Letters to My Younger Brothers (and Sisters)

Friends,

The Lent season is less than a day old, and I already feel like I’m starting to learn things from God.

It reminds me of an episode from Taxi, an old TV show that I’m sure was gone by the time many of you were born.  One of the characters meets a woman in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office.  The woman is smoking a cigarette (yeah, in the waiting room; the show is THAT old), but she looks very happy.  He asks her why she’s so happy and she says, “Oh, I just quit smoking.”

He looks at her in astonishment because, obviously, she is STILL smoking.  She realizes that he’s looking at the cigarette in her fingers and she says, “Oh, this is my last one.  After this, I’m through.”

She then gets a pensive look on her face and says, “And, I feel so much better.  In fact, I think my taste buds are already starting to return.”  All this while she continues to smoke.

I guess I’m feeling kind of the same way.  I really haven’t done anything different yet.  I finished my last game of Scrabble yesterday.  (If that requires explanation, you need to read the previous blog.)  I just removed all the bookmarks from my computer and the icons from my iPhone for the sports web sites I’m not going to read.  The truth is that I haven’t actually started to change anything, yet.

But, even this morning as I woke up about 4 AM, the usual thinking patterns about my day began and, when thoughts about some of my “small amusements” (that’s how I refer to the list of things I’ve set aside for Lent) came up, I stopped and began to pray, instead.

And, I think I began to feel the return of some of my spiritual “taste buds,” if you know what I mean.

In my experience, that’s how spiritual change begins.  It starts with our basic impulses.  Instead of moving down one thinking path, we intentionally choose another, one that may seem less natural, at first.  We kind of have to force ourselves to go that direction in our minds.

But, once we make that small directional shift, things begin to fall into place.

For our Ash Wednesday service yesterday at Journey of Faith, I was looking for a Scripture reading to share with those who came to make their Lent commitments.  I wanted to share something on the subject of fasting, because our Lent commitments are actually a form of fasting.  God directed me to a passage in Joel 2, verses 12-17.  I read it from The Message.  It’s a good Scripture on the subject of fasting, but one brief phrase really caught my eye.  Verse 13 says this:

Change your life, not just your clothes.
   Come back to God, your God.

The reference here is to the ancient Jewish practice of tearing the clothes during times of mourning.  It was traditional to indicate that a person was in mourning, as after the death of a loved one, by making tears in their clothing, literally rending their garment.  The oldest version of this is what we refer to as “sackcloth and ashes.”  The modern version of it is, typically, to tear the breast pocket of a shirt or jacket.

When fasting, a devout Jew would also follow this mourning tradition, indicating that the sacrifice of their fast was akin to the feeling of the loss of someone important.  It was an outward sign that fasting was underway.

But, most of the prophetic writers who speak about fasting rail against this outward show.  Clearly, it had become fashionable to demonstrate the devoutness of fasting rather than to actually feel the process in an intimate way.  Jesus, Himself, speaks out against putting on a show of fasting in the Sermon on the Mount.

In this Joel passage, the prophet refers to this as merely changing your clothes, and offers as the better path an actual change of life.

Right now, I’m feeling the mere flutter of the possibility of change.  I can choose to look like I’m changing, a mere wardrobe shift, or I can choose to actually let God change me from the inside out.

I believe that I really am longing to “come back to God, my God,” just like the prophet said.  I don’t mean to indicate that I had ever left Him, but like all of us, the lack of intentionality of my life has allowed me to stray from best that God has for me.  And, I long to get back in balance.

That’s what Lent is all about, getting your spiritual life back in the balance God intends for you.

Where are you in all this?  Did you make a Lent commitment?  Was it really about a change of life, or was it just a change of clothes.

My prayer for you is that you will allow God to get a brand new grip on your life.  It’s what He wants to do, and not just during Lent.  He longs for you to re-center your life on Him.

Change your life, not just your clothes.
   Come back to God, your God.

Always praying for you,

Your older brother,

Pastor Joe

Friends,

I’ve been challenged this week with thinking about what my commitment would be during the Lent season, starting next Wednesday, February 17.  Much of that challenge has come from my son, Robbie, who has been writing about it in his blog, Intentional Conversation (http://nazareneblogs.org/robbie/, if you’re interested).

