Friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Good to have you with us.
Thanks for joining us.
We’ve been working on this series roughly called Stuff That Bugs Pastors,
and it’s just been a look over the last several sessions,
things that happen in the church that can
be frustrating to the people in the church,
particularly to maybe leadership in the church.
And really, Michael, that’s all some version of people being people.
When our faults and our biases and our own small interests get in the way,
it happens to all of us,
and when it happens in the church,
you know, the church struggles a little
bit for that.
And as we talked through that and as we kind of came to the end of the list,
it occurred to us that we really should probably think about the flip side a little bit,
because as we kind of hinted at last session,
the church is an amazing place.
Yes,
we have some struggles.
Yes, we have some warts.
Yes, we have places we get it wrong.
But when the church gets it right, friends,
the church is an incredible,
amazing organization.
When we live into our calling to be the people of Jesus Christ and to act that way to one
another and to others,
when we get that right,
the church is like no other organization.
I do think there is something,
and I want to be careful with these words.
I’m using them intentionally.
I think there is something sacred,
something holy about the church when we have those moments.
And our hope is always to live into more of those moments.
So we want to spend a couple of weeks celebrating the places the church gets it right.
And you can see we’ve changed our label this morning,
stuff that delights pastors.
And so we thought it would only be fair if from our perspective we tell you a few of
the things that excite us about the church and a few things we celebrate about churches in general.
I think we’ve got to be careful here,
Clint, because it would kind of be easy to just go
back over the talking points of the series that’s come before here.
And we could just reverse it all,
because in so many ways,
it is the flip side of the coin.
As it is in life,
oftentimes our greatest weaknesses are opportunities or places
for our greatest strengths to be known.
Of course, from the Christian context,
we understand that in our weakness,
God’s strength is made known.
It’s God’s grace that works through the midst of the gathered community that we call the church.
If we look at the sum total of our abilities separately,
that’s always going to add up
far below what the church is called to be and what it’s capable of being
by the power of the Holy Spirit.
And that becomes really enfleshed.
It becomes real.
It becomes practical.
When you get to sit in the church office of pastor,
when you get to sit vocationally,
day in and day out,
in the role of helping to try to serve that community,
what ends up happening is you get to see the church at its best.
You get to see real people’s lives being impacted by the church,
doing what the church is called to be in Jesus Christ.
And that is a safe place.
Of course, Jesus uses that image of a flock and having a shepherd.
And we have this idea that the church can be a place where people thrive.
And when it does that,
when the church becomes a place where people can thrive,
then you begin to get to see people’s lives actually change.
Sometimes,
Clint, that happens quickly.
There are some moments of transition or moments of realization in people’s lives
where things really almost transform before your eyes.
You just you see it happen.
That’s incredible.
In some cases, I might even say it’s holy to watch that happen.
In other instances, I think you see that happen over a long period of time.
If you’ve had the ability to serve and work with people over a longer season,
it can be remarkable to see spiritual growth that happens in a decade.
And that is also a really amazing,
incredible holy work to see.
So it’s a unique vantage because on one hand,
yes, we’ve spent how many weeks talking about places where the church can go wrong.
But we affirm that there are so many times when the church
is living in the fullness of grace that real people’s lives are changed for the better.
And that’s an incredible gift to get to see.
Yeah, and the church is complex,
right, Michael?
I mean, there’s multiple members and there’s always a lot going on at any one time.
And so it is not like a light switch where sometimes the church has it wrong
and sometimes the church has it right.
It’s a mixture.
There’s at any given moment in the church,
there are things we’re doing well and celebrating,
and there are places we’re struggling.
That’s how people work.
That’s how life works.
It’s certainly how organization works.
But within that, I agree 100%, this idea of change,
of seeing people grow,
one of the truly blessed opportunities of our tasks as pastors is that we get to walk
with people through their life.
And we,
and often what that means is we get the opportunity to see them grow in their faith, in their service,
in spite of their struggles or through their struggles.
You know, I was one time asked early on in my ministry career,
a person asked me,
“Just prove.
Just give me some proof that there is a God.
Just,
I’m willing to go along.
I just need proof.”
And as I thought about it,
the only answer I could give was to say,
“I can’t prove anything
to you, but I can tell you that since I’ve been in the church and in the faith,
I’ve seen a number of people change their lives.
I’ve seen them give up things that hurt them.
I’ve seen them become more loving.
