• The Naysayer

    It still giggle every time I hear this. Just the “Ticky” cracks me up.

  • Myth: God opens and closes doors

    I’ve heard this phrase to the point where I think people actually believe this is somehow a biblical concept.

    God has opened the door for me to ____.

    I was pursuing something I really felt called to, but God closed the door.

    That’s not in the Bible folks. It is a non-biblical, non-Christian philosophy called fatalism.

    I believe this little phrase, God opens and closes doors, has lead to people falsely blaming God for missed opportunities. We put this philosophy of open and closed doors above biblical concepts like perseverance, patience, and long-suffering.

    Instead, many have bought into a mentality that it’s meant to be, God will open doors. If it isn’t meant to be, God will close doors.

    Again, that’s fatalism. That isn’t how God works. Nor is it how God’s people are asked to look at the world.

    This is what God says about opening doors:

    Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. Revelation 3:20

    • Did David tell his friends, “Yeah, I was anointed as the next king, I don’t know though. Clearly, Saul doesn’t like me so I think God is closing that door?“
    • I don’t think God cared too much about Jonah’s “closing the door” on going to Ninevah.
    • I don’t remember Jesus telling Paul the whole blinding thing was an open door to a life in ministry.
    • And a ship-wreck was clearly a “closed door” if I’ve ever seen one. But did that stop him?
    • Persecutions of the first apostles weren’t seen as God closing doors. The only door that ended their ministry typically involved lions.
    • Pharaoh refusing to release the Jews for the first 9 plagues wasn’t God closing a door.
    • Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had an open door to a fiery furnace. But that didn’t stop them, did it?
    • Seems like the doors were closed around old Jericho, weren’t they? Did that stop God’s people from taking action?

    On and on we see that Scripture is not fatalistic about vocation, doing good, doing right, or fulfilling our call!

    But God does work in us and through us when we persevere, when we are patient in affliction, when we long-suffer for doing right.

    God rewards the righteous. God smiles on those who seek justice. God hears and answers prayer. God wants us to seek wise-council. God’s calling is true. God can move literal and figurative mountains for the faithful.

    God calls us and asks us to depend on Him and Him alone.

    He could care less about our education. (Paul) He could care less about our abilities. (Moses) He could care less about our lack of faith. (Jonah) He could care less about our past failures. (David)

    When God asks us to do something open and closed doors are meaningless.

    If He is asking you to do something He will make a way.

    Rather than worrying about if the door is open or closed we are asked to open the door. We may have to kick it in. And we may need to buy a sledge-hammer to make a way where there is no way.

    But waiting for doors to open or doors to close is meaningly, dangerous, and destructive. The only door you should be closing is on fatalism. The only door you should be opening is to Jesus, “Here I am, use me how you want. I am yours. You are my Savior and Lord.”

    Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2

  • Properly Loading Volunteer Staff

    Your role as a ministry manager isn’t just to plan programs and teach students. Successful ministry largely lies in your ability to properly manage a group of volunteers.

    Take five minutes and identify which category each of your volunteers is happiest in:

    • Low capacity
    • High capacity
    • Super capacity

    What are some ways you can vary what each volunteer contributes to reflect how God has gifted them?

  • When did ministry become an office job?

    Photo by t. magnum via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Somewhere along the way ministry became a desk jockey job.

    When I read the book of Acts and even the pastoral epistles I get the idea that being a pastor was action packed.

    • John didn’t kick it in staff meeting for 2-3 hours per week.
    • Peter didn’t make edits to the bulletin.
    • Matthew didn’t work late to attend the facilities team meeting.
    • Phillip didn’t put on a collared shirt and sit in a swivel chair from 8-4.

    Even if you go back 50 years the pastoral staff wasn’t all about programs and project managing. They were out in the commnity visiting elderly, the sick, and doing house calls. If the staff had an office it was for study. If the staff met it was for prayer. There was an administrative staff that did admin work and project management. Not pastors. Pastors were out doing, not sitting behind a desk.

    But somewhere between there and here all ministry jobs became something else. If we’re honest the ministry job became 75% administrative and 25% ministry on a good day. New people in a church always say the same thing... this isn’t what I thought it would be.

    At least once per week someone will ask me if I miss working in the local church. The truth of the matter is that I have the same level of contact with high school students today as I had in nearly a decade of full-time church ministry as a youth pastor. I’m not in a rush to go from actually doing ministry to riding a desk in the office and talking about ministry. If I ever accepted a call to a church again, the role would be radically different… or else I’d go insane.

    Life in ministry isn’t meant to be boring

    But for many people the jobs that pay are boring.

    Too many meetings and not enough ministry. Office hours and office gossip and office meetings and trying to look busy.

    The goal is all jacked up. Where does the desk jockey model lead too? More desk jockeys running more complicated programs. We need to rebel against it because we know where this leads. With less than 10% of the population actively engaged in a local church… seriously, we know the current way of doing things doesn’t work!

    Stop it.

    Radical change is required in the way church staff operates to reverse the trend.

    We don’t need a revival. We need full-time ministers to do full-time ministry.

