Open Mike

Funny Things Evangelicals Say, and a Love Note

'It takes one to know one' is a true statement. In spite of my frequent protestations, theologically I am an evangelical.  After all, I pastor an 'Evangelical Presbyterian Church.' 

I recently heard a funny thing evangelicals feel they must, at some point, say about their church, or any church they attend for a while. They really love to say it about other churches they don't go to.  Its as reflexive a statement among the species as self-licking is to dogs and cats.  If you don't say this to your other evangelical friends at some point in time, they may ask to check your evangelical i.d. card to verify your hard core credentials.  Here it is:

Reflexive Evanglical speaker: "You know, I just wish we had deeper Bible teaching available at our church." 

Response (not by me, but another person): "Ummm, don't you know I'm enrolled in the seminary (graduate level) class on the Old Testament, taught by the dean of Gordon-Conwell Seminary, that meets at our church every Thursday, that is funded by our church for members in order to specifically offer the 'deepest' Bible teaching available to equip our leaders?"

Reflexive Evangelical speaker: "Oh yeah, I remember that.  I didn't have the time to take that high level of a course with all that homework."

Me as pastor: "Ohmigoshsometimesithinkimightgocrazyfromstufflikethiswishicouldtakeasabbatical."

Evangelical is fine.  Reflexive evangelical is not. (By the way, a funny book I keep on my shelf is the satirical "A Field Guide to Evangelicals & Their Habitat" by Joel Kirkpatrick).

But enough about that.  The core meaning of the word 'evangelical' historically and etymologically is 'good news centered' or 'gospel centered.'  This is evangelicals at their best - centered upon spreading and being the good news of Jesus' love to the world.  Our version of that at Lake Forest Church has most recently been called LOVE 10.  Some of you outside of our church have cheered us on in this initiative to invest ourselves in more fully formed service to the world, being and pointing to the good news.  Here's a link to our most recent newsletter, or LOVE NOTE, updating our progress on giving and ministry, just in case you're interested.

Download LovenoteMay2012

Celebration Mentors (life givers) and Saboteurs (black holes)

I noticed particularly passionate response to one part of my message yesterday - people experiencing the conviction of self-examination in the Holy Spirit for themselves, and people realizing the need to set some healthier relational boundaries.

Our sermon yesterday was a verse-by-verse trip through Psalm 65, learning reasons and practices for celebratory living in light of God's goodness. Our series is on the celebratory nature of God, and the fact that Christians of all people should/can be known as overwhelmingly celebratory people. As I said 'if you are considering becoming a Christian, I'm so sorry to put that legalistic load on you, that if you become a Christian, you're just going to have to celebrate and party more, in God's direction!"

The section I'm referring to was titled "Other People and Your Joy" in my notes. Here's how I wrote it - a mixture of my words, and a couple of paragraphs from John Ortberg's "The Life You've Always Wanted"

If you become a true person of celebration, continuously, there will be people who misunderstand. "Why are you celebrating such small things? Are you arrogant and think your life is better than others'?" Answer: "No, I'm choosing to mine every moment for the possibility of joy." "Well, it seems to me you are blind to problems and are trying to avoid them." "No, but problem-centeredness is not like God and is simply a bad way to live." So you will need to be around some celebration-mentors.

(from Ortberg) Each of us knows a few people who are joy-carriers. When we are around them, they breathe life into us. Prize them. Thank them. Above all, get intentional about being with them. That is important, because there are other people in our lives also--people who have rejected celebration and joy as a lifestyle, who have decided to be victims. They don't want us to be joyful either. They are like the black holes of outer space: If we allow it, they will suck the joy right out of us.

A farmer had a neighbor, a constant complainer, a wet blanket in the linen closet of life. The farmer decided to impress this man for once in his existence, so he bought the world's greatest hunting dog, trained it thoroughly, and invited his joyless friend to go hunting. He showed the neighbor how his dog could stand motionless for an hour and pick up a scent a mile away. No response. From the blind the farmer shot a duck, which landed in the middle of the pond. Upon command, the dog trotted out, walked on the surface of the water, retrieved the bird, and dropped him at the feet of his master. "What do you think of that?" the famer challenged his neighbor. To which his joyless friend responded, "Your dog can't swim, can he?"

