Buildings Falling Down 2

Town of Catawba, 2nd St SE between Central Ave. and Hudson Chapel Road.

Buildings Falling Down

North Carolina Route 16 between Oxford School Road and Catawba River. December 27, 2011.

Bill Hybels discovers the Incarnation

I hate to sound snarky and I am glad he reads the Bible but shouldn't the Incarnation pretty much be on the menu every Christmas?



Bill Hybels: Jesus Deserves One More Gasp This Christmas

Skipping out on the “light and superficial” messages that sometimes characterize the sermons preached on Christmas, megapastor Bill Hybels decided to dig deeper this year and go with something more substantial, focusing on the miracle of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and his suffering on earth to save mankind.

“Since the announcing of the Hybels’ Christmas Day service and not really knowing if...20 or 200 people would show up, I’ve had to make a decision of what kind of sermon to give on this occasion,” the founder of Willow Creek Community Church shared on Sunday morning.

The megachurch had earlier revealed that they would hold one worship service on Sunday, Christmas Day, hosted entirely by Hybels’ immediate family who would run the sounds and lights, lead the music, and read the announcements. All other staff and volunteers would be given the day off.

“As the day got nearer, I thought well I have to basically decide do I do something light and superficial or do something substantial?” Hybels informed his congregants.

“I decided that the people who made the effort to come on Christmas Day at 10 a.m. in the morning deserve something substantial, one can hope. So I’m going to read what I think is one of the most substantial texts in the Bible about the incarnation of Jesus Christ.”

Looking at Philippians 2:6-8, the preacher read: “[Jesus] being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.”

“In my humble opinion, this text captures the full weight and splendor of the incarnation of Jesus Christ.”

Beginning to analyze the passage, Hybels stated that when most thought of Jesus, they thought of him as an assistant to God – vice president, junior partner, backup quarterback.

The Scripture, however, taught differently he pointed out. “All throughout the Bible Jesus is carefully described as a full fledge member of the Godhead, equal with God in every way.

Read more here ...

Survey: poor economy hurting churches

Survey: poor economy hurting churches

More than 92 percent of the congregations responding to a recent survey said they had been impacted by members’ job loss and loss of income. Only slightly more than a third said their church’s finances were healthy.

The Villanova School of Business and the Cooperative Congregations Studies Partnership looked at more than 2,500 oldline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox congregations in their “Faith Communities Today” survey.

The partnership is a multi-faith group of religious researchers and faith leaders representing over 25 faith groups. They reported their findings on Protestant churches earlier this year, reporting that oldline Protestant congregations spend close to half their budgets on salaries and benefits compared to 31 percent spent on salaries and budgets by Evangelical Protestant congregations – even though the oldline congregations are, on average, considerably smaller than the Evangelicals.

In the new study, Catholic parishes across the country were found to be more in line with the Evangelicals with about 39 percent of their budget on salaries and benefits.

Read more here. 

Protests Against Eating Rudolph Backfire

Reindeer Meat Sells Out in UK Because of Protests

Animal rights group Vegetarians International Voice for Animals started a campaign against U.K. store Harvey Nichols reindeer meat, and the publicity led to a spike in sales. for selling

VIVA feels there are a host of problems that make the Swedish delicacy unfit to mass produce.

According to the animal rights group, when reindeer are herded to be farmed, they are frightened. Because the furry creatures are highly susceptible to stress, they can be adversely affected by the snowmobiles and helicopters used to guide them.

VIVA’s website states: “The suffering can be so great that their muscles can literally waste away.”

The group also constructed an email for protesters to send to Harvey Nichols. In the letter, VIVA lambasts the department store not only for “popularizingso-called ‘exotic meat,’” but other crimes against nature, like killing wolves and lynxes – the natural predators of reindeer – to keep the population high for farming.

Harvey Nichols responded to the requests in a statement, saying, “Reindeer is growing in popularity in the U.K. … The reindeer we stock is farmed in Sweden and complies to EU legislation.”

VIVA’s efforts had a surprising effect: the previously unknown treat was publicized, and promptly sold out of stores.

The expensive, sold under the “Edible” brand ($23 for only 6.7 ounces), can no longer be found online or in Harvey Nichols stores because reindeer meat lovers flocked to stores, afraid that their delicacy would be sold no longer.

A spokeswoman for Harvey Nichols, Constance Cooper, spoke to MSNBC about the rise in demand.

“[O]ur online stock has sold out due to the publicity and demand we've received," she said via email.

