning, and so on? Aren't we surrounded by the mystical and the Divine, and our task is to have eyes to see, hearts to feel, faith to receive? So often we miss that "glimpse" of Jesus because we're so busy looking at other things, worrying about other things, complaining about other things, living for other things. We miss the Diving Presence and the Holy and the Mystical. Why? The prophet Isaiah put it this way:

For the hearts of these people are hardened,
      and their ears cannot hear,
   and they have closed their eyes—
      so their eyes cannot see,
   and their ears cannot hear,
      and their hearts cannot understand,
   and they cannot turn to me
      and let me heal them.’ (Isaiah 6:9-10)

Christ wants to do to us what he did to the blind man:

Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. (Mark 8:25)

Here is one of my favorite worship songs. It's my prayer for me and it's my prayer for you. May we see the Divine, Mystical, Holy God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDt0p_Rw1yg

Now, I must get back to reading and paper writing. "Have mercy on me, O God!"

A Decrease in the Increase

I have been thinking about church life and church growth lately. I've been wondering about where my church is in the scheme of these two areas - church life and church growth. It would be safe to say that these two areas are on every pastor's mind when they think about their churches. We pastors take these two areas very seriously, even if we are at a loss on what that should look like at our church or how it should be developed, cultivated and practiced. Church life and growth is, in may ways, an enigma, an ever evolving and fluid process. With all my reading about such I come away, more often than not, with more ideas to add to my coffer but no less unsure on how to go about the process. 

I don't believe the church is to be static, and what I mean by that is that I don't believe that we are to reach a certain level and then stable off. If we are doing what we are called to be doing, if we, as a church and as individual Christians, and are actively reaching out to others, sharing the Gospel and having them become a part of out lives (and we a part of theirs), then the natural expectation is that the church will grow. Maybe not in leaps and bounds but it will see growth non-the-less. Right?

And yet, so many churches have become static, if not in fact decreasing in their numbers. There are a lot of reasons that explain the decreases and I have not the time, space or the expertise to go into those but they do include such things as cultural change, structural (church facilities and use of space), generational styles (worship, music, experiential), and, of course, relevancy (what the church is offering as ministry outreach and growth). But we must also add to that not by any means exhaustive list the church's complacency. Sometimes, quite simply, the church likes they way it is, the size it is, they way it has been doing things, etc, and has very little desire or motivation to adjust and change. The problem with that is that attitude will ultimately lead to, first, spiritual death and, second, physical death (numbers). It may take years but it will come.

I pastored a church that suffered from that attitude. It used to be a large church, several services, active programs but after a series of issues (pastoral appointments and disagreement over ministry purpose) they began to decline. When I arrived they were averaging in the 30's (a long way from over 700). The community has changed but the church was too slow to adjust to that change. Young families that were raised in the church moved away from the area, in part because of school issues and community changes, and left their parents and grandparents at the church. It was literally a dying church. But church life has a unique way of pushing itself up through the growing darkness and these older folks began to adjust their way of thinking. They began to look at their community differently, a community that was changing again, and they took the initiative to change and reach out. Unfortunately, it was too late and the church was closed down but not before it doubled in its attendance in the five months that I was there.

By point to that account is this: why must the church wait to find itself dying before it comes to the realization that it must approach ministry differently? Why does the onslaught of dying serve (sometimes) as the motivator to members to change from thinking "what's in it for me?" to "what's in it for them?"

I've asked these questions before in other blog posts. And I will probably ask them again in the future. But to stop asking these questions, to stop having discussions on such issues, would basically mean that we in the church have accepted the status quo and impending complacency and growing lukewarmness and ultimate death. The church, it's members, attenders, committees, and councils must keep asking these questions and discussing and looking for answers. The church is to be growing and if we are not, then the question should be ask, loud and clear, "Why aren't we?"

I close with the following from Ed Stetzer, church growth and missional guru, from a recent blog post.

Seems to be that churches must be on some powerful birth control. They are not reproducing. And I don't get why.

It's natural. It's normal. It's essential. And we all know how to do it. But somewhere along the way, church reproduction and multiplication became unusual or strange in North America. And I am not happy about it.

The Church is the most powerful institution in the world. Where no electricity and running water exist, you will still find a church that is planting churches. When governments grow corrupt and economies crash, the Church still stands and plants more churches. Nothing in the world and nothing in the last two millennia of history can compare to the Church. It advances best by exponential and explosive multiplying. But not here.

The Church matters. It is God's agent of change for the hopeless. It is how He delivers transformation to a hurting world. Through the Church, God unfurls the banner of mercy and announces the kingdom of grace. He has assembled the Church to tell and model the most important issue in life--how to spend all of eternity with God Himself.

God has chosen the Church to make known His multifaceted wisdom to all in authority (Eph. 3:10). Whether a power in the heavenly realm or an authority on the earth, the Church is where God rolls out His message. It is used by God to speak to the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, the hopeful and the hopeless.

We believe in the Church not only because of what we have seen, but because of what Christ can do next. He constantly amazes us at how lives are changed through the Church.

 Well said, Ed. What do you think? What should we be doing? Why aren't we doing it? Why aren't you?