I’ve seen them reconcile with people they’ve been estranged from.”
And it’s been my experience that people don’t change very well or very easily or very often
on their own.
So if I’m to offer any proof,
it is to say that in places where we talk about the faith,
I think we see people change for the better more often.
And for me,
that is a wonderful testimony of the church.
We ought to be the place where,
you know, Paul says that this is what some of you used to be
when he talks about sins.
And he says in the church,
“Some of you used to live those lives,
but now you don’t anymore.
You’ve grown past those things.”
And Michael, when we as followers or when we as pastors get to see others grow,
I think those are amazing moments.
I think those do good things for pastors’ hearts, for their calling.
They do good things for churches.
They’re not easy because they generally,
in order to grow,
it first means you start
from a place of difficulty.
But when it happens,
it’s a wonderful testimony of the work that God is doing in a faith community
and the way that that connects with actual people’s individual lives,
not just coming together on Sunday to worship,
but really making a difference in the way that they live
and in who they are,
who we are, outside of the church as well.
You know, one of the really unfortunate reputations that the church has sort of garnered,
and it’s always been there,
but I think it’s certainly come back to the fore of conversation,
is this idea that church is a place of restriction,
that we’re very focused on
what you’re not doing right,
on what you should keep out of your life.
We very much have sort of garnered this impression,
certainly in our culture,
that the church is a place that wants to keep you from doing a lot of things.
Some of those, maybe they’re good for you,
maybe they’re not good for you,
but we’re a place trying to sort of hold the people out.
And what’s really unfortunate about that is that I’ve experienced the church at its best
to be a place that gives people real freedom and agency.
We are a people who seek week after week to return to our deepest values.
Clint,
an example of this,
I just recently finished a book,
sort of like one of those armchair philosophy books,
kind of a light reader kind of deal,
but talking about what it means to live your best life.
And what was striking to it was,
there were some of those just simple nuggets of wisdom
kind of thing, but how often it was about coming back to awareness of ourselves,
of our deeper values,
of the things that really matter to us,
that really give us joy,
the things that will last in our life.
And what struck me when I got to the end of the book was
that this is just a tiny part of what church does.
I mean, we have so much more to offer than just a reminder of our deepest values.
We actually have ancient thousands of year old practices and tools and gifts that have been
handed from one Christian to another to remind ourselves to form our imaginations
as to the things that will last.
In other words, you don’t need to construct a life value system.
You don’t need to make a self that understands everything of importance
and that understands your deepest urges and needs.
You don’t need to construct that.
It has been handed from one wise,
thoughtful Christian to another.
All we need to do is be humble enough to listen.
And so I think that if we come to church from that vantage claim,
or we discover as a community that empowers us,
that enriches our lives,
that actually gives us freedom instead of needing to remake the wheel
and figure out all of our deepest values,
we can trust some really,
really wise and faithful folks who say,
“This is the path.”
Now, it’s not always an easy path.
Sometimes it will feel like restricting some things,
but it’s always for the sake of being free in the places that matter.
And I just think that church,
when it gets that right,
becomes an oasis in a dry land.
It becomes a place that doesn’t just recharge our souls for an hour,
but it sends us out the doors with a kind of power and energy and spiritual fervor
that I don’t know any other organization that provides.
You don’t get it at the comedy club.
It’s not the same kind of thing you get in even a public service organization.
It’s a kind of realignment of self in participation with others
that is unique to my experience of church.
And it’s a beautiful thing when it happens.
Yeah, Michael.
I mean, there are lots of ways to grow, right?
I mean,
personal growth,
corporate growth.
I mean,
people can become better at their jobs.
People can become…
I think we live in an era where sort of self-improvement is important to a lot of people,
but rarely does that encroach on the church’s language of spiritual growth.
And there is something to the concept of growing spiritually that is different.
It’s not about being more productive.
It’s not about being better.
It’s not about being fulfilled or satisfied or even to borrow your language, your best self.
It is about being faithful to Jesus Christ.
And I think the church really holds a kind of patent on that language,
which I think makes what we do and what we say about that different than the world around us.
Not to discount any of those other things.
Growing in all those various areas of life,
that’s a positive thing.
But when we talk spiritual growth,
we sometimes talk not just about what’s best for me,
but what is best in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And so, yes,
the world can talk about why it’s important to let go of burdens
so that I can make progress.