The purpose of a Lent commitment is actually pretty simple.  In the period leading up to Easter, it’s traditional to sacrifice something in your life in order to re-focus the saved time toward your commitment to Christ.  The tradition of the Lent commitment has often become a matter of trying to lose weight or cut back on a nasty habit that you really ought to give up, anyway, but in that process, the spiritual nature of this significant gesture has often been lost.

Simply put, the Lent commitment is really NOT about “giving something up.”  It’s really about adding something into your life that ought to be there anyway.  Instead of giving ourselves over to things of this world, we choose to press further into our life with Christ and make that relationship stronger.

It’s something we all need to do, and not just during Lent.  But, if we at least take this opportunity at Lent, we can become more like what Christ intends for us to be.

So, for Lent, 2010, I’m giving up Scrabble.

I can hear many of you now saying to yourselves, “Wow, Pastor Joe, don’t be so hard on yourself.”  And, yes, I understand that you’re saying it in a completely sarcastic way.

Scrabble may not seem like much of a Lent commitment to you, but for me, it’s an almost perfect expression of what a Lent commitment ought to be.

You see, I don’t just sit down at the dining room table occasionally and play a game of Scrabble with a group of friends in a social gathering.  In fact, before this past Christmas, when I was given an actual Scrabble game set, I doubt that I had played a dozen games in my life in that way.

But, a few months ago, my friend, Jenny, put out a challenge on Face Book (you knew this would come back to Face Book somewhere, right?) for someone to join her in a game of online Scrabble.  I saw it and thought, “Why not?”  I didn’t have much experience at the game but it was just about words, right?  And, let’s face it, words is what I do.

So, I jumped in and played.  I actually came from behind and won that first game, and I was hooked.  Jenny and I have been playing a running game of online Scrabble ever since.  I now not only have it on my computers at home and work (it’s connected to Face Book as an application, in case you’re getting interested), but I also downloaded it onto my iPhone (also available as an app for $4.95; I’m not trying to sell it, just filling in the blanks), as well.  As a result, I can pretty much play anywhere and at any time.

Those of you who have known me for a while won’t be surprised to hear that I have a little bit of an obsessive/compulsive personality.  When I do something, I tend to do it full blast.  I’ve also been known to be a little competitive (I hear the laughter at my use of the word, little, in this context).  So give me an interesting and competitive game that I can play anywhere and at any time, and you have the makings of a pretty comprehensive addiction.

I’ve won some and lost some.  I’ve been learning to be a better player as I go.  Please don’t tell Jenny, but she’s actually a better player than me.  The only reason I’m competitive is because of my O/C personality, and every time she beats me using a strategy I haven’t seen before, I immediately try to make that strategy a part of my game.

I don’t spend that much time actually playing since (and I don’t know whose stupid idea this was) you have to take turns.  I tried playing the computer on my iPhone for a while, but the computer isn’t really that good of a player.  It’s much more satisfying to play against a good human player who beats you part of the time and only knows actual words.

So, over the last few months, playing Scrabble has become a part of my daily routine.  Whenever Jenny plays a word, my phone alerts me with a little trill tone which, by the way, has sounded during Sunday school almost every week for the last couple of months.  That tone has become like a little “Pavlov’s dog” signal to me.  Whenever I hear it, I know I have a chance to play next.

And I’m usually ready.  While I’m not able to play constantly (that “taking turns” thing again), I am able to think about it whenever I’m not otherwise occupied.  Once I’ve seen the new set of letters on my rack, I start thinking of words that I can make with those letters.  The goal (at least, my goal) is to get a BINGO as often as possible.  That’s when you use all seven letters on your rack in a single turn.  You get a 50 point bonus for doing that and, for me, that’s more satisfying than winning a game.  Feel free to psycho-analyze that all you want.

So, you can see where this leads.  It filters into all the unused moments of my time.  When I’m walking for exercise in the morning, when I’m driving, when I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room (occupational hazard and the real reason that I downloaded the game onto my phone) or whenever I’m “in neutral” (you know what I mean), the game is in my mind.

And that’s time that I could be talking to God.  That’s time that I SHOULD be talking to God and, of course, listening to Him.

Listen, there’s nothing wrong with Scrabble.  In fact, at my age (I’ll be almost 58 by the time Easter gets here this year), a thinking game like this that stimulates my cognitive skills is probably an excellent therapeutic use of part of my time.  After Easter, I’ll probably start another game, if Jenny is still interested in beating me again.

