I had never heard of Nancy Guthrie until this lecture floated across my radar screen. Apparently she is a well traveled speaker (speaking in September here). Her reflections on what a church and her people should do to be a support for those who have suffered loss is greatly helpful.
Category: Church Page 4 of 6
This post may seem to come out of left field.
Well, technically it comes from the pitcher’s mound, the reflections of Dirk Hayhurst, a seasoned minor league baseball player, and the author of The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran
He recently wrote an article for The Bleacher Report cracking a window on the world of professional baseball.
There is swearing in professional baseball, not to mention fighting, drinking, drugs, cheating, affairs, pornography, gambling, abuse, lying, stealing and just about everything else that would make your mother weep if she found out you were doing it.
Naked.
For some players, professional baseball is the worst thing to ever happen to them.
And as much as I enjoyed this as a baseball fan, I wondered about what being thrust into church leadership, into church office, into the pulpit, can do to some of us. Perhaps this is why the Apostle Paul says that an elder is not to be a recent convert.
The weekend has been one of deep emotion which, I hope, none will mind my sharing in this space.
One year ago, today, I had the unexpected privilege of being installed as the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oviedo, Florida. This has been a wonderful placement for me, and I thank God repeatedly for the grace he has shown to me in giving me this call. It has been a wild year, one sprinkled with challenges, certainly, but as well one blessed with many precious new relationships.
The joy of this anniversary, though, is dampened by the somber reality that yesterday marked the final service of the congregation of Hope Presbyterian Church in Bradenton, Florida, the church I pastored for twenty-five years. My mind does not have a place for conceiving of Bradenton without HPC. And a lively debate could be held concerning the degree of my own culpability in its demise. I know. That debate rages in my mind often.
And yet I don’t want HPC to pass without a notice of its strength. The church was composed of men and women whose love for Jesus ran deep. Children were reared there who are continuing to serve Jesus around the world. Creative ways of bringing Jesus to the community were effected. The church had a genuine beauty that was an honor to Christ. The gospel was more than preached there, it was lived.
I am so grateful for the years that God gave me and my family there. Even now, the great longing of my ten-year old is for the friends and adult mentors he knew there. The impact, not just the memory, of Hope Church will live on in our lives and, we hope, in the lives of many others.
God in his mercy did not allow the impact of these corresponding events go without notice. On Saturday, as members of Covenant Church invested time in my son, playing basketball with him and forming new mentor relationships with him, we were blessed by a surprise visit from Andrea, a former member of Hope, now married and living in St. Louis, who through her years in Bradenton had been like a daughter to us. Both our worlds overlapped.
Then, on Sunday, we enjoyed a long and happy lunch with a few or our new friends from Covenant Church. Later that afternoon we headed off to help a friend from Bradenton, Doug, a med student moving to Orlando to finish his rotations, unload his U-Haul. We were joined in that by Tom and Sam and Pete and Sarah, all young people with Bradenton connections, some deep. Again, our worlds overlapped.
God was masterfully weaving the two parts of my life, the joy and the sorrow, the Bradenton and the Oviedo, together in a way designed to remind me that he is God and the he is good.
Each morning in Bradenton, while it was still dark, I would walk out of my east-facing front door to retrieve the newspaper. When the season was right and the sky was clear, I would look up and see bright and distinct the constellation Orion. That sight came to symbolize for me my life there, a life that has now past.
When I left, I saw it one last time from that place, and bid it farewell. It was hard, harder than I imagined.
I no longer see Orion on those clear and bright mornings. But what I cannot forget is that the God who put Orion in the sky is the God who put me in Bradenton for a time and and who has now put me in Oviedo. To grieve the past that is lost is normal and human. But I celebrate the God who is not lost, who is not past, who is ever present and loving and good, whose shepherdly instincts lead me, undeservedly, beside still waters and into green pastures, and has, beyond hope and imagination, placed me with another flock, who continue to bless me in ways that I will never completely understand.
My heart goes out to the now scattered flock that was Hope Presbyterian Church. I am comforted that we serve a God whose purposes never fail. Far more meaningful than greeting a constellation in the sky is this:
I greet thee, who my sure Redeemer art,
my only trust and Savior of my heart,
who pain didst undergo for my poor sake;
I pray thee from our hearts all cares to take.
At Covenant Presbyterian Church we recently were encouraged by two of our congregation who flew to Japan as soon as they could after the tsunami in order to serve in whatever way they could to bring calm and relief and restoration and hope to that land they love. They were sent with tremendous enthusiasm and overwhelming support and they have returned with great stories of God’s mercy and kindness.
I wonder how often we are blind to the ordinary disasters which sometimes silently befall the community around us.
A young woman in our neighborhood recently found out that another family in the subdivision was facing a relapse in their teenaged son’s cancer. Treatment involved daily five-hour round trips to a facility administering radiation. She on her own decided to respond to this more ordinary disaster in a wonderful way, recruiting many other neighbors to provide frozen meals for this family so that they did not need to worry about dinner for the duration.
