Rags to Riches?

Gilbert's Gleanings

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Rags or riches?

Sometimes things come out of nowhere, smack me in the face and strip my soul bare. It happened recently when I read two news stories. One was about “kiddie couture” with Gucci becoming the latest designer making thousand-dollar clothes for children younger than 12. The second was Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe banning the importing and selling of donated “second-hand underwear.” It’s pretty easy for me to feel outrage over both. The hard part is looking at myself and seeing the same hypocrisy.



Children at a displaced persons camp in Uganda.

This is a confession. I am a horrible shopaholic. I cannot resist the allure of sales, and every time I need to go out of town, I have to buy new clothes. Well, I don’t have to buy them, as you would see if you peeked into my closets and clothes drawers.

I have been to Zimbabwe three times. Naked children or a child wearing the thinnest shreds of clothing is not unusual. I have seen a lot more of the poverty in this world than 3-year-olds with $2,000 coats, and yet I still spend more than I give away.Those two stories sent me off into a spiral of pictures flashing through my mind. Always it is the children that break your heart.

I understand that second-hand clothes could be humiliating and thoughtless. But I have seen little boys and girls naked and dirty in a displaced camp in Uganda, in the garbage heap in the Philippines, begging on the streets of Haiti.

Once those pictures are in your mind, you really can’t do much to escape them. There are as many ways of being kind and generous as there are people in the world who need kindness and generosity. I know The United Methodist Church is working every day in millions of places, and I can trust them to make my dollars multiply. I know people at the United Methodist Committee on Relief that get up every day, look into the abyss and finds ways to pull hands out.

I am far from qualified to preach or even suggest how someone else might do good in the world. Maybe second-hand clothing is not the best thing to give. I am hoping and praying that the next time I feel myself falling into the rabbit hole and rushing to the mall for a sale, one of those pictures will pop up.

Charity really does start at home.

Goals

Proverbs 29: 18,  Deuteronomy 4: 29-31

James 1: 22-25

Mark 1:  29-39

Goals

Every moment of life is granted us for one purpose: becoming more and more like Christ as we make disciples for him. That ultimate, all-embracing end is reached through a multitude of nearer and intermediate ones-- goals.

The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright was fond of an incident that may have seemed insignificant at the time, but had a profound influence on the rest of his life. The winter he was 9, he went walking across a snow-covered field with his reserved, no- nonsense uncle. As the two of them reached the far end of the field, his uncle stopped him. He pointed out his own tracks in the snow, straight and true as an arrow's flight, and then young Frank's tracks meandering all over the field. "Notice how your tracks wander aimlessly from the fence to the cattle to the woods and back again," his uncle said. "And see how my tracks aim directly to my goal. There is an important lesson in that."

Years later the world-famous architect, who achieved many of his goals in life, liked to tell how that experience in the snow had contributed to his philosophy in life. "I determined right then," he'd say with a twinkle in his eye, "while I focused on the goal I had, I would not miss the things in life that my uncle had missed."

Jesus had God-given goals for his ministry, and in this passage we read he was working long and hard to fulfill his goal to heal, but healing was not his only goal. In fact, it was only a step toward his ultimate goal, which was to reveal God’s full love to us through seeking our forgiveness as he died on the cross, and giving us hope through the resurrection. Along the way, his path would not be a straight line. His life took many turns and led him many, many places. His disciples must have wondered about his wanderings as they seemed random. But he did have a goal: Jerusalem, to take his message to the heart of the Hebrew people/

We all recognize that any goal in life worth achieving demands a great deal of our energy. If you are a doctor you must spend vast hours alone and in residency studying the human body. The lives of your patients demand it. If you are a teacher you must devote hours to lesson plans, enrichment ideas, and then grading papers. The minds of your students demand it. If you are a carpenter you must patiently measure before you cut and drive the first nail. The integrity of the structure depends on it. If you are a mother you must sacrifice for another. Your children require it. We could not live adequately if we did not set goals and work to fulfill them. No intelligent person would argue otherwise.

All across the nation, United Methodist churches have been charged with setting goals. We have been charged as a church to set goals each year, while looking forward three years. We have been charged to set objectives for each of the five fruitful practices that were addressed last year in the video sermon series before Charge Conference.  And each church is expected to review with others in our Compass Group, and with District Superintendent Court periodically, how each church is doing in meeting its objectives.

