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I’m excited to report that the inaugural Off-Script Kids retreat was wonderfully received and appreciated. This event, which you can read about here, is designed to bring encouragement and perspective for parents whose adult children have wandered from the Christian faith or in some other way have made life choices that have unsettled the parents’ expectations.

Over the first weekend of November, men and women representing eight different families gathered, talked, reflected, learned, and walked away encouraged. The weather was perfect, our hosts at San Pedro were graciously accommodating, and our special musical guests We Are Tuesday sang thoughtful songs that wonderfully intersected with the themes of the retreat. You can hear one of their songs, performed in San Pedro’s beautiful chapel, here:

It was everything I had hoped for.

Based on the interest in this, and on how well it was received, we have determined to continue to host these intimate events twice more in 2024. The next is scheduled for May 3-5. If you or others you know are interested, more information can be found at the Off-Script Kids web site. We have not yet opened registration for the May retreat, but those who put their names on the waiting list will get the first crack at attendance.

It’s a heavy thing that such an event is necessary, but we are thrilled to be able to offer a hopeful perspective for these parents.

II

A few people know that I have written a memoir exploring my roots as a pastor and how the unexpected intrusion of God’s grace once transformed and broadened me. This story of God’s grace, currently titled A Reformed Pastor, is one I very much want to tell, but it’s not yet ready to be put out there in any formal way. There are portions of it in need of serious editing, and some re-writing, tasks I’ve been unable to do since I’ve been focused on the Off-Script Kids retreat, Greatheart’s Table, and my day job.

Still, a couple of friends have been banging on my door to let them read it, no matter how rough it is. To satisfy their insistence, I have recruited them to be ‘beta readers’. Over the next several months (a year, I imagine) I plan to release chapters slowly to these readers. After I touch the chapters up a bit, I’ll send them out one at a time letting my beta readers go to work offering feedback and suggestions.

It occurred to me recently that there might be others who would like to join this team of beta readers. If you would like to be included, you need to do a few things. First, become a Greatheart’s Table paid subscriber or Patreon supporter at at least the 10K level. Secondly, ask me to include you. Then, as each chapter is released, you will receive it via email and be asked to read it and offer constructive criticism on it. And that’s it!

But remember – this is not automatic for paid subscribers or supporters. You will need to ask me by emailing me directly. This should be a fun journey!

III

My friend Mike Osborne, retired pastor, dean of students at Reformed Theological Seminary, and the author of the helpful book on pastoral endurance called Surviving Ministry is a man clearly wearing many hats. One of those hats is a ministry serving pastors in crisis called Standing Stone Ministry. I asked Mike to describe that ministry for us, as it could be helpful for some of you. Here is what he wrote:

Standing Stone Ministry is an interdenominational non-profit organization founded in 2002 by a lay couple named Jim and Debbie Hogan. Jim and Debbie were concerned about the stories of burnout, isolation, and discouragement they heard from a number of pastors, including their own. They bought a ranch in Colorado and turned it into a place of retreat for ministry leaders who needed a place of rest, counsel, and fellowship.

A decade later, they realized their ministry to burned-out pastors could be multiplied exponentially by training and recruiting people to care for ministry leaders in the field. At last count (October 1, 2023), there were 219 field shepherds walking alongside over 3,000 ministry leaders throughout the US and Canada. Field shepherds are older, experienced pastors who spend time each week visiting, listening to, praying and caring for ministry leaders who need someone safe to talk to. Conversations are held in confidence. Field shepherds are assigned to a cohort of fellow shepherds for training, communication, and accountability.

The mission of Standing Stone Ministry is to guide ministry leaders–pastors, missionaries, church planters, etc.–into healthy ministry. I spend approximately 15 hours a week with ministry leaders who find themselves in all sorts of situations. I meet with them either in person, over the phone, or via Zoom. Some relationships are short, others are long-term.

If this sounds like something you would be interested in, either as one needing care or to be a field shepherd, you can reach Mike by emailing him here.

That’s it for this go round. I wish you all a delightful Thanksgiving week. Our regular posts will return on November 27.

A cursory look around quickly reveals that I have not been frequenting these parts recently. I’m still busy writing, but not here. Two important projects have been consuming me.

The first, which I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, is Greatheart’s Table, a thrice monthly newsletter and podcast. Each post is short, about 800 words, and therefore is easily digested. Though I write this as a vehicle for encouraging pastors, many of my subscribers and listeners are not pastors. I hear they still find great benefit in the content. I encourage you to check it out by visiting the web site or, better, heading straight to Substack to subscribe!

