An Open Door and Changes at Coffeespoons

After much reflection, and at the encouragement of no one, I've decided to stretch out the thin gruel that is Coffeespoons, into a blog post each weekday. By arranging the days topically, I hope to build some accountability for the blog.

So, from now on, today will be known as Ministry Monday.

Recently I've had several ministry opportunities that I want to talk through in blog format, drawing upon the wisdom of the readers. The most significant of these is that last night I was called to be the Intentional Interim pastor at Pecan Grove Baptist Church, a church an hour away from our home.


With these opportunities in mind I anticipate that I can genereate at least one interesting meager blog post per week.


Or not.

A Closed Door...

A few months ago, I received a call about the Intentional Interim Ministry (IIM) from a church in a town around 2 hours from my home. They had been given my name by the state director (from another state) who trained me in IIM. They church had recently terminated their pastor and they thought that the IIM might be appropriate for them. So they asked me to come out on a Wednesday night and share with the church the Intentional Interim Process.

I visited with the deacons and they described a fairly bleak picture. Their pastor had been there for twelve years and church attendance had decreased over that time period. The average church member is in their sixties and the pastor (according to the deacons) did little to address the serious issues facing the church. I asked the chairman of the deacons why he thought that they needed an Intentional Interim Minister. He replied “I can look out from the choir and see the congregation seated in the pews. Everyone is sitting where they’ve always sat. But people are beginning to die off. Now I see the holes in the congregation where people used to sit. There’s no one to replace them and the holes in the congregation are growing.”

They thanked me and asked me to come back a few weeks later to preach to the church on a Sunday morning and to attend a fellowship afterwards. The deacons expressed one bit of concern. They were unsure whether they needed someone full time or part time. In a follow up phone call, the deacon chairman quizzed me in some detail about the necessity of the minister being either full time or part time.

When I returned a few weeks later, I led in worship and then went to the lunch fellowship. Following the fellowship the church called a business meeting. I was asked to address the congregation and give another brief summary of the IIM. At the business meeting, the deacons recommended to the church that the church undertake the IIM. After a brief time of discussion, the church unanimously agreed that the IIM would be the best option. They expressed an excitement and a joy at what God might do.

They then turned to the question of full or part time. After much discussion, the church voted to call an intentional interim minister to lead the church full time through the process. They would try to find someone willing to relocate to their community (of around 8,000). As I prepared to leave, the deacon chairman patted me on the back and thanked me for visiting with them. I told him I’d keep the church in prayer and I asked him to stay in touch.

I haven’t heard from them in months.

One amusing occurrence. After finishing my lunch I went back to get some pecan pie. Right after I stood up, a lady approached me and said “We don’t have any church by-laws. Isn’t that strange?” I confessed that it seemed unusual for a Baptist church not to have any by-laws. When I reached the dessert table I was about to select the largest slice of pie I could find and another lady gently caught my arm in her hand. “Preacher, don’t you think it's important that a church should have by-laws?” I replied “Since you are the second person to ask me that question between the dinner table and the dessert table, yes I think it’s important that you have some by-laws.”

Valentine's Book Review (II)

But the best book of these four is I Do Again by Cheryl and Jeff Scruggs. This is a powerful book by a married couple narrating an affair that one of them had and how it destroyed their marriage. Rarely is a book put by a Christian publisher so frankly honest about the tragedy of an affair and the difficulties of reconciliation.

Cheryl narrates the “harmless” flirting that led first to an emotional, then to a physical affair. What was striking about her story is how she lost her heart long before her physical affair was consummated. Cheryl pushed for a divorce so that she could leave Jeff and continue her relationship with the man. Jeff opposed the divorce, and (not knowing about the affair) was mystified that Cheryl pursued the divorce with such determinism. Ultimately, she achieved the divorce

But after the divorce, Cheryl found little happiness. Although she did continue her relationship with the other man for a time, this relationship was ultimately unsatisfying. But in the aftermath of the divorce, Cheryl did form a relationship with Christ for the first time in her life. Through the mentoring of some Godly friends and increasing involvement in the church, she gradually became convinced that God wanted her to reconcile with Jeff.

