Hi y'all,
Over the weekend, a pipe burst in the second-floor kitchen of main building of our church, flooding the second and main floors. We still don't know yet exactly how much damage was done to the property, but all the water has been extracted and the restoration specialists have been amazing.
But it has still added another huge plate to the many others I am spinning at the moment, and I need to take a week or two to focus on getting us here at the church through this--and through the other many things going on this month, including a wedding.
So while I will continue to post my sermons every Sunday, I won't have time for my regular midweek updates until October, and hopefully I'll hit the ground running again here on the blog.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. I promise the midweek hiatus is only temporary. In the meanwhile, please pray for us here at FCC Longview as we bounce back from the damage the flooding has caused.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
This Week's Sermon: "Recasting Eternity"
12 Those who stand firm during testing are blessed. They are tried and true. They will receive the life God has promised to those who love him as their reward. 13 No one who is tested should say, “God is tempting me!” This is because God is not tempted by any form of evil, nor does he tempt anyone. 14 Everyone is tempted by their own cravings; they are lured away and enticed by them. 15 Once those cravings conceive, they give birth to sin; and when sin grows up, it gives birth to death. 16 Don’t be misled, my dear brothers and sisters. (CEB)
“Seeking God Anew: Faith, Doubt, and
Other Lines I’ve Crossed,” Week Two
Abraham
Joshua Heschel, a Polish-Jewish theologian who eventually immigrated to—and
taught in—the United States, tells this story (in Elie Wiesel’s The Sunflower) of a rabbi he once knew:
(This) rabbi, a scholar of extraordinary
renown, revered also for his gentleness of character, entered a train…the
rabbi, a man of slight stature, and of no distinct appearance, found a seat in
a compartment. There he was surrounded
by traveling salesmen, who…started to play cards…one of those present said to
him: “Either you join us, or leave the compartment,” took the rabbi by his
collar, and pushed him out of the compartment.
For several hours, the rabbi had to stand on his feet until he reached
his destination.
But this was also the destination of the
salesman. The rabbi left the train where
he was immediately surrounded by admirers welcoming him and shaking his
hands. “Who is this man?” asked the
salesman. “You don’t know him? He’s the rabbi!” The salesman’s heart sank. He had not realized who he had offended. He quickly ran over to the rabbi to ask for
forgiveness. The rabbi declined to
forgive him…he then went to the rabbi’s house and said, “Rabbi, I am not a rich
man. I have, however, savings of three
hundred rubles. I will give them to you
for charity if you will forgive me.” The
rabbi’s answer was brief: “No.”
The salesman’s anxiety was
unbearable…when he shared his anxiety with some people in the synagogue, they
were deeply surprised. How could their
rabbi, so gentle a person, be so unforgiving?
Eventually the rabbi was asked why he had not forgiven the salesman. He said, “I cannot forgive him. He did not know who I was. He offended a common man. Let him go to a common man and ask for
forgiveness.”
What
forgiveness really means to us—and how we ask for it—says a great deal about
our presence in heaven or in hell—not just in any afterlife, but in the here
and now. And it matters.
This
is a new sermon series that revolves around a new book, by a fairly new(ish)
pastor, with a very un-new name: Jay Bakker, the son of the (in?)famous
televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, first pinged my radar when he came to
speak at my seminary’s annual Earl Lectures series in 2010. I have followed bits and pieces of his work
ever since, and after beginning the Revolution church movement in Phoenix, he
has gone on to plant Revolution churches in Atlanta and New York City, and he
is now planting a church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the meanwhile, he has also taken to
writing, and his latest book, entitled, “Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve
Crossed” spoke strongly enough for me make a sermon series! The chapter I am borrowing from this week is “Recasting
Eternity.” Jay writes in it:
When Jesus was asked if he wanted to
bring down hellfire (Luke 9:54), He said, “You don’t know what you’re asking
for.” Perhaps when Christians talk about
hell today, Jesus’ response would be the same…
(But) if I was saved from something, I
was saved from myself. We all have
obsessions; we have dark places and secret desires. That’s hell.
And when we give in to those things—and they take different forms for
different people—we discover hell.
And then there are the things that
happen to us that cause us hell. Death,
disease, loss, divorce—I’ve been through them, and the people who got me out of
those dark places are the ones who bore the fruit of the kingdom of God:
patience, kindness, self-control. They
taught me to find joy even in my sorrow.
To be patient with my grief.
And so I hope for life after death, but
I believe in life before death.
Last
week, we talked about how the Sadducees, one of the two main temple factions
(the Pharisees being the other) in New Testament Jerusalem—had essentially
stopped believing in an afterlife because their current life—the one they were
living—was as good as it would ever be.
But
Jay follows up in this chapter by explaining to us the dangers of concern only
for the afterlife, and not for the here-and-now-life. Because to him, heaven and hell are not so
much abstractions, or distant worlds to be theorized over, but they are, in a
sense, what we live in today. Even in
our lives today, we can catch glimpses of heaven and of hell.
Crucial
to this worldview, I believe, is one key perspective: that it is not God who
brings hell upon us. We do it to one
another, and we are capable of doing it to ourselves. And that is why I was led to this passage
from James—not the apostle James, but the James who was the brother of Jesus
and the first archbishop of Jerusalem.
James puts it starkly: God tempts no person. We instead tempt ourselves. And we make available for ourselves a wide
array of things to tempt one another with: power, money, sex, substances, you
name it. James says we are tempted by
our desire for these things, that they lure and entice us in, sometimes without
us even knowing it. It’s the old
frog-being-boiled-alive analogy: if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling
water, he’ll hop out, but if you stick him in a pot of lukewarm water and
gradually raise the temperature…well, you can guess the rest.
But
here’s the curveball that life throws at us: we can become so concerned with
our fate in the afterlife, of whether we go to heaven or to hell, that we
forget all about the circumstances around us.
We neglect to see that the temperature of the water around us is rising,
so focused are we on the horizon that we cannot see that the world we live in
has begun to boil over.
And
I have to think that this is in part why God—through Jesus—made the path to
heaven so simple. Notice I did not say “easy,”
or “straightforward,” or anything like that.
I said simple. And it is. Which is the most important law, the scribes
and temple authorities ask Jesus. “Love
the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor
as yourself. On these hang the entirety
of the law and the prophets.” When Jesus
says this in Matthew 22, He is not making our religion easier, or more straightforward,
but He is making it simpler.
And
I have begun to wonder if He did not do that precisely so that we could free
our minds from the concern of heaven so that we could once again focus on the
heavens and hells we live in now.
Because
ultimately, those heavens and those hells that we live in now, in this life,
all come from the same place: within.
Whether it is what we do to one another, or what we do to ourselves, we
are responsible for what happens to us today, not just tomorrow. But when all we see is tomorrow, we lose
sight of how bad today really can be for people. We say, “We just saved your soul! You’re going to heaven now,” and the person
we are talking to says, “Yes, but what about the today where I live in poverty,
or where I am homeless, or where I am starving?”
In
other words, just as religion that does not care about tomorrow—the belief of
the Sadducees that there is not, cannot, will not, be anything to look forward
to after death—is a dangerous religion, so too is a religion that does not care
about today also dangerous.