The church talks about reconciliation.
The church talks about forgiveness.
Yes, the world can say,
“Have a good marriage because that’s good for you.”
The church says, “Yes,” but that also reflects the nature of God and the covenant of God.
And so,
we bring at our best,
I think, Michael, a depth to some of those conversations that can be lacking in other versions of them.
And it’s not to – again,
I don’t want to say this with arrogance.
It’s not to say that those other conversations aren’t helpful,
that they aren’t true.
It’s just to say that I think we bring something unique.
And when we do that well,
I think we really have something to offer.
There is an ancient wisdom.
There is a sense of truth in the biggest sense, a capital T,
that when the church humbly offers it,
I think can be extremely helpful
and very balancing to the broader context.
I think one of the most impressive sort of vistas,
if you’re looking upon church,
is when the gospel is being preached,
when it’s being lived out in the life of the people,
you inevitably will see transformation.
There’s no way to have gospel and lives not being changed.
It’s in the DNA of the thing.
It’s like you plant a seed.
There’s no way, if the conditions aren’t right,
for that seed to not grow.
It’s built into the nature of that very seed.
When you look at the church,
you see the gospel being proclaimed.
It’s living in the right context.
What I think is impressive is every life that’s transformed,
but from a pastoral vantage,
what may be slightly unique,
when you get to see all of the conversations happening simultaneously,
there’s this kind of horizon that stretches out in front of you,
if you will allow that metaphor.
And what happens is,
when you can begin to see that transformation happening
in radically different people,
at radically different times of their life,
you may have a young family bringing a child for baptism,
literally starting what it means for them to be parents,
beginning this idea of family.
And then on the other hand,
you have a widow who’s been without her husband
for five or 10 years,
living in a new kind of season of her own life, serving, growing,
being transformed.
You have that in the midst of retirements and people
getting diagnoses that most of us could not even imagine.
And all of this is happening simultaneously,
these people serving together,
praying together,
worshiping.
It’s hard to put into words the kind of nuance that you begin to see.
It’s not just one plant growing and budding,
it is a whole garden of them.
And when you see that transformation happening in people who in no other circumstance
are really sharing life together,
they’re just not by season of life,
by hobby, by all of those things that we sort of separate out by,
they would not be at the table.
But in church they are.
The same gospel is producing fruit in all of these varieties of circumstances.
And it is a testament to the robustness of the faith that we have been given.
It has nothing to do with sort of the rigors or the rules.
It has everything to do with the innate power of this good news to transform community.
And when you get to see it happening on that wide horizon,
that larger garden to use that metaphor, Clint,
it is inspiring.
I mean, it’s delightful.
There’s a kind of joy and whimsy in getting to see it.
Yeah, it is one of the true privileges of our job,
I think, Michael, that we have an increased number of those moments to have insight to people’s lives.
So we get a lot of those looks at what faith and what growth looks like.
And I think I find those very inspiring.
I would list many of them as the kind of things that in my own life
have compelled my faith and have strengthened my faith and challenged my faith.
I have had the privilege of walking next to couples who faced devastating relational challenges
and yet rebuilt strong, healthy marriages.
People whose lives were slipping away to addiction and out of control behavior,
who returned to the humble confession of,
“I need to be made right with Christ,”
and pursue that and regain a measure of health.
People who have carried the burdens of broken relationships with family members
and carried things that they couldn’t forgive and finally get themselves to the point of saying,
“I don’t want to live with that burden.
I want to let that go.
I want to pray for that person.”
Whether or not reconciliation could happen in the actual relationship,
at least at a spiritual level, to say,
“I don’t want that anger.
I don’t want that anymore.
I’m willing to put it aside.”
To see people grow in just the various ways that we sometimes have glimpses to it.
And again,
in those moments, I think when that happens in the context of the church,
the person is navigating that individually,
but they’re doing that with the support,
whether it’s outspoken or not,
whether the church is aware of it or not.
They’re doing that with the support of a community.
And to see a person tackle a challenge in their life, in the faith,
and to say that part of it is being surrounded by their brothers and sisters in the faith,
that’s a staggering thing,
Michael.
I mean, it is so humbling.
Most of the people they sit with in church don’t even know what’s happening.
They see that couple and they think,
“Oh, that couple, it’s good to see them.”
They don’t know that couple’s hanging on by a thread.
They don’t know that person’s battling some addiction.
