Saturday, November 2, 2013

QUOTES FOR PREACHERS



“Under Construction: Thank you for your patience.” –Ruth Graham’s tombstone


"How glorious the splendor of a human heart that trusts that it is loved." -Brennan Manning
  

"One cannot be a pastor without being a theologian, nor can one be a theologian without being a pasto"r - Andrew Purves.
 

"We must make good people wish that the Christian faith were true, and then show that it is.” ~ Blaise Pascal

"Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it." - John Stott
 

"Prayer is not a duty to be performed, not just a place of refuge for me to pour out my needs to God and bring Him the needs of the world. Prayer can be God and I meeting, embracing, and encountering one another in listening love". ~ Pastor Dean Baublitz



Sunday, September 1, 2013

PASTORS AND LEADERSHIP

A thoughtful and helpful post from John Frye via Scot McKnight: 

Many pastors feel like the pastor in a cartoon I saw years ago. The congregation of people was running fast down the road and the pastor was running far behind shouting, “Wait! Wait for me! I’m your leader!” There is more confusion per square inch in pastoral ministry over the definition of leadership than over most any other topic. I have read the books that set your hair on fire with “choose the hill that you’ll die on and go for it!” type of leadership. I have read other books that suggest if you ask “Who’s in charge here?” you have already abandoned Christ-like leadership. I have read that there is the biblical gift of leadership (see Romans 12:8) and I’ve read that all spiritual gifts have within them a latent, yet effective leadership component. I have read good books that try to baptize the culture’s view of successful leadership into the church and I’ve heard suggested that the gospel of the kingdom of God radically transforms the world’s view of leadership. Many have tried to transform military-style leadership and USAmerican business-style leadership into pastoral leadership. I think “mutate” is a better word for it than “transform.” During the 1990s it seemed that if you just tacked the word “servant-” onto any form of leadership, it was considered biblical, like Jesus, the Servant-Leader. When big-hitter pastors host conferences in their mega-church venues and talk about leadership, you can count on many little-hitter pastors slinking back to their home churches not feeling the least bit like leaders. No matter what is said at the conferences, the medium is the message. The message is: real leaders build and lead mega-churches and host stimulating conferences. Getting caught in that fierce undertow of USAmerican success, many pastors flail just to stay afloat. So, what’s a pastor to do?

 As I have wrestled with and reflected on pastoral leadership, here are a few of my observations:

The gifting and calling of pastors by Jesus Christ includes dimensions of leadership. I do believe there is a specific gift of leadership and pastors need those gifted folks in the church. Yet, the pastor is a leader as well and those gifted leaders without solid pastoral direction can become wrecking balls in the church. The pastor as leader will keep her specific focus and use her arsenal of resources to enhance her leadership. Pastors lead by communicating ideas that are shaped by imaginative reflection on the person of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God that he represents. A congregation is not going to fix their eyes and hearts on Jesus Christ unless the pastor stays absolutely fascinated with Jesus. The pastor’s transparent journey into his or her own Christian formation is a high pastoral priority. (See my post in the Jesus Creed archives titled “Lashed to the Mast”).

Pastoral leadership is conversational, even leisurely, and filled with attention to details. Pastors observe and reflect on in the ordinary, day to day lives of the people. Pastors are on the look-out for those spontaneous brushes of the Spirit and the tiny shoots of grace growing in backyards of the lives of people. In this sense, pastoral leadership is prophetic. “Prophetic words are never detached from the concrete, historic situation. Theirs is not a timeless, abstract message; it always refers to the actual situation” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man). I owe the image of shoots of grace in the backyard of people’s lives to Eugene H. Peterson in Five Smooth Stones. Hopefully, pastors are learning that homiletically casting grand doctrinal ideas (timeless truths) Sunday after Sunday is not the heart of pastoral work.  

Like most pastors I’ll continue to read books on leadership. Readers are leaders. I’ll try to glean what I believe is helpful to me as a pastor and let the rest go. Anything that I read that reminds me of Jesus the Christ and what Jesus stands for will always get my attention.

Friday, August 30, 2013

SONGS AS YOU PREPARE-THE STAND

A new feature, songs as you prepare. They may never make it into the worship gatherings of your church, but I hope strengthen your heart as the proclaimer of the Good News. - Steve

Thursday, August 29, 2013

THE PREACHER AT HIS BEST


The Preacher at His Best 

 by Kevin DeYoung

Permit me a brief word about a disconcerting trend I see in young, and sometimes very popular, preachers. I mention this concern knowing full well my own temptation to it.

Let me pose the problem as a question: Preacher, are you at your best when you are closest to the text?

Too many preachers are at their best when they are telling a personal anecdote or ripping into some sacred cow or riffing on in a humorous fashion. There is a time for all of that, but we ought to beware if those times are when we are at our best. We can be orthodox preachers of good, gospel truths and still tickle people’s ears. If we’re not careful, we’ll train the large conference audience and our local congregation that the time to really pay attention is when we start drifting not when we start digging.

“Got it. Understood. Text means this, not that. Sound good. Now get back to that funny, over the top, in your face thing you do.”

