Category: personal

so here’s why today sucked.

my senior pastor, bill, resigned from our church today. our church has been going through some disagreements for awhile. bill has born the brunt of the disagreements. here’s basically what was going on:

• our church has a large private school of a little over 1600 kids (talking about the school is a separate issue for me because i basically believe in public education). some years ago the school wiggled out of the church’s direct control.
• certain individuals wanted to bring the school back under direct church control. other individuals didn’t want that to happen.
• during this same disagreement one group of people wanted the church to come under pastoral control and another group wanted it to stay congregational in it’s nature.
• finally there were two other groups: a group that didn’t like the superintendent of the school and a group that didn’t really care for our pastor.
• all of these groups finally found an issue that they could unite over and fight about – the school and it’s relationship to the church structure.
• when everyone else chose a side our pastor had too also.
• then the fight began and some people on both sides were willing to do anything to win. even to the point of questioning the fedility of our pastor’s wife.

the sad thing is that the disagreement has consumed a group of people on each side. most of the other church members couldn’t care less about the whole thing. apparently bill became fed up with the whole thing and decided it was time to go.

so now my church is confused and hurt. allot of people that i love and care about are worried about what is going to happen next. now is when i feel that we, the church staff, have to “shepherd” the most. this is not the first time that a pastor has left over a dispute and it won’t be the last. we have to remind our church members that while it may feel like the “sky is falling” it is in fact not. GOD has not left our church and HE will still do great things in and through it. now is the time to remind people that sometimes families disagree and cruel words are hastily said but in the end we are still family.

so here’s the process for finding a new pastor within a southern baptist church:

• complete confusion for the first three weeks or so – for good or bad southern baptist churches are very dependent upon the personality of their pastors. most people go to a southern baptist church for one of three reasons: 1) they were raised within that church, 2)they came from another church/city because they liked the present pastor, or 3)because this was the church in which they began their relationship with CHRIST. for a large number of people this means that when a pastor leaves they suddenly find that one of the main reasons that they had been at that church has also left. so this leads to some “sky is falling” “GOD has forsaken” us confusion.
• after the initial chaos has finished the church slowly starts the process of searching for a new pastor. the first step for the church is that it will pick a group of individuals from within the church who will have the job of searching for a new pastor. this is usually called the “pastor search committee” but can be called anything. for the church staff the first step will be picking one of the staff members to be the staff leader.
• the first thing the “pastor search committee” will be to search for an interim pastor. the interim pastor will preach on sundays and wednesdays. the “staff leader” will take on the remaining administrative responsibilities of the now departed senior pastor.
• after the “pastor search committee” finds an interim pastor the group will then move to the process of finding a senior pastor. this begins with getting as many resumes as possible. resumes will be sent in from friends, seminaries, individuals, pastors, etc.
• once they received the resumes the group will pray over everything and begin to weed through it all. they will narrow the group down and then call and ask if the individual would mind praying about the possibility of discussing this further.
• after everyone has prayed and some of the individuals have said “yes” the committee will ask for sermon tapes and references. they will listen to the tapes, watch videos of the individuals and search through the references.
• the group will then pray again and reach a decision to go further with one individual.
• then the group will deal with this individual until all of the them (the committee and the individual) say “yes” or they say “no”.
• if it is a “no” then they will go back to the pile of resumes and tapes and start praying again.
• if it is a “yes” they will bring the pastor in for a weekend for the church to meet the pastor prospect.
• then the church votes – which is usually, but not always, a forgone conclusions because the church obviously trust the committee, since they picked them.
• the whole process will probably take 8 months to 2 years.

the good thing is that every interim i have ever been through has been extremely positive. in fact, the interim times have been some of my best experiences within any church.

it’s been awhile since i last blogged.

i’ve thrown up 4 times over the past 24 hours and i basically feel curdy.

before throwing up for the first time yesterday i took my kids to see batman begins (which is why the contents of my first hurl was mainly popcorn – a good substance to throw up because it comes up easy). wow, what a movie. it was incredible. j.t. was right in bragging about it. it was great. i loved it, my kids loved it, and my stomach even lasted throughly the entire movie without releasing its contents.

thursday night i went to speak l.s.u.’s baptist campus ministry. usually there are a couple of hundred people there for their worship service. thursday night there were 25. i killed the message i gone there with and instead got everyone into a circle to discuss why our first century brother’s and sister’s confession of “JESUS is lord” was considered so dangerous by the roman world and our same confession is not. it made for an interesting evening.

i usually love sundays but tomorrow is going to suck.

i figured i would give y’all an update on my arm. as you probably know i received a typhoid shot earlier today to get myself ready for our annual youth mission trip to nicaragua. for some reason the typhoid shot is always painful and earlier today was no exception – it hurt. the question now is does it still hurt?

the answer is – yes it does still hurt.

i’m not a wimp about shots or anything but i received my bi-annual typhoid shot for going to nicaragua and my arm is killing me. this has to consistently be the most painful shot i have ever gotten.

i love good comments from people. i really enjoy it when people brag about something i have done or said. it makes my day or night we someone says that what i have lead has been amazing.

of course, i don’t usually grow much from these positive comments that i love to hear. actually, i usually grow the most form negative comments. for me the negative comments usually point the clearest to my weaknesses. in some ways the negative comments are closer to honest critique than any of the positive comments i have ever received.