She added that mostly likely, there would be no more of the “Edible” brand until the new year because of the scarcity of reindeer."It's a seasonal product and stocks are limited so we will not be restocking prior to Christmas," said Cooper.

My Advent/Christmas article is up at the LCMS front page

My article is up at the LCMS front page. It is little piece on Advent and Christmas entitled: Advent: Wanting, Waiting and Welcoming. 


You can read it here.

Here are some bits and pieces:

Advent is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Church Year seasons. It gets no respect. In the mad rush to Christmas, the season of Advent can get pushed aside like hapless shoppers in the way of a bargain at Wal-Mart.

...

Advent tells us that what we really want for Christmas is to be joined to our Creator, who made us in His image. The hymns of Advent repeatedly express this longing and desire for Christ. We call out, “O, come desire of nations” (LSB 357), and we pray, “Come thou long expected Jesus” (LSB 338). Only the Son of God who comes in human flesh in the manger, dies on the cross and will soon return can fill this desire.

Advent reorients all our frantic wanting and points it to the manger. The Word of God takes on our flesh to fill us with Himself, making us partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). He takes on our flesh in order to blot out our sins with His blood.

...

That welcoming is what the church does now. As we wait for Christmas and Christ’s final coming, we are not alone. Christ is not far from us. We welcome Him as Mary did: hearing His Word and receiving it in faith. When God’s Word is proclaimed to us, Christ comes and is present with us. The Holy Spirit, working through the Word just as He did with Mary, creates faith in us so that we might receive Christ. Then, the church, like Mary, is filled with His presence by being filled with His Word.  

The King of all has come into our country

Through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of mankind is such that, by virtue of the Word's indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all.

You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.

Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 9.

O Antiphons : ero cras

According to Professor Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Benedictine monks arranged these antiphons with a definite purpose. If one starts with the last title and takes the first letter of each one - Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai,Sapientia - the Latin words ero cras are formed, meaning, “Tomorrow, I will come.” Therefore, the Lord Jesus, whose coming we have prepared for in Advent and whom we have addressed in these seven Messianic titles, now speaks to us, “Tomorrow, I will come.” So the “O Antiphons” not only bring intensity to our Advent preparation, but bring it to a joyful conclusion.  


From here. 

Athanasius: Purpose of Incarnation to satisfy the sentence of death from God

And thus taking from our bodies one of like nature, because all were under penalty of the corruption of death He gave it over to death in the stead of all, and offered it to the Father— doing this, moreover, of His loving-kindness, to the end that, 

firstly, all being held to have died in Him, the law involving the ruin of men might be undone (inasmuch as its power was fully spent in the Lord's body, and had no longer holding-ground against men, his peers), and that, 

secondly, whereas men had turned toward corruption, He might turn them again toward incorruption, and quicken them from death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of the Resurrection, banishing death from them like straw from the fire.

Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 8.

About the virginity of Mary

Homiletically, how do we approach it?

Is it an achievement, a purity, a state she has attained to and guarded and so God responds by giving her Christ?

Or is it more an absence, a nothing, a lack of human work, the ex nihilo from which God works the Incarnation and salvation?

Homiletically, I tend to the latter. Her virginity matches the nothingness, the no effort, no righteousness with which we approach God. Not that Mary's virginity is a sin but it is, I think, a symbol of the fact, a picture of the fact, that we come to God with nothing to add to our salvation and he speaks his Word to us and that Word received by faith joins us to Christ, delivers Christ to us.

Southern Baptists go swimming in Lake Geneva

Here is a very interesting article by Peter Berger surveying and seeking to explain the rise in Southern Baptist interest in Calvinism. Nice mentions of TULIP, Kuyper and Arminius.

A good paragraph:

How then is one to understand the New Calvinism in this improbable setting? I will venture a sociological interpretation.

In 1994 the historian Mark Noll (now on the faculty of Notre Dame) published an influential book titled The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In it he bemoaned an anti-intellectualism that had become established in the Evangelical community. He understood this as a defensive reaction against an elite culture which was increasingly secular and which looked down on Evangelicals as backward provincials. A big change has been occurring more recently. There is a new cohort of Evangelical intellectuals, well-educated and increasingly self-confident. Some are ensconced in a nation-wide network of Evangelical institutions, but others have moved into mainstream institutions. (Noll’s own move, from Wheaton College to Notre Dame, is prototypical.)  There is a certain instructive parallel here with the new class of Jewish intellectuals, who flooded into mainstream academia and media in the 1950s (though the Evangelical development has not yet reached that level). The underlying fact, however, is the same and very simple: upward social mobility and higher education, with a concomitant decline of prejudice against the rising group. Evangelicals, including the Southern Baptists among them, have developed a more sophisticated approach to the faith, and they have looked for intellectual resources to do this. Despite the aforementioned difference, Calvinism had to be appealing in this quest. It has a great intellectual tradition, with roots in European cultures. It shares with American Evangelicals a conservative theology, a high regard for the authority of the Bible (frequently moving over into the notion of Biblical inerrancy), and a gut dislike of all liberal directions in contemporary Protestantism.