Think
again about the salesman in the story I told you, who offended the traveling
rabbi and could not receive forgiveness.
He swings this pendulum from not caring at all about the present moment,
because who does when they are physically assaulting someone, to caring only
about the moment in the here and now when he can be forgiven for what he did to
this holy man. And the rabbi, in turn,
is trying to teach him that he is looking for forgiveness in all the wrong
places, because he is not finding it at either extreme of this pendulum.
We
sometimes search for heaven and for hell, for forgiveness and grace and
salvation and justice, in all the wrong places, and in so doing, we sometimes
begin to focus on only one, rather than all of the above. We focus on a god of judgment, rather than a
god of both judgment AND mercy. We focus
on a god of wrath, rather than a god of both wrath AND love.
And,
amazingly enough, in all of this theologizing mess, we are apt to lose sight of
ourselves, of the roles that we play in all of this, of our own accountability
and culpability in creating the heaven or the hell that another person might be
living in right now.
Ultimately,
I think we are apt to do that because it is an incredibly easy way to let
ourselves off the hook, to turn our eyes from a great and terrible reality:
this God who steps forward to offer us grace and salvation and mercy and all of
these things, well…one of those things this God does not offer us is
temptation. And it might be easy enough
to say, well, He doesn’t need to! We do
such a good job of tempting ourselves!
And we would not be wrong for thinking that.
But
such an answer is ultimately incomplete.
We tempt ourselves not only with the things I listed earlier: power,
money, sex, and so on, but also with the belief that we are made better than
what we really are, that we deserve whatever heaven or hell we are living in
because, hey, it means God likes me more than some other poor schlub who has it
worse off than me.
But
James—and Jay—says that God does not work that way. And instead, when God sees such a perspective
from us…well, it becomes yet another thing that we have to be saved from. Fortunately, God has something to say about
that, too. And like with all these other
temptations, He shows us a way out. He
shows us the way of Jesus Christ.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
September
15, 2013
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
9/11: My 10th Anniversary Sermon, "On The Heights"
(In 2011, the tenth anniversary of 9/11 fell on a Sunday. Before "officially" beginning my work at FCC Longview, I preached one last sermon at my childhood congregation in Kansas City with an old friend from youth group who also became a pastor and was recently ordained herself. This is that sermon, based on Habbakuk 3:17-19 (below).
There will always be evil in this broken, fragile world. But the sooner and more able we are to respond to evil with God's word, the better off I believe we ultimately shall be. I believed then that God's love could triumph over evil. And I believe it still.
In memory of the 2,977 men, women, and children who lost their lives to terrorism on September 11, 2001. -E.A.)
Habakkuk 3:17-19
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
19 The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.
For the director of music. On my stringed instruments. (TNIV)
The rocker was no stranger to controversy. In decades past, his lyrics were appropriated by presidential campaigns, NGOs, and any number of people who decided their interpretation of his songs fit their own mission. But when he announced a series of ten concerts in New York City after a short hiatus from his work, an unprecedented thing happened…the New York police force’s largest union, the Patrolmens’ Benevolent Association called for a boycott of the entire series. What makes this story newsworthy is that the rocker was Bruce Springsteen, and in 2000, he had just penned the mournful song “41 Shots” in tribute to Amadou Diallo, the African-American immigrant and street cart vendor who was shot and killed by four white New York City police officers in his apartment in 1999.
But Bruce is also from the New York area, and just over a year after the boycott of his performances, the terrorist attacks that we remember today took place. Rejoining his longtime friends in the E Street Band, he penned a new song, called The Rising, for the eponymous album he would be releasing. And like so much of our painful pasts, the memory of the pain and hurt of the boycott was pushed aside.
You’ve probably heard this song at some point in the last ten years—and if you remember its bridge lyrics, they recall the New York sky, beginning as a backdrop for sorrow and tears before being transformed gradually into a sky of love, and of fullness, and of life itself. It is not often that poetry is put to events so fear-inducing. But every once in a while, across our history, it does happen.
The prophet Habakkuk likely began his career before the sacking of Judah by Babylon in 587 BCE, but much of the book attributed to him contains oracles concerning Babylon and the coming strife attending to Judah. His book begins with a cry that has been echoed by humanity from the Pearl Harbor and the World Wars to Oklahoma City and 9/11—“God, how long must I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?” In the oft-cliched question of why bad things happen to good people, Habakkuk has already arrived at his answer—either God can act and ruthlessly chooses not to, or God cannot act and is grieving right alongside us in our suffering. And based on that, Habakkuk creates three chapters of poetry in his dialogue with God; in fact, the final chapter, the one from which today’s reading comes from, was meant to be sung, as evinced by the final line of “to the leader, with stringed instruments.”
And so turning to music in our own times of suffering and of need is a practice as old as time itself. And transcending that time are images played over and over again in our minds and ears as we hear the notes played and the lyrics sung. Habakkuk then, and Springsteen now, offer to us the image of the sky—Habakkuk says “heights”—as the backdrop for hope itself, not for the death that has arrived on their doorsteps, but for the promise of renewal that God offers us, and we can fulfill that promise simply because God has created us to be extraordinary in the depths of our grace and compassion when the need arises to do so. It is not that God would see the hurt and violence that Habakkuk sees, that we see, and do nothing, it is that God has already done so much in creating us. Even amidst the jingoism and prejudice that 9/11 gave light to, I still remember the numbers of people lining up to donate their money, their time, their labor, their blood, whatever they could of themselves, because of one immutable, unchangeable, unbelievable reality—with God, all things become possible, all hatred will meet its opposite, and our salvation will never be any further away than it was before. The extremity of 9/11 brought out terrible parts of us, but it also brought out truly inspiring parts of us as well. It is our painful task to take the bad along with the good, and it is our difficult task to transform the bad into good, not unlike how the sky itself can be transformed, from sorrow into life, from blackness into light.
There is an epilogue to this selflessness, and it is that such actions can transform situations both before and after 9/11. After 9/11, many of our first responders began suffering from medical conditions. But people are stepping up to heal them as well, just as the responders had stepped up on that day. And before 9/11, Bruce Springsteen would not have been welcome in many a New York police cruiser, but after that day, the rock star returned home to honor his city. The real tribute in remembering 9/11 is not in public displays of patriotic piety as much as it is in the day-in and day-out work of elevating it into a place into our communal memory that remembers, and memorializes, and grieves, but that does not hate. And ten years later, that task is still incomplete. But we are working towards it, step by step, bit by bit, piece by piece, soul by soul.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Olathe, Kansas
September 11, 2011
There will always be evil in this broken, fragile world. But the sooner and more able we are to respond to evil with God's word, the better off I believe we ultimately shall be. I believed then that God's love could triumph over evil. And I believe it still.
In memory of the 2,977 men, women, and children who lost their lives to terrorism on September 11, 2001. -E.A.)
Habakkuk 3:17-19
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
19 The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.
For the director of music. On my stringed instruments. (TNIV)
The rocker was no stranger to controversy. In decades past, his lyrics were appropriated by presidential campaigns, NGOs, and any number of people who decided their interpretation of his songs fit their own mission. But when he announced a series of ten concerts in New York City after a short hiatus from his work, an unprecedented thing happened…the New York police force’s largest union, the Patrolmens’ Benevolent Association called for a boycott of the entire series. What makes this story newsworthy is that the rocker was Bruce Springsteen, and in 2000, he had just penned the mournful song “41 Shots” in tribute to Amadou Diallo, the African-American immigrant and street cart vendor who was shot and killed by four white New York City police officers in his apartment in 1999.