I’ve done that thing; probably will again. If the rant is honest and true, the Lord can use it. But, again, I repeat myself, it must not be the best we have. The congregation should be most aflame with gospel zeal when they are beholding new things in the chapters and verses at the end of their noses. God uses all of the preacher–personality, humor, gestures–all of us. But the indelible impression left on our people must be a sense of the presence of God arising from careful attention to the word of God. If the best stuff we have every Sunday is disconnected from our hard won exegetical work, our people will learn to trust us and not the Book. They will look forward to our new antics, not our new discoveries in the text.

Ask yourself this Saturday: “Can I make my best point–the one I’m most excited about, the one I can’t wait to deliver–without noting anything from this week’s passage?” Everything you want to say isn’t everything you should say. We must be constrained by what we can sincerely say from these verses. If we want fresh power from the pulpit let us labor to demonstrate that our most passionate appeals come from the most precise exposition. The best preacher is the preacher who is at his best when he is closest to the text.

From Steve:  Do you have articles that you would like to share or suggest we repost that would help preachers/pastors in their ministry?  Send them to me at sdunnpastor@gmail.com

Friday, May 24, 2013

PREACHERS PREACH

by John Frye in his blog THE SHEPHERD'S NOOK

 My own vision of pastoral ministry in the North American context has been profoundly influenced by the person and writings of Eugene H. Peterson. Consider me a Petersonian in my view of the pastor and his or her place in the local church (see, e.g., Jesus Creed archives). I’ve heard Eugene speak, but I’ve never heard him preach. I am glad. We all seem to have an innate desire to imitate someone we admire. I don’t want to preach like Eugene Peterson.

 The best metaphor for talking about preaching is a slippery bar of soap. It’s just hard to grab. Good books about preaching abound; good books full of profound sermons abound; good radio preachers are ubiquitous. For all that, a preaching pastor is a particular being, serving in a specific locality with its own history and “feel,” overseeing an assembly of peculiar people that 99.9% of pastors will never know. Where the idea came from that the church can franchise preaching as a general, marketable process baffles me. The cat’s out of the bag: preaching is as unique as the pastor and the congregation she shepherds.

When I consider preaching as sacrament (last post), I am stopped, silenced, and humbled. It is a God thing shot through and through with mystery. On the other hand, when I consider preaching as a form of human communication, I lighten up, even laugh at the sheer creative freedom attendant to such a holy endeavor. Encountering God is ultimately in God’s hands; preparing for that encounter is a pastor and people endeavor. A leisurely conversation, sipping at good wine or delicious coffee, may be filled with the presence of our surprising, conversational God. A sermon, yes, a formal communication event, is also a living nexus of our particulars-loving God, a passionate, know-the-sheep pastor, and an assembly of people urged to expect God’s arrival.

I still remember when I stumbled into this reality. Parishioners, in what Prof. Howard Hendricks used to call “the glorification of the worm” ceremony, shake hands with and speak to the pastor at the end of the worship service. For a time I was accustomed to hearing things like, “Wow. I just didn’t know so much information was packed into those two little verses. You are a good Bible teacher.” As God continued transforming my particular life and preaching, I began to hear people respond with something like, “I really met God today. God spoke right into my life.” Do you hear the profound difference? I’m reticent to write this, yet believe me, I am not bragging. C. S. Lewis wrote that it would be silly for me to brag about having brown eyes. I am not the source of my brown eyes or of God showing up. A pastor is a co-worker with God, but never God.

Human co-working requires some behind the scenes work. Behind the dependency on God to meet us (we do “invoke” God’s presence) and behind the creative joy, dare I say fun, of communicating are hours of diligent study. But not just diligent Book work, that is, all the study that goes into shaping a biblical text into a meaningful sermon. Pastors also intentionally do people-watching. We offer keen, will-behind-the-ear listening. We allot time for leisurely pastoral story-hearing and story-telling. All the while, we celebrate the inestimable privilege of having a vocation that dares to engage two holy realities: the lives of human beings and the Word of God. We’re living a calling; not doing a job. I am troubled that pervasive USAmerican consumerism has turned the pastor into a professional employee for a consumerist group of religious people. A pastor is a vocational servant. Preaching is not about marketing Jesus and/or our church; it is about encountering the Trinitarian God as revealed in the Bible.

It is vexing that pastors get petrified in a theological/denominational stratum of “truth” and cease to keep on learning. I find it inexcusable that many pastors are afraid, yes, afraid of new theological ideas. Many pastors are more afraid of the “slippery slope” than they are of encountering the living, inexhaustible Lord Who is “making all things new,” including many theological ideas. I marvel at pastors, having spent so much time and hard-earned money training for their vocations, who let slip the good habits of wide theological reading; they quit looking for the most current biblical commentaries; they stop exploring excellent theological dictionaries on Old Testament and New Testament words; they lose touch of the pulse of the larger conversations and issues in the evangelical world, and they cocoon in their little worlds with no desire to travel cross-culturally on mission trips. If pastors get bored with ministry, it’s not the ministry’s fault. He or she should take a long look in the mirror. Some say, “If you knew my people and my personal and church struggles, you would understand my ministry disillusionment.” We must be careful that we do not allow our personal disillusionment to define all pastoral ministry. It doesn’t. There’s so much more to focus on. We all need to keep engaging our God and his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Supreme Pastor.