Recently we had someone over and as the night came to a close Angel warmly offered, “Let’s do this again soon!” I wilted as I processed just how many things were on our calendar in the coming month. Just like Angel did, I wanted to be with them again and soon, but her invitation made me flinch.
My wife Angel and I are very different people. Angel brings light and life everywhere. People are drawn to her, and she is drawn to people. One of the many things I love about Angel is how she gets caught up in a moment with people. In that space, it’s not unusual that she shares hopes with those we are with of spending more time together. And she means it: there is no doubt of her genuineness.
“I don’t compare myself with anybody, but nobody is better.” Michael Jordan
“They say the sky’s the limit, but I think my potential is beyond it.” Jay-Z
“I won’t be happy until I’m as famous as God” Madonna
“I won’t be a rock star. I will be a legend.” Freddie Mercury
“We’re more popular than Jesus now.” John Lennon
We tend to expect that greatest among us are also some of the most arrogant. And why wouldn’t they be? For many who make it to the top of their field, we can see how that arrogance can be a driving force for their greatness.
God became flesh.
Let that sink in. Christianity asserts that God—sovereign, immutable, omnipotent, other—the eternal God who has no beginning and end—became a human being.
Because many of us have had exposure to Christianity from our early years, it is easy to miss how massive the theological implications of the incarnation are. The incarnation lays the groundwork for a God who chooses to participate in his creation. The incarnation denies the existence of an abstract and distant God, unmuddied by his handiwork.
“God did not, as the Bible says, create man in his own image; on the contrary, man created God in his own image.” Ludwig Feuerbach dropped this theological bombshell three years before Friedrich Nietzsche’s birth. Feuerbach, a name forgotten by most, but who influenced Nietzsche, wrote these words in his book, The Essence of Christianity (1841). He argued that human beings project their own attributes and desires onto an imagined deity, creating God in their own image. This for Feuerbach, is the essence of Christianity (and indeed all religions), the deification of our human ideals. “What man wishes to be, he makes his God… God is the outward projection of a man’s inward nature.”
We Westerners avoid death.
When was the last time you walked through a cemetery? When was the last funeral you went to? Our churches no longer have cemeteries, those who are older head to retirement communities and then to head to long-term care or assisted care facilities. The number of funerals held in churches has diminished. Death has become professionalized, antisepticised, and remote.
I love gardening. I love helping bring something to life, nurturing it, and watching it flourish.
I am not particularly great at gardening, though. Any improvement I’ve had has come through the school of hard knocks: a plant I put in the wrong soil, a plant placed in the incorrect amount of sunlight, or not giving a plant the right amount of water (my default is always that more must be better—it isn’t).
Relationships are like plants, aren’t they? They are fragile. They are challenging.
“I want to forgive him, but how do I forgive someone who died years ago?”
“I want to forgive her, but I don’t have any way to contact her.”
Do you have someone in your life that you want to forgive, but you don’t know how to because they are no longer in your life or perhaps they have passed away? This topic has come up a number of times in counseling others. May I offer some advice?
While my last article told how and why Greg and I chose to become co-lead pastors, I’ve also experienced plenty of frustration as a co-leader. Greg and I have very different personalities. Among those differences is my propensity to plan every detail and Greg’s propensity to have a go-with-the-flow approach.
Have you ever sent off an email or a text with the jab of an angry finger? Have you ever slammed a door or punched a wall? Have you ever hung up on someone? We all have conflict in our lives.
We encounter conflict daily: we have disagreements with our spouses, parents, children, co-workers, and neighbors. But how do we navigate conflict and come out the other side in one piece? How do we not become the worst version of ourselves during conflict? What if conflict provided an opportunity for us to grow as people and also to glorify God?