But Bruce is also from the New York area, and just over a year after the boycott of his performances, the terrorist attacks that we remember today took place. Rejoining his longtime friends in the E Street Band, he penned a new song, called The Rising, for the eponymous album he would be releasing. And like so much of our painful pasts, the memory of the pain and hurt of the boycott was pushed aside.
You’ve probably heard this song at some point in the last ten years—and if you remember its bridge lyrics, they recall the New York sky, beginning as a backdrop for sorrow and tears before being transformed gradually into a sky of love, and of fullness, and of life itself. It is not often that poetry is put to events so fear-inducing. But every once in a while, across our history, it does happen.
The prophet Habakkuk likely began his career before the sacking of Judah by Babylon in 587 BCE, but much of the book attributed to him contains oracles concerning Babylon and the coming strife attending to Judah. His book begins with a cry that has been echoed by humanity from the Pearl Harbor and the World Wars to Oklahoma City and 9/11—“God, how long must I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?” In the oft-cliched question of why bad things happen to good people, Habakkuk has already arrived at his answer—either God can act and ruthlessly chooses not to, or God cannot act and is grieving right alongside us in our suffering. And based on that, Habakkuk creates three chapters of poetry in his dialogue with God; in fact, the final chapter, the one from which today’s reading comes from, was meant to be sung, as evinced by the final line of “to the leader, with stringed instruments.”
And so turning to music in our own times of suffering and of need is a practice as old as time itself. And transcending that time are images played over and over again in our minds and ears as we hear the notes played and the lyrics sung. Habakkuk then, and Springsteen now, offer to us the image of the sky—Habakkuk says “heights”—as the backdrop for hope itself, not for the death that has arrived on their doorsteps, but for the promise of renewal that God offers us, and we can fulfill that promise simply because God has created us to be extraordinary in the depths of our grace and compassion when the need arises to do so. It is not that God would see the hurt and violence that Habakkuk sees, that we see, and do nothing, it is that God has already done so much in creating us. Even amidst the jingoism and prejudice that 9/11 gave light to, I still remember the numbers of people lining up to donate their money, their time, their labor, their blood, whatever they could of themselves, because of one immutable, unchangeable, unbelievable reality—with God, all things become possible, all hatred will meet its opposite, and our salvation will never be any further away than it was before. The extremity of 9/11 brought out terrible parts of us, but it also brought out truly inspiring parts of us as well. It is our painful task to take the bad along with the good, and it is our difficult task to transform the bad into good, not unlike how the sky itself can be transformed, from sorrow into life, from blackness into light.
There is an epilogue to this selflessness, and it is that such actions can transform situations both before and after 9/11. After 9/11, many of our first responders began suffering from medical conditions. But people are stepping up to heal them as well, just as the responders had stepped up on that day. And before 9/11, Bruce Springsteen would not have been welcome in many a New York police cruiser, but after that day, the rock star returned home to honor his city. The real tribute in remembering 9/11 is not in public displays of patriotic piety as much as it is in the day-in and day-out work of elevating it into a place into our communal memory that remembers, and memorializes, and grieves, but that does not hate. And ten years later, that task is still incomplete. But we are working towards it, step by step, bit by bit, piece by piece, soul by soul.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Olathe, Kansas
September 11, 2011
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
We are Legion, Reprise: Suicide Awareness Day
(Today, September 10, is World Suicide Awareness and Prevention Day. What follows is an unedited re-post of an intensely personal installment from the weeklong "We Are Legion" series of blog posts from earlier this year. This one was written in the wake of the suicide of Pastor Rick Warren's son Matthew, who was (is) my age.
Even when you feel completely, utterly unloved, God still loves you. Please, always, always remember that. Don't be afraid to seek help if you need it. -E.A.)
Trigger word warning: suicide.
I know I said initially that this was a three-part series of posts. It will be four instead.
Beginning at the age of 14, I began having increasingly frequent thoughts of suicide. I became socially withdrawn, flunked out of advanced algebra, and by the time I graduated, I had been suspended from school twice for fighting.
After months of refusing, I eventually caved to my parents' wish to take me to see a psychiatrist. He was able to immediately diagnose me with major clinical depression, and he put me on a regimen of antidepressants that I have continued in some form or fashion to this day. Today, I am medicated and I am well, but I still remember how much I underachieved during my teenage years.
I remember it because even on medication, those episodes still return in minor forms. Depression is like any chronic disease--I cannot be cured of it, I can only manage it. I will likely be medicated for the rest of my life.
And I'm okay with that. That's the way it has to be in order for me to function.
But it also isn't something that, for obvious reasons, I ordinarily share with people.
I'm writing about it right now, though, because Matthew Warren, the youngest son of Rick Warren (yes, that Rick Warren, the pastor of Saddleback and Purpose-Driven Life fame, and whom (full disclosure) I have occasionally criticized on the blog) killed himself this weekend after a lifelong battle with mental illness.
Matthew was twenty-seven years old.
It is how old I am.
Believe me, it hit home. Please pray for Matthew's family, biological and church alike.
I worry that people sometimes rush to judge a suicide because of our own Christian orthodoxy that it constitutes a grave sin. And I understand the logic behind that--I forget who said it, but suicide is our way of telling God, "Screw you, you can't fire me. I quit."
We aren't supposed to quit on God.
But if we take a step back, and remember that depression is a mental illness, suicide becomes apparent as the result of terminal depression. Roughly 3.5% of people in the United States who have depression eventually will commit suicide. If we were to see depression as the disease that it is, it would be like saying that 3.5% of all cases of this disease become terminal.
Depression is not a moral failing.
It sounds simple, but I'm going to repeat it: Depression. Is. Not. A. Moral. Failing.
It is a disease.
I have always understood why folks might call depression a "demon," as though another's personal demon might be addiction or substance abuse, but I have recently begun to shy away from the urge to do that. My depression isn't a demon, and the minute I say that it is, I am saying that having it is somehow wrong or somehow a moral weakness of mine.
And it isn't.
Because of how we normally associate demons with evil, saying someone's mental illness is a demon of their's implies an evil within that person which the person may or may not have control over.
And that's harmful. It puts an unfair burden on the person suffering from mental illness, and it lends an inauthentic identity to the disease itself.
My depression is not a demon I have to be exorcised of, it is a disease I have to live with.
But for however long well-meaning people still put the words "depression" or "mental illness" in the same breath as words like "demon," we're going to have people engaging in extremely private battles with their illnesses and, in some cases, ultimately losing.
Read through the statement Rick Warren made again (in the CNN link above). He wrote, in part, "But only those closest knew that he (Matthew) struggled from birth with mental illness, dark holes of depression, and even suicidal thoughts."
I'm not suggesting that making personal struggles with mental illness more public is the way to go--as a PK (pastor's kid), Matthew likely already had more burdens growing up than your average boy. And it is saddening that, based on Rick's statement, Matthew had been receiving treatment and it had ultimately failed.