Read the rest here.

HT: First Things

See Amid The Winter's Snow

This has become one of my favorite Christmas hymns that we sing in our congregation. It was new to me when it came out in the Hymnal Supplement '98 and I have grown to love it. It is so nice to sing this on a bright joyful Christmas morning!

Sacred Infant, all divine,
what a tender love was thine,
Thus to come from highest bliss
down to such a world as this.

Issues Etc blog of the week!

Rev. Todd Wilken of Issues Etc. picked two of my blog posts blog of the week. Excellent!

The Young Clergy Crisis in the Presbyterian Church

From the Christian Century website.  It is obviously geared toward a mainline liberal denomination (PCUSA) but much of what faces Lutherans in the LCMS is similar.  

Perspectives on the young clergy crisis

Since I’ve been chairing a national Presbyterian Church (USA) committee on the Nature of the Church for the 21st century, I’ve been gaining a different perspective on many of the larger trends of our denomination. One thing that has been difficult to realize (and equally difficult to communicate to the larger church) is the young clergy crisis.

Why would I call it a crisis? We’ve known for a long time about the startling decline of young clergy. The drop-out rates don't help (I can't find hard and fast stats on this... but some claim that about 70% of young clergy drop out within the first five years of ministry, usually because of lack of support or financial reasons). The average age of a pastor in the PCUSA is 53. And I’ve realized that the age might be much higher.

Over half of our congregations cannot afford a full-time pastor and many associate pastor positions were cut during the recent economic downturn. These are churches where seminary graduates would normally be heading, so what are the congregations doing instead? Many of them are hiring retired ministers or retired laypeople to serve these churches while our younger pastors remain unemployed.

Do I have something against people over 65? Of course not. I also have sympathy for people who have seen their retirement savings dwindle over the last four years. I know that many people have great energy well past the age of 65. So why would this situation be a problem?

Like all denominations, the age of our worshipers is increasing. The median age of a Presbyterian in the pew is 61. Half of our membership is over the age of 65, and four out of five worshipers are over the age of 45. Jackson Carroll points out that the age of a congregation will often reflect the age of its pastoral leadership.

So, if we’re trying to imagine a compelling vision for the church in the years to come, we'll need to reach the next generation. But that's hard to do when

•Half of our congregations may be served by pastors and laypeople who are 65 or older

•The other half of our congregations are being served by people who are about 53

•Younger pastors can’t find calls and are forced to take up other employment

•Many younger pastors who do get called to pastorates drop out within the first 5 years of ministry.

An American tradition is ...

... anything a baby boomer did twice.

HT: XKCD and Outer Rim

Wearing the Cross: Pastoral Leadership Fads

This essay of mine was published in Touchstone in October of 2005. 


Wearing the Cross: Pastoral Leadership Fads

I have been a pastor for only thirteen years, but I have already seen several models of pastoral ministry—each the latest thing and the final word—come and go. Scores of workshops, programs, and even whole industries have promised to make me a better shepherd. Many offer new paradigms, new techniques, new strategies, summed up in great catchphrases, to increase my effectiveness and success.

Servants & Visionaries

When I entered the holy ministry, the buzzword was “servant leadership.” The best way to exercise pastoral care was to be a servant. Pastors did not exercise authority; they served. They did not tell lay people what to do or think; they enabled parishes and people to become healthy and whole. Servant leaders were experts at facilitating and assisting, all of it aimed at better functioning in life.

Sounded great. This soon segued into another “hot” paradigm: being the visionary. Visionaries did not concern themselves with the nuts and bolts of pastoral ministry (you wouldn’t find them at a hospital bed; they had a “vision” for multiplying ministry so that others could care for the sick).

They were intent on setting the vision, outlining the future and the bright horizon toward which the congregation was pressing. This visionary leadership was inspirational and uplifting, for it drew others into its orbit as they “felt ownership” of the vision painted by the pastor and then coalesced to carry out his vision for the congregation.

