Category Archives: calling

Questions to ask at the beginning of a new year:

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Are you in a rut? Are you slow to think about resolutions because you’ve made them (and tossed them) before? If you’re not intentional, momentary ruts can cost you greatly and you’ll end up squandering days, months, even years of this one and only life you’ve been given. The following diagnostic questions will help you dream again and, with God’s help, allow you to be all you can be in 2013.

  • What is your dream for your life?
  • What do you see as the vision/calling- or God-given picture- of your life?
  • If you had unlimited resources (of time, money, energy, people) what would you want to accomplish with the rest of your life?
  • What do you love to do more than anything else?  What makes you feel fully alive?  Why?
  • What do hate the most?  What makes you angry?  Why?
  • What do you do best?  What are your best gifts?  These are things you’ve heard others (not just mom) say mark you as being unique.
  • What is God’s unique mission for your life?
  • How will you fulfill this mission, starting TODAY?

You can begin by setting S.M.A.R.T. goals now. It’s critical that you write them down.

S pecific- Be as detailed as you can be about the goals you are stating. A specific goal has a much greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal. I heard years ago that, “If you shoot at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” To set a specific goal you must answer the six “W” questions: Who will be involved? What do I want to accomplish? Where will it happen? When will it happen? Which requirements and constraints will place on me? Why will I do this? (What will be the specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing this goal.

M easurable- Every goal must be measured. How will you know you’ve accomplished it? What will be success? At what point will you know you’ve achieved that goal?

A ttainable- An attainable goal will stretch you to achieve it, but it will not be extreme. Attainable goals will challenge your attitudes and abilities and help you develop skills you may not have in order to reach them. Attainable goals will help you identify previously overlooked opportunities and bring you closer to the achievement of goals you once thought impossible.

R ealisitic- A realistic goal represents something that you are both willing and able to work toward. A goal can be both very challenging (perhaps seemingly beyond your reach to start) and realistic.  You are the only one who can decide just how challenging your goal should be. But be sure that every goal represents major progress. Challenging goals are more often reached than lower, easier ones because a low goal exerts a much lower motivational force.

T imely- Your goals must have target dates. If you don’t set a timeline you will not be motivated and you will not reach your goals. A deadline too far in the future is too easily put off and a goal that’s set too close is unrealistic and then discouraging. Place times/dates on a calendar that will mark where you should (will!) be when you get to that date.

PRAY, DREAM again and then set S.M.A.R.T. goals in order to accomplish your dreams. Remember: If your dreams are not God’s dreams for your life you will fail, or even worse, you will succeed at the wrong things and squander your life. Go for it!

Happy 2013!

Keeping God’s People Attentive to God

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Eugene Peterson is best known for his brilliant work presented in “The Message”- a paraphrase of the New Testament that has challenged millions to read the Bible in a different and enlightening way. As a former professor in my doctoral work, I have followed him from afar as a mentor in pastoral ministry. His writings regarding the role of the pastor are his best. His trilogy- “Contemplative Pastor”, “Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work”, “Under the Unpredictable Plant”- on pastoral leadership have encouraged and challenged me through the years. I’m inspired and troubled by his words below and I want my fellow pastors to be as well.

“American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.
A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted…. It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills.
The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns– how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.
Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists.
The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.”
-Eugene Peterson

Lord God, break us. Keep us on task, seeking to please you alone, glorifying our Savior to the end.

The Role of the Pastor

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Dr. Robert Creech, Professor of Christian Ministries and Director of Pastoral Ministries at Truett Seminary, has faithfully served as the interim of the First Baptist Church of McKinney, Texas.  As an outstanding interim, his messages have been intended to prepare the FBC family for the arrival of the new pastor, Dr. Richard Lee.  (I am very excited about his arrival and coming tenure as the pastor there).  I received a few excerpts from a recent sermon that I thought were outstanding.

  • The perfect pastor preaches exactly 10 minutes.
  • He condemns sin roundly but never hurts anyone’s feelings.
  • He works from 8am until midnight and sets a good example as a husband and father.
  • The perfect pastor makes $200 a week, wears nice clothes, drives a good car, makes good buys, and gives $100 a week to the church.
  • He is 29 years old and has 40 years of experience.
  • The perfect pastor has a burning desire to work with teenagers, and he spends most of his time with the senior adults.
  • He smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his church.
  • He makes 15 home visits a day and is always in his office to be handy when needed.
  • He always has time for the church council and all of the various committees.
  • He never misses the meeting of any church organization and is always busy evangelizing the unchurched.