Conference and the District will not set the objectives for the churches. The churches are to do that for themselves. The purpose for charging each church to set its own goals is to help us to focus on what Christ directed us to do, to go make disciples and teach them, so that our community may be transformed. It has been found that churches, regardless of size, that set realistic goals and then work to fulfill them grow more vital, and those that use the five practices as guides to their goal setting are much more likely to thrive than those who do not.

Setting realistic goals or objectives for 6 months or a year at a time and working to achieve them takes a lot of commitment and can be hard work. It requires learning the needs of the community, and selecting which needs the church can best serve given the assets each church has. It means not focusing on what the congregation members alone enjoy and want to do, but on taking time to learn as much as possible about what the non-church people in the community are interested in, and what the congregation can do to meet the needs of community. It is an ongoing process, not a one-time effort. It means taking risks, accepting the possibility of failure but then trying again to find a way to meet those needs. It takes prayer.

But in the process of setting our short term objectives we must not lose sight of why we do it and that is to make and mature disciples for Christ for the transformation of our community and the world. There are many ways to do that, and some might work well today, but not work so well next year. Some might not work at all. We have to learn that what is most important is the journey, what we learn from it, how many we bring along with us, the new relationships we make, and the joy that comes from knowing that despite the zigzag path our efforts may take, we are doing God’s work and he is with us, guiding us, and will give us the resources we need.

Our goals must be specific and measurable. We will never reach a vague goal. The more general a goal, the less power it has. But the more specific it is, the more power it has. However, while we may set numbers to measure our objectives, we should not make the numbers the sole measure of success. If we do God’s work, he will take care of the numbers. We are here to enjoy the journey as we do the work.

Just as vital churches set and work toward goals, vital Christians do as well.

Many people live with wishes, goals, or visions. Children often have an idea of what they want to be when they grow up. That may change many times before they are fully adult, but it is natural for every human to seek a purpose for his or her life. And, every person’s life has a center. Every person’s dreams, passions, and goals revolve around one bigger passion, whether they realize it consciously or not. Everybody wants to be successful, at least at something. Dr. Ari Kiev of Cornell University observed that from the moment people decided to concentrate their energies on a specific objective, they began to surmount the most difficult odds. He concluded, "The establishment of a goal is the key to successful living." There's nothing wrong with the desire to succeed at one's job, as a parent, as an artist, etc. However, when personal success becomes the sole end and purpose of your life, then it has, in effect, become the center, the god in your life.

What is your center and what does your days and life revolve around?  Christians are to live with a calling. A calling is deeper than all of those personal things we may tend to center our lives upon because it is rooted in God's purpose for our lives. We are called to serve God by serving others throughout our lives. A dynamic Christian is grateful, prayerful, loving, evangelistic, and serving.  A dynamic church is full of grateful, prayerful, loving, evangelistic, serving Christians.

As either a church or as an individual, the size of our God determines the size of our goal. Setting goals with and for God always starts with a promise of God that if we do his will we will not fail. Don’t look at the limitations; look at the promises of God. With God, all things are possible. But it has to be WITH God, and for him, for his kingdom and glory, not for our own gratification.

Finally,  we must not forget that while we set and strive toward the goals God wants for us, we should enjoy the journey because when we journey with God wherever he leads, life is full of joy. Remember, every moment of life is granted us for one purpose: becoming more and more like Christ as we make disciples for him. If we live our life with that goal, God promises that our cup will run over.

Soul of Small Churches

The Soul of a Small Church
By Lew Parks

 

These are anxious times for the lay and clergy leaders of small congregations. The repercussions of a disappointing economy, aging and shrinking membership, and a growing sector of happy seculars combine to raise hard questions. How long can we go on like this? Fail to connect with those outside our doors? Afford our pastor? Keep up this building?

Give credit where credit is due. Many if not most of the lay and clergy leaders of small churches know that nostalgia, blaming others, and cussed defensiveness will only delay necessary work.

They know that the times call for reawakening a sense of identity and mission, maybe even radical surgery. But they also know that not everything about a small church needs to be fixed, and small churches are not deficient just because they are small. So a necessary first step in any reform would be to locate the enduring substance of a small church, its soul which holds even when change is required in institutional forms. From observation let me try three guesses as to where that search might lead. What is the soul of a small church?

1.      Surrogate family.

Recent Census data report that only 21 percent of U.S. households are married couples with children, and more than one in three households are a person living alone. [See Update, August 11, 2010, “Churches Face Changing Demographics”] Small churches are as well practiced in providing surrogate aunts, uncles, and grandparents for the first group as they are in providing sisters, brothers, grandchildren, and friends to the second group.