What I am suggesting, though, is that maybe people might one day feel more free to explain their depression to people if they wish, rather than suffering mostly in private.
After all, a big part of what helps heal a person is the other people around them--medical staff, family, friends, and fellow patients.
In Mark 5, the Gerasene Demoniac confronts Jesus and the demon says, through the possessed man, "We are Legion, for we are many."
Far too often, the inverse is true of the people who suffer from these so-called "demons:" We are depressed, and so we are lonely. And it is so for this man, the demoniac--he has gone into self-imposed exile in a graveyard, surrounded only by the dead.
We become lonely through a variety of ways, which has been in part the thrust of this weeklong blog series: we divide up one another. I wrote about how we divide up the church, and then about how we divide up God's word.
We need not, should not, and cannot divide up ourselves.
For depression is, for better and for worse, not a demon. It is a disease.
And like many other diseases, it can kill. Even, sometimes, with treatment.
But also like many other diseases, it can be whipped. It is possible.
If you are depressed, please, please, please do not be afraid to seek help. Your family practice doctor can almost certainly refer you to a psychiatrist or psychologist, and many churches and pastors should also be able to refer you to mental health specialists.
If you are actively considering suicide, there are hotlines you can call. The National Suicide Prevent Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. It is toll-free and staffed 24/7.
We are Legion, sneered the Gerasene Demoniac, for we are many.
But we--the people who see and understand and live with mental illness every day--we are legion too, for we are many.
And with help, we can be the many who control our illnesses, instead of letting them control us.
So do not be afraid to seek help. It is there for you if you ask for it.
My hope and prayer is that if I, and others like me, can be more open and courageous about mental illness, you--whoever you are--might feel courageous enough to make that life-saving request.
Yours in Christ, from someone who cares for you,
Eric
Dedicated to the men and women I met during my brief time as the intern chaplain of the inpatient psychiatric ward of California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. I still remember seeing the scars on your wrists and your necks. I still remember listening to your stories. I still remember hearing your fear. And I hope and pray that that fear has, like our time together, receded into the sea of years-ago memories.
Even when you feel completely, utterly unloved, God still loves you. Please, always, always remember that. Don't be afraid to seek help if you need it. -E.A.)
Trigger word warning: suicide.
I know I said initially that this was a three-part series of posts. It will be four instead.
Beginning at the age of 14, I began having increasingly frequent thoughts of suicide. I became socially withdrawn, flunked out of advanced algebra, and by the time I graduated, I had been suspended from school twice for fighting.
After months of refusing, I eventually caved to my parents' wish to take me to see a psychiatrist. He was able to immediately diagnose me with major clinical depression, and he put me on a regimen of antidepressants that I have continued in some form or fashion to this day. Today, I am medicated and I am well, but I still remember how much I underachieved during my teenage years.
I remember it because even on medication, those episodes still return in minor forms. Depression is like any chronic disease--I cannot be cured of it, I can only manage it. I will likely be medicated for the rest of my life.
And I'm okay with that. That's the way it has to be in order for me to function.
But it also isn't something that, for obvious reasons, I ordinarily share with people.
I'm writing about it right now, though, because Matthew Warren, the youngest son of Rick Warren (yes, that Rick Warren, the pastor of Saddleback and Purpose-Driven Life fame, and whom (full disclosure) I have occasionally criticized on the blog) killed himself this weekend after a lifelong battle with mental illness.
Matthew was twenty-seven years old.
It is how old I am.
Believe me, it hit home. Please pray for Matthew's family, biological and church alike.
I worry that people sometimes rush to judge a suicide because of our own Christian orthodoxy that it constitutes a grave sin. And I understand the logic behind that--I forget who said it, but suicide is our way of telling God, "Screw you, you can't fire me. I quit."
We aren't supposed to quit on God.
But if we take a step back, and remember that depression is a mental illness, suicide becomes apparent as the result of terminal depression. Roughly 3.5% of people in the United States who have depression eventually will commit suicide. If we were to see depression as the disease that it is, it would be like saying that 3.5% of all cases of this disease become terminal.
Depression is not a moral failing.
It sounds simple, but I'm going to repeat it: Depression. Is. Not. A. Moral. Failing.
It is a disease.
I have always understood why folks might call depression a "demon," as though another's personal demon might be addiction or substance abuse, but I have recently begun to shy away from the urge to do that. My depression isn't a demon, and the minute I say that it is, I am saying that having it is somehow wrong or somehow a moral weakness of mine.
And it isn't.
Because of how we normally associate demons with evil, saying someone's mental illness is a demon of their's implies an evil within that person which the person may or may not have control over.
And that's harmful. It puts an unfair burden on the person suffering from mental illness, and it lends an inauthentic identity to the disease itself.
My depression is not a demon I have to be exorcised of, it is a disease I have to live with.
But for however long well-meaning people still put the words "depression" or "mental illness" in the same breath as words like "demon," we're going to have people engaging in extremely private battles with their illnesses and, in some cases, ultimately losing.
Read through the statement Rick Warren made again (in the CNN link above). He wrote, in part, "But only those closest knew that he (Matthew) struggled from birth with mental illness, dark holes of depression, and even suicidal thoughts."
I'm not suggesting that making personal struggles with mental illness more public is the way to go--as a PK (pastor's kid), Matthew likely already had more burdens growing up than your average boy. And it is saddening that, based on Rick's statement, Matthew had been receiving treatment and it had ultimately failed.
What I am suggesting, though, is that maybe people might one day feel more free to explain their depression to people if they wish, rather than suffering mostly in private.
After all, a big part of what helps heal a person is the other people around them--medical staff, family, friends, and fellow patients.
In Mark 5, the Gerasene Demoniac confronts Jesus and the demon says, through the possessed man, "We are Legion, for we are many."
Far too often, the inverse is true of the people who suffer from these so-called "demons:" We are depressed, and so we are lonely. And it is so for this man, the demoniac--he has gone into self-imposed exile in a graveyard, surrounded only by the dead.
We become lonely through a variety of ways, which has been in part the thrust of this weeklong blog series: we divide up one another. I wrote about how we divide up the church, and then about how we divide up God's word.
We need not, should not, and cannot divide up ourselves.
For depression is, for better and for worse, not a demon. It is a disease.
And like many other diseases, it can kill. Even, sometimes, with treatment.
But also like many other diseases, it can be whipped. It is possible.
If you are depressed, please, please, please do not be afraid to seek help. Your family practice doctor can almost certainly refer you to a psychiatrist or psychologist, and many churches and pastors should also be able to refer you to mental health specialists.
If you are actively considering suicide, there are hotlines you can call. The National Suicide Prevent Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. It is toll-free and staffed 24/7.
We are Legion, sneered the Gerasene Demoniac, for we are many.
But we--the people who see and understand and live with mental illness every day--we are legion too, for we are many.
And with help, we can be the many who control our illnesses, instead of letting them control us.
So do not be afraid to seek help. It is there for you if you ask for it.
My hope and prayer is that if I, and others like me, can be more open and courageous about mental illness, you--whoever you are--might feel courageous enough to make that life-saving request.