There was only one problem: Jeff (who was already a Christian) wanted nothing to do with her. When Cheryl shared with Jeff her hopes for reconciliation he threw her out of his house. It was only after a lengthy process (covering some seven years) that Jeff too became convinced that God wanted them back together and overcame his own anger and bitterness toward Cheryl. They then remarried.

There are two other characters in Jeff and Cheryl’s narrative. They have twin daughters who were around the age of two when they were divorced. Their presence formed a powerful force that required Jeff and Cheryl to live in proximity to one another and to interact weekly as they shared custody of the girls.

What I liked a lot about the book:

1. As I mentioned earlier, I Do Again is brutally honest in its powerful description of the sheer pain and hurt that came into their marriage as a result of Cheryl’s unfaithfulness. But the book takes a hard look at Jeff’s emotional neglect of his wife during their first marriage.

2. This is a book that should scare the heck out of anyone involved in “harmless” flirting with someone besides their spouse. Cheryl’s heart left her husband long before her body did and that fact made her unwilling to work on their (first) marriage, even after counseling.

3. This work emphasizes the impact of the divorce on the kids. Towards the end of the book, after she and Jeff are reconciled, Cheryl talks about the night when she had to tell the girls about her adulterous affair that ended their marriage. The girls were thirteen and she painfully describes how she had to explain the affair in terms an eighth grader would understand. Furthermore, in a Q/A section at the end of the book, one of the twins (now aged 20) describes how she wrestles with trust issues in her relationships, attributing this fact to her parents’ divorce.

4. Lastly what I really liked about the book is that it was complex. I expect in books like these that the central characters will find Jesus and everything will work out nice and neatly. But not here. Even after Cheryl became a Christian, life remained hard, messy, and painful. Like the rest of us, her new life in Christ didn’t erase the consequences of her sin.

One of the best books I’ve read this year.

Valentine's Book Review (I)

A three pack, yea a four pack of valentine reading pleasure for you. I’ve divided these four reviews into two posts. Just read the second post if you’ve not got much time.

First up is a devotional version of the well reviewed book from last year Love as a Way of Life. This devotional takes the five categories of love in Chapman’s book and breaks them down into 90 devotionals, with stories added for illustrative purposes. Frankly, the entire enterprise reeks of repackaging. Chapman had an assistant work on this and I could never tell how much Chapman wrote and how much his assistant contributed as both writers speak in first person throughout the text. Regrettably, this has the feel of a repackaged text, aimed at a literary marketing microniche. Skip this book and read the original.

Two books I had not encountered before are entitled For Men Only and For Women Only by Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn. These two books have just been released as a boxed set entitled For Couples Only. They each contain a great deal of useful information for members of the opposite sex. Based upon interviews and surveys of thousands, the Feldhahn’s make numerous conclusions about each gender. They then summarize their findings in this work.

Each of these books reads like a wildlife handbook for examining strange species. Now I understand that Men are from Mars while women sojourn from Venus. I am further willing to concede, that after living in close proximity with not only a wife, but two daughters, for almost a decade and a half, I know less about women than I did while I was single. But I do think we need to be careful in the broad stereotyping that goes on in some of these books.

For example, For Men Only comes with a fold out cheat sheet on women (I’m not making this up). It’s called a “Quick Start Guide.” Again, let me emphasize, I’m being serious. This is a sheet (not unlike what you would find accompanying a box of software or a new stereo system) that allows you quick knowledge without having to read the entire manual. This guide is subdivided into several different areas (reassurance, beauty, emotions, etc) that contains questions like “Why does she ask ‘Do these pants make me look fat?’” Answer “When she asks you how she looks, she’s not asking whether or not she’s presentable for the party. She wants to know that she still rocks your world.” I think that there is a lot of valuable information here, but packaging it as a quick start guide is offensive and dehumanizing. She’s your wife, not your new Kubota Tractor.

But aside from the packaging, I would recommend each of these books. For Women Only offers an accurate, though stereotypical, exploration through the male mind. And a quick check with Kadie confirms the accuracy of For Men Only as well.

