Category: Church Page 5 of 6

Some may recognize the words of this title as coming from the Nicene Creed. If you are in a church which has used this this creed, it’s possible that you, like me, have blown by with little thought the tiny yet significant word ‘one’.

If you have noticed the word, you may have had cause to chuckle or to weep recognizing that ‘one’ seems to carry such little weight in a world where every town has dozens of Christian denominations and sects. (I once heard that the US could ‘boast’ of 16 thousand denominations.) That all seems to make a mockery of the word ‘one’.

And yet, there can be a unity, a oneness, experienced, enjoyed, and sometimes displayed in spite of the diversity.

Early this week, I had the joy of meeting with a couple of pastors serving independent pentecostal and evangelical churches in Oviedo. We met for an hour of prayer, and it was an encouraging and joyful experience of that ‘one’ that meant so much to Jesus.

There may be much that divides us. But that need not prevent us from standing together upon what unites.

In Manatee and Sarasota Counties on the west coast of the Florida peninsula, there are five Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) churches. Each is quite different from the others in size and style, but one of the things they share in common, odd as it might seem, is the longevity of the pastoral tenure in each church.

Though I am leaving, I have been at Hope Presbyterian Church for nearly 25 years. Larry Edison, has been pastor at Covenant Life Presbyterian Church for 30 years. Dave Sturkey has pastored Cornerstone of Lakewood Ranch since its founding 18 years ago. John Grady became the pastor at Faith Presbyterian shortly after I came here, through a merger with the congregation that he pastored for a few years before that, so his total is 30. And Dwight Dolby, of Auburn Road Presbyterian in Venice, has nearly 20 years behind him.

No matter how one slices it, this shatters the average tenure (about 7-8 years) of most protestant churches. Not sure why this is. Is it the water we drink or the weather we enjoy? I guess we’ll never know.

Most of us are aware that a volcano has been spewing ash all over Europe and shutting down flights in and out of the continent.

This has happened at the tail end of the Easter holiday in England leaving numbers of British travelers stuck in Florida.

This led, for us, to finding some new and wonderful friends. A stranded family from Yorkshire (Christine, Andrew, and Alex) joined us for worship on Sunday. We invited them to have Sunday dinner with us, and we had a great time comparing cultures, churches, and stories.

It would have been better had they spoken our language, but we managed to deal with that barrier.

We sympathized for them in their dilemma, but we all agreed that there could be worse places to be stranded!

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As we spoke about their experience here, they told us that when they pulled into our church parking lot, they were greeted by a very polite young man who directed them where to go and where to find things. He was their guide from the parking lot into worship.

This is such a wonderful and welcoming ministry. This young man was demonstrating a sensitivity to newness that few of us in the church understand. Coming to a new church is daunting and confusing. To have someone naturally and casually and in an unprogrammed way take interest in our experience will leave an impression upon our guests far greater than most anything else we do as a church.

I should add: this young man is only nine years old. Pretty cool. [This detail, I should note, will identify the ‘young man’ of the story to some. But for the rest I leave him anonymous. His natural and sincere care for the stranger humbles me as it should us all!]

As I’ve pointed out before, I write a monthly “church related” column for the local newspaper. I write the column; they write the headline. This time, the headline works.

You can read the column here. However, knowing these things do not stay live for very long, I’ve reproduced it below.

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I know quite a few pastors, being one myself.

Spoiling popular stereotypes, the pastors I know are not money or power hungry. They are not child molesters, sex fiends, or hate mongers.

The pastors I know are just ordinary people who love God and care about others. They are not superheroes or supervillains. Just ordinary.

We laugh and play and we struggle and worry. We wrestle with doubt and we question our calling. We own houses and we wonder how to pay the bills.

We tell jokes and play games. And we make mistakes. Many of them.

We have our favorite sports teams, and we often get our priorities confused. And when we do, we are filled with sorrow.

We don’t know it all. We agonize over how to handle the Bible and how to handle people who are making terrible mistakes. We try to manage prosperity with humility, but more often we wrestle with the self-doubt of failure.

We have families whom we love, but we get angry. We sin against them and have to ask their forgiveness. We are ordinary people.

Most of us pastor small congregations. Our hearts are easily broken. We are hurt when people leave, we laugh and rejoice when people come.

We work six days a week, sometimes more. Some of us work multiple jobs. We make house calls. We will be with you at 3 a.m. if the need calls for it. We will stand with you when some great pain has entered your life. We’ll hold your hand.

And we will fail you. We will forget to call you. We will forget to pay a visit to you in the hospital. We will make decisions that you think are wrong. We will get angry when we shouldn’t. We will be passive when we should make a stand. You will wonder what is wrong with us.

What is wrong with us is that we are ordinary people. We do not breathe purified air. We do not claim a greater measure of God’s favor. In fact, we carry a greater burden of responsibility before him and that weighs heavily on us.

The pastors I know don’t want either pity or special recognition. They will take, however, with great joy, the news that you pray for God’s blessing upon them as they are: mere people with extraordinary responsibility. They will thank you.

We once had a man at the church I pastor whom I thought would have been a superb youth volunteer. He was sharp, biblical, fun, and cool. When I approached him with the idea, he told me that he just did not like the idea of youth groups. The idea of getting kids together to play games and tack on a bible lesson was just not the way to go about discipling our youth, was his position.

At least that was his rhetoric.

I later asked him about how his relationship was progressing with a man who had visited the church, a man with a drug problem and a skittish relationship to the gospel. My friend said that he was in a day or two going to meet the guy at some place and play billiards with him.

I laughed. His methodology for reaching adults was the same methodology he repudiated for youth: develop the relationship, earn the right and respect to be heard. He was meeting this guy, playing games with him, and, if you will, ‘tacking on’ some bible talk afterward.

I call this a ‘happy inconsistency’ – a situation in which our practice is better than our preaching.

Sometimes our environment or the teaching around us forces us into a box bound by rules we believe to be true. My friend was being fed from the ‘youth groups are evil’ school. But his heart, nurtured as it was by the grace of God, reacted normally and with grace in those contexts where he was free from the bondage of rules. The result was a happy inconsistency.

I pray that grace will make me in every way where my thinking is wrong happily inconsistent!

I wonder sometimes, with all our rhetoric about welcoming and care for the unreached cultures around us, if perhaps this is the way the Christian church appears to the outsider:

[Note: I realize that I do not have permission to use the above cartoon. Perhaps I can justify this by pointing you to where I read this regularly, and by encouraging you to read it. Wiley is very perceptive about human foibles, and addresses them with a deft hand.]

Here is a quote from Tolkien’s The Return of the King.

While Sauron’s forces assail the outer walls of Minas Tirith, Gandalf is summoned address the madness of Denethor. Confronted with his madness, some of his guards have sought to intercept his descent into madness while others in seeming loyalty oppose them. Each slay the other, prompting Gandalf’s despairing observation:

“Work of the Enemy!” said Gandalf. “Such deeds he loves; friend at war with friend; loyalty divided in confusion of hearts.”

Those who love Christ’s church are all too familiar with the war that rages among those who should be friends.

Pray for Christ’s church. As you do, acknowledge that her continued existence is due to our Father’s mercy and is ultimately unhindered by our Enemy’s schemes.