The second project is one done under the auspices of Greatheart’s Table called “Off-Script Kids.”

The goal here is to help parents adjust mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and practically to life when an adult child heads in a concerning and unanticipated direction. This material does not center on our kids (mine receive only passing mention) but on how we as parents may have been misled by an evangelical parenting subculture and how we might navigate a way out of the guilt and shame this has produced.
For now this material is presented primarily in a retreat held in Winter Park, Florida. Two are planned for 2024. For more information on these, visit the retreat website here.

So, yes, I have been busy. But I still want to drop in here now and then. As a part of Greatheart’s Table, I publish what I call a ‘Third Monday’ edition which is a designed to update readers on what I’m doing and to point toward things that I think they might find helpful. It occurred to me recently that it would be worthwhile to post those editions in this space as well. For now, that’s what I’ll do every third Monday.

Til then, thanks for dropping by!

I was mopping today thinking good thoughts of a dear friend. That’s what she always called me. A dear friend. I was her pastor once and I suppose with a friend like her one is always her pastor. She called me Tuesday because I had failed to respond to a few emails – emails I assumed were newsy and could wait, but perhaps emails the contents of which I somehow instinctively feared. So we talked, Adri and I, and laughed, and she cried as she shared the news of her liver cancer diagnosis, the subject of the unread emails. We talked of death. She said, “I’m not afraid of death; it’s the process that scares me.”

I was thinking good thoughts of our lives together – her unwavering support, her immense trust in me, her unflagging zeal for the things of God. I thought of the blonde jokes I delighted in telling her, and the verbal jabs I’d receive back. I thought of her laugh and her smile. I thought of her deep devotion to her family and her insistence that her youngest son was to be called “Nathaniel,” not “Nate,” as he is known to the rest of the world. I thought of how she would arm herself with pictures of her grandchildren to show me and her feisty resistance when I joked that all babies are ugly at the start. She won that one. I lamented how she, of that wonderfully inquisitive and thoughtful mind, often would disparage herself as stupid.

It is sad what it takes to stimulate meditation on the value of a person. I was thinking good thoughts of my dear friend Adri and her devoted husband Gus because I received word Friday that Adri had suddenly taken ill and was in the ER in critical condition. Why, we don’t yet know. But she wanted me to know she was there. She told her sister who took her to the ER, “Get Randy’s phone number. He doesn’t answer his emails.”

That was Friday. By Saturday morning I received word that her sons had agreed to a DNR order and the ventilator was being removed. She had been showing no signs of any ability to breath on her own. She was afraid of the process of dying, not death. God knew that and showed her grace. Her battle is over. The rest of us grieve.

Paul Miller in his book A Praying Life encourages us to create prayer cards for those for whom we pray. On these cards are to go the names of the people, the things we pray for, and any scripture that in some way represents the person or persons or guides our prayers for them. When I prepared the card for Gus and Adri, years ago, I could only think of Psalm 16:3.

“As for the saints in the land,
they are the excellent ones,in whom is all my delight.”

And now, there is one less saint in the land.

In my study hangs a needle work piece that Adri made for me years ago of the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism. It is fitting to end with that. This indeed was Adri’s only comfort in life, and in death.

Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own,
but belong-body and soul in life and in death-
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid all my sins with his precious blood,
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven:
in fact, all things must work together
for my salvation.
Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life
and makes me wholeheartedly willing
and ready from now on to live for him.

Tuesday morning my wife and I read together these words:

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? (Psalm 13:1, 2)

In my experience, “How long” questions generally morph into “why” questions and when those who ask them don’t hear an answer from God they often ask their pastor. When asked I would love to answer with words that make the pain disappear. I listen and empathize as a fellow struggler.

That day that began with these questions ended with the terrible news of a friend’s tragic and sudden death.

Kevin Collins was a faithful minister of the Gospel, a servant who had given his life (that part not irretrievably captured by his love for the University of Tennessee!) to Christ and his church. As such he had loved and ministered to me and served and strengthened the church I pastor. His kindness was legendary and his pastoral heart irrepressible. I was shaken by this and was reminded how often death steals from us the things, the people, we love.

Why, God? How long shall our enemy be exalted over us?

Our souls cry out for explanations that satisfy our hearts. We want what theologians call a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God, an explanation of how evil can seem to still exert sway in a world purportedly governed by a loving God. We want a word to satisfy the ache in the heart caused by death.