They don’t know that person has been devastated by something someone else did to them,
and they’re desperately struggling to understand what forgiveness looks like in those moments.
But they are connected to it.
They are a part of it.
And as a person who sometimes catches a glimpse of the bigger picture and the way those threads intertwine,
it is—I almost don’t have words for how wonderful and beautiful it is.
Again, for me, such an important understanding of what it means when we call ourselves church.
Because to an outsider,
it may just look like we’re coming into the sanctuary and having worship,
but when you know some of the stories of the people who are there,
it is immeasurably more than that.
So, Clint, I’ve had sort of a growing awareness of that,
I think, now in two stages,
if you will allow.
So the first stage happened relatively early on,
because though I served as an intern
in some churches and was certainly a volunteer and those kinds of things,
it is different when you take upon yourself the vocation of pastor.
You work with a kind of consistency amongst the people,
and it’s probably too soon,
honestly, how quickly people by office,
by vocation, they give you trust.
It’s incredible, actually, how quickly people will allow you into their life.
And so very early on,
I remember that awareness being in the sanctuary with a congregation and
seeing in the number that the sheer shocking variety of challenges that people were facing in their life,
the diversity of celebration,
realizing 50 years of marriage right there,
cancer diagnosis there, addiction there.
And that first awareness was,
wow, this is a huge collection of humanity.
And there was a kind of vastness in that.
The second awareness that came, I think, much,
much later was this coming to see
that church is not just a collection of these people brought together for the common task of worship.
It’s brought together for the express purpose of knowing and living and loving one another,
that the point is that we are always integrating and allowing those threads to be
worked together.
That is what the church is.
It’s a more nuanced kind of experience of the church.
And I don’t hear this as critique.
I think that is one of the inherent weaknesses of going to a
massive church and worshiping there every Sunday and not building real meaningful relationships in that place.
Because the temptation in that is to be a ship passing all of these other ships.
What you miss is the spiritual richness,
the vibrant color of lives being transformed in
Jesus Christ.
No matter what your role in the church is,
you’re called to be part of the body.
You’re called to be built into it.
And so by nature of that,
you should have a connection.
Many churches, I think, use small groups to try to accomplish and end similar to that.
However,
it works out in the life of your fellowship.
I sincerely pray that you’re serving.
I sincerely pray that you’re finding the fellowship of the gathered body.
I sincerely hope that simply you know folks’ names,
you know the the burdens that you’re bearing,
and you know the things that
they’re celebrating because that is not ancillary.
That’s not just a nice byproduct of being church.
I would put to you that is very close to the center of being church.
Because Jesus Christ is living in those people’s lives.
He’s carrying them in their time of need.
He is the one who’s
brought them to that moment of celebration.
And if we miss it with them,
we’re missing what Christ
is doing in a much bigger way.
One of the praises of the early church in the book of Acts,
Michael, it says that, you know, daily they were adding to their number.
So there was growth,
which I think we’ll talk about maybe either in this session or the next.
That is also a beautiful thing about the church.
But the other thing it says is that there were none among them that had needs.
They cared for one another.
Early Christians were known for the way that they cared for each other,
and to some extent their broader community.
And I think when you see the church live that out, in simple ways.
We just this week had a funeral.
And as is the case at most of the funerals,
we have a group of volunteers who come in and set a reception.
They come in and give their time,
put their efforts into serving the family that has lost a loved one.
We have that call that goes out
and people bring in salads and desserts and et cetera.
And that seems like such a small thing
until you’re the one receiving it.
And you find out that people,
you may not know them just by
the fact that they go to the same church that you do.
You may or may not,
you know, be in relationship with them, but they took the time to do something because they recognize you’re at a moment where
some act of care might be helpful to you.
And I think when we see that in the church,
it is, it’s very powerful.
It’s a very powerful witness to our ministry.
I have seen churches
nearly to the point of adopting a family that was struggling.
A mother gets sick and for
literally weeks on end,
somebody in the church takes a meal,
sits with people who are lonely, gives people rides,
whatever visits them in the hospital,
whatever those things look like,
things that we often attribute to the pastors and pastors,
you know, should be a part of,
but the church is far more powerful when it’s not simply the pastors,
when it’s the people
in the community doing it.
And Michael, I will say that,
you know, to use our language of our
series here, that certainly delights me.
And it is always a measure,
I think, of when I see those
moments in the church taking its call to care for one another seriously,
I always find myself
inspired.
