Open Letter to Pastors from Jesus

Dear Pastor,

I want you to know my deep love for you. I know that there are many pressures on you. And some of them go with the job. But most of the pressure you feel is self-imposed. You do not have to earn my love. I love you just as you are right now. You know that message of grace that you preach to others. It applies to you as well.

The most important thing you can do as a pastor is to relax in my love for you.

And while we are on the subject of relaxing, remember, it's my church. It's not your job to build it or make it grow. That's our job (the three of us you call the Trinity). We like to work through people, but the people who are the most useful are the ones who depend upon us the most.

And here's something you keep forgetting, you are most useful when you are "weak." We don't work in spite of your weaknesses. We work through your weaknesses. When you are weak, I am strong. So don't be wasting all that energy trying to convince yourself and others that you are omni-competent. Instead, just be yourself—honestly and vulnerably.

Remember what the title "pastor" means. It means shepherd, not business mogul. I have entrusted you with the care of my sheep. Feed them and watch over them. Don't get sucked in by all this talk of the church as a business. You are not a CEO. You are a shepherd who is caring for someone else's sheep. They are not yours. They belong to me.

I don't need you to be a "leader." I don't want you investing your time and energy devising brilliant strategic plans and then forcing people to conform to them. The kind of leader I'm looking for is the person who leads by example in becoming more like me and exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit.

What I need from you is faithfulness. Keep doing what is right. Keep trusting in me. Keep growing in love.

I've already warned you that it was going to be difficult. You have real enemies out there. But your enemies are not the people in your church who are resistant to change. Neither are your enemies the people who subscribe to a different branch of theology. (All of you are in for a shock when you learn how much you've gotten wrong.) And your enemies are not the sinners who are yet to believe. Your real enemies are the forces of evil.

And these forces are at work in obvious and not so obvious ways. One of their most effective methods is to distract people like you. If they can get you to become focused on "professional fulfillment" or success, then it is just a matter of time until they can render you ineffective. And before long you will forget your true calling.

Don't lose heart. Sometimes it looks as if we are losing, but I have already overcome the world. My kingdom is advancing in ways and places that you would never expect. Some of my best people are working "undercover." Unfortunately, they sometimes get as much opposition from "church people" as they do from my enemies.

Don't worry so much about who's in and who's out. Focus on drawing people to me. Of course the real work here is done by the Holy Spirit. It is your job to live the gospel and call people to true discipleship. Don't reduce the gospel to getting people signed up for heaven. Teach them to do what I've commanded. I really did mean all that stuff Matthew collected in his "Sermon on the Mount."

As one of my shepherds, you have several serious responsibilities. But the most important responsibility you have is becoming one of my true disciples. You must deny yourself every day, take up your cross and follow me. Where did you get the idea that you could convince others to be committed to me when your own commitment is half-hearted?

I don't want your compliance. I want your heart. I want you to fall passionately in love with me. I'm not talking about being your boyfriend. There's far more to love than just the romantic and sexual part (as important as that is). Your culture, in its attempt to promote sex to "transcendent" status, has ironically cheapened it and also lost contact with other important expressions of love.

You see, the Father, the Spirit and I know something about love. It's at the essence of who we are. And in the same way the Father loves me I love you as well. I think you've heard those words, but I don't think you really understand them. I love you—with all your flaws, mistakes and selfishness.

The most important thing you can do as a pastor is to bask in that love.

If you do that, everything else will pretty much take care of itself.

Jesus

Market-Driven Church

Life in North America is dominated by market forces. And church life is no exception.

When believers are looking for a church, they do an informal (or formal) cost-benefit analysis.

It might look something like this:

Benefits	Costs
Quality of worship	Driving time
Skill of preacher	Giving expectations
Children's ministry	Volunteer expectations
Facility features	Facility limitations
Youth pastor?
Prestige of church in community
Business networking opportunities
Variety of service times
Variety of service styles
Number of paid staff

Of course, one size does not fit all.