God, however much we might plead, chooses not to answer all our questions. The scriptures do not exist to assuage our curiosity but to ensure our salvation. What we are told is that in the light of the cross, no matter how great the inexplicable evil around us, there are no grounds for questioning the love of God for us nor his devotion to our welfare. The God whose ways we so often question leaves us no question of his love for us.

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us…. (1 John 3:16)

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10)

No matter what we face, we need to be once again stunned by the depth of the love of God in the cross.

“We learn from John [1John 3:16, 4:10], then, that although in this world our attention is constantly arrested by the problems of evil and pain, which seem to contradict God’s love, we will be wise not to allow it to be deflected from the cross, where God’s love has been publicly and visibly made manifest.” (John Stott, The Cross of Christ)

God’s love has been revealed to us in a dazzling and objective display of sacrifice. Will he who died for us not care for us in every other way?

We will still not understand the evil we experience. Life will continue to confuse us. Hard things will come. Questions will be asked. We will not get the answers we want. It is then we must look to the cross and know the unwavering love of God for us.

I spoke to someone the other day about how we would be adjusting our family Christmas morning activities because of Christmas falling on a Sunday, given the fact that our church would be meeting for worship that morning.

“You’re having church on Christmas?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “It’s Sunday.”

“And you are having a Christmas Eve service, too?”

“Yes.”

“Wow,” she laughed. “That’s a lot of Jesus.”

She’s right, in a way. But is that bad?

I’ve spoken with pastors whose churches are canceling services on Christmas morning, most so that they do not disrupt special family time. That’s an honorable and precious motive, but one which may be tilting in the direction of the not-too-glorious triumph of the family. As my friend, Geoff Henderson, has often pointed out, and does so eloquently in this context here, the church in an attempt to honor the family runs the risk of idolizing the family.

Certainly left unchecked the church can become a hub of activity that draws husband away from wife and child away from parent. But an equal and perhaps greater danger is the ‘corrective’ that subtly communicates to our children that their personal preferences are more important than the worship of God. I know the challenges and have faced them when sporting events are scheduled during Sunday worship. There are hard decisions here, decisions which aren’t always clear. But do we not at some point subtly communicate to our children that public worship is and can be a secondary matter? Whether we mean to or not, when we choose family tradition, i.e. Christmas morning, over the worship of God (ostensibly the origin of that family tradition) we have chosen family over God. And that makes me sad.

But you think I’m overreacting. I know. Maybe I am. What is one Sunday, after all? That’s an important question. It’s one Sunday, but maybe we need this Sunday more than most.

It has been a hard year. It’s been hard for our family personally, but it has been hard for us all culturally. In the light of this past year, I was asked twice in one day this week how I keep pressing on through all the realities that threaten to pull us down. My response was, without any sense of pastoral piety, and without hesitation, “Advent.” Advent, of which Christmas is the culmination, keeps me going.

The promise of Advent in the Christian calendar is that the sad things in this world are going to be undone. The promise is that those things which are broken will be healed and that the evil that has embedded its terrible talons in our flesh and threatened to drag us to the ground will be stripped of power and banished from doing us harm. The hope of Jesus’ birth is that with his coming God has begun a work which he fully intends to complete. Advent and Christmas is the season that confirms to us that there will be a time when

They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9)

This is not simply an ‘in house’ kind of hope. Memoirist Mary Karr, whose spiritual convictions are unknown to me and certainly not revealed on her Twitter feed, tweeted this week a quote she attributed simply to the prophet Isaiah.

“Strengthen the hands that are feeble,
Make firm the knees that are weak,
Say to those whose hearts are frightened,
Be strong, fear not.”

She feels it. She longs for it, as we all do. The hope we have, absent from her tweet, is Advent. For the hope that was Isaiah’s is ours:

“Behold your God…. He will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35:4)

What we all long for whether we know it or not is the coming of One who will make things right. Worship on Christmas is not an interruption in our family lives. It is an act of desperate hope.

If three or thirty or three hundred gather for worship on Christmas morning, it will be a time to bow before the one who has come and is coming, and to drink deeply of the hope we celebrate in the gifts we give.

Heaven knows, we need it.

We need Jesus. We need, in fact, a lot of Jesus.

There are two (or three!) ways you can help this blog map its future. The first is easy. I’ve created a simple survey which shouldn’t take you more than a minute or two to complete. Please click here. This will help me think through what has resonated with my readers and how this content gets to them. (A link to this survey is also on the sidebar.)