This visionary prototype was often presented alongside a CEO pattern for pastors. The CEO would delegate tasks, concentrate on efficiency, see the big picture, set up programs, and make the congregation responsive to the customer (the newcomers and unchurched reputedly lurking at the doors of the church and wanting to come in, if only the church were responsive to their needs). The CEO pastor was a growth pastor who would grow the church with strategies and processes and approaches taken from the corporate world.

Many of these paradigms are still around. But lately I have encountered yet another one. Now I am being told to forego all of that “office work” and be an evangelist. The buzzword is no longer “vision” or “leadership”: It is “sharing,” one-on-one sharing of the gospel.

Whereas in years past I was advised to hold meetings, compose vision statements, and concentrate on systems therapy to diagnose my congregation, now I am encouraged to get out of the office and go down to the corner barbershop or the 7-Eleven and share what Jesus means to me with the teenage girl who cuts my hair or the clerk behind the counter. No longer am I supposed to be Lee Iacocca, guiding the ship; I am now supposed to be John Wesley, revealing the warm glow Jesus has put in my heart so as to win souls.

What I have found in my short time as a pastor is that none of this has much to do with really being a pastor. I think that much of this yearning for models and systems has to do with the weakness all pastors feel, the inherent conflict, the cross that a shepherd must bear in the apostolic office.

These fads and models are all based on effectiveness and on measuring what happens in the church, on setting up measurable goals that tell us if what we are doing is working. This sounds so sweet to the ears of a pastor. It sounds wonderful, for it lifts that cross off the pastor’s back.

What is that burden? What is that cross the pastor bears? The burden of forgiving and relieving people of sins and guilt, people who come back the next week or, often, the next day with a full plate of disgust and filth needing to be rinsed again.

The Cross of Uncertainty

The pastor’s burden is to preach the gospel, a message that is the power of God for salvation, to a congregation full of people who can barely be roused to pay attention for an hour a week and who, then, as far as human sense can often make out, fall back into the carnal slumber from which they were so briefly awakened at Sunday liturgy. The pastor’s crucifixion takes this form: to work in a calling where the results are by nature invisible, where the harvest is hidden from our eyes in the heavenly wedding hall, and where we now sludge forward with only faith that what we do matters at all.

What the paradigms and models and programs do is to take faith out of the equation. They lift the burden and the cross from our backs. There it is, finally, results I can see and count. Even if I fail, at least I can know it for sure. There it is in the spreadsheet: attendance is up . . . alleluia! Attendance is down . . . weeping and gnashing of teeth. But there is no uncertainty either way, no cross to bear.

With statistics and paradigms and quantifiable, goal-driven ministry, I do not have to wonder if the fumbling words with which I try to catechize the squirming bunch of adolescents will ever really shield them from the sorrows and sadness of life. Instead, I can count the number of newcomers I have enticed to come through the door. I don’t have to wonder if the baby I am baptizing, whose parents are of uncertain piety and dedication, will know the joy of growing up in the Church. Instead, I can devise a new program, measure results, have a meeting.

The Lord’s Farmer

It is funny how our Lord never promised his apostles great success, or told them to count, or offered them a concrete program of pastoral ministry. He just said, “Follow me, take up your cross, baptize, teach all things I have commanded, do this in remembrance of me.” He gave his pastors a crucifix, not a plan; he led them to walk in his footsteps, in the darkness of faith, with his promises only.

Most often as a pastor I feel like an uneducated but pious farmer who pushes his seeds into the dark soil and then prays. I do a lot of seed-pushing and I do a lot of praying. I suspect this is how it is supposed to be.

I have come to know a few things for certain in this uncertain ministry I pursue. I have an idea that the Church that survived persecution and success, growth and decline, knew that the pastoral life is one of faith. I think the Church of all the ages, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, gave me a paradigm of pastoral care at my ordination: to preach, to administer the sacraments, to visit the sick, to forgive the sins of the penitent.

I am pretty sure that I am not supposed to know or have any measurable ground on which to stand. Rather, I have been given the words of my Lord: baptize, teach, do this. I am convinced that when my parishioners open their mouths to take the Body of Christ, they are being cared for in an ineffable, uncountable, non-statistical, heavenly way, the way our Savior intended.

I do know this: When I preach to my little flock, when I give them the gospel, then I am most a pastor; when they hear from my lips not the latest marketing technique but the eternal truth of Jesus and him crucified.

We all long for Eden

Nice one for Advent: 

We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature...is still soaked with the sense of exile. 