according to wikipedia criticism is:

the activity of judgement or interpretation … the process of offering valid and well-reasoned opinions about the work of others in a friendly manner rather than an oppositional one.

i need people to “reason” about what i am doing so that it’s weaknesses can be pointed out and i can work on improving those areas. that’s why i joined the weekly group at flickr. weekly is a place where you can post one picture a week and then people offer their criticism concerning your photo. i want to improve as a photographer and the weekly group is helping with that. i love it. the positive comments are good but truthfully i usually learn allot more from the negative comments.

i feel the same is true in ministry. the positive feedback is nice but the negative statements (when we sort through all the person crap that often accompanies them) do the best job of pointing out our areas for improvement. i don’t absorb all that is said with a negative comment because often there is a bunch of personal bitterness connected with some of those statements. yet more often than not there is a nugget of truth to be found within the criticism. that’s what i want to discover. i want to find that small granule of truth and learn from it.

alan, the assistant youth minister, and i are about to start critiquing each other’s messages. hopefully we can lovingly point out each other’s strengths and weaknesses and improve because of it. i hope it works because i know that i need it.

i’m finally back home (actually i got back earlier today). i have eaten, taken a nap, watched the final disc of “24” season 3, and now i am watching “equilibrium“. i still need to process my thoughts concerning the mission trip i just experienced. i did have the chance, along with alan, to talk with one of the leaders of the organization and express my worries concerning it. she seemed to receive it well.

overall the trip did once again confirm that i love my youth. they are simply the greatest youth in the world.

we finished working with our site church today. all of us have loved working with them. the program at night has still continued to stink (mainly because it has been a program).

every now and then i have wi fi access at the mission trip i am presently on and so i now have the chance and ability to post. the trip has been positive and negative at the same time.

first the positive.

• the church we are working with in doing a neighborhood vacation bible school has been amazing. all of the teens and adults have loved the church and the kids. this church is incredibly interested in being involved with their community. it’s great.
• the church has also made us feel very welcome there. they have been very enjoyable to hang out with. we already feel like we belong with them.
• the kids we are working with have been amazing. they are starved for attention, and love being with our teens. therefore, our teens have loved being with them. our teens have befriended the kids of the neighborhood we are in with an intense and great love that i am sure GOD is honored by.
• my teens – enough said. i have the greatest youth and youth workers in the world. i love them. they take any situation and work with it.

now for the negative

• the whole program has been very poorly organized. every leader’s meeting i go to has a volunteer in it rather than staff and the meeting ends up with the volunteer having to say over and over, “i’m sorry i don’t know i’ll have to ask part of the leadership team.” why have a meeting and waste my time if it’s not going to answer questions. the most telling statement of the disorganization is that all of the schedules given to the teens have been wrong. so from the first day all 500 teens that are here have been dependent upon their leaders for knowing what was supposed to happen.
• whoever planned the schedule has no understanding of the developmental needs of teens. consider trying to control middle schoolers as you take their whole saturday and push them through 4 one and a half hour long “training” sessions with only lunch for a break. the sermons weren’t even active in their nature. it was 6 hours of lecture and singing. or consider being forced to keep 500 teens quiet for an hour right outside of the church’s first worship service waiting for the moment that the pastor calls for them to dramatically march into the service and be “commissioned” for all the church to see.
• on the schedule we have free time but in truth it is merely travel time. this translates to everyone feeling tired and worn out.

so the good side of all this is that all the stuff that we have planned and done at our work church has been very positive and our kids have loved it. this means that my teens will leave with a good experience that has brought them closer to GOD and our work church will have been able to use us as tools to extend their ministry. the bad side is that i have basically paid someone else lots of money for me to do my own mission trip, because what they have done has added very little good.

if you can’t tell i’m a little bitter.

i love trying new things – when i’m in a place that i am familiar. the problem is this week i am doing a “new to me” mission experience with some of my youth. it’s called global encounter. thus far there have been somethings that i liked about it and somethings that i haven’t liked about it. the biggest thing i have realized is that i am very comfortable with change when i am in control of it. i do not like having to “float along” in someone else’s sea and be captive to their winds and currents.

of course, this whole thought then turns in on me and i have to start considering if i am forcing teens to “float in my sea” or if i am inviting them to float with me. floating with me is cool but just being in my world that i control is awful frightening. i might have to reconsider some of my creative projects when i get back home.

yesterday i posted about the great and instant increase in the number of visitors to this blog and the confusion that it was causing me. thankfully, adam from ys forum blogring told me that the ys update listed my blog as their blog of the week. while i appreciate the “nod of the head” i do feel i have to ask “why would they list my blog?”

so here are my thoughts:

• ys has made a huge mistake meaning to actually type the url of http://disciplenow.blogspot.com/ instead of http://disciple-now.blogspot.com/ and accidentally sent innocent people to my blog.
• whoever picks the “blog of the week” for the ys update was smoking something strange last week when they were putting together the update.
• they have recommended so many blogs that they have reached the end of the blogsphere and are stuck recommending mine.

all i know for sure is that as someone who respects ys greatly i’m a little disappointed that you’ve dropped to such a low level. common ys i know you can do better.