This portion below (from Eugene Peterson) is especially powerful and I am sharing it with my friends who are pastors. It’s also a great word for all church leaders and members.

“Century after century, Christians continue to take certain persons in their communities, set them apart, and say, “You are our shepherd.  Lead us to Christ likeness.”  Yes, their actions will often speak different expectations, but in the deeper regions of the soul, the unspoken desire is for more than someone doing a religious job.  If the unspoken were uttered, it would sound like this:

“We want you to be responsible for saying and acting among us what we believe about God and Kingdom and Gospel.  We believe that the Holy Spirit is among us and within us.  We believe that God’s Spirit continues to hover over the chaos of the world’s evil and our sin, shaping a new creation and new creatures.  We believe that God is not a spectator, in turn amused and alarmed at the wreckage of world history, but a participant.”

“We believe that the invisible is more important than the visible at any one single moment and in any single event that we choose to examine.  We believe that everything, especially everything that looks like wreckage, is material God is using to make a praising life.”

“We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact.  We don’t trust ourselves; our emotions seduce us into infidelities.  We know we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it.  We want you to give us help.  Be our pastor, a minister of Word and sacrament in the middle of this world’s life.  Minister with Word and sacrament in all the different parts and stages of our lives – in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle.  This isn’t the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task.  We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks.  This is yours:  Word and sacrament.”

“One more thing:  We are going to ordain you to this ministry, and we want your vow that you will stick to it.  This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community.  We know you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are.  We know your emotions are as fickle as ours, and your mind is as tricky as ours.  That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you.  We know there will be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you.  And we know there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it.  It doesn’t matter.  Do it.  You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.

There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now.  Promise right now that you won’t give in to what we demand of you.  You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better.  With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of Word and sacrament so you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.”

“There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the foundational realities with which we are dealing – God, Kingdom, Gospel – we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives.  Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.”

Missional Church-Simple.

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2011 Resolution for pastors and church leaders: Turn your church inside out for the sake of the kingdom, for the sake of the Gospel, for the sake of the mission of Jesus… for the sake of your congregation.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arxfLK_sd68]

Pastor: follower, leader, servant, debtor

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I’ve been called to be a pastor.  Paul wrote, “It was He who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers…” “Pastors and teachers is actually one word in the Greek- it could be said, “shepherd/instructor”.  Clearly my first calling is not to a position or a place but to a Person.  My highest calling (like any believer) is to Jesus Himself.  My role as a pastor is love God with all my heart and to love others- more than I love myself.  My task as a pastor is to communicate God’s vision for His church and to shepherd the people as together we accomplish the mission God.

“The first task of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say, “thank you”. In between the leader is a servant and a debtor.” Max Depree

I love Max Depree’s definition of the role of a leader.  My first task is to tell the Truth- whether people want to hear it or not.  The Bible gives us His truth.  And I know that I am a servant and that I indebted to anyone who will allow me to lead. It was Andy Stanley who said, “leadership is a stewardship, it’s temporary, and you’re accountable”.  All of us are accountable before God Almighty for the vocation (“calling”) He has given us.

My primary role is to stay close to Jesus. My highest calling is to Christ Himself- to stay so close to Him, to listen to Him and obey Him in my role as pastor.  The priorities of my life will be guided by Scripture: God first, my wife second, my family, and my ministry.  I will live openly and authentically before you. I follow the apostles example in Acts 6:1-4. I will devote my life to prayer and to my personal walk with Jesus Christ. This is true for me- but it is true of you as well- as a parent, a friend, a co-worker, a classmate… if you’re not walking closely with Jesus, everyone around you becomes a victim of your unspiritual life.

I long to walk so closely with Jesus that I could join Paul who said, “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.”  1 Corinthians 11:1 Copy me as I copy Jesus.  The pastor’s role is to point everyone to Jesus. I don’t want to waste my life- and I know you don’t want to either.  God is calling us into this great adventure that is His redemptive mission- to bring hope and healing to our world.  If a church can determine to align all things (both personally and corporately) with His mission, that church will change the world.  Let the journey begin.

What’s Your Story?

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My Story- the Grace of Jesus Christ

My story is the story of God’s transforming grace that has changed my life.  I was blessed to grow up in a Christian home and was going to church nine months before I was born.  My mom and dad are committed followers of Christ.  So I learned about Jesus from a very early age and when I was 9 years old I wanted to make a decision to trust Christ with my eternity.  Looking back, I didn’t know much but I knew He had died on the cross for my sin and that in Him I would find forgiveness and not have to pay the price for my sin before a holy God.  I sat in my grandfather’s house, with my dad, as they explained that God loves me and that Jesus had come to die on the cross so that I might have a relationship with Him.  I could live with Him, now and throughout eternity.  And so, with child-like faith, I asked Jesus to forgive me of my sin and I told Him I wanted Him to be the Leader of my life.  I know that it was then that the trajectory of my life was forever changed.

