All Wisdom is Learned Relationally
In a sentence, all wisdom is learned relationally, in the context of family and friends, work and neighborhood, under the conditions of sin and forgiveness, within the complex stories that the Holy Spirit has been writing and continues to write for our lives.
-Eugene Peterson, The Unnecessary Pastor
2 Essential Qualities of a Church Planter
Continuing the story (but skipping a bunch of posts I meant to write)…
I made a new friend at the expository preaching conference we put on in the Philippines, Alfred Hermosilla (pictured above). Alfred is a church planter who has himself planted scores of churches throughout the Philippines and who has trained and sent out men to plant many, many churches throughout the Philippines and southeast Asia. Two years ago, Alfred even sent a church planter to Switzerland (homeland of the Buzzard name).
Over a meal of rice and fish, I asked Alfred what he looks for in assessing whether a guy might be called to plant a church. Among the many qualities he looks for, Alfred said there are two qualities that a church planter must have:
- A father’s heart.
- Perseverance.
Alfred said a man must have the heart of God the Father, a heart that’s broken to see sinners come home. He must have the heart of a father of a family, passionately dedicated to the well being, protection, nurture, maturity, and joy of his family.
Alfred said a man must have perseverance, because planting a church is hard. He must be a self-motivator, resilient, and able to push on through great difficulty and spiritual warfare.
I’m thankful for what Alfred taught me, for I soon begin the adventure of planting a new church. And, I’m thankful Alfred is on Facebook, he can keep teaching me.
Get Your Joy Back
Get your joy back.
What happened to all your joy? Where did it go? Who (or what) did you let steal your joy?
This is the question a missionary named Paul asked a group of Christians living around Galatia:
What has happened to all your joy? (Galatians 4:15)
These people used to live with joy, but something happened to it. Their joy was lost, stolen, snuffed out, buried.
What about you?
What has happened to all your joy?
You need to answer this diagnostic question before you can answer the remedy question: How do you get your joy back?
The Galatians lost their joy because they lost a firm grip on the freedom and grace they had in Jesus. Therefore, the remedy for their joylessness was to rediscover Jesus.
Get your joy back. Answer the first question, find out how you lost your joy. Then you can answer the second question and get your joy back.
Your diagnosis and remedy might be the same as the Galatians.
Or, it might not be. You may simply be overworked and in need of a long vacation and change of pace. Even if that’s the case, getting your joy back will have everything to do with rediscovering Jesus.
I’m 31 years old and have finally realized that you can’t do anything well without joy. At least not for the long haul. Or, maybe it’s more the case that I don’t want to live life and do work without joy. If joy isn’t fueling the work I do as a pastor, I will quickly burn out.
A little while back I realized I’d lost my joy. I didn’t like this. I wanted to get my joy back. So I did.
It felt like cutting my way through a dense jungle at the time, but looking back I see the process was simple:
1. I asked, “What has happened to my joy? It took months to come to clarity on this question.
2. Once I had that clarity, I asked, “How do I get my joy back?” I knew what I needed to do. It took months to feel like my old self again, to regain a sense of stable, steady joy in the Lord, but it came.
We’ve got work to do. We’re on a mission to make disciples of all nations. It’s not going to happen without joy. Joyful Christians are what this world desperately needs.
…the greatest need of the hour is a revived and joyful Church…Unhappy Christians are, to say the least, a poor recommendation for the Christian Faith; and there can be little doubt but that the exuberant joy of the early Christians was one of the most potent factors in the spread of Christianity. -Martyn Lloyd Jones (writing in 1964)
Go. Get your joy back. It’s the most important thing you can do today, it’s the most important thing you can do with the rest of your life.
Find Your Way to Say It and Live For It and Die For It
…whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.
-John Piper
Mind Over Meds
Daniel Carlat, professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, has written an important article for the New York Times Magazine: Mind Over Meds. Carlat argues:
…psychiatry has been transformed from a profession in which we talk to people and help them understand their problems into one in which we diagnose disorders and medicate them.
Make a List of What You Hate
Are you having trouble sorting out what you want to do with your life? Maybe you need to tap into what you hate.
Recently I spent time with an old college friend over a cup of coffee. We had a long, fun conversation about sorting through God’s calling on one’s life. We talked about all that this involves–knowing your passions and strengths, listening to what others say about your calling, looking at the opportunities in front of you, etc.
Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, my friend said something really helpful:
One way to sharpen your sense of calling is to make a list of what you hate.
I thought this was a great idea. I haven’t made my list yet. Maybe I’ll do that today.
I’ve been thinking about how this method is the backdoor entrance into your calling. The front door entrance is thinking about your greatest loves, delights, and passions (“I love working with at-risk youth,” etc.).
The front door approach is great. But, because you use the front door all the time, sometimes you need to go through the back door to get a new perspective on the calling that God’s put upon your life.
Try the back door. Make a list of what you hate.
“I love working with at-risk youth” now becomes: “I hate what happens when families break apart,” “I hate what poverty and economic injustice does to inner-city youth,” “I hate it when local churches stand isolated from the problems of at-risk youth,” etc. This line of thinking sends you in a fresh, sharpened direction.
See what the hate-list, the back door, can do? It can sharpen your calling. It can sharpen your sense of what God has burdened you to do with your life.
Leave the front door alone for a little while. Walk around the back of the house and try that door.
What do you hate? Make a list. Share the list with a few friends. Pray through it.
Then do something about the list.
See what you can do with your life, by the grace and power of God, to start erasing some of those items off of the list so that they don’t show up on somebody else’s list.
(Photo is of some protesters I ran into in San Francisco a few years ago. This is a photo of something I hate).
Creativity is Messy
Creativity is not neat. It is not orderly. When we are being creative we don’t know what is going to happen next. When we are being creative a great deal of what we do is wrong. When we are being creative we are not efficient.
-Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, p. 163
A Jesus Who Sets the World on Fire
The Gospel presents us with a Jesus, not meek and mild, but One come to set the world on fire. It presents us with a plunderer, and it bids us to throw ourselves away in pursuit of this new world order.
-Bob Heppe
New Thinking
The kind of thinking that will solve the world’s problems will be of a different order to the kind of thinking that created those problems in the first place.
-Albert Einstein
City
If even ten percent of the evangelicals of our nation moved into the largest cities and lived out their lives of love, truth, and servanthood, the culture would be fundamentally changed.
-James Montgomery Boice, Two Cities, Two Loves. p. 165