But, for 46 days beginning on February 17, I’m going to offer to God the additional time and attention in prayer that I would otherwise use playing Scrabble.  I’m going to press into my relationship with Him in a focused way.  I expect to hear Him say some things to me that I might not have heard if I had been focused on figuring out a word that could use both a J and a Z at the same time while also using at least 5 other letters AND hitting a Triple Word Score square (see how this works?).

Scrabble isn’t going to be my only commitment.  My actual commitment this year is to forego a whole series of what I think of as my “small amusements.”  I’m going to take down my baseball links on my phone and computers to Andrew Baggerly, Henry Schulman, the McCovey Chronicles and MLBTradeRumors.com.  Yes, during spring training, I’m going to rely on just the radio and TV (and maybe the Giant’s website) to get my baseball news.  These, and a few others like them, are all things I enjoy but which take those precious extra moments that I can give to God instead for a time.

After Easter, I’ll return to allowing those things into my life, because there’s nothing wrong with them.  But, I’m guessing that they’ll take on a smaller place when they come back.

Because, in the mean time, I expect that God will more than fill those moments I return to Him with the bigger things He has for me, as I give additional time to considering who He is and what He has done for me.  I expect to “re-discover” a few things that have been temporarily lost to me in the hustle of my life.  I’ll likely shed some tears with the realization of what I had been missing out on.  And, I won’t want to give those things up.

In the end, I don’t expect to actually “give up” anything, except temporarily.  I’m just going to allow God to “re-balance” me.

What are you planning to do this Lent season?  Maybe you hadn’t even considered doing anything, or maybe you just thought Lent was a “Catholic” thing. 

Listen, this is a “Christian” thing.  Consider these words from Philippians 4:8 in The Message:

Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.

I’m ready to let God do that in me.  And, really, all I have to do is to give up Scrabble for a few days.

Always praying for you,

Your Older Brother,

Pastor Joe

Friends,

Some people are good with money and others are, …well…not so good.

I’m kind of in the second group.  It’s not that I’m not able to make money; I’ve done a little bit of that.  I’m just not very good at accumulating it.

I have some savings; not a lot, but some.  I’ve tried to set some money aside for retirement, even though I don’t really ever expect to actually retire.  And there have been things that Margie and I wanted to do and we were able to set aside enough to get them done.

Understand, I’m not careless or frivolous with money; it just seems like every time we get a few dollars ahead, something worthy appears in front of us and, more often than not, we end up giving it away. 

People used to talk about what they would do if they won the lottery (they probably still do) but Margie always said she wasn’t interested in those conversations.  She said that if we ever won a lot of money, we’d probably just give it away.

But I know people who’ve spent their entire adult lives storing up money for some future event.  Maybe it was to purchase some desired item, or to go to some far off place, or maybe just so they could retire and not have to work any longer.  They’ve sacrificed in the short term for their long term goals, and I’m not at all criticizing that.

The only problem that I have noticed is that once a person gets into the mind set of storing away every available financial asset, it becomes difficult to let it get away.

Back when I worked in the oil refinery (for those who don’t know, I spent several years as a young man working for an oil company as a refinery technician) I knew an older guy, Wilbur, who had worked for nearly forty years in that refinery.  Late is his career, he had risen in seniority to the job title of Blender.  That meant that his job was to actually blend streams of oil and additives to produce products that met specifications for certain customers, with those products then being packaged for wholesale to those customers for resale.  The customers were companies like Wal-Mart, selling their own brands in their stores.

It was a pretty good job.  All that was required was taking the “recipe” and lining up hoses from the product pumps to the blending tanks, filling them accurately and pulling a sample to demonstrate that the specs were met before canning and packaging.  In a typical day, Wilbur would probably only blend a couple of tanks of product, with the remainder of his time spent sitting in a control room watching gauges and talking to his fellow blenders.  All the blenders were older guys who had earned their positions by working for the company for lots of years.

Wilbur wanted to retire.  He had been with the company longer than almost anyone else, and he had faithfully set aside money throughout the years.  Because I was the union’s chief financial officer, he had spent quite a bit of time talking to me about his retirement planning, and had actually told me how much money he had saved.  Without going into specific numbers, I’ll just say that it was more than enough.  I kept telling him that if he wanted to retire (not everyone did), he should just sign on with a financial planner and set it all up.