And I always find myself thinking,
we may not have it all right,
but this is, for certain, part of what it looks like to follow Jesus Christ together.
So one of the things that I think is delightful in church is when you see people go deeper in
their understanding of faith.
And I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second.
But to start with
maybe an illustration of that,
I don’t know if you’ve had a similar experience.
I remember in high school,
we were asked to read some of that classic literature,
things, you know, of course, like Moby Dick or the Scarlet Letter,
you know, things that are written by some of the brightest
minds, the best writers, the folks who are most able to embed many layers of meaning in their writing.
And here I am,
a high school kid asked to interpret what that means.
And I think, like, a lot of my peers end up going online for some summaries,
right?
Like, what’s the thing I need
to write in the report?
What you discover when you come back to one of those classic writings
later in life is you realize the depth of the characters,
you realize the kind of nuance that
was there all along,
you couldn’t see it as a high school kid reading it.
But as an adult,
you begin to get access to there is so much more there than what’s just simply on the surface.
And you don’t expect a high school kid to understand all that they don’t have the life experience to unlock it
yet.
They’re not broken.
That’s not wrong.
They’re not there yet.
So the same with faith that the
point I want to make is that is great that we go to Sunday school,
we need to teach our kids the
basic stories of the Bible,
you know, David and Goliath, Moses, we need to talk about Jesus and
the healing stories that these are essential, we start there.
But there’s something beautiful,
delightful, incredible, as people’s minds continue to be open,
their faith deepens, they realize that in these stories, there are so many more levels of spiritual wisdom and insight than what we could
have ever accessed as children.
That doesn’t always happen.
Not everyone who goes to church
digs into their Bible and sees by the power of the Spirit that these things that that’s just
not everyone’s experience.
But when it happens,
the kind of transformation of the mind,
we might call it sort of this continued conversion,
as that happens in a person’s life,
it’s remark.
I mean, in some cases,
though we as Presbyterians don’t access or use the language
of saints very often,
we don’t make some people saints,
you know, when you’re in the room with
someone who’s done that for 70 years,
when they’ve lived their life and taken their faith seriously,
you know, it almost immediately, you can feel the grace you can experience through both the
things said, and in a lot of cases,
the things not said,
the kind of depth of wisdom of the
faith that’s happened, it is remarkable,
it’s beautiful, it’s delightful.
And, you know, it’s an amazing thing to see that kind of transformation in a person’s life.
I’ve lived out most of my adult life in a professional sense within the church,
Michael, and so I like to think I’m pretty well versed on church.
If people want to talk to me about the
frustrations of church or the places where church gets it wrong,
I generally am never surprised by
that.
I often feel like, oh,
yeah, I could tell you even more.
I’m aware that the church has its moments.
We have lots of struggles.
And having said that,
one of the things that compels me and
gives me hope for the church is that I think without exception,
the most beautiful,
wonderful,
caring, mature,
real people that I’ve ever met have all been people of faith.
The people who I look at and I aspire to be like have all been people who practice this thing
that we call faith,
who connect to this thing we call church and who seek to live out this thing
we call the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And my privilege has been to interact with many of them
in the church.
And so to get to do that,
to get the opportunity to look to those
saints, those saintly people in our midst,
and to say, “How can we learn from them?” And to
understand that they weren’t simply born that way.
They didn’t simply – they’re not just made of different stuff.
They have formed themselves on the anvil of the gospel of Jesus Christ,
made and remade themselves over and over again seeking to be faithful,
seeking to know Him,
seeking to enact what He wants of us in their life.
They’ve struggled.
Most of them have been
through difficulties.
It’s not that they’ve had an easy life.
In fact, often just the opposite.
And there is a depth in them that I’m attracted to and hope to emulate,
hope to copy at some
point in my own life.
And I think,
again,
when the church gets it right,
we provide a fertile
ground in which people like that can grow with prayer,
with Scripture,
with community, with fellowship, with ministry.
We have those tools at our disposal.
And when the church will
sort of put its energies in that direction rather than some of the things that could distract us,
when we will dig in to say,
“How is it that we can all grow in our faith,
our understanding, in our service in the name of Jesus Christ?” We have a much greater chance of producing those
results than when we get distracted and go down roads that ultimately probably won’t lead us to those same goals.
Yeah, by the way, it’s not even close.