    Exceptions: No doubt, there are objectors to my generalization. That’s the nature of hyperbole, isn’t it? But at the same time compare the hours per week that your own church spends in the office vs. the amount of time the New Testament church did. They didn’t even have an office! So it was 0%. The biblical model is 0%. God’s Word is true, right? God is unchanging and unchangeable? Did I miss the memo in my Bible? How can we justify 50%, 75%, or 90% of our hours doing office work?

    Church, we have an office problem. (Misappropriation of funds if you ask me.) And if we want to reach more than the 10% we currently reach, we need to change or watch that 10% shrink to 5%. We know where this leads.

    Stop what you are doing and think about a new way.

    What’s the solution?

    Follow the church planters. That’s where the growth happens, right?

    Close the church office. Morph your ministry staff into field agents. Tell your team to go out and visit the sick, serve the poor, feed the hungry, teach the Bible “out there,” and minister to the widows and orphans. The pastoral epistles give us a pretty good vision for what to do. The reality is that we don’t want to do the job laid out there.

    Remove the office temptation and lease the office space. Pastors who are lazy will just set up offices in coffee shops or their homes. Fire them. If the church is to change, we will need agents of change and not desk jockeys.

    Church planters do it every day. It’s funny that they come up with all sorts of fancy statistics as to why they think their new plants stop growing after 12-18 months. Maybe it’s not the movement that slows, missiologically. Maybe it’s the staff that stops trying and starts with office hours?

  • DIY Sun-Dried Tomatoes

    As I mentioned last week, our garden severely over-produced yellow cherry tomatoes, leading to the great tomato apocalpyse of 2010. With more than 5 lbs of tomatoes and no one willing to eat them in sight, we decided to get creative about preserving them.

    Here’s how we made sun-dried tomatoes.

    Step 1: Prepare the place

    This is a pretty simple project. You’ll just need a clean workspace and a sharp knife. We also found a window screen in the garage, which we hosed off the night before to get it ready.

    Step 2: Halve your tomatoes

    If you are working with cherry tomatoes, cutting them in half worked just fine. If you are working with Roma or any other full sized tomato, I’d recommend cutting them into 1 inch wide chunks. (Keep them even, you’ll be cooking with these later, and even sizes will help.)

    We had about 5 lbs to cut and it took us 10 minutes with 2 people. If you are using full-sized tomatoes go ahead and remove the seeds as they’ll just slow the drying process. But with smaller ones we didn’t bother and it didn’t seem to matter.

    Step 3: Add seasoning

    Dice up some fresh herbs, mix them in by hand, and let the mixture sit for about 20 minutes. (Set up step 4 while this all stews)

    For our sun-dried tomatoes we added in some garden fresh rosemary and basil. This added a nice flavor and an incredible smell.

    Step 4: Prepare your rack

    Drying vegitables outside is an ancient food preservation technique. Chances are good that if you live in a sunny climate, you won’t have a problem drying fruits and vegitables out in the open. You can basically dry stuff anywhere that is hot and dry. So inside a car on a summer day works. As does your oven at 150 degrees for several hours. As does a food dehydrator.

    We live in San Diego, it was especially sunny and hot, and the summer made for a long day of sunshine. So we opted to try the outdoor method. We placed an extra window screen we found in the garage on our garden table, propped up by 4 matching clay pots. It wasn’t fancy but it was free and best of all, it worked brilliantly!

    Step 5: Spread out your tomatoes

    Spread them out evenly on the screen. We found that it was useful to seperate them as much as possible so try to break up the little piles as best you can.

    Step 6: Wait a couple hours

    This isn’t a very exciting process. But every couple hours go out and check on them. It really does help them dry faster to flip them and bounce them around a little bit. They have a tendency to stick to the screen, so you’ll be pealing a flipping a bit the first few hours. I set a timer so I would only check on them hourly, taking pictures every time.

    Note about flies: We were worried about our local hummingbird or other birds taking notice and feasting when we weren’t looking. That didn’t happen, but we did attract a few flies with the sweet, savory smell. For our purposes this didn’t matter because we knew we’d be cooking these. But if that bothers you then you’ll need to build some one to seal this process off from bugs.

    Step 7: When are they done?

    For us, by the time we came back from a family trip to the beach, the sun had gone down and they were done. In climates where it isn’t quite so warm you may need to store your rack inside overnight and leave them outside a second day.

    They are done when they stop feeling sticky. Some of them we a bit crispy, but most of them were gummy but not overly sticky. If you do yellow tomatoes you’ll see that they darken significantly. If you are using red, you’ll see them get a very deep red when done.

    Step 8: Storage

    We emptied our drying rack and stored our bounty into several ziplock bags. 5 lbs of tomatoes made about 1.5 pounds of sun-dried tomatoes which we broke up into 5 bags. We put one in the fridge because we knew we’d use it right away and we froze the rest.

    Step 9: Cook and enjoy!

    The next day we enjoyed a delicious pasta dish with a sun-dried tomato and onion base.

    Let us know how it went for you. And happy drying!

  • Paramore’s Hayley Williams Sings Bed Intruder

    OK, I thought this was funny. If you don’t get it here is the original that this is mocking.