Throughout my teenage years I was in a great youth group and I got involved in Young Life and later Campus Crusade for Christ on the college campus.  I began to serve God through these ministries and through my many relationships.  My junior year of college I knew clearly that God was calling me into vocational ministry.  Following seminary, I was serving as a Youth Minister in Dallas when I had a “Grace Awakening” that was life-changing.  Though I was a committed follower of Christ and serving Him in a great ministry, I sensed my motivations were skewed.  You wouldn’t have known this outwardly, but inwardly I was driven by a need for approval, a kind of need to be needed.  Ministry provided me a way to help, encourage, and bless others.  In return I blessed by a sense of purpose because I was making a difference in the lives of others.  But I realized I was not serving to honor Christ alone, but because of what serving others could do for me as well.

Several things converged in my life at that time but perhaps the most significant was a new revelation from God’s Word, found in 1 Corinthians 5:21 that says, “He made Him who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”  I understood the first part of that verse but it was the second part that changed my life.  God was telling me that He had forgiven me fully, accepted me unconditionally, and loved me completely.  Through Christ’s death upon the cross, He had made me righteous (perfect) before Him.  I realized anew that my identity was found in Him alone- not in my performance or through the approval of others.  I was able to embrace His grace fully and from that day on I’ve determined to live in it.  This is why I can genuinely love others- even those who disagree with me or are unkind to me.  It’s really not my grace to give, but God’s grace.  I’ve since learned that when I serve Christ for any reason other than to make Him known, it becomes a form of idolatry- serving ministry (or others) instead of Him.  On our best days, ministry is simply an overflow of the one relationship to which He has called us.  The greatest joy of my life is telling others about this life-changing grace of Jesus and being there when the Light comes on.

For more stories or to post your own, go to: www.10000stories.org

TOP TEN in 2010- my New Year’s resolutions

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TOP 10 for 2010

1. I will wake up every day and pursue Christ.

2. I will bring my best energy to the people I love the most (remembering that nothing makes up for failure in the home).

3. I will let grace rule in all of my relationships.

4. I will keep “prayer and ministry of the Word” (Acts 6:4) my first ministry priority.

5. I will graciously and patiently lead us forward, recognizing the fact that there will always be naysayers (some people’s default mode is “no”) and that God often calls us to move ahead with those who will come.

6. I will constantly lead our church to rethink how we engage an ever-changing culture with the Gospel (so that we will not drift into irrelevance).

7. I will not let the regrets of the past or worries of the future impact my decisions in the present.

8. I will delve deeper and deeper into the mind of Christ to discover more clearly what He envisions His Church to be.

9. I will do what I do best and encourage and empower others to do what they do best.

10. I will daily live an authentic and contagious Christian life (and have lots of fun doing it).

… all by the grace of God.

Jeremiah- The Unwavering Prophet

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Jeremiah in the cisternIf you’re life looks like this today, don’t give up!

Consider this: what if God called you to a ministry that would require you to present a very difficult message to people who did not want to hear what you had to say?  What if, in fact, some would want you dead as a result of hearing what you had to say?  What if you were to do this for forty years- and without a single convert?!  And perhaps worst of all, you were to do it all alone.  This was the life and ministry of Jeremiah.

No wonder he wrestled with discouragement, depression, and even despair.  I look at his life and think, “I have nothing to complain about.”  I’m inspired by his courage, his honesty, and his persistence.  I’m also reminded that one’s legacy is not determined by worldly “success”, but is only measured by obedience to God.

Jeremiah’s legacy was simple: mission accomplished.  He was faithful and unwavering to God’s call that came upon him in chapter one, all the way to the end.  He did not seek the approval of others, he didn’t pretend to be someone he was not. He preached God’s Word, regardless of what the people said or how they responded.

What will be your legacy?

Legacy is not something you finally think about when you’re near the end of your life.  It’s not something you hope will fall into place.  Your legacy is something that takes place today and you must be intentional about it.  Let me encourage you today to remain faithful, remain moldable, remain true to your calling and pray.  Many start out strong, but very few finish strong.  Will you?  Don’t give up today!

Listen to the word that came to Jeremiah (while he and the people were in exile):

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.  Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.  You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.  I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity.  I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.” Jeremiah 29:11-14