The vast majority of those people who I’ve
experienced to embody that deep saintly kind of faith are not pastors.
100%.
They’re teachers, they’re lawyers,
they are doctors,
they are…
Farmers,
you name it.
Yeah, absolutely.
There’s no profession that precludes you from that task.
There’s no complex job or simple job.
In fact,
in some ways,
pastoring may be a hindrance to that task if one can’t see the work of the spirit
happening.
If you get fixated on the stuff that bugs you,
all of those previous things,
and you don’t see God doing remarkable, generative things,
that is a temptation of
the pastoral office to not trust the process and to grow in insight and wisdom in lots of different ways.
I will say this as well.
As we recognize the power of the church to be a place of transformation,
I think that image,
Clint, of Anvil is very helpful because the Anvil can sit there gathering dust easily.
It can easily become a tool that sits out there.
Regardless of how much you desire to be deeper and closer,
to be formed and fashioned in a particular way,
if you never avail yourself of the Anvil,
it will not be a useful tool for you.
The church is a place where we experience a kind of fellowship and communion
that I would argue you will not find any other place.
It is not a perfect place.
You don’t walk in the door and experience a kind of perfectness or all put togetherness in the church.
St.
Augustine, an ancient pastor,
once told us that church is a hospital.
We shouldn’t be surprised when it’s
filled with sinners or sick people.
That’s absolutely true.
We don’t come to church
because it meets our needs.
This is where I wanted to go.
Our temptation, Clint, I think sometimes is to think of church as a group of programs that we enjoy or that meets our current
and present life stage needs.
That’s good and helpful.
I certainly affirm that one of the goals
of the church is to build pathways that folks at different moments of life all find what they need
within its number.
A good, healthy church is going to be working to make that possible,
but a church is not measured by the value of its output.
That is not ever the image of the church
given in Scripture, but rather it’s a body.
It’s a thing knit together so that it can be whole.
That by definition is a slower process.
It takes time.
It is a place where we find a lot of
inefficiencies like sitting around the table,
sharing coffee with one another may not move us
forward in our goal to take kids on another youth mission trip,
but it’s an essential part of the body.
Some of that becomes a struggle for folks.
I’ll be honest.
Some people come to church and
it’s not glitzy enough.
It’s not glamorous enough.
It doesn’t move fast enough.
It doesn’t bear all
the cultural sort of markers of hip or in vogue.
And some of that may be toward detriment.
Some of that is certainly to our strength.
The ability to say when we’re dealing with the stuff of timeless faith,
we can take our time or we can be a little more persevering.
We can have a little bit more patience.
And at its best,
the church is patient without being afraid of change.
At our best, the church knows that we’re called to love these people,
not just the people inside the circle,
but those outside the circle.
We’re called to love and we will slowly but intentionally,
carefully and thoughtfully seek to do that task.
It’s a beautiful kind of dance.
It’s a lot of things
held in tension, but when the church gets it right, it’s beautiful.
I think that I might have a
difficult time explaining this to people who aren’t in church often, Michael,
but I think for
people who have been in churches regularly and consistently,
I think this will make sense.
The connection that I see between those differences,
right?
There are churches that are very formal,
very structured.
We might experience a stiff.
There are other churches that are very loose,
very unstructured, whatever happens.
They may show up not even sure what that’s going to be.
There are organ churches, guitar churches,
storefront churches,
cathedral churches.
I think underneath that,
the thing that intrigues me and that I appreciate is a sense of life,
and I don’t have a better way to describe it than when you walk into that place,
there’s a humility and honesty about who they are.
They’re not trying to be all things to all
people.
They know who they are and what they do.
They’re open to other people joining them,
and there’s just a passion.
There’s a real sense of this matters to us.
It’s not just the thing we do.
It’s an extension of who we are and who we’re trying to be,
and having the privilege of serving
in a place where I regularly sense that that is true here at First Press.
I believe that to be the case.
Again, you want to talk about a thing that delights pastors.
Let them serve in a place where
faith seems alive and real and not some structured remnant,
and the church doesn’t feel like a museum
or a place where things are just slowly grinding to a halt.
But it feels like there are real people
living out real faiths here in the name of Christ together.
It doesn’t make it easy.
It certainly doesn’t mean that there are no issues,
no problems.
In fact, it probably creates some.
But there’s something underneath that I would have a hard time defining that I do think you can sense.