I sat across the room from the couple, trying to slow down my mind and open my heart to the criticism they were leveling at me. They had been offended by my sermon and had reacted on Facebook, indicating they were leaving the church. I reached out privately and asked if we could meet to talk. They agreed to do so. When we met, he was relatively calm, but she was very upset and I knew that I needed to hold my own emotions in check to be able to listen to the heart of what she was saying and respond in love, not hurt. As I had prayed to prepare for the meeting I genuinely didn’t think I was going to be able to ask for forgiveness for anything as I didn’t think I had done anything wrong. But in the midst of the meeting God opened my heart to see an area of blindness. I was able to ask and receive their forgiveness for the way this blind spot had injured them. I then asked if they would be willing to ask for forgiveness for their slander. They were willing to do so and I forgave them.
These are not the meetings that you anticipate when you sign up to be a pastor, but there are few moments more important in your ministry than these tense conversations.
Over the course of this series, I’ve reflected on a congregant’s responsibility, but pastors and leaders bear a responsibility to help congregants navigate departures well.
One friend wisely said, “I think the pastor needs to do his part in hearing the discord, attempt to reconcile, and when reconciliation is not the solution for continued membership, to ensure a good relocation.” She’s right. Here are six ways a leader should respond to those who are leaving:
So, you’ve decided to leave your church: you’re moving, or you’ve come to a doctrinal impasse, or there has been conflict that you’ve tried to navigate, but the church has been unwilling to biblically walk through a peacemaking process to bring about reconciliation.
As a pastor, every person who leaves the church hurts. As a pastor of ten years, there have been hundreds that have left the churches I’ve served at and I can only think of a very small handful that I was glad to see go. Every goodbye is painful.
But, as we discussed last week, there are times to say goodbye (although a lot fewer than we are encultured to believe). When you say goodbye, say goodbye well. Sadly, in today’s culture, most of us say goodbye very poorly (usually by not saying goodbye at all, just slipping away). We’re called to say goodbye in a harder, but better, way.
1. When to Confront Another’s Sins: Brady Goodwin’s post is loaded with wisdom on this difficult question. He begins by sharing the importance of discerning the other person’s motivations, “If you are unsure of a person’s motivations, seek to cover their offense with love wherever possible. Extend grace, wait with patience, pray for insight and understanding, and strive to love them as Christ does.”
2. Nearly There: My friend Chris Thomas with a moving reflection on his son’s birth and recent departure from the faith. He says, “Two decades later and my son is gone. No gravestone marks his death, or memorial service to recall in our grief. Instead, my son lives apart from us. His path, he said, forked away from faith, and as he walked that wide way, it lead him away from us.”
3. Where and How Progressive Christians Differ from Jesus: I appreciate not just the content of Colton Hinson’s post, but also the tone. He says, “Most of the progressives I met were genuinely compassionate people who love Jesus (or at least their idea of him) and the Bible.”
4. 3 Crises Churches Must Address to Meet the Next Generation: Charles Holmes begins with the challenge of social media. He says, “We’ve often thought that providing students with better Christian media is the solution to winning their attention amid the barraging media of the day. But what if a better way wasn’t us trying to compete with secular content (in which, if we are honest, we will lose every time) but transcending it?”
5. Beautiful Numbers: Need some encouragement today? This is a reminder that, in spite of all of the challenges in today’s world, so much progress has been made (thank you God for your mercy to us, the undeserved!)
1. Woe is Me: Abigail Dodds reflects on the sin of self-pity and how to be free from it. She reframes the biblical story, “There is a sense in which the entire story of the Bible exists to wake us up from the stupor of deadly self-pity and cause us to receive the only pity powerful enough to save us — the pity of God.”
2. Autumn and the Beauty of Death for the Christian: Tim Counts with a beautiful piece reflecting on fall in New England. He concludes, “Winter can be long and bleak. After the leaves fall, our trees will be barren here for over 6 months. But lift your heads, brothers and sisters, because spring follows winter. It may be fall now, but springtime – and Resurrection Morning – is coming.”
3. What Christians Can Bring to Online Conflict: Greg Morse with an important reflection on the power of fire and our tongue. He concludes, “And instead of setting flame to everything it comes in contact with, it hopes, ‘May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like gentle rain upon the tender grass, and like showers upon the herb.’”