  • What is worship?

    Photo by Bill Lollar via Flick (Creative Commons)

    A youth worker in Minnesota asked me to share my definition of worship with her as part of a lesson she’s preparing for her youth group. I thought it’d be fun to post my response to her (with her permission) for a couple of reasons.

    1. I hadn’t thought about it like this before.
    2. I like it when people call me a heretic.

    What is worship?

    I think the English word for worship is limiting versus what God asks of us. So I break up the act of worship into a bunch different categories. (Not limited to this list)

    • We come together to worship God in community.
    • We spend time in prayer, fasting, song, reading of Scripture individually.
    • Our work is worship.
    • Our attitude is worship.
    • When I give my talents and treasure to God, that is an act of worship.
    • When I journal, that is worship.
    • When I am alone with my wife, that is worship.
    • Everything I do… I can do as worship of God.

    Now, how do I define worship? Worship is any intentional human actions which bring glory and honor to God.

    What do you think? Is the intention what makes an act worship? Or have I overstated what worship can be?

  • Help Haiti: Education

    This is Pastor Wilnord. We got to know Wilnard and his ministry while in Carrefour last month.

    If you are interested in helping fund the school in Wilnard’s church or perhaps your church (Or a group of Christian educators, or any combination) is interested in adopting this school to help pay the teachers, provide uniforms and shoes, or even feed the students, please let me know.

    If you’d like, we can plan a trip together and I can introduce you to Pastor Wilnord myself.

    The needs in Haiti are still real. The opportunity is still huge. Please don’t forget.

  • Pastors Most Powerful Answer

    New pastors quickly learn that ministry life is full of big questions.

    Questions that make you feel very small and insignificant. Questions that make God feel massively huge and almost out of reach. Questions that are so loaded and full of pain that they prime tears just to get the words out. Questions that have layers and layers of answers.

    Questions in which the answers will define a persons walk with Jesus for years to come.

    In those moments it is tempting to rattle off a pat answer. Or the denominations party line. Or what the board would rule as the right answer. Or something you read in a book. Or what you think the person wants to hear. Or a mechanical theological opinion.

    My encouragement is that often times, the best first answer is simply… I don’t know.

    Why did my dad die?

    I don’t know.

    Why did God chose me to get this disease?

    I don’t know.

    Was I born gay?

    I don’t know.

    Why did God allow my parents to divorce?

    I don’t know.

    Why can’t I have children and all my friends can?

    I don’t know.

    Why can’t the Cubs win the World Series or Brett Favre stay retired?

    I don’t know.

    Why did I lose my job?

    I don’t know.

    Why does God answer some people’s prayers but not mine?

    I don’t know.

    The list never ends. It gets longer and deeper every day.

    Why say “I don’t know?“

    I’ve found that when someone comes to me with a big question like that they really do need to know the answer to that question. But my responsibility, and what is ultimately helpful for them, isn’t to give them “my answer.”

    I’ve found it most helpful in those situations to comfort, console, reaffirm, and point them to Jesus as the author, answer, and hope for those big questions.

    With those questions I always point them to Scripture. I always make time to pray with them. I always follow-up later. I always affirm where the Bible is clear on a topic and where it isn’t. I always look in their eyes and say, “I do know this, that God always shows up. He always loves you. His ways aren’t always meant to be known by you.”

    But my first response is almost always, “I don’t know.”

    The temptation

    I bring this up because it is incredibly easy to pretend to have all the answers. As if, a seminary degree is permission to have all the answers. It makes you feel powerful. It makes you feel like you know what you are talking about. It feels good when people come to you with big questions.

    But the role of a pastor is not to be the Bible Answer Man or to just to give the hard, cold facts. (There is a place for that, for sure. But an initial meeting isn’t it.) More often, our job to point people wandering the desert in their pain, sorrow, and longing to the Grace Giver. To the only answer to life’s hard questions. To remind them that no matter what, Jesus thought they were worth dying for.

  • God of our Fathers

    It was very hard to leave Jimmy and Ashley behind in Romeo when we moved to San Diego two years ago. In the last year he transitioned from Michigan to the Houston area and is working full-time for a church plant called, Thrive.

    There are probably a lot of very intelligent people who know how to judge a worship leader better than me. But Jimmy exhibits all the qualities I’m looking for.

    • Vocally and musically talented. (This is actually the easy part, dime a dozen)
    • Fun to be around. Jimmy has a smile that can light up a room.
    • Versatile. Jimmy is good in darn near any setting. Kids, students, camps, adults, bars, inside, outside… he’s ready to roll.
    • Fun to work with.
    • Listens to God. When you are over the top talented its easy to listen to yourself or to what has worked for you. That’s not how Jimmy rolls.
    • Creative. He’s good enough to push past imitation to find creativity.

    So, that’s why I like Jimmy. He’s a good dude. I’m stoked for his album to [finally] come out. I hope a bagillion people book him for shows, camps, and stuff like that. And one day he will be such a big deal that he’ll finish a song and his guitar guy will walk onto stage and hand him a new one.