Publicity Hound

The Daily News, the local newspaper, just did a pretty neat profile on my church and me, which you can find here. It is sort of half biography about the church and about me, and half sort of our hopes for going into the future together.

To my knowledge, I have never been written about quite like this before. It feels good, but it also represents a new challenge for me in remaining humble before God and before my church. The running gag is that when a church calls a pastor, God keeps the pastor humble and the church keeps the pastor poor. I continue to believe that only the former will happen here!

There's no way around it--it really is great to see my church and me getting this kind of press. At the same time, I think of Jesus in His ministry, how in, say, Matthew 16, he orders his disciples never to say that He is the Messiah. It is an incredibly powerful contrast from His final commissioning of the disciples in Matthew, where He commands us to go and make believers of all the nations. So the attention that we Christians seem to be great at getting from the press (witness how famous megachurch pastors like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels are) is, from a Biblical perspective, a double-edged sword, a mixed bag, if we are to look at Christ's example.

If I would fault myself for something in the quotes I gave in the article, it is that I didn't do enough to glorify God in attributing my call here and my vision to Him. I was talking a mile a minute during the interview, especially about my church's future, but I did less talking about how God was at work before the interview even took place.

In any case, it is great to see the story of my church told to the community in a new and different way. Some of the most influential Christians, from Paul to Luther, were influential precisely because they were innovators, using every new medium available to them in the vernacular to spread the Word of God. Hopefully this article does the same to convey that fundamental truth--that God loves YOU without condition, hesitation, reservation, or abandon, and that He has called you to do great works in His name to make His creation better for all.

Amen.

Yours in Christ,
Eric