Month: February 2009

Posted on

yesterday on church street

drove by this yesterday and since i am now a stevens point police chaplain i decided to stop and ask if there was anything i could do. everyone was out and the office said it was just a matter of waiting the fire department to get there and take care of business. they arrived in another minute and got to work. not sure why the lady in the photo was yelling but at that moment she was letting a guy just outside the right side of the photo have it.

here’s the stevens point journal article on the fire.

Posted on

down with the ceo model of senior pastors

interesting blog post quoted by kottke concerning non-hierarchical business management. one of the opening quotes is:

The word manager makes many people uncomfortable. It calls up the image of a bossman telling you what to do and forcing you to slave away at doing it. That is not effective management.

 

A better way to think of a manager is as a servant, like an editor or a personal assistant. Everyone wants to be effective; a manager’s job is to do everything they can to make that happen. The ideal manager is someone everyone would want to have.

 

Instead of the standard “org chart” with a CEO at the top and employees growing down like roots, turn the whole thing upside down. Employees are at the top — they’re the ones who actually get stuff done — and managers are underneath them, helping them to be more effective. (The CEO, who really does nothing, is of course at the bottom.)

sounds very similar to this from JESUS

JESUS called them together and said, “you know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. not so with you. instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the SON OF MAN did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

the problem for me is that i have unfortunately seen churches where the pastor serves more as the ceo of all rather than the servant of anyone. in this view the pastor is the head and everyone else’s job is merely to make him (or her) more effective.

i know of one pastor that has a group of people whose job it is to surround him after the service is over so that he won’t be stopped by any of the church members when he is making his way out. it’s not that this pastor doesn’t love the church members, rather it is that there are too many other things that he needs to do and therefore he must move it in order to make it to them. probably says more about large churches than it does about the pastor.

anyhow, if JESUS told HIS apostles to “lead” in the manner of a servant shouldn’t the rest of us do the same thing?

Posted on

tapestry haircut

the audio quality sucks but this video is the beginning of me cutting off jesse’s hair for the message on amos 2:6-16 at tapestry last night. jesse was a beast for letting me do this. his hair was so thick that my normal cavalier approach to things accidentally inflicted pain on him. i wasn’t able to finish his haircut during the message but i did finish it during the last two songs of the night. my favorite moment is at the end of the video when jesse says that his hair is so thick because he conditions daily.

here’s what it looked like afterward.

the finished haircut

Posted on

how the bible should be for us

i once heard someone say that when we read the bible we should have a hard hat on because when we read it our lives should turn into construction zones. there is also a story that shane claiborne tells of being thrown into jail and a police officer telling him that he should be careful in reading his bible because it is a dangerous book. well at least it should be. i’m not sure it always is in my life.

the faith, stories and teachings found in scripture have lead people to take amazing leaps to faith. still it seems that so often we treat it as a nice little book that has comfortable sayings in it. don’t get me wrong. there is comfort to be found in the ONE of WHOM the bible speaks. yet there is a vast difference between receiving comfort and being comfortable. comfort you need when times are though and struggles are going on. comfort helps you to continue. being comfortable implies no need to move or change. comfortable can be a great thing in relationships (we should be able to be comfortable in GOD’s love – hebrews 4:16) but it can be a lousy thing in living out faith.

i love the lyrics of rich mullins. one of his last songs was “surely GOD is with us.” in that song he makes the following statement concerning how people may have reacted to JESUS when HE was walking on earth:

who’s that MAN who says HE’s a preacher?
well, HE must be, HE’s disturbing all our peace

wouldn’t life be exciting if all of us who claim to be followers of JESUS lived that lyric out in our faith and in the way we approached the bible? i think it would be cool if i was constantly have my peace disturbed by the words of my LORD. it might not make me very comfortable but i think it would probably lead to many others receiving comfort.

SIDE NOTE – this post was just supposed to be about the fact that i like the above sign. it’s on by florian.b on flickr. i was just going to say that i like the photo. as most of you probably know i can be a little long winded. ht neatorama.