We all know people like that. We all have to endure a few joy-destroying people in life. We need to love them as best we can, but we also have to be very careful not to let them shape us. We may need to limit the time we spend with them. We certainly need to restrain their ability to sway our hearts, by setting relationship boundaries as needed.

(Back to my words) That includes limiting the amount of time you listen to your favorite news channel. Most of it, statistically speaking, is negative. A steady diet will embitter your spirit toward life, and specifically embitter you toward half of our country (depending on which direction of slanted news we choose - right or left).

Cultivate time with celebration mentors and joy carriers!

Working "On" in addition to "In": Our Staff Retreat Agenda

A helpful way to reconceptualize planning for me is "to spend time working ON your life instead of just IN your life."  That way I don't think of it as work, or business, or something only geeky or smart people do.

I first ran across the concept in a book on church planting - the fact that yes a pastor needs to do stuff pastors do by loving people, preaching the Word, etc.  But a pastor also needs to spend time working ON the church - where are we going, what's working well/not well, etc.  That's true for every worker, every owner, every person. 

"Those who plan what is good find love and faithfulness."  Proverbs 14:22

Sunday's message applied these and similar Proverbs to our personal lives.  This week, I took some of our church staff away to a mountain house to do the same for our church.  We set aside two days of time to work on the church, not in it.  Planning is hard work - everyone came home tired.  Even though we essentially sat in a circle in a big room with a beautiful view and talked/discussed/argued/prayed/laughed while eating snacks for 24 hours.  This staff team has reached a refreshingly unified and productive stage of working and being together, and it showed this week.

(here's a picture of some staff women 'hashtagging' - the lasting goofy memory of this planning retreat - naming the twitter hashtag that would be most appropriate to each funny/ridiculous/inappropriate comment made during our meetings)

We followed up the plan for 2012 ministry that we set last August by adding detail to the rest of this year, and addressed a few specific decisions to be made (most of our time was around September-December sermon series and related ministry, so that we are leading the church with the Word in the worship of the people of God). We already have the dates set for two days in August when we will seek the Spirit of God, in leadership community, for our 2013 plans.

Have you set aside a bit of time in your week, or month, or year to work ON your life? ON your business or ministry?  Here is a copy of our retreat agenda, i thought you might like to see it:

LFC Strategy and Planning Retreat  March 19-20, 2012   The Snider Shack, Boone NC

Agenda:

1. Before we shape the church, reflect on how God is shaping you:     Isaiah 49:2    How is the LORD using events of the past 12 months to sharpen you for ministry?What target has God sharpened you to most uniquely hit in ministry?

2.  Future thoughts – a look at our 3-5 year goals, where we’ve come from and where we’re going - to inform current year ministry

3. Evaluate first quarter of our 2012 Strategic Ministry Plan (sermon series, leadership weekend, building-opening Farris concert, House of Blues kickoff attached to building opening, practical life series to connect new spiritual seekers)

4. “ Teach Team”  Sermon series plan rest of 2012.  Bare bones plans were made last August; relook at current plan that’s been filled out by the pastors:

    a. where do we want to synchronize all lfc content (like HOB)?    Where can we take a creative zig or zag with this plan?

    b. FOCUSED planning/brainstorming on fall missio dei series:  goal is an Attractional (high attendance) series that is around ‘Loving the Poor Missio Dei’ – Gospel impact through extension of Missio Dei publicly in LKN, further discipleship of LFC Ministry Partners in missio dei biblical themes

5. Inform/Discuss/Calendar ministry plans rest of year.               

  i. September and January Lake Forest leadership weekend date and content    ii.  Each ministry

5. Transition to Jesse as Executive Director on staff, a case study:  Mike’s sabbatical.

  a..Here’s what I see, my expectations for summer sabbatical (“When I return August 1, if X has happened, it would mean success for…ministry…XD transition”)

  b.. Working sabbatical plan for LFC – review.  What do you see – concerns, rough spots, ideas etc to be planned for?