Yours in Christ, from someone who cares for you,
Eric
Dedicated to the men and women I met during my brief time as the intern chaplain of the inpatient psychiatric ward of California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. I still remember seeing the scars on your wrists and your necks. I still remember listening to your stories. I still remember hearing your fear. And I hope and pray that that fear has, like our time together, receded into the sea of years-ago memories.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
This Week's Sermon: "Dying and Rising With Christ"
So what are we going to say? Should we continue sinning so grace will multiply? 2 Absolutely not! All of us died to sin. How can we still live in it? 3 Or don’t you know that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore, we were buried together with him through baptism into his death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too can walk in newness of life. 5 If we were united together in a death like his, we will also be united together in a resurrection like his. 6 This is what we know: the person that we used to be was crucified with him in order to get rid of the corpse that had been controlled by sin. That way we wouldn’t be slaves to sin anymore, 7 because a person who has died has been freed from sin’s power. 8 But if we died with Christ, we have faith that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ has been raised from the dead and he will never die again. Death no longer has power over him. 10 He died to sin once and for all with his death, but he lives for God with his life. 11 In the same way, you also should consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus. (CEB)
“Seeking God Anew: Faith, Doubt, and
Other Lines I’ve Crossed,” Week One
The
webfeed wasn’t the greatest, but if you squinted, you could make it out: a pair
of arms, one rotating after the other, bracketing a swim-capped head. That was all you could see of her on the
feed. That was all you could see of
history being made, of Diana Nyad, a courageous 64-year-old woman who finally,
after four abortive attempts, became the first person to swim from Havana,
Cuba, to Key West, Florida, sans shark cages or safety tethers.
And
as I watched her swim, it began to dawn on me: her emerging from the Gulf
waters, triumphant, is not so different from what we would consider a baptism:
an immersion into waters so miraculous that they forever change the person we
are, because in being baptized, in being immersed, we reflect the image of
Christ Himself—not only in His baptism, but in our being buried in the likeness
of His death, and lifted up against in the likeness of His resurrection.
And
it’s a funny thing, resurrection…we have witnesses to the empty tomb, to the
angels who appeared, to the risen, bodily Jesus. But now we have far, far more witnesses to
the resurrections that happen today—not from death into life, but from
limitations into immortality. We live
and die with our successes and our failures, and in this way, we do indeed die
and rise with Jesus.
This
is a new sermon series that revolves around a new book, by a fairly new pastor,
with a very un-new name: Jay Bakker, the son of the (in?)famous televangelists
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, first pinged my radar when he came to speak at my
seminary’s annual Earl Lectures series in 2010.
I have followed bits and pieces of his work ever since, and after
planting the Revolution church in New York City (as part of the same movement he began in Phoenix), he is now planting a church in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the
meanwhile, he has also taken to writing, and his latest book, entitled, “Faith,
Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve Crossed” spoke strongly enough for me make a sermon
series! And so we begin this series with
the chapter in Jay’s book entitled “Dying and Rising With Christ.” He writes in it:
Afraid of God’s wrath, we’ve created an
elaborate system to prove to ourselves exactly how far we are from those who
deserve hell. In other words, we’ve made
sin our ultimate concern. We’ve built
rules and regulations so we don’t go anywhere near sinning. And in doing so, we’ve recreated the law…
A few years ago, I would have read this
chapter, thrown the book across the room, labeled the poor idiot who wrote this
chapter a heretic, and preached a sermon about Jesus dying for our sins so (as
long as we believed in him) God wouldn’t throw us in hell.
But today I wonder if Jesus died for our
sins in a completely different way than we think. Maybe it was so we could understand exactly
what the kingdom of God is like. Maybe
it’s not about giving God his pound of flesh so we would be spared hell. Maybe it’s about showing us a way of dying to
ourselves and rising again…
Jesus died and rose again after three
days. Saul died, blinded on the road to
Damascus, and rose again. Perhaps this
dying and rising is what atonement is really about.
There’s
an old joke about a person who goes into a completely empty sanctuary as a
first-time visitor on Sunday morning—they are the first ones there for
worship! And they pick a seat and make
themselves comfortable. The second
person to enter the sanctuary is a lifelong member and, seeing the new person,
walks up to them and, in the completely empty sanctuary, says:
“You’re
in my seat.”
We
laugh because there is some degree of truth to this, right? If y’all really wanted to mess with me when I
first started, you would have kept switching your usual seats on me like I was
a substitute teacher. Although Jean did
try to tell me her name was Alice for my first month here.
But
church is a place where, let’s be honest, we like our rules. We love ‘em.
We love rules that are written down, codified into bylaws and
constitutions, doctrines and creeds, and we love rules that are simply adhered
to because, well, that’s just what we do.
We love coming into church and knowing that everything is going to be a
certain way. Seriously, what would y’all
do if I just got up one morning and said to all of you, “Okay, today we’re
going to try snake handling?”
But
when we indulge in those tendencies too much, bit by bit we have done what Paul
is warning us about here in Romans—and what Jay is warning us about at first in
his book: we are re-creating the law.
It’s not the same law as before, sure—there’s nothing about our church
that says you can’t eat shellfish, or wear polyester, or pierce your slave’s
ears. But that does not mean that we are
not in thrall to a law—it is just a different law than that of the Old
Testament.
And
that law is all-encompassing. It really
is all-inclusive. It covers not only
unofficially assigned seating on Sunday morning, it covers what sins are safe
to confess in church and which ones aren’t.
It covers who we can accept and who we can’t. It is, in effect, one great big seating
chart: it says that those of us who live by the rules get to sit up front like
the good pastor’s pets we are, and everyone else can just hang out in the
spitball-throwing section behind us.
And
so, despite Paul’s admonitions, we die to the law once more. Because we still try to seek personal glory
and satisfaction in the law. We refuse
to, as Jay puts it, die to ourselves, because why would we want to die when we
have such a privileged spot in the kingdom of God already?
That
was the dilemma that some of Jesus’ opponents faced in ancient Israel. Not the Pharisees, who got way more ink in
the Gospels, but the Sadducees, a rival temple authority faction that was even
more reactionary than the Pharisees. And
the Sadducees had it made: they were a part of the elite, the 1%, the
made-in-the-shade-with-cherry-lemonade crowd.
Life was as good as it would ever possibly be in that time and place. So the Sadducees just stopped believing in
any afterlife. They decided that in
their worldview, there was no heaven and no hell. Because why would you hope for heaven when
you could already have everything you wanted here, on earth?
When
we start talking about legalism and rules and church, people often say that
they are worried about us—the church—becoming like the Pharisees. I’m not.
I’m worried about us becoming like the Sadducees, with no hope of heaven
or promise of eternal fate, good or bad.
And
so the Sadducees, in putting limits on the possible, by labeling it as
impossible, shut themselves off from a fantastic new source of God’s grace: His
Son, Jesus Christ.
Imagine
being told to settle for the possible…actually, don’t imagine it: recall
it. It has surely happened to you at
some point. But then, something happens
that completely changes what we believe to be attainable. A man walks on the moon. Or a doctor discovers a vaccine for polio.
Or
a 64-year-old woman swims literally from one country to another.
And
here we are, content in the rules and laws of our own little kingdom that we
have built for ourselves, and we think, perhaps with inspiration but more
likely with a dash of fear and trepidation, “Imagine what this kingdom will
look like tomorrow!”