The problem was that his wife wouldn’t agree.  For all these years, they had saved money from his pretty good paycheck, and she could not conceive how they would be able to live for long without that paycheck coming in.  They had gone to the financial seminars and heard the process explained, but she didn’t believe it.  She was sure that if he left the refinery, they would soon find themselves broke and on welfare.

At one point, health issues required Wilbur to take several weeks off.  While he was gone, I talked to him a couple of times and each time, he told me that he didn’t want to come back, but his wife wouldn’t hear of it.  The “income” habit was so deeply engrained that she would not consider any other paradigm.

Wilbur came back to work in the middle of a work week.  Because everyone in the blender section already had their work assignments for the week, he was assigned to assist in another job for a couple of days, running a machine that loaded empty oil cans from pallets into the supply line that went into the canning machines.  It was another pretty easy job, except that occasionally a pallet would get stuck and have to be pulled out.  No big deal; people did this job every day.

On that first day back, a pallet got stuck.  Wilbur went to pull it out, the machine that had been stuck jumped ahead when the jammed pallet came out, and the resulting action severed two of his fingers from his left hand.

I was working in the middle of the warehouse when Wilbur came through with the medical people.  He was holding a blood soaked rag to his hand as they hurried him to an ambulance to go to the hospital.  Even today, I can’t remember that sight without tears welling up in my eyes. 

Wilbur never worked in the refinery again.  He got a disability retirement with the extra money that goes with that, so I guess his wife got what she wanted, but Wilbur didn’t get what he wanted, which was to walk out on his own timetable.

Sometimes that accumulating habit can be hard to break.

And, it’s not just with money that this principle holds true.  Anytime people are fortunate enough to “get ahead” in any part of life, there’s a tendency to tighten our grip on our newfound gains and hang on to them.

We even do it with the blessings God gives us.

There are lots of churches that seem like fortresses.  Once having experienced the blessings of God, the people within them acts like they’re trying to “protect” these blessings from an evil world.

We’re careful about who we let into the “inside” of the church.  We build hedges around membership in the church, as if the church will be damaged if less than perfect people somehow manage to become members.

We carefully protect every position of even the least leadership, as if a less than perfect person will get into such a position and God will be unable to save His church from their imperfection.  Heaven forbid that an unsanctified person would become a greeter in our foyer.

And, of course, it really shows up in the finances of our churches.  It often seems like we’re trying to bring the Kingdom in at a profit.  It’s as if we don’t believe that God is able to provide whatever we need WHEN we need it, if we’ll just depend on him.

Listen, I’m not saying that we should let just anyone become a teacher of doctrine within the church.  I’m not saying we should be irresponsible about the finances of the church.  And, I’m certainly not saying that there aren’t any standards of living to which followers of God should hold.

But, I AM saying that we need to check our practices that seem to say that WE are the maintainers of God’s church.  Jesus clearly said that HE would build His church.  We certainly have a role in His church, but building and protecting it is NOT our job.

So, what is our job?

Hmmmmm; I wonder if we could look at the life of Christ and figure out the answer to that question?

Let’s try this; let’s look at Scripture for an answer.

In the third chapter of the Gospel of John, John the Baptist talks about his view of the mission of Jesus in what we see as his last testimony.  In verses 33-35, from The Message, it says this:

The One that God sent speaks God’s words. And don’t think he rations out the Spirit in bits and pieces. The Father loves the Son extravagantly. He turned everything over to him so he could give it away—a lavish distribution of gifts. That is why whoever accepts and trusts the Son gets in on everything, life complete and forever!

God came in human form and brought with Him all the love and wisdom of God the Father in the person of Jesus, God the Son, so that He could give it away.

And, we hang onto this love and blessing as if it belongs only to us, or as if it would be blemished by getting into the hands of others less worthy.

It’s time for a new view of the mission of the church to emerge.  It’s not really new, at all; it’s the same vision that Jesus brought to earth with Him, but it IS different from the church in which many of us were raised.

The Kingdom of God can never be contained within the walls of a church building.  We should not act as if the blessing of God being God within our lives is something that we should experience only within the walls of a church.

And, these blessings are not ours only, or ours at all, if we try to hold them for ourselves.

Here is the mission of the church for our day:

We should be giving the Kingdom away!