We all have personal preferences, and we take them with us to church. So we shop around until we find just the right fit.

Then we enter into an informal contract with the church and its pastor: We pledge a certain level of attendance, giving and volunteering in return for religious goods and services.

If the quantity or quality of those services drop below our expectations, then we are released from our agreement and become free agents.

But this mindset is not limited to the "consumer."

Churches market themselves with yellow-page ads, direct-mail pieces and clever sayings on the church sign.

The market-driven church becomes the data-driven church. Demographic reports dictate the long-term ministry strategy. Programs are designed around the felt needs of the community. The pastor is expected to be a technician rather than a theologian.

This video is only a slight exaggeration:

This one is dead serious:

Ian Littler warns

Beware the measurable. Neither growth nor effectiveness is a reliable indicator of faithfulness. Consumers are trained to believe (wrongly) that they alone are the final arbiters of what they need. For marketeers the real issue is church survival, which they perceive to be entirely in our hands rather than the concern of the God who calls the church into being.

The church has been called into existence by God and entrusted with his mission. This mission is not fashioned in response to marketing studies and surveys. It is a mission that is not always welcomed by the powers that be.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You To Be"

Viral Networking

As you can see from the side bar, I've added a new syndication service.

Every time you load a page, it will give you different links to other blogs featuring posts about religion and spirituality. Each page load will also cause a link from Kingdom Come to appear on another blog that has subscribed to Blog Rush.

(If you would like to add this to your own blog, click here. It's free.)

I don't have control over the content that shows up, and I certainly don't endorse everything listed. But my readers are smart enough to know that without me having to tell them. Over time, I will be able to weed out certain types of posts.

This should provide you with access to interesting posts that you might not have found otherwise. It will also expose this blog to more potential readers. Let me know about your experiences, both positive and negative.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional “in quotes”

Today it's two for the price of one:

So if we take the incarnation seriously, we must take seriously the call to live incarnationally—right up close, near to those whom God desires to redeem. We cannot demonstrate Christlikeness at a distance from those whom we feel God has called us to serve. We need to get close enough to people that our lives rub up against their lives, and that they see the incarnated Christ in our values, beliefs, and practices as expressed in cultural forms that make sense and convey impact.
Michael Frost, Exiles, p. 55

It is our point that socializing must be intentional, missional, grace-filled, and generous. It must be seen as part of a broader pattern of infiltrating a community.
Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come, p. 57

So what do you think? How do we do this? Why has the North American church been so terrible at this?

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Wesley Right?

Here are some excerpts from an address given by Will Willimon at the Oxford Institute of Wesley Studies at Christ College, Oxford University: What If Wesley Was Right? (HT: Michael Spencer)

Wesley was more medieval than modern theologian. That is, he inherited the robust Trinitarian faith that had been worked out in the early centuries of the church. God is not an idea, an abstraction, a source of meaning, a wholly other, a general concept, or a technique to help us make it through the day; God is the One who presently, directly speaks, creates, intrudes, convicts, enlightens, demands, commands, passionately loves, continually transforms. Wesley's biblical interpretation is a sort of anti-interpretation in which he assumes that God speaks through scripture, every word of it. Rather than assume that the task of the interpreter is to make the text more meaningful to sophisticated, modern people who drive Volvos, Wesley seems to assume that the task of the text is to make the interpreters' lives more difficult.

We've reduced God to a collection of propositions. He is no longer the dangerous, unpredictable, living God.

Spent Calvinism, sliding into a renovated Deism, has triumphed. Silence is what you get when you know everything about God except that God is love. God is all distant concept, abstraction, and essence . . . and never speaking, revealing, troubling subject. We've got just enough God to give our lives a kind of spiritual tint without so much God as to interfere with our running the world as we damn well please.

How true this is of much of contemporary theology: Knowing everything about God except that God is love.

