Congrats to Me

I would like to be the first to congratulate me on being Time Magazine's 'Person of the Year'. Honestly, I can think of thousands of people who have had better or more interesting years, but it would be in bad taste to turn down such an honor.

After all, this year has had it's ups for me. I was honored to be able to be a reviewer/reader for Sarah Cunningham's book, Dear Church: Letters from A Disillusioned Generation. I have also had the opportunity to contribute to the writing of The Voice Bible Project, which I'm extremely honored by. I was blessed to teach at both the winter ACU Lectureship and Pepperdine University Lectures on topics which I think are important to the church. In addition, I've had a pretty full speaking schedule, speaking to hundreds of teens, ministers, and other adults -- which is always needed when a family is living on one income. Plus, this year my wife became pregnant with our second daughter. And my brother -- whom I come to love and appreciate more ever day -- became engaged to a nice young woman who obviously loves him. Most importantly, I'm still the husband to an absolutely wonderful woman and father to an incredible 3-year-old girl.

I've noticed since high school graduation that life seems to move pretty fast -- faster every year, it seems. Ferris Bueller was right, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it." I have to confess that I'm one of those people who can easily become so engaged with projects and work that I forget to "look around."

That's why it's probably a good thing that Christmas is so close to New Year's Day. The combination of the two forces us to reflect on where we have spent our time, and what we have done with our minutes, and the whole time the birth of Jesus looms over us reminding us of what is most important. As I reflect on my year, it's not the projects or production that make me feel like the person of the year, it's the people whom I love the most that make me feel special, wanted, and loved. Those are the things that last.

Plus, you have to remember, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Nikita Kruschev have all been Time's "Person of the Year." Not the best company!

Merry Christmas.

Market Share

I mentioned in my last post that I would be reading a number of books over the Christmas holiday. Well, I've begun, and much to the dismay of my wife and daughter, once I start reading it's hard to get me untangled.

One of the books I'm currently reading has me asking some questions. The questions are not about the argument of the book, but rather the language of the text. In the book, terms like "organization," "gain market share," and "compete with the competition" keep springing up.

I'm not sure how I feel about the words. Of course there are organizational aspects to the church, but aren't we going a little too far when the organization of church becomes concern with "market share." At what point -- if any -- does the church transition from a community of people seeking and offering life-change into a gaggle of salesperson? How much do we want the church reflect the best practices of the Fortune 500? It seems to me that it is very easy to build a large church: give people what they want, challenge little in terms of transformation, offer more and better activities for kids than any organization in town, make it easy, serve up religious goods and services. The problem is that I'm not sure if the best way to build a church is the best way to make disciples. I often wonder what many church leaders would spend their time doing if they (we) could divorce ourselves from the desire to compete with our fellow ministers and increase our market share?

Updates On Things Only I Think Are Important.

OK, enough is enough! Two weeks ago I enjoyed my favorite meal from Taco Bell -- two double-decker tacos and a bean burrito. The next day people in the northeast were getting sick from eating at Taco Bell. Well, guess what. I ate at Olive Garden yesterday and now folks are getting sick from that. I hardly ever go out to eat, now when I do somebody dies.
------------------------------

Everyday brings the birth of our second daughter ever closer. Still no name decision in sight. It's just that when we ask people for name ideas, the women just tell us to name her after them and the men give their wives or daughters name. Originality is dead!
------------------------------

Christmas is coming very quickly. I usually get a lot of reading done during that time. On my list to finish before the January 1: Barna's "Revolution", Rainer's "Simple Church", McManus' "An Unstoppable Force", Stanley et al's "7 Practices of Effective Ministry", and Batterson's "In The Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day".

History as Spiritual Discipline.

I just finished reading Rowan Williams' book, Why Study the Past: The Quest for the Historical Church. I'm typically resistant to theological books that are on a "quest" for something. Usually they are an experiment in heresy and essential put forth some line of reasoning or argument that has long been debunked -- think "The Da Vinci Code". However, Williams work is different. At once it is boring, thoughtful challenging and inspiring.

Here are some of the more interesting quotes:

"The inspiration of Scripture, as some modern writers have said, is not a matter of the Holy Spirit holding a writer's hand as a book is written; it is the present reality of a divine mediation that makes recognition possible as we now encounter the strangeness of the story. Abraham isn't 'one of us'; yet we and Abraham do make up an 'us' in relation to God, a shared reality before God which will take a lifetime to fathom."
-------------------

"God is free to do what He wills, and his freedom takes the form of acting so as to change us. It is a mistake to think that Luther (or any other classical Protestant) believed that 'justification' meant only a change in God's attitude without effect in us. On the contrary, what changes is that we become the locus of God's free activity. Unprovoked, unconditioned, and unconstrained by any other agent. God steps into the void and chaos of created existence and establishes himself there as God."
-------------------

"The challenge posed by the Reformation era is whether it is possible to conceive the question about unity and communion in the Church as bound to a witness to the priority of God's act rather than to issues around visible structures...In other words, baptism already encodes the theology elaborated by the doctrinal disputes of the early church."
-------------------

"If it (unity) is most clearly done in worship, then when we sing canticles, psalms and classical hymnody we express a unity across time as well as a unity in space."