I feel that in one large way our Bible schools are failing the ministers they are training. They are not preparing our up and coming ministers in the realities of church transformation. There is a huge shift in the approach to ministry that has been occurring over the last 10 years or so. Our young ministers are as passionate about God as any other generation, they are well-grounded in the faith an in our doctrines, and they possess skills and intelligence that are on a par with any generation ever produced. They are passionate about social justice, life change, worship and discipleship, but in a way that differs significantly from the previous generation. I truly believe that the changes in perspective from this generation are more significant that any previous generational shift. These ministers are truly effective, technologically savvy, and relational. The problem is that the churches they are inheiriting haven't seen this new way. Many of them have had wonderful long-time pastors who served their congregations for decades. These churches are still doing things the way they did them decades ago. Then the long-term pastor retires or dies and it is time to get someone new.These churches, with a core group of older people who have belonged to the church for decades realize that they need an infusion of young people and think that bringing in a young pastor will do it.
Where the breakdown occurs is in the differing of expectations. The people of the church are good people who love God and the church. They don't know any other way, and aren't especially interested in learning any new ways. The young pastor knows only the new ways and isn't especially interested in learning any old ways.
Of course, no one admits to any of this in the selection process. The church falls in love with the new pastor with his pretty wife and kids. They see an infusion of energy in their midst that they can enjoy. They just know that this young family can round up some more good solid young families and their church will be happy again. They can do some painting and fixing up of the nursery, and they will be ready to go and grow just the way they did when they were the young families. After all, it worked then, it should work now. They tell the new pastor that they know some things have to change, and he should feel free to do whatever it takes to get the church growing again.
The young pastor takes the reins and his mandate for change and goes to work. The hymnals disappear and new choruses are sung. Guitars and drums show up on the platform. There is talk of a projector and screens replacing the song books. Maybe the people grit their teeth and endure that because, after all, that's what the young people supposedly want. But things get tense when the young people the new pastor brings in start showing up. They are disrespectful. They wear shorts and flip-flops to church. They have tattoos. They are of different races. Now, instead of having the monthly pancake fellowship, the new pastor wants to have a before school breakfast for really rough kids around the neighborhood. These kids cuss and speak rudely to the servers. Even though they live in walking distance from the church, they have never been inside the church before. The new pastor thinks things are going really well. Attendance is growing, people are being reached for Christ and all of a sudden he is informed that the board is calling for a meeting to vote on his ouster.
This scenario plays out over and over, but we keep doing things the same way. We teach our Bible school students to pray, how to seek and cast vision, and how to take spiritual authority in their congregations. They are told to lead with confidence. But they are not told what to do when they take a declining church. They are not counseled how to build relationships before casting their vision. They are not taught that being voted into office does not automatically give them permission to do things their way. They are not told that they should not believe the encouragment to make changes. They need to make friends, first. They will eventually be invited to lead, but that will only happen after they have gotten to know the folks well enough to earn the benefit of the doubt. They need to be told not to change a thing- even if it means gritting his teeth during every service because the song service is awful and no one seems to care about outreach. They need to be told that they need to listen to all of the long boring stories of how wonderful their predecessor was. Until that is done and he is truly "one of them", he will be the outsider and will be in the minority in every controversy. These people have been there their entire lives; he just got there.
But we're not doing that. Instead, we are sending these highly qualified people into situations without basic tools for survival. Churches and ministers suffer needlessly as a result. I think that is just awful.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Barbarians at the Gate?
In my relatively brief lifetime I have seen a tremendous change in the Assemblies of God. When I was a little boy back in the 60's the A/G was unknown to most of my school friends. When we would talk about where we went to church I envied my Baptist and Nazarene friends, because the other kids had at least heard of their church. The A/G was regarded in many circles as a ragtag group of holy rollers, residing outside the mainstream of church. I find it a little ironic, now, to see the A/G viewed as not only mainstream, but hopelessly bogged down in old-school tradition in the view of the generation now coming to influence. The baby boomers, of whom I am a young member, are no longer the revolutionaries and world changers. We are the obstacles. We are the establishment we railed against so many years ago. Back then many articles were written about the "generation gap". There was a huge chasm separating the worldviews of the boomers from their parents. Now the boomers are separated just as far from their children. As we saw our parents holding us back, our children see us as obstacles to their clear vision for the future.