Review: The New Media Frontier

The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting for Christ is the first work that I’ve read to take a detailed look at how the emerging world of cyberspace is affecting the way we Christians commonly think about connecting people together. This work illustrates how several institutions are affected by these various new media. The book divides into two parts: the platform and the content (these are my terms).

The first section covers the essential elements of the growing media presence online. It provides several reflections on the consequences of media migrating from print to pixels. Helpfully, this section doesn't simply take up pom poms and cheerlead this new reality, but it also explores some of the very difficult implications of these new media for Believers. It concludes with two chapters on the nuts and bolts of the new media: blogs, podcasting, vlogging (video blogging) etc.

The second section of the book takes a magnifying glass to several different areas of these media and explores how they are shaped by some of the top practitioners in the field. So Fred Sanders looks at what changes that the internet will bring to higher education, Scott Ott to Journalism, Roger Overton to Apologetics, and Mark Roberts to Pastoring.

Some chapters simply take the existing topic and translate it into cyberspace. Other sections, like the one on Bioethics by Joe Carter and Matthew Eppinette go beyond simply looking at how Bioethics are affected by the media and include an excellent survey of the topic itself that their work could be used in a classroom setting. It could be stolen by some unscrupulous professor and foisted off as their own material. Not that anyone would actually do that.

Conclusions from the book:

As one might expect, each of the authors takes a position that the new media have emerged to stay. There will be no turning back the clock. Those who ignore this new media will increasingly find themselves marginalized from contemporary community. The benefits of the new media are a wider circle of contacts and a greater opportunity to provide megaphones for individuals and organizations.

But the authors pretty consistently argued that the wide opportunities carry a significant cost: while these various media allow more and more people to be reached than ever before, their impact is proportionately smaller than ever before. For all their breadth, the new media sacrifice depth.

Additionally, these new methods of communication add to rather than remove barriers between actual humans. Human interaction is always mediated through electronics. Anyone who has perused the comments of a blog often see how the commentators can misunderstand one another.

But the authors of The New Media Frontier know these shortcomings of their approach. And since these media are here to stay, they engage proactively, and constructively with them. Anyone wishing to seriously harness these new media for the good of the church and the good of the Kingdom of God, should be familiar with this work.

Full Dsiclosure: One of my good friends wrote a couple of chapters of this book and provided me with the review copy, which no doubt affected my glowing review. A little.

Life and such...

As much as I enjoy blogging and dialoguing, it is sadly amongst the first to go when the tempo of life picks up. My intention is to deluge you with a series of book reviews and perhaps some thoughts on budget cuts which have occupied too much of my mind recently.

Some details of what’s been going on:

I’ve been in contact with a few churches recently about the Intentional Interim ministry. It is heartening to see some interest in this area. If there’s a fit, I’ll share some of the experiences.

Things at Lakeview continue to go along well. Pastor Rick has implemented several changes and they have been well received. His honeymoon has stretched to six months now.

Our girls have decided, fresh from their experience of cheering on Mom and Dad down in Houston last month, that they want to run in the same ½ marathon next January. With that goal in mind, we’ve begun to train for a 5K here in town at the end of February. We’ve all enjoyed being together and it’s easier to run with a group in the cold, so you can huddle together for warmth.

I was called, out of the blue, to lead a marriage seminar for a young couple’s class in another church. It was a good experience, but reminded me again how far (alas) Kadie and I are from that demographic. I had a wonderful time spending a few days in a retreat setting with this group. More thoughts later this week.

Budget reductions continue to batter our campus. We’ve made substantial cuts for this fiscal year, and are looking ahead toward next year. In a worst case situation, we will lose some faculty and staff. Part of the greatest challenge of managing in this environment is addressing the undercurrent of fear that affects the faculty and staff. Like any other worker in this economy, when it’s difficult for them to focus on their jobs when they’re worried about losing them.

I leave you with one of the more curious political spectacles of recent years, the ongoing public immolation of (former) Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois. He recently appeared on David Letterman and the interview is painfully enjoyable to watch. (I haven’t felt this embarrassed for someone on TV since the Bakkers went on Nightline a few decades back). Unbelievable. (And Dave can still bring the heat when he wants to. His first question had to be the exact one on the minds of every viewer).