I do think you can feel, and I think when you go into a place that has it,
you may or may not ultimately
like how they do this thing or that thing.
It may not be for you from a style perspective,
but you leave thinking there’s something real in that place,
something good is happening,
and God seems present and active.
I think regardless of all of the other parameters,
if you look at what we might call good churches,
growing churches, whatever way you describe them,
I think that’s what they have in common.
And I do think people who have been in church
can sense it when they bump into it.
I think if I was going to try to summarize
that relationship,
Clint, I feel like it is a beautiful set of nuanced tensions.
The thing is, whenever you take the church to the extreme,
it will inevitably become a place that lacks life.
If the church ever doubles down on only one thing or maybe two things,
it will inevitably find itself carving that thing into stone,
and it becomes a kind of sculpture to what
could have been or what was at one time.
The church that lives in that messy tension of real
life, I mean, go into the house of a young family,
and you’re going to find stuff strewn about,
even the best kept home has got toys somewhere,
right?
And it’s got Cheerios in the corner.
And it’s just reality.
When life is being lived,
you’re trying to keep the house clean,
but you’re also trying to make sure that you’ve got gas in the car because you’re going places,
and you’re trying to make sure you find time on the family calendar to be together.
It’s by definition making all of these sort of compromised choices because you’re living in
a dance.
You’re keeping the tensions.
That is a life well lived.
I think that’s the same in the church.
When we live in those relationships with one another,
we’re never doing anything
perfectly.
Nothing is going to get chiseled into stone because,
quite frankly, by the time you get
done, you probably have to change it again.
And that’s actually good.
It’s hard.
It’s hard to live
in the midst of that,
and especially if you’re maybe more of the perfectionistic type,
and you sort of like things to be in routine,
and this is the way this church may be a place of challenge
for you because you find other people who have different values,
or they’re bringing different
perspectives of the gospel,
or they’re seeking to push the church down the faithful road,
which is maybe not in conflict,
but in tension with your own.
That is the beautiful kind of
transformation that happens at a corporate level,
which works its way into our own hearts because
maybe you’re in a season of life that’s way beyond kids.
The beauty of church is there are kids today
who need the investment of faithful men and women of faith.
One practice that gets lived out
practically at first presence Spirit Lake is mentoring.
Folks, some of which who haven’t had
their own kids in the home for 20 or 30 years,
they for two and a half,
three months walk alongside
an eighth grader learning about what that eighth grader likes,
what kind of music they listen to,
what sports they’re in,
and they read scripture together.
That is not a small thing.
That’s a transformational experience for that eighth grader,
and from all of the conversations I’ve had with
those mentors who participate in that program,
a transformational experience for them.
That is, I think, Clint, what it looks like to be in a living church,
in the words that you use.
It’s to
experience the kind of enrichment that comes from the life lived together,
and we do sometimes,
I think, come into a church.
Maybe this is the temptation.
We come into the church.
We’re looking for a church family.
We look at what things do you offer for me at my place of my own faith journey.
The mistake in doing that,
looking for the brochure that might answer that question,
is we miss a far deeper marker of the life of a church, and that is,
what is this church doing
together to be the body?
What is the stuff not said,
but the stuff lived out?
The meals being delivered.
The time spent together over table.
The service work done together.
The money sent to do work both near to home and far away.
I mean, that’s the kind of broad,
difficult-to-pin-down
kind of life I hear you speaking to,
Clint, but when you experience it in a healthy church,
it is captivating.
It is unforgettable,
I might even say,
and that’s a great gift that the church
gives to everyone in its number is an experience of true community,
and from that experience, then,
a sort of desire and drive moving forward to continue it,
to grow it, to deepen it, to care for it, to tend it in a scriptural language,
and I think that’s a beautiful gift when one finds it.
That’s helpful, Michael.
I think as I listen to what you’re saying,
the idea that comes to mind is
that a healthy church,
a vibrant church, can navigate the sort of dichotomies of real life.
In other words,
they are a place that takes what they do very seriously,
but has room for joy,
for laughter,
for humor.
They are a place convinced that they are pursuing truth,
but do it with the humble recognition that we are more than capable of getting it wrong,
and we wouldn’t possess that truth even if we knew it.
It would be God’s truth.
It wouldn’t belong to us.
We would be seeking to uncover it,
you know, a church that says,
“This is the way we
do things,” and we’re okay with that.
We’re even proud of that.