In watching the online streaming video of the business sessions of the recently completed General Council, I saw that the generation gap is alive and well in our movement. Resolutions were debated and although the words were civil, the attitudes were dismissive and distrustful in several instances. I saw resolutions which would have changed some things that had good technical reasons for their success or failure, seemingly voted up or down based on the emotional pleas of those arguing for or against their passage. It all boiled down to the attitudes of "protecting the institutions" vs. "bringing change to institutions that don't work". And it got pretty intense at times. Challenges were laid down, and threats of leaving were made.
It doesn't have to be that way. As we move forward, both young and old need to realize one important thing. The old will not be "in control" much longer. The old need to remember this and begin to think in terms of legacy. We need to see if the issues we defend so vigorously are transcendent issues or merely institutions of our own making. Organizational structures and matters of polity are not the altars we really want to sacrifice our legacies on. We need to explain the heart of how we got here instead of giving the impression that we are fighing off the barbarians at the gate. We need to be mentoring the young and asking for their counsel and advice on decisions we make that they will be living with. There is no room for "if you don't like it you can hit the road" attitudes. Let's be smart. The old might have a majority now, but their members are dying off. The ranks of the young are growing. They will be the majority soon. We can be mentors with respected opinions or we can wait to be replaced and see every change as an attack on what we have built.
The young need to realize the same thing. They have time on their side. They will be in charge, and soon. Much of what we are doing now will be changed, and for the better in most instances, because the changes will reflect current realities of how organizations should relate to the organized. Fabricating long-term solutions to short-term problems will cause greater troubles down the road. Threatening to leave the movement if a particular resolution is not passed will not help anything. Disrespecting the life's work of the current generation will not help. It is good that the young are frustrated. It means that they are thinking and that they are passionate about what they are inheiriting. In the few short years until the young take over completely, it would serve them well to get to know their predecessors; learn what to hold on to and what mistakes not to make.
Both groups need to be willing to try new things. We have much to learn from one another. Old folks, the non-essential stuff we are defending so vigorously now will be changed. Get ready for it. Young folks, some of your sure-fire ideas will fizzle. Count on it. But we will all benefit more from a commitment to unity than we will from a consolidation of political power.
In watching the online streaming video of the business sessions of the recently completed General Council, I saw that the generation gap is alive and well in our movement. Resolutions were debated and although the words were civil, the attitudes were dismissive and distrustful in several instances. I saw resolutions which would have changed some things that had good technical reasons for their success or failure, seemingly voted up or down based on the emotional pleas of those arguing for or against their passage. It all boiled down to the attitudes of "protecting the institutions" vs. "bringing change to institutions that don't work". And it got pretty intense at times. Challenges were laid down, and threats of leaving were made.
It doesn't have to be that way. As we move forward, both young and old need to realize one important thing. The old will not be "in control" much longer. The old need to remember this and begin to think in terms of legacy. We need to see if the issues we defend so vigorously are transcendent issues or merely institutions of our own making. Organizational structures and matters of polity are not the altars we really want to sacrifice our legacies on. We need to explain the heart of how we got here instead of giving the impression that we are fighing off the barbarians at the gate. We need to be mentoring the young and asking for their counsel and advice on decisions we make that they will be living with. There is no room for "if you don't like it you can hit the road" attitudes. Let's be smart. The old might have a majority now, but their members are dying off. The ranks of the young are growing. They will be the majority soon. We can be mentors with respected opinions or we can wait to be replaced and see every change as an attack on what we have built.