4. The Goodness of the Wrath of God: My friend Sarah Sanderson with a very helpful consideration as to why even God’s wrath is good news. She asks an important question: “Practically speaking, if you have a high view of God’s sovereignty (as I always believed that I had), it means, (or I always took it to mean) that whatever happens is whatever God wanted to happen. If God has the power to do anything, and the ability to control everything, then surely anything and everything that happens has been willed and controlled by God?”
5. Pride is Meant to Be Swallowed: My friend Anne Imboden shares about pride, humility, and love. She shares of the moment repentance breaks through her son’s proud heart, “When I hold my arms out to reassure him, the weight of sin is lifted and the freedom of humility releases his heart. Owning up to God first helps us own up to others, because we can approach them with a heart that has been humbled by God’s great grace.”
6. How to Stop Hating Yourself: Emma Scrivener’s piece is clear and important. Maybe you need to hear these truths today.
1. Why the Devil Didn't Think He Won When Jesus was on the Cross: I hadn't thought this through as clearly until I read this JA Medders post. His final reason is the strongest: " Fifth, as Jesus was hanging on the cross, he is tempted to get himself down from the cross. Why? This would cease his substituting death for us—Satan wouldn’t be disarmed and defeated. But Jesus did the Father’s will, he died and rose again for us. Defeating Satan every step of the way."
2. How to Mend a Relationship That has Been Broken for Years: Vital Signs delivers consistently difficult, but healthy advice on matters related to conflict: Joseph Grenny offers, " I have come to believe that my capacity for joy in life is a function of my capacity to love imperfect people. And the most aggressive calisthenics of that capacity is practicing vulnerability at times of the most acute emotional risk."
3. Seeing the Individual's Face: Jennie Cesario with one of the most beautiful reflections I've read in a while: "[T]o grow in the love of God is to expand my heart and vision in this way. To, little by little, allow more faces to become particular to me, more faces to become dear — whether they’re next to me in a church pew or against me in the voting booth; whether they’re my kindred or my worst enemies."
4. What Teens Value Most: Helen Gibson reports on Pew Research Center's latest poll on teens. In it, having a career they enjoy ranks first, then helping others who are in need, and third is having a lot of money. Getting married is fourth and having children is fifth with less than 40% of teens saying they desire to have children one day.
5. Is God Anti-Gay? Sam Alberry reflects on this big question during a Gospel Coalition panel (this is a podcast).
1. 5 Christian Cliches That Need to Go: Matt Smethurst considers the issues of when we say, "When God closes a door, he opens a window, " "You're never more safe than when you're in God's will," Let go and let God," and others.
2. Why You Can't Have Friends Without Conflict: Eric Geiger on the cost of God-intended relationships: " We can live with the absence of conflict. Or we can live in relationships. We cannot have both friends and the absence of conflict. If we desire to be in community, we will have conflict."
3. Religiously Unaffiliated Surge in Latest Study: The so-called "Nones" continue to grow according to the General Social Survey. Aaron Earl reports: "What’s the largest religious group in America? For the first time in more than 30 years, it’s not Catholics or evangelicals. Evangelicals and Catholics remain slightly less than a quarter of the American population, and now so are the religiously unaffiliated."
4. In Their Own Words: Parents of Kids Who Think They are Trans Speak Out: These are heartbreaking stories from five anonymous moms. One shares, "Parents like me must remain anonymous to maintain our children’s privacy, and because we face legal repercussions if our names are revealed. Parents who do not support their child’s gender identity risk being reported to Child Protective Services and losing custody of their children. In New Jersey, the Department of Education officially encourages schools to report such parents. Meanwhile, the media glamorize and celebrate trans-identified children while ignoring stories like mine. I have written to well over 100 journalists, begging them to write about what is happening to kids. I wrote to my representative and senators, but have been ignored by their staff."
5. Pro-Life Letter Campaign: I plan on joining this grassroots letter campaign with letters going on July 2. You might want to consider doing so as well.
6. What Happens in an Internet Minute in 2019? Take note especially of the dramatic increase in Instagram and Netflix hours watched and those which have tailed off: Snapchat stands out.
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