However,
we may need to change
if those things aren’t effective and aren’t the best way for us to move forward anymore.
I think, you know, the church that says,
“We love one another,” and sometimes we bug one another.
The church that can be honest about the dichotomies in both ends of the spectrum and doesn’t
seek to communicate that,
“Well, here, we do it this way.
We only live on this side of the spectrum.”
It seems to me that maybe that sense of life I’m trying to describe is a community that says,
“Hey,
we do all of it.
It’s all present here,
and we try to navigate it just like everyone else does.”
Sometimes we get it right.
Sometimes we get it wrong.
But if you want to try and navigate
with us, if you want to be on that journey with us,
if this seems like the kind of place
you can follow Jesus,
come on board and let’s try to figure it out.
I think, to some extent, maybe that encapsulates what I have in mind when I try to describe that sense of
that passion or a place that is real or a place that has,
I think, what in church speak sometimes
we would call life.
And it’s not to knock other churches.
It’s just to say that I think that is,
in my experience as a Presbyterian,
I’ll say that it’s sadly not the norm.
It is not as common
as I wish that it was to interact with a church and think there’s a lot of life in this place.
I think we live in a season in which there are some struggles in the broader context that keep
that under wraps sometimes.
It may be there,
but it’s maybe not as obvious as I wish it were
in a lot of the churches that I’m aware of.
If you’re joining this conversation and maybe for you it is compelling,
and maybe it does give
that image of the oasis in the desert,
and it feels to you like you’re in the desert,
I want to encourage you that it is in the nature of the gospel to affect Christian community.
This is the work of the spirit,
and we don’t manufacture it.
And so wherever we’re planted,
whatever congregation you are a part of,
or maybe a congregation you’re called to be a part of,
maybe you’ve not been in a church and this conversation piques your interest and you say,
“I wonder what that kind of life might look like.” I want to encourage you that it only takes a
small spark to light an entire forest on fire.
And there’s a kind of spark in the gospel
that if we seek to live out the faith to the best of our ability, wherever we’re planted,
that God will and can be trusted to take that thing that we offer,
whatever it is, in our own faith discipleship,
and to do something with it.
And so my encouragement to you is this,
do what you can.
Grow in your own faith.
Seek discipleship.
Seek to be around folks who
encourage you and challenge you to keep Jesus Christ at the center of every part of your life.
Seek to serve and live in fellowship and in leadership in the community in whatever way
you’ve been gifted to do that.
And everything else can be left to Jesus Christ.
Now don’t
give up.
Don’t despair.
Life will grow even in remarkably difficult places.
May I remind you
that Christian history teaches us that whenever the faith has been most difficult,
that is where the gospel has grown most fantastically, most beautifully.
It is in some of the most difficult
circumstances that God is able to make the faith grow beautiful gardens.
And so my hope of this
conversation is if you’re in a place where you feel like the next step is simply plugging in and
engaging and being faithful,
thanks be to God.
If you feel like that’s not your experience,
don’t despair.
God is faithful and God will make life appear even in places where it may not appear to come easily.
Do not despair.
God is faithful to His people.
It can be easy to forget when we
talk about church that church is nothing more than a collection of people.
Right.
It’s not an entity in itself.
Its personality,
its ministry,
its flavor,
its faithfulness,
its struggles will all be determined by the individuals who make up that faith community.
And so yeah, don’t find the place that you can plug in and you can have a great impact on that place as you bring your
individual faith to it.
And as we do that together,
we become what scripture describes as the body of
Christ.
But that only means the place where individuals who follow Jesus,
follow Jesus together.
And so,
and again,
when you find that place,
it’s wonderful.
And when we live up to that calling,
the church is, I’m convinced,
the best place on earth.
I really believe that.
You know, that really leads me to a wonder.
You know, where have you seen the church,
vibrant and full of life?
I mean, certainly put it in the comments,
send us an email,
contact us through the form in the description.
It’s a beautiful gift when we see church alive.
And I’d be curious where you’ve seen that.
Thanks for joining us today.
It’s a joy to have you
along with these conversations,
especially now as we make this turn to talk about what is delightful
about our experience of the church as pastors.
I hope it’s been encouraging for you and we’ll
continue on next week with some other ways in which the church is full of life.
And we hope you’ll join us for that.
But until then,
subscribe,
like, share, all those things.
We look forward to
seeing you next week.
Thanks for listening