Although there are the painful exceptions, small churches in general provide a healthy, familylike environment for the sharing of physical and emotional resources. Live-alone widows and widowers experience human contact. Harried single parents share the energy of their children with other adults for a couple of hours. Baby Boomers reared on “bowling alone” give in to the tight quarters and repeated face-to-face contact that encourages the hard work of growing up together and staying, not running, when the inevitable episodes of disappointment and pain come.

2.      Small group religious experience.

If you watch small church worship like a critical tourist, measuring what you see against what you’ve experienced in larger congregations, you are likely to be disappointed. The music is undisciplined, the passing of the peace is raucous, and the announcements go on too long. But if you approach that same worship service from the perspective of a curious tourist, you begin to detect a local religious vitality that may remind you that most small churches began not as seeds planted by a preacher but as small groups of lay persons experiencing spiritual awakening.

Beneath the first impressions, the curious tourist will find a solid substance. A group of people who follow each other’s stories assemble to surrender their personal stories to the larger narrative of the congregation and the even larger narratives of Scripture. There is connection with a higher power and self-transcending for a larger cause. There is singing of familiar hymns, which in the words of poet Robert Lowell “give darkness some control.” There is the marking of the seasons, sacred and secular. There is praise, interceding with God for others, seeking forgiveness and starting new. It is a flourishing of local religious creativity in the tradition of the first house churches where monotheistic Jews discovered and developed devotion to Lord Jesus.

3.      A plentitude of spiritual gifts.

You have everything you need, Paul tells the church at Corinth; “you are not lacking in any spiritual gift” (1 Cor. 1:5-9). The exercise of spiritual gifts goes on in small churches, more effectively when tied to biblical teaching, but potent even before it is named. Attention to this Spirit-generated energy shifts focus away from scarcity of resources, the ghoul that haunts so many small church decisions. It helps congregations focus instead on freeing, sustaining, and equipping activities.

Even the smallest of small churches has its unique catch and combination of gifts. I once surprised a congregation of 36 persons assembled for worship with a spiritual gifts inventory. It was the kind of pop quiz you can get away with in a small church. A cornucopia of gifts surfaced among those 36 persons. There were singular gifts like tongues and leadership that gave the congregation its local color. And there were redundant gifts like faith, giving, and humor that helped to explain the congregation’s resilience.  

  

Of the estimated 335,000 congregations in this country, more than half have less than 100 persons in worship weekly. Although these small churches only account for 11 percent of worshippers on Sunday morning, the vitality of 177,000 communities of faith with their impact on the 9 million people who gather there is serious and necessary business.

Before we begin the hard work of realigning practice with vision and mission, and before we begin to tinker with the personnel, financial, and property systems, we need to pause long enough to feel the pulse of the Spirit-animated life before us. What is accidental and replaceable here? And what is essential and to be protected? I once heard a surgeon explain his caution in words something like this: “You want to make sure that the nerve you cut isn’t the one that connects the body to its soul.”

Dr. Lew Parks is professor of theology, ministry, and congregational development and director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Wesley Theological Seminary. His most recent book is Preaching in the Small Membership Church (Abingdon, 2009).

Comment on this article at http://www.facebook.com/lewisleadership.

Fishers for Christ

Habakkuk 1: 14-17

1 John 2: 1-6

Matthew 13: 47-50

Fishing

How many of you have gone or like to go fishing?  It is a fascinating sport. Especially if you go out hoping to catch one kind of fish, and you wind up catching other kinds. There are often surprises when you fish.

Back when I was in training with the Ohio Division of Wildlife we had a whole class on the laws pertaining to fishing.  There were—still are—certain methods of getting fish that are illegal. One of them was using nets, unless you were a commercial fisherman. Another was using dynamite. We all heard stories of people using dynamite to get a bunch of fish all at once and rather quickly.

Later on I became a fish management supervisor up in Akron for ODW and we used a variety of large nets to sample fish in the water bodies in our District. We would set the nets and then a day or two later we would go out, lift the nets, count the number of each kind of fish in the net, weigh and measure certain species, collect scale samples to determine the age of the fish, or collect eggs from certain species to take back to the hatchery at Portage Lakes. The fish were then returned to the water unharmed. That was always a lot of fun, because it was amazing the variety of fish caught, and their sizes. We often caught record breakers.