Reaching out to speak to the world, we fell in face down. Too troubled by our expectations of what our audience could and could not hear, we reduced the gospel to a set of sappy platitudes anybody could accept and no sensitive, thinking person could resist. "Open minds, Open hearts, Open doors." Our testimony got reduced to whatever the market could bear. In the process of such "preaching," distinctive Christian speech was jettisoned and the discourse of instrumental, utilitarian, therapeutic Deism is the dominant homiletic mode. Finney's pragmatism triumphs.

We've become market driven instead of gospel driven. We've traded transformation for mere therapy.

Ecclesiologically, when the name "God" designates a stable, abstract essence rather than an active, reaching Trinity, then internal maintenance displaces external mission.

Wesley should be the patron saint of the missional movement.

Wesley's "conjunctive theology," (Ken Collins) in its complexity and tensive holding together of seemingly disparate emphases (knowledge and piety, sacramentalism and evangelism, faith and good works, justification and sanctification, personal holiness and social holiness, reason and enthusiasm, etc., etc.) is just the sort of sweeping intellect that is produced by the worship of a complex God for whom Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, these three, are one.

When you've got a resurrected Christ, we always have more future than past. God give us more theologians and fewer historians.

Theology is much more than memorizing and repeating what dead men have written.

Wesley's full embrace of both forgiveness and radical personal transformation sent both Lutherans and Calvinists through the roof. On the cross, Jesus didn't just do something about our guilt; Jesus defeated the kingdom of Satan and established the Kingdom of God; Jesus recreated the world and us, making us into a new people who had a fresh start in life. What Lutherans and Calvinists thought wrong was Wesley's extravagant assertion that something radical was done not only for us but also is being done in us to sever our desires from their evil affections and to infuse us with robust craving to live a life of love toward God and neighbor.

The Enlightenment still holds our imaginations captive and that captivity is killing us.

May the spirit of Wesley live on.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

The Missional Swan

In The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb argues that "success" rarely is the result of strategic forecasts and superior skill. And those who survive often construct a narrative to explain the reason for their success that sounds plausible but that has no real basis in fact.

In a previous post, I explained how some of Taleb's ideas apply to theology. We often think that we know more than we actually know.

I also noticed several similarities between ideas and attitudes in this book and a missional mindset.

This applies to all businesses. Think about the "secret recipe" to making a killing in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious, then someone next door would have already come up with the idea and it would have become generic. The next killing in the restaurant industry needs to be an idea that is not easily conceived of by the current population of restaurateurs. It has to be at some distance from expectations.

There is no secret formula for planting a church or for turning a small church into a mega-church.

There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (of the positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them.

This is analogous to finding out what God is doing in the world and joining in. God often is using the least-expected people and instruments to accomplish his purpose. The church is all too often off busy doing its own thing and unable to recognize the hand of God at work in surprising ways and places.

History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.

Missional thinkers have been arguing that we live in liminal time, a period of discontinuous change. Taleb would say that all of human existence is so.

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without being demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel [prize] . . . . "How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.

This sounds like the life of nearly all missionally-minded leaders. Sure there are the exceptions (Black Swans), but they just make the pain all the more intense for everyone else.

I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is painful only if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success other expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking.

You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.

Quitting a high-paying position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved (this may seem crazy, but I've tried it and it works).

This sounds very much like putting first the kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33) and like the self-denial required for discipleship (Luke 9:23).

Buy this book and read it.

You literally cannot afford not to know what it says. You will not look at the world the same ever again.

It has numerous implications for your personal, professional and spiritual life.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Black Swan--Arrogance

There are many things that we don't know.

The problem is that we don't know that we don't know them and that we won't admit many of the things we do know that we don't know.

Taleb is not writing about theology, but he might as well be. Here are a few of his words in isolation:

He starts with rigidly Platonic assumptions, completely unrealistic. . . . Then he generates "theorems" and "proofs" from these. The math is tight and elegant. . . . But the whole edifice is like a game that is entirely closed, like Monopoly with all of its rules.