 6. Decision to be made: 

1. All LFC celebration outdoor Sunday worship at end of Celebrate series?  or mid-summer for momentum factor?  Where/how?
2. Other

Is Your Plate Full?

How full is your plate? Do you know the size of YOUR plate?  How do you manage your plate? Proverbs has so much wisdom regarding our use of time.  One aspect of our time that didn't quite make it into yesterday's sermon is the subject of our time as a 'plate.'   Here's material I gathered from a couple of sources and made my own for the sermon, but it didn't make the cut.  I hope its helpful to you:

Some of you are big-plate people, like a platter  (you can handle a lot of things at once).  People look at you and say ‘I don’t know how you do it, you’re insane, you’re freakish, are you on time management steroids?’  Some of you, you're not a platter, you're more like dinner-roll plate people (can only handle a few things at a time).  Your plate’s not real big – you focus.  You say ‘I was gonna do two things, then I realized that was one too many.’ 

The key is to know yourself before the Lord - know how big YOUR plate is, accept the size of your plate, like that about yourself, keep it relatively full, and if you put something new on your plate, take something off, unless it wasn’t full. 

A full plate is wonderful – life is meant to be lived, not defended against!  But if its full, and you’re serving in one organization or ministry, and you start serving in another, you probably need to choose between the two.  Decide you’re going to have another child?   Great – but something probably has to come off the plate.

Our problem is most of us fill up our plate, and then start piling more things on the plate, and it all can’t stay on and some of it falls off.  That’s when you’re late, you’re broke, burned out.   With no margin. Letting other people down frequently.  That's the sign you need to take some time to work ON your life, assess your plate, take a thing or two off, and move forward into more abundant life in Christ.

"Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed."  Proverbs 15:22

The Sweetest Fruit

We like to tell a lot of what we call 'God stories' at Lake Forest Church, and today I HAVE to tell you one that's between two parents and their child from this week.  I used to often say, 'the way I know whether we are a healthy church or not is if I'm hearing two kinds of God-stories regularly - stories of people coming to faith in Jesus, and stories of people growing deeper, transformed by their faith in Jesus.' 

For a few years, the elders resisted me.  Used to working in the world of spreadsheets, they felt the need for more data.  So after me telling a couple of God-stories or two, they'd feel the need to say 'yeah, but what does the data say.'  Eventually we've trained ourselves to follow Hebrews 12 and Luke 15 to believe that these types of stories are the most important data when it comes to the Kingdom of God and the business we happen to be in.

The reason is that we want to celebrate what Jesus celebrates and be motivated by what motivated Jesus.  Hebrews 12:1-3 tells us Jesus endured the cross "for the joy set before him" - the joy of people being reconciled to the God who loves them.  In Luke 15, Jesus makes his mission clear - to seek and to save people 'lost' from knowing God. In those parables, Jesus relays his and heaven's (the angels' ) joy and celebration when even 'one sinner repents' and is found by the great love of God through Jesus.  Each person who turns, or turns a bit more into the image of Jesus here on earth, is the utmost 'data' for those seeking to live 'motivated by what motivated Jesus.'

So the 'data' is in, and here's the sweetest fruit I know of this week in our community.  It's from two parents, Ashleigh and Ken, applying God's Word from last Sunday in Proverbs to their high calling of shepherding their children's hearts (shared by permission - from a Facebook message on Wednesday):

Hi Mike,
I just had to share some great and awesome news with you. Ken and I have been talking with Carter (our oldest daughter, 5) about not just believing in Jesus, but following Him, and what that means. I told her to just think about it and let me know if she had any questions. Well, tonight, our sweet baby girl prayed to the Lord that she wants to follow Him and wants Jesus in her heart. I am so thankful to you and our wonderful church for leading me and Ken, so that we may in turn, lead our children well. Thanks for all you do, and all you teach and share.
Ashleigh

"(The shepherd) calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ “I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance." Luke 15:6,7 

"Repent" means to turn from one direction and head in another one - the earlier in life the better to turn from self-derived, self-defined, self-sufficient life, to the life where Jesus Christ is sufficient for all.  I celebrate with these my friends, Carter's parents, and I pray for their ongoing shepherding of her heart.