And
when we get to that point—where we fear that what we find glory in will be lost
to us—we are already dying inside, because we moved from creating and building
something to holding onto it. We are
interested only in our piece of the pie, not in how the rest of the pie tastes.
Perhaps
this should not surprise us. After all,
one of the biggest differences between us and Jesus is that while He was more
than equipped for both the dying and rising parts, we really only come out of
the box equipped for the dying part.
We’re good at that. We’re good at
dying. It’s probably partly why we
resist it so fiercely: we know that we can slide into it so damn easily.
But
unlike Jesus, we aren’t naturals at the rising bit. We don’t resurrect automatically after three
days. Resurrection, the act of being
reborn, can be years or decades in the making because, yes, while we can have
those born-again moments, those God experiences that cause us to cry out, “I
have been to the mountaintop and I cannot unsee what I have seen, for I have
cast mine eyes upward and saw the face of God,” at some point, we come down
from the mountain again.
We
return to the valley. We fall back into
the abyss. Instead of being lifted up
after our baptism, we plunge back under the cold water instead.
Put
a different way: we’re good climbers, we Christians. But we haven’t learned how to fly just
yet. We’re good at getting ourselves up
for those brief, fleeting moments of ecstasy and divine communion, but we don’t
know how to stay there, not for any sustained length of time, anyways.
Maybe
we aren’t meant to, or designed to, or intended to. But I doubt it. Because in place of our need, our craving, to
be in God’s presence, we build up these laws and these rules instead to comfort
us, to act as a security blanket in what we perceive of as the absence of God’s
grace. We say that we are in because
others are out, we make ourselves the kingdom while relegating others to exile,
and in doing so, we make it all the more difficult to do what it is that
Jesus—and Paul—is, in fact, calling us to do: to let Christ in to do the rising
for us, to show us how it’s done. And
then, as He would say to us, we can then go, and do likewise.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
September
8, 2013
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Five Items That Every 21st Century Church Office Needs
(If y'all remember my recent attempt to be systematically theological or somesuch in this post explaining my views on penal substitutionary atonement, take a moment to read through a friend's response to it here. Rev. Evan Welcher is the pastor of a congregation in western Iowa, not far from my own hometown of Kansas City, and we correspond frequently on Twitter. While he and I obviously have differing opinions on the atonement, I truly appreciated the thoughtfulness, care, deliberation, and mutual respect his argument contains, and in responding to me, he does me the courtesy of framing my main thesis far better than I originally did: "Grace that is paid for is not grace at all." I commend his post to y'all as a perspective on what the other side of this particular coin looks like. -E.A.)
Here at FCC, I am lucky to work with Charlotte, our hardowkring, kind, and very competent office secretary. One of my Achilles' heels in the workplace is office work: I am not, nor have I ever been, a good organizer or administrator, and she does a good job of seeing what my eyes miss and keeping me accountable for things that I forget.
But that job--not only of working well with the church pastor but of simply being able to work well, period--was made unnecessarily difficult for a long time because of outdated software and office equipment, and so during my first two years here, we have, bit by bit, upgraded almost everything in her office: we bought a new printer/scanner and shredder, a new wireless modem (along with a new wireless tower to expand our network to the main building as well as our office building), a new (refurbished) copier, and just last week, a new desktop computer, along with the newest Microsoft Office software.
The difference has been phenomenal. I think we have only had one mechanical breakdown of any piece of office equipment that required the calling of a repair specialist, and even that was a pretty easy fix, saving us both time and money. The new Office software should be able to allow us to bolster the production value of our church materials and publications. And our responsiveness to a great many tasks has become more efficient and streamlined.
Yet I have also seen a great many church offices that do still operate with outdated equipment and software, and it is a shame because I know that while church budgets are usually very tight, we pastors also have a terrible tendency to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, unwilling to make upgrades that might, in the long run, actually be better for our congregations.
In light of this, here are five items that I have come to believe that no church office should be without. If you're from a bigger church, you likely already have all these things...this is admittedly a post more geared towards my small church colleagues. The first entry here is the longest and most important:
1. A computer with the following: Windows 7 or 8, Microsoft Office 2010 or later (including Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Paint), Constant Contact (or a similar program), and QuickBooks (or similar software).
As this list indicates, I am a PC person, but the same is true if your office has a Mac: technology is changing, and there are a great many things we need now that we might not have needed ten or fifteen years ago. Our new computer has Windows 8--and so far is receiving mixed reviews from Charlotte--but Windows 7 is a more than capable OS and represents a major step up from the outdated XP and Vista systems--it is generally more secure from viruses and malware, and it more easily supports later (and better) versions of Office software.
Having a program to enable professional-level email communication with your congregation is also, in my book, a must-have. At FCC Concord, the church I served for two years as a part-time student associate while in seminary, we used Constant Contact to email out weekly news updates as well as one-time announcements and devotionals, and it was more than worth the subscription fee we paid.
Granted, most churches in my experience do have QuickBooks or something similar, but I still hear the horror stories of churches that do their accounting in, say, an Excel Spreadsheet. Charlotte is able to, with Quickbooks, break down every source of income and every expenditure so that it can be isolated and studied by me and our board, and that sort of transparency is priceless for a church.
Finally, a word about PowerPoint, Paint, Publisher, and similar programs: I can't say how important it is to have programs like these and to be competent in them. They allow your church to put on a professional facade for members and visitors alike, and they help engage visual (as opposed to verbal) thinkers, thus allow for a more inclusive manner of communication to the church as a whole.
2. A color printer/copier/scanner all-in-one (fax, too, I guess, but who the heck still faxes anything anymore?)
Gone are the days where churches have to devote tons of space to file cabinets for every financial report, every minutes of every committee meeting ever, and for a bunch of other deceased trees we use to record the minutiae of church life. Charlotte was able to transfer all our documents either digitally (or via CD for the bigger stuff), and we're already up and running on the new computer. Everything these days can be saved, stored, and archived digitally via email, Cloud, etc.--or at least archived on CDs. Even with hard copy documents, the inexpensiveness and ubiquity of scanners means there's no excuse for maintaining stacks of file cabinets anymore. That office space could be put to better use for almost anything (I personally recommend a beer fridge. Just don't indulge while on the clock. ;-) ).
3. A shredder that...you know, shreds.
Charlotte and I deal in a lot of confidential work, especially concerning the use of my discretionary fund (which is earmarked for direct financial assistance to needy families). Maintaining the privacy of the people we aid is crucial to the dignity of our ministry, and simply ripping up paper in half is not good enough, even if you think the chances of someone finding it and read it are slim. You'd be amazed at who goes dumpster diving at churches. If you haven't yet, invest a hundred bucks in a shredder. You'll be glad you did.
4. Wireless capability over the entire church building
One of the long term visions I had (have) for our beautiful grounds here at FCC Longview was to make this a place where folks can simply hang out and enjoy one another's company and fellowship. We have experienced some real successes in that regard so far: our praise team turns our fellowship hall into a garage band venue once a month, and we had a Pilates class on Saturday mornings that sprawled into an open house-type of environment for all sorts of folks. Both of these ministries have brought in new people to the church. Having internet access will one day, I hope, go a long way towards facilitating this type of atmosphere, since people can camp out at the church like at a coffeehouse...except that at a church, you can offer programs and opportunities a coffeehouse never could.
