I think she has two excellent points, the first about the danger of thinking of oneself as a celebrity (evangelical or not!), and the second about the value of structured prayer. I’d add a note on the value of structured Bible study, which also forces one to leave one’s comfort zone and one’s own desires and to let God speak.
Christians in many countries face imprisonment, but is it possible the American is imprisoned metaphorically by our way of thinking? Eric Carpenter thinks we are, and suggests some things to rethink.
My church has a good children’s ministry. I’m impressed every time I hear our children’s minister present a children’s moment during the church service, and every time I’ve encountered the children’s programs myself, including the couple of times I’ve been invited to speak.
The children are learning a great deal about Christianity, their church, the Bible, and how to live. The problems are challenging and sound. I’m likely to always push for more challenging material, but it’s possible that I would go overboard on that.
I was talking to a church leader a while back who told me that one of all the things going on in the church, the children’s ministry made him most hopeful. Despite the fact that my children are grown, and they’re taking my grandchildren to churches in other cities, I would agree.
So how can I have a problem with this exceptional ministry?
The problem I have isn’t with the program. In fact, I suspect that your church has the same problem as does mine. I’m wondering just where the needed backup is. No matter how good your church’s children’s program is, you can’t depend on other people (children’s ministers, teachers, pastors, and so forth) to nurture your child’s faith.
Just as the home situation is a better predictor of how a child will do at learning, so the home is where most spiritual formation takes place. The church can help, but it cannot replace the parents (or grandparents!) in preparing children for life.
My parents were quite willing to talk about their faith, though they were much more willing to live it. I know my parents prayed, not because they told me they did so, nor because they talked about praying, but because I saw and heard them doing it. I know they spent time studying the Bible, again not because they said so many pious things about the Bible, but because I saw them do it.
I have in my possession one Bible from each of my parents. One is a pocket sized King James Bible that belonged to my father. There isn’t a page in that Bible that isn’t packed with the notes my dad wrote as he read it year after year. It’s in doubtful shape now. But I don’t have to wonder just how much my father cared about his Bible.
I got the Hebrew Bible I carry from my mother. It’s the smaller edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. She wanted to stick with the larger edition because the print in this one is too small. But this Bible reminds me that not only did she study all her life, but that she eventually took the time to learn both Hebrew and Greek to use in her personal study.
It was not uncommon to hear the words of scripture from my parents’ lips. But even more importantly they tried to put those words into practice, from the various places the practiced medicine here in the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, and in South America. They gave of themselves.
And that is the true formula for seeing your children involved not just in church but in service throughout their lives. Let them see you do it. Let them know that your faith is important to you, not just because you send them to a Sunday School class, or because you attend a worship service, but because you have made it part of your life.
They’re going to remember a great deal more of what they see you model than they will of what you or someone else tells them. And if you make prayer and Bible study a part of your daily life you’ll also find that those wonderful folks who work in children’s ministry can accomplish much more than they can otherwise.
Don’t make your children’s faith an afterthought. Live your life of faith. Let them see something worth choosing and pursuing.
Shauna Hyde is one of the authors at Energion Publications, so I admit to bias, but I really did like this write-up in the Charleston (WV) Gazette-Mail. Her book, Victim No More! is mentioned in the article.
I’m often critical of newspaper articles, not so much for being negative, but for being shallow. I think this one is pretty good.
I’ll be eagerly awaiting the inexpensive ebook of his lecture at Fuller. The summary is interesting.
I have made a few negative comments about conference dashboards keeping statistics on membership, apportionments, and other activities available to anyone who wants to read. I continue to question whether these numbers really tell the story of the health of the churches. There are, I believe, some very large and growing churches that have little or nothing to do with the kingdom of God.
Nonetheless, I think we have a problem with accountability in the United Methodist Church. When I took my new member class in my first United Methodist congregation, I recall the teacher, who made a number of historical errors, emphasized connectionalism. But if I were to go by his discussion of it, connectionalism means simply that we all go help one another as needed; nothing was said about accountability.
Those who are pushing the statistical approach are, I believe, responding to a very real problem. Pastors and church congregations in the United Methodist Church can go on indefinitely violating the discipline of the church or refusing to take necessary actions to make their church successful, while expecting that others will take up the slack.