The second is a bit more difficult. I am deeply grateful to those of you who have generously supported this blog over this past year. Your generosity is enabling me to take the steps that are necessary to move forward. The need for financial support will continue on into the future. So, if any would like to help us as we move forward, you can contribute by clicking here. I am very grateful. (There is a link to this also on the sidebar.)

Finally, any time you can direct traffic to this site, do so! If something strikes your fancy, pass it on to others. It’s the only way, really, any will find their way here. This will especially be true when we kick off the new site.

Thanks!

I love writing this blog, and I am gratified by the kind words many of you often pass my way in response. Some of what has been written here has resonated in an encouraging and helpful way with some of you. When “Somber and Dull” lay dormant for a couple of years, a few of you kept prodding me to resurrect it, and so I did. I like to think I have things to say that are worth saying, and this blog gives me the space to say them. I am trying to contribute something positive and helpful regarding how we are to live as Christians and the church in the modern world.

So far, I have written for a core of very loyal readers, a core who either are fond of the name “Somber and Dull” or who are not put off by it. But as I consider ways to grow the readership of the blog, I think the time has come to put the title out to pasture.

“Somber and Dull” was chosen as the title of this blog on a whim when I started it in October, 2006. You can read about that here and here.

The title and its ironic sensibilities grew on me and a few others. Others, however, are puzzled by it. In fact, the title confuses even internet sales algorithms, one of which thought this week that it would be suitable to inform me that the domain name ‘somberandstupid’ was available if I wanted to purchase it.

I’ll pass, but the point was received. The title is too obscure.

Soon, therefore, I will be giving this site a good makeover christening it with a new name and a new URL. You won’t see the changes soon, and I’ll give plenty of warning.

As I was thinking through this, I drove by a pond and watched a duck start at one end and madly flap his wings trying to gain altitude and speed. That will be me trying to move this blog along. I may crash into the far end of the pond, but that’s okay. There may also be a chance to soar.

For the first nineteen years of my life, I attended Methodist churches in which we possessed ‘trespasses’ needing to be forgiven, according to the form of the Lord’s Prayer we regularly recited. For all but three of the years since (I’m now sixty) I’ve attended Presbyterian churches where the ‘trespasses’ had become ‘debts’. I’ve been confessing debts twice as long as trespasses. And yet…

Some months ago I was sitting in my study troubled by many things and seeking to pray. I prayed, as I am prone to do in such times when I don’t know how to pray, the Lord’s Prayer. In the intensity of that moment, I found myself praying for the forgiveness of my childhood Methodist trespasses and not my adulthood Presbyterian debts. Praying from within the context of desperation, those childhood liturgical forms welled up from deep within me where they had been disciplined to reside until needed most. Liturgy has an ability to shape the young and formative mind in powerful and lasting ways.

I was reminded of this in a comment by journalist James Fallows, not a particularly devout man if his blog and other writings are any indication, and yet he says this:

“I spent my youth hearing the cadences of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer repeated roughly one zillion times and still feel they are my main guide to the proper shape and pacing of a sentence.”

Somehow our youthful liturgical exposure is formative in ways that transcend the merely spiritual.

And yet, we’ve persuaded ourselves that children get nothing from public worship. I beg to differ.

Advice is easy, listening is hard, and advice given without first listening can be hurtful. So I often pray for the grace to be silent. Sometimes I forget.

Years ago, my mother had had some surgery after which she was confined to a rehab facility until she had recovered sufficiently to return home. She hated it and let me know. On the phone she told me about how the place was full of crazy and demented people. I immediately told her that it couldn’t be that bad. I told her to just go sit at a table and start talking to people.

We had a joke in our family that Mom could carry on a fifteen-minute phone conversation with a wrong number. Where I got the notion that she was not already trying to befriend people in precisely the way I suggested I cannot say. Nevertheless, I did not hesitate to give her the advice which, when followed, would clearly make everything okay.

Except that it wouldn’t. I was not living near her and so when I had the chance to visit her, I met the people I was telling her to befriend, people whose mental acuity had long since departed. I suddenly understood her loneliness and to this day regret not being more quick to sympathize than I was to advise.

Sometimes people trust us enough to share their sorrow with us. That is a gift before which we need to be quiet. We need to believe that they in fact know what they are talking about and that their sorrow or confusion or hardship is real and that it will not bend or bow to our hastily spoken simplistic solutions.

There is a time to speak, but not before we’ve listened and made every effort to understand. And even then, the best move might be to simply be quiet and wait for the words that God will give.