I was really impressed, and we were delighted to be a part. I’m not likely to fly to Japan or to the location of the next geopolitical locus of need. But I pray that God would give me, my family, and our church, clarity in the ways we can reflect the compassion of God to our neighbors in the midst of their ordinary disasters.
I don’t see dead people.
But I hear voices. Or, perhaps I should say, I hear ‘the Voice’.
Take your hand away from the phone. Don’t be calling the guys in the white jackets just yet.
But I’m serious. I hear the voice that we all hear. The voice that says, “That’s not really true.” I hear the voice of doubt.
I’m not saying that the Voice is audible and I’m not saying that the Voice is welcome. But I would be lying if I said that I was a stranger to the Voice.
The Voice is annoying when I’m praying. It whispers to me that praying is a waste of time, that there is no God to hear me, that to imagine him hearing and responding to the prayers of a billion people is just fantasy. I do my best to ignore it and to remember that a man once, who rose again from the dead, found that prayer was very important.
The Voice is threatening when I’m traumatized. It speaks questions to my heart challenging the claims of the love of this one whom we call God. It is quite the logical voice, speaking in propositions which begin with some variation of “If this God was real…” or “If this God really loved you….” Like Christian fleeing the city of destruction, all I can do sometimes is put my hands over my ears and try my best not to listen.
But, I confess, I sometimes am taken in. I believe the Voice. I want to believe the Voice. I want to be led beside waters of self pity and to wallow in the muddy fields of rotten luck. I give into the Voice for a time, but somehow I always emerge. Someone comes along and says, unknowingly, and in so many words, “What are you doing there?”
I long for the day when the Voice is silenced. When his threatening tones are no more. When try as I might, I won’t be able to hear. When the only voice I will hear will be that of a Good Shepherd.
But until then, I’ll still hear the Voice. I’m comforted that others have heard the Voice and persevered – Spurgeon, Luther, John the Baptist, and our patron saint, Thomas. And I’m grateful to be and to have been in churches where people are honest enough to admit that they hear and listen to the Voice. Such honesty helps me realize that the Voice has no real substance and his logic no real basis.
But still, I listen. And I grieve for those who find no outlet to admit what they hear and how they struggle. In sympathy, a man has put together an online group called Doubters Annonymous [via Justin Taylor] and this is a good and courageous thing. I’m just sad that such cannot be admitted openly in the church. I’m sad that anonymity seems necessary.
In hearing the Voice, I figure I’m in good company. Like everyone. I also know that there are answers to every question the Voice throws at me. Just sometimes I’m not in a frame of mind to hear those answers. I just need to be loved and embraced and supported.
But I also know that Jesus died and rose again. For hearers of the Voice. It’s His voice, then, that I strive to hear above the din.
And I do. But often I hear it through the means of fellow pilgrims. And for them, I’m grateful.
This past Sunday morning, I went to church.
That in itself is not so unusual. After all, I am a pastor, and going to church is my job. What was unusual is that I went to church as an ordinary guy. Not as pastor, but as worshiper. And I was reminded of how great a privilege and how important a component of life is worship.
Sunday for a pastor is normally a work day. My mind is filled from the moment I rise – usually very early – with thoughts about the details of the service and particularly the sermon I’m to preach. Right or wrong, this preoccupation rarely disappears even after worship has begun. And though I benefit from worship and truly do celebrate the Lord’s kindness in the communion we share, there is still a distraction that comes from having such a public role to play.
But this past Sunday was different. It was ordinary. I was on vacation and had no responsibilities. In fact, I could have stayed home. I could have judged that I ‘needed a break’, or that I was tired, or any one of the myriad of reasons that I have heard as a pastor over the years for placing a low priority on public worship.
But I went, with no responsibilities, and I was blessed.
We showed up later than planned because we went together as a family. My visiting son and his wife have an infant son whose presence slowed us down. But that was okay. We arrived as worship was beginning and we took our seats as would anyone else. We listened, we spoke, we sang, we prayed.
When the time came for the sermon to be preached, I reached for my note pad. The one preaching in my place was my intern and I knew he would be interested in my critical reflections upon his preaching. I started to take notes to share with him, and then stopped. More than he needed my reflections, I needed to be fed God’s Word. I needed to be preached to, and he did such a solid job of that that it was a blessing just to listen.
And then I had the rare experience (for me) of being served communion. I am normally the one serving. The sacrament served to remind me of my place in the people of God and the privilege that is. It was such a warm and encouraging reminder.
I left having been blessed by the ordinary service of God’s ordinary people in the ordinary rhythm of the church.
And I left wondering why anyone would ever voluntarily pass on the extraordinary privilege of gathering for worship with God’s people. It is not something that we merely should do. It is something that we are regularly privileged to do.