The young need to realize the same thing. They have time on their side. They will be in charge, and soon. Much of what we are doing now will be changed, and for the better in most instances, because the changes will reflect current realities of how organizations should relate to the organized. Fabricating long-term solutions to short-term problems will cause greater troubles down the road. Threatening to leave the movement if a particular resolution is not passed will not help anything. Disrespecting the life's work of the current generation will not help. It is good that the young are frustrated. It means that they are thinking and that they are passionate about what they are inheiriting. In the few short years until the young take over completely, it would serve them well to get to know their predecessors; learn what to hold on to and what mistakes not to make.
Both groups need to be willing to try new things. We have much to learn from one another. Old folks, the non-essential stuff we are defending so vigorously now will be changed. Get ready for it. Young folks, some of your sure-fire ideas will fizzle. Count on it. But we will all benefit more from a commitment to unity than we will from a consolidation of political power.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Political Appointments
I want to rant today about a couple things relating to politics in general and Supreme Court nominations in particular and how they relate to the Christian community.
Of course, anything having to do with anything political has always been an opportunity for the politics of extremes to have a field day. Judicial appointments have always been seen as an opportunity for the majority party to tilt things toward its current proclivities. That alone is fine. That is how politics operates. Political people find ways to achieve majorities so that they can further the issues that enabled them to be elected in the first place. I have no problem with that. Politics is politics. Do or say whatever is necessary to get elected and re-elected while trying to get more like-minded people elected instead of the people of a different mindset.
What upsets me and has caused this rant today is twofold. Starting with the unsuccessful nomination of Robert Bork back in the 80's, the attacks on court nominations have left the realm of principled opposition and have become an opportunity to forecast apocalyptic results with each subsequent nominee. The left screeches that any nominee presented by the right will result in poor people being denied the right to vote, women forced to endure "back-alley abortions done with coat hangers" and a hateful disregard for the disadvantaged. Equally shrill come the charges by the right about the nominees presented by the left. Those charges are predictable, regardless of the nominee. They forcecast that the nominee will re-write the constitution from the bench, will cause the doors of our prisons to be opened up and give more rights to criminals than to law-abiding citizens, and will strip away the foundations of our American values.
In the past twenty plus years, it hasn't mattered who the nominee was, the charges remained constant. The minority party is portrayed as obstructionist for challenging the nomination, and we are supposed to forget that the majority party did the same thing when they were in the minority. So, the first thing that I want to rant about is that politicians of every stripe think that I am stupid and have no memory of previous justices that have been seated and what was said of them during their nominations. When a nomination occurs and the charges begin to fly I am supposed to be offended in one of two ways: If I am aligned with the majority party I am supposed to be offended that such a fine jurist is being attacked so unjustly. If I am aligned with the minority party I am supposed to be deeply offended that the other guys have nominated someone who will undermine the very foundations of what we hold dear. Regardless of which party I am aligned with, I am supposed to forget that we acted the same way last time. I am just supposed to write letters, and most importantly, send money.
The second thing that makes me mad about all of this is that the Christian community has become such visible and predictable participants in all of this. Immediately upon the nomination, I know the content of the e-mails that will be forwarded to me. If the nominee is presented by the conservatives, the e-mails will tell of the deep spiritual walk of the nominee, and how we need to pray that the evil forces of the left will not be able to overturn this nomination. If the nomination comes from the left, the messages tell of the dark, sinister nature of previous rulings by the nominee and that we need to pray that this person will not be able to destroy our "Christian Heritage". And we respond predictably. We see everything as black & white, good vs. evil, and light vs. darkness.
What we forget is that America never gave us freedom of religion and no law passed will ever take it away. America has laws that say that no one will be punished for the practice of a religion and those laws could be overturned someday. But we have freedom of religion just as every person in the world does. The personal cost is much higher to practice your religion in many other countries. It may cause you to die. But the free practice of your religious beliefs is not legislated. It is an individual choice made internally. If every lawmaker and every justice was fully Christian and even if they were practicing Pentecostals; and if every law passed was in complete agreement with the King James Version of the Bible, we would still be a nation of sinners. Laws establish penalties for behaviors we want to discourage, but they don't change hearts.