A scholar who applies such methodology resembles Locke's definition of a madman: someone "reasoning correctly from erroneous premises."

Now, elegant mathematics has this property: it is perfectly right, not 99 per cent so. This property appeals to mechanistic minds who do not want to deal with ambiguities. Unfortunately, you have to cheat somewhere to make the world fit perfect mathematics; and you have to fudge your assumptions somewhere.

[They] can be safely accused of having invented an imaginary world, one that lent itself to their mathematics.

If you question what they do . . . they will ask for "tight proof." So they set the rules of the game, and you need to play by them.

I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong. Elegance in the theories is often indicative of Platonicity and weakness—it invites you to seek elegance for elegance's sake.

He then presents a chart (on page 284) contrasting his "skeptical empiricism" and the orthodox "Platonic" view. I have reworded his comments to apply to theology instead of finance. (I have also added a few observations of my own.)

Skeptical Empiricism	Rigid Theological Systems
Interested in what lies outside the systematic theology box	Focuses on what is entirely within the theological box
Respect for those who say "I don't know"	"You keep criticizing these doctrines, but these doctrines are all we have."
Wear suits only to funerals	Wear dark suits and white shirts, speak in a boring tone
Bottom-up theology	Top-down theology
Prefer to be broadly right	Precisely wrong
Minimal theory, consider theorizing a disease to resist	Everything needs to fit some grand, general theological model.
Ideas based on skepticism, aware that there are unread books in the library	Ideas based on beliefs, on what they think they know
Goes from specific biblical truth and moves toward a unified theology	Starts with a systematic theology and tries to incorporate specific biblical truths
Blind man (John 9)	Pharisees
More concerned with reality than with a rigidly, precise theological system	More concerned with a precise theological system than with a messy reality
More concerned with the overall teaching of Scripture in selecting and supporting a theology	Begin with a theological system and use "proof texting" to reinforce that system
See epistemological humility as an essential characteristic in the search for the truth	Consider the search for the truth over and see any deviation from epistemological certainty as heresy
Comfortable with an absolute truth only partly known	Confuse absolute truth with absolutely perfect understanding of that truth

Of course, anyone who accuses others of arrogance becomes a target for the same attack. And Taleb is no exception. But he argues:

People who worry about pennies instead of dollars can be dangerous to society.

So what do you think? Do you see similar danger in overly rigid theological systems? Do you epistemological arrogance as a more serious problem than epistemological humility?

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Black Swan--Overview

What you don't know certainly can hurt you.

That is the message of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Taleb (Random House, April 2007).

The problem is not so much what we don't know. It is rather that we refuse to admit what we don't know. Humans are terrible at processing uncertainty. We overestimate our ability to predict the future. We assume that the world operates according to the law of "normal distribution" (Gaussian bell curve).

Some things do operate according to the "bell curve." Body size (height and weight) is constrained by genetics and physical laws.

But most things are subject to wild extremes.

Taleb defines a Black Swan using these criteria:

• No one expects it to happen. Nothing in the past suggests it is likely to happen.
  
• When it happens, it will cause a huge impact (either positively or negatively).
  
• Even though it could never be predicted, once it happens people construct explanations for why it had to happen.
  

Most innovations are Black Swans.

Most disasters are Black Swans.

Most world-changing events are Black Swans.

This is not a criticism about our ignorance. It is an attack on our inherent arrogance.

Black Swans are unknowable by nature.

A couple of examples of Black Swans are the attack of September 11, on the negative side, and the rise of the Internet, on the positive side. Both of these have changed the world forever.

Imagine trying to predict the invention of the wheel. It is impossible to anticipate. If someone could predict it, the prediction would be equivalent to its invention.

By nature we try to fit reality into neat "Platonic" theories.

We use the following strategies to convince ourselves that we know more than we really know:

• Ludic fallacy: Thinking that the real world operates according to the rules gambling and chance.
  
• Confirmation error: Looking for evidence to confirm our preconceived theories.
  