That is what happens when a church continually fails to pay its apportionments. Now I’m not 100% a fan of apportionments as they are currently implemented, but they do represent a critical element of connectionalism. We put our money together to accomplish things we can’t do separately. Whatever reforms the system might need, the basic concept is sound, and more importantly if you have such a system, and some churches don’t do their share, all suffer.
This means that we need accountability as part of our connectional system. Churches need to be accountable to those who support them. In a more congregational system, an older church barely hanging on while slowly dying would have a hard time getting people to send money to help. A United Methodist congregation that refuses to take necessary actions, and continues to fail to support the team will nonetheless benefit from the resources of the denomination.
We should be willing to give money to support the mission of the church. But supporting a church that is willfully imitating a sinking ship sliding under the waves is not mission—it’s bad stewardship.
In addition, dysfunctional congregations continue to be part of the witness our denomination gives regarding Christ. Our “brand” can be tarnished by the actions of any of our churches. In the case of a denomination, tarnishing the brand also provides a negative witness—tarnishes the brand, so to speak—of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
My problem is that statistics can and generally do fail to get the entire picture. You can have good statistics and still not be building the kingdom of God. I welcome moves to make pastors more accountable. I think more could be done to make churches accountable as well.
But accountability is going to take more than reading the numbers. It will require people with good discernment who can see the context, make the necessary decisions, and take responsibility for those decisions. It may be difficult. We may prefer to find some objective measure, but it is still necessary. An objective measure of a subjective set of values will, by nature, be deceptive.
In critical ways, the church is not a business. Thus my call is for accountability carried out by human beings who exercise all their discernment and wisdom and seek to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Yesterday I posted one of my short stories over on my Jevlir blog. For those who don’t read that blog (its readership is quite low), I wanted to write a couple of notes here.
Many churches think they’ll find the solution to the problem of declining membership or financial problems by hiring just the right staff. But in most churches, the problems are much deeper than who is on the staff. In most declinining churches, I would suggest there is a need to change the church culture. You can’t hire a “Minister of Evangelism” and expect that to make the church grow. A “stewardship consultant” is only going to be able to go as far as the church’s commitment will take it.
The solution to declining membership, in my view, is discipleship. If you can’t get the church to commit to being disciples in all ways, then no number of paid staff is going to solve your problem. In order to change the culture of the church, you may have to lose even more members. Let the folks who don’t want to be disciples and who don’t want to be ministers (every member should be!) move on.
I don’t mean by this to sit in judgment on their discipleship. What I mean is to allow the self selection. If the church determines to be Christ in their community and to take this commitment seriously, then those who don’t want to go along will get annoyed and leave. Too frequently, our response to this is, “Oh no! We’re losing more members!” So we keep the problem alive by sacrificing discipleship to numbers.
I don’t have a problem with church staff when the purpose of that staff is to facilitate the ministry of the members. But in an overwhelming number of cases, the paid staff is expected to do the ministry, and the stewardship problem is to get the members to cough up enough money to pay the staff to do the things that they, the members, should be doing themselves.
The gospel fulfilled in discipleship is the only answer … not more paid staff to replace the ministry of the whole body.
There have been any number of Christian leaders who have fallen recently, and while the publicity makes it appear that there are more and more, I suspect this isn’t anything new.
One major reason for a failure in leadership is that we put too much trust in people. We give a pastor a great deal of authority, we give him a job that is impossible for any one person to do, and then we’re surprised when failure occurs. I think the pattern of Christian leadership is not supposed to put that much pressure or authority on any single person.
I believe that reasonable responsibility, reasonable trust, and a reasonable job load would be a good starting point to helping Christian leaders keep their balance.
No, this isn’t a topic I know much about, but I know that many past readers of this blog are either in part-time ministry or are (or have) considered it.
There’s still space in tonight’s Webinar, Part-Time Ministry Call: Disappointment or Opportunity, by Energion author Bob LaRochelle. He’s author of Part-Time Pastor, Full-Time Church
John Meunier asks if he can be replaced by a video screen. It’s a good question, considering the number of megachurches that are broadcasting a sermon to multiple locations.
I have several objections to the idea of a broadcast sermon:
I think every worship service should involve active participation and personal contact. I can watch or hear great sermons from great preachers on my television if I want.
And while we’re at it, we need a service long enough to cover the ground, which includes hearing the scripture itself (not just someone’s discussion of it), prayer, interaction, discussion, learning discipleship, and preparing to take the message outside during the week.
