Minors and Major - A Request for Prayer

This next week I go to be with my father who is having major open heart surgery. I am grateful that God has protected my father and I know that God is in absolute control of all that will transpire.

I have only had "minor surgery." Of course I have come to believe that the label "minor" is only given to the surgery that is done to someone else. But this is a "major" deal. No matter what kind of circumstance of life, major or minor, we need to always remember that God is still God. Nothing has taken Him by surprise and that His will is best.

I am most certainly not a fatalist, nor am I one to believe that life is only what I make of it. God has a plan, a purpose, a design for life. I fit into that framework and in my existence I affect and am effected by others.

My father has affected many lives in over 50 years of ministry. This is a surgery that will be prayed for in many different time zones and in different countries. I am sure of that. However, I am grateful that people are praying for it is to the One and only One God that we turn to in these "major" points of life with absolute confidence that He is the only one who can make the "no-matter-what-happens" of life work out for His glory and our good.

I hope we can also learn this in the "minors" of life as well. God is still the only one who can seam together the monotonous of our daily routine into a tapestry of effective and purposeful living.

Thanks for praying and may we remember that God is just as concerned with our minors and we are about our majors.

The First Argument

I know I was planning to get back to my previous post, but I came across this today and thought it pretty funny. What do you suppose was Adam and Eve's first argument after they were kicked out of the garden? Here is one possibility.

Open Source Churches

J. R. Kerr, the singles/teaching pastor at Park Community Church in Chicago, IL, recently wrote an article in Leadership Journal. The title of his article was "Open Source Activists." The motivation behind his article is to demonstrate how leadership styles need to change to reflect the changes in how people process and interact with information.

Open Source tools like YouTube and Wikipedia give the average person on the street the ability to create and give input where before that person would be forced to simply observe or only interact with a limited audience.

J. R. Kerr challenges the way our churches today use leadership and specifically a top-down mentality. The pastor becomes the focal point and without his input and direction, people are left powerless to perform their tasks and accomplish their ministries.

He put it this way, I was supposed to have some degree of control over every part of the church, supposed to have the answer to whatever problem arose. One day, I had a string of meetings that kept me from my office most of the day. Upon my return I met five people whose jobs had come to a halt because they needed me. They all had the information and the skills necessary to do their work, but they lacked the authority—the necessary space—to lead. This kind of organizational environment expects leaders to know and control virtually everything in the life of the community.

Mr. Kerr's big push is that leadership in churches today needs to relinquish control and allow others to be involved in the creative and development process of ministry within the church. He argues that people today want to be heard and have a voice in the development of ideas and even the shaping of vision for that assembly.

Kerr holds that nothing within our churches should be considered off limits or untouchable if it is felt to be an obstacle to success.

J. R. Kerr's final paragraph helps summarize his view. This new generation sees themselves and their potential differently. They don't require titles and positions to influence the culture. This is a generation of social activists, artists, and leaders who intend to accomplish great things for the kingdom of God. Our responsibility is to make space for them, and that requires thinking differently about how we lead.

Read the article if you find time and I am going to react more in my next blog. It is a challenge to us as "leaders" to make sure that we are truly leading in a way that is Biblical, effective, relevant, and going somewhere. Are we leading or just being control freaks? Are we enabling or just micromanaging? Are we shepherding or butchering our flock? We are to be leaders so how should we lead?

Kerr is pressing an issue here. Is he right or reactionary? Is he on target or misguided? Is it situational, personality, or is it overarching?

Crazy Love (A Review)

I have just finished listening to the audio book version of Crazy Love by Francis Chan. It has been a very challenging and meditative time. Francis Chan incites us to earnestly inspect our God and His love for us. Chan also then provokes us (me) to consider how I love my God in return. How then do I demonstrate, interact, and increase my ability to love God?

Tim Challies does his review of this book as well. Read his review and then I encourage you to also read or listen to this resource.

It is a crazy love to this world. But to us may it be a kind of love that causes us to be more like Christ. You can also check out the website for this book HERE.

Fearful

My family and I had the opportunity to go this past Monday and Tuesday to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Baptist Churches. It was their annual meeting and held in West Bend. We traveled over and had a great couple of days making some new acquaintances, seeing old friends, and getting know newer friends better.

The theme this year was from 1 Corinthians 16:13 Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.

The phrase they took was "stand fast in the faith." Fred Moritz was the main speaker and did a phenomenal job of challenging us to stand fast, be strong, to understand that the source of our strength is not in us but is from the Lord.

I am reminded of Paul's comments in 2 Timothy 1:7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

What do we have to fear? What do we have that could cause us to cower in dread and timidity? The power of God is mighty to the pulling down of strongholds. It is the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead, cast demons out of people, healed the sick, opened the eyes of the blind, gave strength to the lame, and today transforms a sin-dead soul into a forgiven-eternally saved saint!

This power is the same power that rests in each and every one of us who knows Christ as our Savior. This power is what grants us the authority to go and proclaim a message of deliverance and redemption.

Fearful? Of what? A threat on our life, a shunning of a relative, a losing of an old friend? Afraid of losing your job, losing your health, losing your parent, losing your spouse, losing your child?

Fearful? Of whom? The devil, the political activists, the unregenerate neighbor, the waiter at our table? The bill collector, the soldier at the door who is there to tell you your loved one is missing or dead while serving his/her country?

There are perhaps many scenarios that would warrant our response to be fearful. But really, what do we have to fear? For God is not its author. God is not the bringer of fear. He is the One who grants POWER! His power, the creative power of a God who can and did create everything in six literal days according to His perfect design. The Power of this God created storms and yet He also calms storms.

He is the One who grants us LOVE! A love that sees the burden of a sin-sick soul and the consequences of a life who rejects Christ's sacrifice upon that cross. A love that is not sensual, selfish, or based upon it being reciprocated. We have the love of Christ which then compels us to love others and to demonstrate that love. It is a love that passes all comprehension and yet is something to be known. It is a love that sacrificed all and gave it to you and to me. It is a love that sees past the immediate and beholds the potential of all that is good in the hand of this gracious and loving God.

He is the One who grants to us a sound mind, a discipline, a view point on reality and the way we are to live. Fear causes a frantic tendency. We lose perspective; we lose faith. Fear stirs up imaginations and tendencies to lose touch on what is real. God is REAL. God did not put into us a spirit of fear, but gave to us a source of control and understanding. We can grasp the direction we are to go because we have His Word. We can gain the comfort we need because we have His Spirit. We can gravitate toward the right support group because we have His Body, the church. Nothing can truly shake us if we are living by faith and not by fear.

We are not to live in fear. Fear cripples, distracts, and states that we have not a God who understands, comprehends, or transcends to our situation, needs, or time frame. Fear takes our eyes off God who CAN and declares that there is now before us a situation that God cannot do anything about. But that is not true. Fear focuses upon the lie and Faith focuses upon the truth.

I have not a God who can't, but a God who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us. (Ephesians 3:20)

Fear CANNOT, but God certainly CAN!