It's simple to do, and much less expensive than you might think, especially if you already have a strong modem. If you're worried about people using the network illicitly, just rotate the password on it every so often. And you'll find plenty of other uses for it, too, trust me. Sunday School, small groups, even worship: the possibilities are endless.
5. An online presence
This last one isn't so much an item as a paradigm or vision...but I'm still amazed at the legions of smaller churches that steadfastly refuse to either create an online presence, or update the meager online presence they have. The church website is increasingly the first point of contact for first-time visitors, and everyone in your office should be familiar with how the website works and how to update it. There is TONS of open-source software out there that makes this sort of thing fairly idiotproof--our own website uses Website Baker software that I was able to master fairly quickly, and the daughter of one of my congregants has been teaching me FTP code so that I can add podcasts and mp3s to the website.
But the website is for your members as well: your church's calendar should be online. Sermon mp3s should be online. Newsletters should be online (or at least emailed out to members). And much like several of the other points here, all of these are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg...compared to many bigger churches, our own website (and what it offers) is really quite bare bones!
Which returns me to my original asterisk that accompanied this list...if you belong to a bigger church, chances are you already have ALL these things I have listed. But bigger churches often are not the ones that are in immediate danger of dying off because of a lack of access to the outside world.
A properly equipped office allows your church to properly equip its staff and members to engage in the mission of the body of Christ: to express the love of God, to strive for compassion, and to make disciples. You owe it to yourself to make as many tools available as possible to achieve that mission.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
PS: As a disclaimer: while I describe a great many technology products in this post, I am not necessarily endorsing those specific versions, as there exist a great many products a church can use for similar purposes (trust me, there is plenty of different email and small business accounting software out there). I am simply endorsing having programs, software, and equipment, with comparable capacities.
Here at FCC, I am lucky to work with Charlotte, our hardowkring, kind, and very competent office secretary. One of my Achilles' heels in the workplace is office work: I am not, nor have I ever been, a good organizer or administrator, and she does a good job of seeing what my eyes miss and keeping me accountable for things that I forget.
But that job--not only of working well with the church pastor but of simply being able to work well, period--was made unnecessarily difficult for a long time because of outdated software and office equipment, and so during my first two years here, we have, bit by bit, upgraded almost everything in her office: we bought a new printer/scanner and shredder, a new wireless modem (along with a new wireless tower to expand our network to the main building as well as our office building), a new (refurbished) copier, and just last week, a new desktop computer, along with the newest Microsoft Office software.
The difference has been phenomenal. I think we have only had one mechanical breakdown of any piece of office equipment that required the calling of a repair specialist, and even that was a pretty easy fix, saving us both time and money. The new Office software should be able to allow us to bolster the production value of our church materials and publications. And our responsiveness to a great many tasks has become more efficient and streamlined.
Yet I have also seen a great many church offices that do still operate with outdated equipment and software, and it is a shame because I know that while church budgets are usually very tight, we pastors also have a terrible tendency to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, unwilling to make upgrades that might, in the long run, actually be better for our congregations.
In light of this, here are five items that I have come to believe that no church office should be without. If you're from a bigger church, you likely already have all these things...this is admittedly a post more geared towards my small church colleagues. The first entry here is the longest and most important:
1. A computer with the following: Windows 7 or 8, Microsoft Office 2010 or later (including Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Paint), Constant Contact (or a similar program), and QuickBooks (or similar software).
As this list indicates, I am a PC person, but the same is true if your office has a Mac: technology is changing, and there are a great many things we need now that we might not have needed ten or fifteen years ago. Our new computer has Windows 8--and so far is receiving mixed reviews from Charlotte--but Windows 7 is a more than capable OS and represents a major step up from the outdated XP and Vista systems--it is generally more secure from viruses and malware, and it more easily supports later (and better) versions of Office software.
Having a program to enable professional-level email communication with your congregation is also, in my book, a must-have. At FCC Concord, the church I served for two years as a part-time student associate while in seminary, we used Constant Contact to email out weekly news updates as well as one-time announcements and devotionals, and it was more than worth the subscription fee we paid.
Granted, most churches in my experience do have QuickBooks or something similar, but I still hear the horror stories of churches that do their accounting in, say, an Excel Spreadsheet. Charlotte is able to, with Quickbooks, break down every source of income and every expenditure so that it can be isolated and studied by me and our board, and that sort of transparency is priceless for a church.
Finally, a word about PowerPoint, Paint, Publisher, and similar programs: I can't say how important it is to have programs like these and to be competent in them. They allow your church to put on a professional facade for members and visitors alike, and they help engage visual (as opposed to verbal) thinkers, thus allow for a more inclusive manner of communication to the church as a whole.
2. A color printer/copier/scanner all-in-one (fax, too, I guess, but who the heck still faxes anything anymore?)
Gone are the days where churches have to devote tons of space to file cabinets for every financial report, every minutes of every committee meeting ever, and for a bunch of other deceased trees we use to record the minutiae of church life. Charlotte was able to transfer all our documents either digitally (or via CD for the bigger stuff), and we're already up and running on the new computer. Everything these days can be saved, stored, and archived digitally via email, Cloud, etc.--or at least archived on CDs. Even with hard copy documents, the inexpensiveness and ubiquity of scanners means there's no excuse for maintaining stacks of file cabinets anymore. That office space could be put to better use for almost anything (I personally recommend a beer fridge. Just don't indulge while on the clock. ;-) ).
3. A shredder that...you know, shreds.
Charlotte and I deal in a lot of confidential work, especially concerning the use of my discretionary fund (which is earmarked for direct financial assistance to needy families). Maintaining the privacy of the people we aid is crucial to the dignity of our ministry, and simply ripping up paper in half is not good enough, even if you think the chances of someone finding it and read it are slim. You'd be amazed at who goes dumpster diving at churches. If you haven't yet, invest a hundred bucks in a shredder. You'll be glad you did.
4. Wireless capability over the entire church building
One of the long term visions I had (have) for our beautiful grounds here at FCC Longview was to make this a place where folks can simply hang out and enjoy one another's company and fellowship. We have experienced some real successes in that regard so far: our praise team turns our fellowship hall into a garage band venue once a month, and we had a Pilates class on Saturday mornings that sprawled into an open house-type of environment for all sorts of folks. Both of these ministries have brought in new people to the church. Having internet access will one day, I hope, go a long way towards facilitating this type of atmosphere, since people can camp out at the church like at a coffeehouse...except that at a church, you can offer programs and opportunities a coffeehouse never could.
It's simple to do, and much less expensive than you might think, especially if you already have a strong modem. If you're worried about people using the network illicitly, just rotate the password on it every so often. And you'll find plenty of other uses for it, too, trust me. Sunday School, small groups, even worship: the possibilities are endless.
5. An online presence
This last one isn't so much an item as a paradigm or vision...but I'm still amazed at the legions of smaller churches that steadfastly refuse to either create an online presence, or update the meager online presence they have. The church website is increasingly the first point of contact for first-time visitors, and everyone in your office should be familiar with how the website works and how to update it. There is TONS of open-source software out there that makes this sort of thing fairly idiotproof--our own website uses Website Baker software that I was able to master fairly quickly, and the daughter of one of my congregants has been teaching me FTP code so that I can add podcasts and mp3s to the website.