Posted on

the week in tweets – 2009-02-14

  • It’s 39º outside now and thus feels like the Spring is happening. Of course, that will change soon. Yes I am an optimist! #
  • @Joshross – getting together to talk abotu camp sounds great. i’ve already talked with joe a little on a theme. in reply to Joshross #
  • I just walked part Michael Landon #
  • @dhaltom7 – what are you doing instead? in reply to dhaltom7 #
  • my ipod is officially dead! R.I.P. Narnia. #
  • I can see grass in February. Global warming is true! #
  • I think Mr. Darcy, one of Pam’s cats, snores louder than I do. #
  • Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older. – John Maynard #
  • I don’t know why but I love watching people communicate in public through ASL (American Sign Language) #
  • to live is the rarest thing in the world. most people exist, that is all – oscar wilde #
  • @meganckelly – i was wrong concerning everything i said to you about “celebrity rehab.” #
  • Looking for Creative Commons photos to use in Sunday’s message and found this (http://tinyurl.com/bt9kng) casket wagon – I want one! #
  • I bought Pam’s Valentine’s Day card 3 weeks ago and now I can’t find it! #
  • KFC hotwing sauce is disgusting! #
  • Valentine’s Day = Dinner @ KFC, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” and watching a “Flight of the Conchords” episode – why yes I am a hopeless romantic! #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Posted on

stand up for your product or throw it away

usb port man

awhile back i read this article at lifehacker (which you should add to your rss reader right now). basically it recommended sending broken beyond warranty stuff back to the manufacture instead of just throwing it away. if it’s just small stuff it won’t cost you much and there is apparently a pretty decent chance that you will get something back. so i’m trying this out today. i bought the above usb hub for one of our computers about 7 months ago. the other day it decided to stop working. the warranty was only 3 months but surely it should have lasted longer. so i’m sending it back to kikkerland to see if they will stand behind their product or not.

we’ll see what happens.

Posted on

mad, hopeless, possible

i am fascinated by ernest shackleton and his failed attempt to cross antarctica. i’ve read several books and watched several documentaries on the trials of the endurance crew but until this week i had not read much concerning the ross sea party (on the aurora, the supply ship for the second half of the journey across antarctica). in this book i was reminded that while shakelton was considering crew members for the two ships he divided their names into three drawers labeled “mad,” “hopeless,” and “possible.”

how true is that? don’t you have to be a little mad or hopeless to be a part of a great adventure into the dangerous unknown? don’t you have to to be a little mad or hopeless to take a “leap to faith” that is serious enough that real harm is faced if it doesn’t turn out? most of us are simply too sane to take such leaps. that’s probably why we don’t see GOD do truly incredible things very often.

instead of taking real serious “leaps to faith” we try to describe slight and tame acts of faith as though they are gigantic. there is no real risk in them. no harm comes if they fail. the church continues, our prestige isn’t harmed, there is no great struggle that happens as result of the failed attempt because the leaps that we usually take just aren’t very great. shackelton’s and the ross sea party’s journeys were life and death. usually we followers of CHRIST are merely trying to jump a very small puddle while pretending that it is the atlantic ocean we are trying to span.

nope, most of the time we followers of CHRIST are very rarely “mad” or “hopeless” and therefore we rarely face the real opportunity of being put into the “possible” drawer when it comes to things that are truly amazing works of the kingdom of GOD. the amazing works of the kingdom of GOD involve real risk. the kingdoms of our churches do things that don’t require “mad” or “hopeless” people because usually there is very little real risk involved in those tasks. i believe that the stories of scripture reflect that GOD is always looking for the the “mad” and “hopeless” because they are the only ones crazy enough to attempt the things that are a part of HIS kingdom. those stories, and the modern day continuance of them, are cool because they are risky.

may all of us who call ourselves followers of JESUS become a little more “mad” and “hopeless” in taking risks with and for HIS kingdom.

SIDE NOTE – the above image is from a series of watercolor paintings inspired by shackleton’s journey. you can see the rest of them at samantha scherer’s website