• Narrative fallacy: Constructing a story of events that lead up to a Black Swan after it happens.
  
• Argument from silence: Mistaking the absence of evidence for evidence of absence.
  
• Epistemic arrogance: Overestimating our knowledge and underestimating our ignorance.
  

There is a whole industry built around explaining success. Successful people and businesses are analyzed. Then characteristics are generalized from the study and touted as the keys to success. A story is constructed to explain why these people and organizations were destined to become successful. The problem is that the failures are usually not studied. Many of the "losers" could lay claim to the same characteristics. Success is often a Black Swan.

Not only do we generally fail to account for the possibility of Black Swans, but we also tend to underestimate their significance.

We can benefit from positive Black Swans by increasing our exposure to them. Taleb recommends going to parties, living in cities and taking advantage of the opportunities we encounter. One key skill needed is the ability to accept good mistakes and learning from them. We will sometimes be fooled, but we should be careful to "be fooled in small matters, not in the large."

We should pay attention to what actually happens and not try to fit everything into our theories of how things should work.

He argues that ignorance is materially the same as randomness. Predicting something that is already determined but unknown to me is the same as predicting a future that is yet to happen.

He also has distain for "experts in suits" who pretend to know more than they do.

In a subsequent post, I will explore the implications of these ideas for a missional approach to ministry.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional “in quotes”

We are in a period that makes it impossible to have much clarity about the future and how it is going to be shaped. Therefore those leaders who believe they can address the kind of change we are facing by simply defining a future that people want, and then setting plans to achieve it, are not innovating a missional congregation. They are only finding new ways of preventing a congregation from facing the discontinuous change it confronts.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader, p. 159

The Church in North America is experiencing a period that sociologists call liminality. The future cannot be predicted by extrapolating from the past. If there ever was a time when leaders could create their own future by sheer willpower, it no longer exists.

Leadership requires more flexibility and more skill.

True leaders will need to be able to handle uncertainly. They will need to be able to adjust to change. They will need to be able to adapt to unforeseeable opportunities.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

All Around the World

One of the cool things about writing a blog is having readers from other countries. The Internet is indeed creating a global village.

Over the past five months, this blog has been visited by individuals from 94 countries.

The top ten are

1. USA
   
2. Canada
   
3. UK
   
4. Australia
   
5. Germany
   
6. Malaysia
   
7. Denmark
   
8. South Africa
   
9. Netherlands
   
10. India
    

Some of the more interesting and surprising locations for visitors were

• Romania
  
• United Arab Emirates
  
• Czech Republic
  
• Slovenia
  
• Pakistan
  
• Lithuania
  
• Iceland
  
• Georgia
  
• Mozambique
  
• Azerbaijan
  
• Malawi
  
• Malta
  
• New Caledonia
  

Almost 5% of my visitors are using a language other than English for surfing the Internet.

So if you are one of my international visitors, I'm glad to welcome you to my little corner of the world. I enjoy meeting people from different countries and different cultures. I also teach ESL. If you have any questions about my use of English, ask about it in the comments. I love to answer questions like that. I learn a lot in the process.

God Bless,

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Addicted to “Success”

Western culture is obsessed with its image of success. Professional sports teams fire their coaches because they don't win championships. Businesses "need to show earnings growth to satisfy both equity analysts and investors." Even scientists succumb to the pressure to succeed and fudge the results of their research.

One doesn't need to engage in extensive investigation to discover that the same disease has infected the Church.

We must break with the big is better mentality of the Western world and learn the foolishness of the cross of Jesus, which says, "Small is beautiful." We must courageously open ourselves to the full outpouring of the Holy Spirit in order to increase the gifts of God in our life. If we are not willing to get radical for Christ, he will never be a radical force in our lives, and we will remain in our darkness and pain.

How to Build Spiritual Muscles, John Michael Talbot

The danger is not only spectacular failure when high-profile leaders crash and burn. But this addiction to "success" also prevents us from experiencing the true power of God which can only be known in weakness.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"