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Tag Archives: Church
Thanksgiving Guilt Trip?
Bishop and Christian*, November 2016
This year, November 27 is the First Sunday in Advent. That means that we begin a new church year, and enter again into the life of Jesus, from prophecy through the giving of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Here’s the challenge for you: to participate in the entire church year. Yes. I’m asking you to be in the Lord’s House every Lord’s Day and on festivals, too. And that should include corporate Bible study, particularly on Sunday morning. [If you’re reading this and you’re not a member of Faith, then take up the challenge in your own congregation.] To let the rhythm of the church year, and the weekly rhythm of Word and Sacrament, order your days and your months and your year. To refuse to let the world order your life. To refuse to be conformed to this world, with its priorities and schedules and what it considers important; and, instead, to be transformed in the renewing of your mind as the Holy Spirit brings you the Word of God each and every week.
Babylon and Jerusalem
Bishop and Christian*, February 2016
What is a pastor for? I’ve been thinking about that a lot, lately. The answer is obviously of vital importance to me! I think much of the answer that a person might give depends upon expectations. One member of a congregation has certain expectations based on his experience with previous pastors. Another member might have expectations based on what she wants done in the future. One pastor has expectations based on good or bad experiences in the past; another has expectations based on what he’d like to see in the future. Insofar as they are found in the Scriptures, these expectations are not right or wrong in themselves.
But often the expectations of both pastors and congregations are based on abstractions or generic descriptions, rather than on particular contexts and specific people. Normally, when people are hired in the secular business world, it makes sense to identify a need and hire someone who can fill that space. That doesn’t always work well when it comes to pastors and congregations, because the Christian Church is based around a single need and a single solution: dying sinners in need of Christ, who is life.
The Way of Glory
Take Shelter
Bishop and Christian*, February 2015
The Church of Jesus Christ is never a static, unmoving entity. Even as she lives in the present, she is tied to the past as she waits in hope for what the future will bring. Often, conversations about the Church—what she is, what she should do, how she should look—revolve around various points of time: this is what my congregation used to look like; or, these are the problems here and now; or, this is how she should be in the future. Because the Church is an historical entity, those aspects are all worthy of consideration. But we can never privilege one point of time over another. The Church was not better or purer the closer it was to Jesus and the Apostles; the Church is not smarter or more significant because we’ve had two thousand years to get it right; the Church is not heading toward a utopian future in this creation.
Behind all of the disputes and controversies that have disturbed the Church internally is a failure to hold close to the second phrase of the Third Article of the Creed: “I believe…in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” Just as we cannot look around at the world, or into the circumstances of our own lives, in order to discover what God is doing, neither can we look at what we can see of the Church in order to discover her source, sustenance, or goal. As with Christian faith generally, the only One in whom we can know for certain what God is doing is His Son, Jesus. Just as Jesus’ death and resurrection tell us what the outcome of this world will be for His saints, so they also tell us the truth about the Church’s existence in this world. Jesus is the source and beginning of the Church’s life in the water and blood of His pierced side, He is the ongoing food and drink to sustain the Church’s life in the midst of this world, and He is the goal to which the Church is headed, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesisans 4:13).
There Is No Other
Bishop and Christian*, October 2014
How are your feelings related to your worship? That is a question that is behind many of the arguments in the church related to worship. Talk to enough people from various congregations and it will not be long before you come up against a division between those who, on the one hand, know that they have been to church if they feel good, or different, or forgiven and, on the other hand, those who do not seem to care whether they feel anything at all. The division can be seen most clearly when someone leaves a particular (“stale,” “dead,” “boring”) congregation for another (“refreshing,” “alive,” “exciting”) one in which the Spirit seems to be moving more noticeably. What is striking about those conversations is that the descriptive words are completely tied to individual perception: that is, for worship to be good, everything depends on the feelings of the individual who is participating in the worship experience. If someone does not feel (there’s that word again) that he or she “got anything” from the service, and if this experience goes on long enough, such a person may be inclined to seek out a church where something (the “something” is rather ambiguous) is “gotten.” You may recognize a friend or a family member—or yourself—in that description.
Bishop and Christian 