J.R.R. Tolkien ( at least attributed to him on the internet ... reader beware)

Baby boomers heading back to seminary

Baby boomers heading back to seminary

Washington (CNN)– At 51, Vincent Guest could well be the professor at a table filled with 20- and 30-year-olds. He is leading a lunchtime social justice meeting for seminarians at Theological College at Catholic University in Washington.

Forks clink on plates in the basement conference room as Guest opens the November meeting in prayer. "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit," he says as he bows his head and clasps his hands.

Guest is not a visiting professor. He is a seminarian, just like the other younger men at the table.

But he is not alone in his age group. According to a decade-long study of enrollment by the Association of Theological Schools released in 2009, the fastest-growing group of seminarians include those older than 50. In 1995, baby boomers made up 12% of seminarians, while today they are 20%.

"I think I was always looking for something else in a lot of ways and always felt the call to do something else," Guest said.

He spent time in government and Pennsylvania politics before settling into a career in law. He had a three-bedroom home near the Jersey Shore with a meaningful job as an attorney helping the poor.

Though successful by any measure with a job that made a difference, he kept looking.

“Helping people with domestic violence, you know suffering from domestic violence or immigrants who were being deported ... I just saw their brokenness. In so many different ways, they were broken. And I know they needed to be touched by the love of God,” he said.

The feeling that something was missing led Guest to Theological College to study to become a parish priest in Camden, New Jersey.

Ministry, whether that be a priest or a minister or a rabbinical student touches people’s lives at the core, where God is where it’s most meaningful. I think people grasp that and are searching for that," he said.

Guest, who never married, was good candidate to become a priest. As a young man, he enrolled in the seminary for a few years to become a priest before leaving to experience life.

It is a journey that has played out similarly for a lot of baby boomers.

“Many of them felt a call early in life, maybe in their teenage years or college, and set that aside to be the bread winner for the family or do what the family expected them to do,” said the Rev. Chip Aldridge, admissions director at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington.

The Methodist seminary, which boasts students from 40 denominations, has also seen a rise in baby boomers in the last decade, making for some interesting classes.

For many of the boomers who went to college in the analog age, they have to get up to speed in a hurry to learn in the digital era.

"Everyone has to be able to use online academic tools. ... They've got to be very comfortable with technology," Aldridge said.

The majority of seminarians are still in their 20s and 30s.

"You've got two very different kinds of rich experiences when the baby boomers and the millennials come together in the classroom setting," Aldridge said.

"Yes, the baby boomer may have had a career, two careers, has raised a family, but millenials are coming from these colleges where almost all of them have some overseas studies, almost all of them have been on some kind of volunteer mission; they speak a second language. So in some ways those two sets of life experiences complement each other, and it becomes a very rich conversation," he said.

One benefit, unseen a decade ago when boomers began returning to seminaries, was the impact they would have on shrinking mainline denominations.

“They’ve got a little bit of that financial burden taken off them because of a previous career behind them," Aldridge said. “We’ve got a lot of churches that would not have been able to have a full-time pastor unless these baby boomers are returning to study and are raising their hand and saying, ‘Send me to those churches because I’m ready for something quiet in the country or outside the beltway.’ "

It’s a working retirement plan that skips the beach house.

“Whose got time to lie on the beach? There’s so much going on out there," Leah Daughtry said.

Daughtr, 52, is a former senior staffer for the Democratic National Committee who ran the party's 2008 convention in Denver.

As her secular career was slowing down, she started ramping up a spiritual one, taking the pulpit at House of the Lord Church, a Pentecostal church in Washington.

Like many boomers, she kept working a 9-to-5 job during the day and took seminary classes at night to bolster her theological knowledge.

On a bright November afternoon, she was pouring over books in the library for her thesis. She even was mastering paperless photocopying, using a USB thumb drive in combination with a photocopier at Wesley's new library.

She chuckled as she considered when some of her classmates were born. "I'm glad that I came later in life – after I had a chance to experience some things and experience some knocks in the outside world before coming to this sort of secluded space of seminary."

For Daughtry, it's natural for boomers to return to seminaries.

“We came of age at a time of activism and doing something, where you want to roll up your sleeves and be involved in something, somewhere," she said. "I don’t think we’re people who check out, and would be happy sitting on the beach in Florida looking at the sun. There’s something in our ethos that craves involvement with the world around us.”

Folk Hymnal for the Now Generation

 Just found this found this in my my books in my library. "Folk Hymnal for the Now Generation" . Contemporary worship that's not so contemporary.

Copyright date? 1970. Love it. The Now Generation has somehow become the "then" generation. So it goes.