So, are Supreme Court nominations important? Of course they are important. As Christians who are citizens, we have an obligation to be the best Christian citizens we can be. But please realize that no political party fully encompasses the teachings of Christ. Only Christianity does. Have political opinions. Vote your values. But never forget that neither laws nor lawmakers have a say in our relationship with and our responsibilities to Christ.
Of course, anything having to do with anything political has always been an opportunity for the politics of extremes to have a field day. Judicial appointments have always been seen as an opportunity for the majority party to tilt things toward its current proclivities. That alone is fine. That is how politics operates. Political people find ways to achieve majorities so that they can further the issues that enabled them to be elected in the first place. I have no problem with that. Politics is politics. Do or say whatever is necessary to get elected and re-elected while trying to get more like-minded people elected instead of the people of a different mindset.
What upsets me and has caused this rant today is twofold. Starting with the unsuccessful nomination of Robert Bork back in the 80's, the attacks on court nominations have left the realm of principled opposition and have become an opportunity to forecast apocalyptic results with each subsequent nominee. The left screeches that any nominee presented by the right will result in poor people being denied the right to vote, women forced to endure "back-alley abortions done with coat hangers" and a hateful disregard for the disadvantaged. Equally shrill come the charges by the right about the nominees presented by the left. Those charges are predictable, regardless of the nominee. They forcecast that the nominee will re-write the constitution from the bench, will cause the doors of our prisons to be opened up and give more rights to criminals than to law-abiding citizens, and will strip away the foundations of our American values.
In the past twenty plus years, it hasn't mattered who the nominee was, the charges remained constant. The minority party is portrayed as obstructionist for challenging the nomination, and we are supposed to forget that the majority party did the same thing when they were in the minority. So, the first thing that I want to rant about is that politicians of every stripe think that I am stupid and have no memory of previous justices that have been seated and what was said of them during their nominations. When a nomination occurs and the charges begin to fly I am supposed to be offended in one of two ways: If I am aligned with the majority party I am supposed to be offended that such a fine jurist is being attacked so unjustly. If I am aligned with the minority party I am supposed to be deeply offended that the other guys have nominated someone who will undermine the very foundations of what we hold dear. Regardless of which party I am aligned with, I am supposed to forget that we acted the same way last time. I am just supposed to write letters, and most importantly, send money.
The second thing that makes me mad about all of this is that the Christian community has become such visible and predictable participants in all of this. Immediately upon the nomination, I know the content of the e-mails that will be forwarded to me. If the nominee is presented by the conservatives, the e-mails will tell of the deep spiritual walk of the nominee, and how we need to pray that the evil forces of the left will not be able to overturn this nomination. If the nomination comes from the left, the messages tell of the dark, sinister nature of previous rulings by the nominee and that we need to pray that this person will not be able to destroy our "Christian Heritage". And we respond predictably. We see everything as black & white, good vs. evil, and light vs. darkness.
What we forget is that America never gave us freedom of religion and no law passed will ever take it away. America has laws that say that no one will be punished for the practice of a religion and those laws could be overturned someday. But we have freedom of religion just as every person in the world does. The personal cost is much higher to practice your religion in many other countries. It may cause you to die. But the free practice of your religious beliefs is not legislated. It is an individual choice made internally. If every lawmaker and every justice was fully Christian and even if they were practicing Pentecostals; and if every law passed was in complete agreement with the King James Version of the Bible, we would still be a nation of sinners. Laws establish penalties for behaviors we want to discourage, but they don't change hearts.
So, are Supreme Court nominations important? Of course they are important. As Christians who are citizens, we have an obligation to be the best Christian citizens we can be. But please realize that no political party fully encompasses the teachings of Christ. Only Christianity does. Have political opinions. Vote your values. But never forget that neither laws nor lawmakers have a say in our relationship with and our responsibilities to Christ.
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