Perhaps it is only we who rarely have that privilege who can see that so well.
One more morsel to chew on from Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life
“By the 1930s the average American Fundamentalist was not, at least, a proponent of theocracy, but he did have a way of confusing America, the Republican Party and the capitalist system with the kingdom of God.”
I guess things don’t change much. Tim Keller makes this observation in the forward to a new book by Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era
“A very large number of young evangelicals believe that their churches have become as captured by the Right as mainline churches were captured by the Left.”
Here are some flavorful nuggets from a recent reading of Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life
On the lack of congregational prayer:
“Undoubtedly the small quantity of intelligent intercessory prayer in most twentieth-century congregations is part of the short-circuiting of missionary consciousness among the laity. The establishment of the kingdom of God is an elusive task; we cannot even see what it involves in our vicinity without specific prayer, and we certainly will have little urgency to carry it out unless we are praying.” (page 157)
On the misdirected focus of our prayers:
“In small prayer groups, often the concerns which are shared and prayed about are wholly personal, involved with healing, psychological adjustment and other immediate individual burdens. Larger issues which are closely related to the interests of the kingdom of God are ignored. Groups in which this occurs should make a determined effort to engage in kingdom-oriented prayer.” (pages 158-159)
Arguing against what he sees as the ‘monastic’ tendencies of many churches, the tendency to withdraw from the world and send evangelistic forays into it:
“Ultimately, however, [the church] loses by this approach: it erects too great a cultural gap between the believing community and the surrounding world, and it fails to see that converts are won more by the observable blessedness of a whole way of life than by the arguments of individuals.”
On the intersection of change and solidity in the church:
“The church ought to be like a mobile sculpture in which fixed forms of truth and fellowship are constantly shifting their relationship to harmonize with the decor of the social and cultural environment. Enculturation freezes the form of the mobile until it becomes a static monument, a reminder of the past which appears to have no relevance for the present.” (pages 197-198)
I think it was Mark Driscoll who once said that the New Calvinists are just like the Old Calvinists, just nicer. I’ll leave that without comment other than to say that if that is true, then I want to be a New Calvinist.
The Orlando Sentinel took notice of the New Calvinism in a lead story Sunday profiling one of the movement’s well-known old proponents. R. C. Sproul is the teaching pastor and clearly the face of Sanford, Florida’s St. Andrew’s Chapel.
The article articulates in positive tones St. Andrew’s place and vision, and in so doing speaks appreciatively of Rev. Sproul’s clear influence upon modern American theological thinking. R. C. Sproul has been a steady voice articulating a reformational orthodoxy during a period of theological experimentation. He has been used by God not only to defend but also to lend credibility to Reformed thinking. And he has done so while at the same time avoiding the moral traps that have ensnared so many who rise to prominence.
His has been a remarkable career which has blessed many, myself included. It is good to see the front page of a large secular newspaper acknowledge that not all of those shaping the cultural landscape sit in congress or swing a putter.
Nevertheless, while the article rightly connects Sproul with the current renaissance of Reformed thinking, it would be wrong to suggest, as the article could be read to suggest, that Sproul defines the borders of that renaissance. Calvinism does not exclusively reside in a St. Andrew’s can.
The beauty of Calvinism which has drawn many to it is its hearty embracing of the centrality of God in all things, including salvation. God’s holiness, his sovereignty, his grace, his good and remarkable providence, these things all find careful and comforting prominence among those who extol what I call a Big God theology. But what one might not know from the article is that these things are finding prominence not only in the neo-gothic traditionalism of St. Andrews, but as well from pulpits set on stages in the midst of the trappings of worship bands.
In fact, surprising to some would be the fact that those very worship bands, seemingly so far removed from the reserve of a St. Andrew’s type experience, are leading people to give glory to God for his holiness and his sovereignty, a holiness and a sovereignty many first learned from R. C. Sproul.
Though Rev. Sproul would not be interviewed for the article, a spokesman of his Ligonier Ministries is reported to be ‘dismissive’ of churches which have both ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ services. I know what it is like to be taken out of context, so I certainly hope that the brothers at Ligonier and St. Andrews are not dismissive or scornful of any other ‘container’ in which God-centered worship might appear.
What is wonderfully ironic is that this same solid Calvinism is emerging from worship services like that at St. Andrews as well as those which the spokesmen of St. Andrews might characterize as ‘pep rallies’. And if one probes, one might find that there is a God-saturated passion and vigorous biblical methodology motivating those churches every bit as much as that motivating the traditionalism at St. Andrews. All of it flowing from the theology so well championed by good men like Rev. Sproul.
Geoff Henderson was my associate in Bradenton for four years or so. I wish I could claim that the wisdom he now reflects was the result of what I poured into him. I could claim that, but it would be a lie.
Geoff recently posted on his blog a warning that we not make an idol of good preaching. I’m impressed with his reflections.
I encourage you to read both his installments, here and here. There is some good counsel here.