But the website is for your members as well: your church's calendar should be online. Sermon mp3s should be online. Newsletters should be online (or at least emailed out to members). And much like several of the other points here, all of these are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg...compared to many bigger churches, our own website (and what it offers) is really quite bare bones!
Which returns me to my original asterisk that accompanied this list...if you belong to a bigger church, chances are you already have ALL these things I have listed. But bigger churches often are not the ones that are in immediate danger of dying off because of a lack of access to the outside world.
A properly equipped office allows your church to properly equip its staff and members to engage in the mission of the body of Christ: to express the love of God, to strive for compassion, and to make disciples. You owe it to yourself to make as many tools available as possible to achieve that mission.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
PS: As a disclaimer: while I describe a great many technology products in this post, I am not necessarily endorsing those specific versions, as there exist a great many products a church can use for similar purposes (trust me, there is plenty of different email and small business accounting software out there). I am simply endorsing having programs, software, and equipment, with comparable capacities.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
The Power of a Pastor
(I took some time off for Labor Day and wasn't preaching last Sunday, which is why there wasn't a sermon here for y'all this week. We'll be starting a new sermon series on Sunday, though, which I am really looking forward to. -E.A.)
In the movie Keeping the Faith, one of my favorite romantic comedies of all time (sort of by default, because I like so few), Ben Stiller's character, a rabbi named Jake Schram, tells his synagogue in a sermon that a religious teacher cannot actually ever save anyone--that they can only offer themselves as guides to other fearful souls.
I was only 14 years old when that movie was released, but it is still a lesson that I have taken to heart as a fully-formed religious teacher, 13 years later. I cannot save anyone. I can only offer myself as a preacher and a teacher to fellow wayfarers and pilgrims.
It is humbling to admit, but it is also liberating as well. The pressures of full-time ministry are the cause of a great many cases of burnout in my vocation, and if it sounds like I am trying to set the bar low for that reason, believe me when I say that it isn't the case. Ask anyone directly involved in my work, and they will tell you how invested I am in it, and in doing it right.
But it is work in which I have little direct power. I am not a prophet of old like Nathan or Isaiah who has the ear of the king. I am not a high priest, clad in the twelve gemstones of the Israelite tribes, who alone in Israel is allowed to commune directly with God. I am a man, and a weak man at that. The direct power I have over this world--shaping it, influencing it, or otherwise molding it according to my vision is truly very limited.
Yet the indirect power I possess is practically limitless. Even as the pastor of a small church, I have the ear of a flock whose numbers are increasing. Each of them lives within their own lives, their own homes and spheres of influence and power, and God willing, what I say to them every Sunday has some impact on their life, to keep them doing what they do well in making the world and the kingdom a better place. So many laypeople I know who do amazing, fantastic justice- and mission-oriented work tell me that they could not do what they do without the church and its teaching.
The most concrete example of this phenomenon that I have seen lately comes from a place mostly synonymous with tragedy and with death: the life of the principal at Columbine High School. He recently announced his retirement, effective at the end of this school year, and buried in the article announcing it was this particular recollection:
DeAngelis described how two days after the Columbine shootings — in which 12 students and one teacher was shot to death before the two teen gunmen killed themselves in Littleton, Colo. — he went to his pastor seeking answers. "He said, 'Frank, there's a reason you did not die that day. You got a cause. You need to rebuild that community.'"
And as a result, this brave principal and public servant stayed at his post until the children who were in diapers at the time of the Columbine shootings are now graduating from his school.
To my colleagues: this is the sort of power we do wield. While sometimes our callings may feel like we are meant to simply run on treadmills, there are also moments when we may not move heaven and earth ourselves, but enable another to do so in our stead. That is a vital part of ministry, so much so that these are the types of occurrences that keep us from burning and flaming out.
To my lay audience: I imagine that this post represents, in many ways, the deepest longings of your own pastor, whether it be me or another servant of God. We got into this line of work because we felt called to make a difference in the lives of other fearful souls, and every time we are able to for the better, it validates that calling and makes us better at our jobs. If your pastor or your church has empowered you to be better at what you do, and to be better at improving the world around us, then I humbly ask you to say a quick prayer of thanks to God for them.
Those prayers mean a lot to us, trust me.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
In the movie Keeping the Faith, one of my favorite romantic comedies of all time (sort of by default, because I like so few), Ben Stiller's character, a rabbi named Jake Schram, tells his synagogue in a sermon that a religious teacher cannot actually ever save anyone--that they can only offer themselves as guides to other fearful souls.
I was only 14 years old when that movie was released, but it is still a lesson that I have taken to heart as a fully-formed religious teacher, 13 years later. I cannot save anyone. I can only offer myself as a preacher and a teacher to fellow wayfarers and pilgrims.
It is humbling to admit, but it is also liberating as well. The pressures of full-time ministry are the cause of a great many cases of burnout in my vocation, and if it sounds like I am trying to set the bar low for that reason, believe me when I say that it isn't the case. Ask anyone directly involved in my work, and they will tell you how invested I am in it, and in doing it right.
But it is work in which I have little direct power. I am not a prophet of old like Nathan or Isaiah who has the ear of the king. I am not a high priest, clad in the twelve gemstones of the Israelite tribes, who alone in Israel is allowed to commune directly with God. I am a man, and a weak man at that. The direct power I have over this world--shaping it, influencing it, or otherwise molding it according to my vision is truly very limited.
Yet the indirect power I possess is practically limitless. Even as the pastor of a small church, I have the ear of a flock whose numbers are increasing. Each of them lives within their own lives, their own homes and spheres of influence and power, and God willing, what I say to them every Sunday has some impact on their life, to keep them doing what they do well in making the world and the kingdom a better place. So many laypeople I know who do amazing, fantastic justice- and mission-oriented work tell me that they could not do what they do without the church and its teaching.
The most concrete example of this phenomenon that I have seen lately comes from a place mostly synonymous with tragedy and with death: the life of the principal at Columbine High School. He recently announced his retirement, effective at the end of this school year, and buried in the article announcing it was this particular recollection:
DeAngelis described how two days after the Columbine shootings — in which 12 students and one teacher was shot to death before the two teen gunmen killed themselves in Littleton, Colo. — he went to his pastor seeking answers. "He said, 'Frank, there's a reason you did not die that day. You got a cause. You need to rebuild that community.'"
And as a result, this brave principal and public servant stayed at his post until the children who were in diapers at the time of the Columbine shootings are now graduating from his school.
To my colleagues: this is the sort of power we do wield. While sometimes our callings may feel like we are meant to simply run on treadmills, there are also moments when we may not move heaven and earth ourselves, but enable another to do so in our stead. That is a vital part of ministry, so much so that these are the types of occurrences that keep us from burning and flaming out.
To my lay audience: I imagine that this post represents, in many ways, the deepest longings of your own pastor, whether it be me or another servant of God. We got into this line of work because we felt called to make a difference in the lives of other fearful souls, and every time we are able to for the better, it validates that calling and makes us better at our jobs. If your pastor or your church has empowered you to be better at what you do, and to be better at improving the world around us, then I humbly ask you to say a quick prayer of thanks to God for them.
Those prayers mean a lot to us, trust me.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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