In Jesus’ time when fishing on the Sea of Galilee, or Lake Magdala as it was called then in that area, there were two kinds of nets used. One was a round net weighted all around the perimeter that could be thrown out by one person, in the shallows, and then pulled in. You may have seen that on TV as those nets are still in use in many parts of the world. The second was a much larger net that was used behind a boat or sometimes between two boats, pulled along behind and then drawn in to trap the fish: a dragnet. This, too, you can see on TV regularly. Dragnets take more than one person to use. In this gospel passage, Jesus is speaking of the latter kind of net.

 In using any net, you will almost always catch a variety of fish, and often have other stuff in the net too. In the Sea of Galilee there are at least 36 different kinds of fish, and any dragnet will likely pull in many of those kinds.

In this Gospel parable we read the word fish, but actually the original Greek Gospel does not use the word fish at all. Instead the word Jesus used is more accurately translated to mean “all sorts”, in other words all kinds of  “stuff”. That word just doesn’t sound quite right in the Bible, but it is more accurate. Jesus knew about fishing and he knew there could be surprises when you use a dragnet. Off the coast of England a commercial fishing boat hauled in WWII live torpedoes, and not long ago another pulled in $2 million pile of marijuana. Also, not long ago, they hauled in a newlywed couple who had chosen to scuba dive on their honeymoon. So a net is rather indiscriminate. You catch a lot of stuff.

So what is Jesus really telling us in this parable? First of all, this is the last of 7 parables in a row in Matthew chapter 13. Each is telling us about the kingdom and what our role is in kingdom work. The first parable tells about a farmer going out and scattering seeds everywhere, on rock, on a trodden path, amongst weeds, and on fertile ground. In that parable he tells us that the sorting out of the good crop from the weeds is to be later, and not ours.  In all seven of the parables he tells us that judgment between what is good and what is not is not our business. We are to do the sowing, we are to do the fishing, and the sorting is to be left to God.

Second, this parable points out God’s interest in diversity. Jesus attracted all kinds of people: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, paralytics, lepers, people from Judea, Galilee, from across the river in what was called the Decapolis, Romans, blind men, women. Some would stay and listen to him, some would follow him, others were indifferent, and still others hated him. But he cast his net over all, not just a select few. We are to do the same.

Earlier in Matthew, and in Mark and Luke as well, Jesus calls his disciples and tells them he will make them fishers of men. In other words, he will teach them to put out the drag net and bring in a lot of stuff. Then let God do the sorting.

Fishing with a big net is labor intensive, and cannot be done successfully alone. Likewise, together as a church we can bring in more people than any one of us alone. And, just as in fishing with a big net, each of us has a role to play to help bring in new people. It is not the job of a handful of persons to do the work while others watch. It is all hands on deck.

However, our fishing analogy does break down a bit when it comes to bringing new people to Christ. Jesus also wants each of us to do fishing of our own. In fact, though we are called to work together as a congregation to cast our large net, the real success in bringing new people to Christ is person to person. The church can provide the training needed, can provide activities attractive that encourage and enhance the person to person work, and as a congregation we can support and encourage each other and celebrate success. But, one of the problems a lot of churches have is, they can have wonderful activities that attract and bring people in--- that is casting the net. But they never complete the catch.

Just having people come to an activity does not bring them to Christ. Besides, some churches they have a difficult time getting new people into the activities. The real work has to person to person. People need to be brought to the activities by friends. There they need to meet and be accepted by others who believe in and follow Christ.

So, how do we do individual “fishing”? We will do more with this in the future, but for now remember BLT.  BLT.

First, Build relationships with non Christians or lukewarm Christians. It doesn’t start with praying with someone to receive Christ. That’s the end. And it doesn’t start with inviting someone to church. That’s the middle. . It begins with making friends with non-Christians, people who don’t know and have not accepted Christ as Savior. That’s all. Just making a new friend, without anything religious to start with.

Second, Listen for opportunities to help your new friend. Listen and pray for and watch for the chance to do something helpful and important for the person with whom you have been developing a relationship. The opportunity to extend the love of God to that person. If you are working and praying to develop a real friendship, God will provide that opportunity.

Third, Take your new friend to a non threatening activity where they can hear a little bit of the gospel in an enjoyable way, and meet some other real Christians. Like a musical event, or a church dinner, or some other enjoyable activity. This is where the congregation as a group casts the big net. But this will not work if what is planned is just for the interests of the congregation members and they are the only ones who come. Congregation members need to bring new people to the activity. That is the person to person fishing Jesus wants each of us to do.

We will touch on each of these more in the future. What is important is, you don’t catch fish just sitting on the porch. Or in a pew on Sunday. Are you willing to go out on the water and be a fisher for Christ?