It was freely given to us.  We are Christians, that is, “little Christs” or followers of Christ.  We should handle the Kingdom exactly as the One who brought it to us handled it….

We should be giving the Kingdom away, EXTRAVAGANTLY!

How about it?  What could you be doing today to give the Kingdom away to someone who needs it?  Get out of the comfort of your church and get into the mission field to which you have been assigned and get started.

Always praying for you, I am….

Your Older Brothers,

Pastor Joe

Friends,

Everyone wants to have a legacy, something for which they’re remembered.  You see it all the time with famous people like athletes, actors, musicians and politicians.  They do what they do for a time in which they are surrounded by fame, but late in their careers, they start to wonder how they’ll be remembered.

A President of the United States, for example, may spend 6-7 years doing their job according to their philosophy of government, but then, in that last year to year and a half, suddenly they start to wonder how people will remember them and begin hedging their bets a little to leave a good taste in people’s mouths.

In the same way, musicians try to find that signature song, actors look for that memorable role and athletes suddenly start giving more interviews to reporters they’ve been snubbing for years.  Everyone wants to be remembered well.

Even us “not so famous” folks think from time to time about how we’re being viewed by those around us.

I remember growing up as the son of a pastor and a teacher and thinking of myself as Rev. Shreffler and Mrs. Shreffler’s middle kid.  I actually did a few things that people might have noticed, but even within my extended family, I was always Charles and Katherine’s son.  It was OK; I always figured that my “turn” would come.

It never really did.  In the span of just a few short years, I went from being Charles’ son to being Joey’s dad.  For a few people, I was Margie’s husband, but to tell the truth, Margie didn’t get a much better deal than me.  We were kind of a ‘tweener generation couple.  That was OK, as well; we have always been pretty proud of our sons, so being Joey’s dad, Robbie’s parents or Drew’s mom was never much of a burden.

Of course, now I’m getting a little older (I know; you hadn’t noticed) and I’m no different from anyone else.  I’m asking myself the same question everyone eventually asks themselves; “Have I really made a difference?”

It’s not that it really matters that much.  As of yesterday, according to the World Population clock maintained by the U. S. Census Bureau, the world population is approximately 6,768,558,757.  There’s no reasonable cause for me to assume that my impact on the planet will exceed that of any of the well over 7 billion lives with whom I have shared this ground.

Still, it would be nice to know that I’ve made some small difference, even if for only a few people and over a short span of time.  You know what I mean, don’t you?  I mean, I’m thinking you feel the same way.

My reading of Scripture brought me recently to the story of Daniel, again.  I like to read about Daniel; his story is one of a man who stood up and made a difference, and I think most of us could really learn something from it.

But, I was caught this time by one specific thing that I had read many times, but never with the impact it had on me this time. 

The story of Daniel tells us about a man who was caught up along with the rest of Israel in the Babylonian captivity.  Removed from the country of his birth and brought into the household of Nebuchadnezzar along with other young men of promise, he served a succession of ruling kings without ever deserting his God.

In time, Darius (one of these kings) made Daniel a prominent ruler as a result of the quality of his service.  Daniel became the target of evil men seeking to use his allegiance to his God as a way to separate him from the favor of Darius and, for a time, it appears to have worked.

Darius was convinced by these men to proclaim an edict that if anyone made petition to any god other than the king for 30 days, they would be seen as a traitor and sentenced to be thrown into the den of lions, a crude form of capital punishment.  Darius, persuaded by his own vanity, signed this edict and gave it the force of law.

Daniel’s response to this edict was to simply continue to pray to God and allow himself to be dragged before the king for punishment.  Darius was distressed by this outcome, but he had painted himself into a corner.  Daniel was sentenced to go into the lion’s den, but it was Darius who said, “Your God will deliver you.”

You know this story.  God Himself closed the mouths of those lions He had created and over whom He was sovereign.  There is no coincidence here.  Scripture says that Darius, the king who had sentenced Daniel to this punishment, went back to the palace and fasted.  Listen, God does not act in our circumstances except in response to our yielded will to Him.  You know that Daniel prayed; that’s what got him into this mess.  But, so did Darius.

And, in the morning, Daniel was brought out from his “punishment,” a restful night among God’s creatures, to a complete exoneration.

Look at these verses, found in Daniel 6: 25-27, in The Message:

King Darius published this proclamation to every race, color, and creed on earth:

    Peace to you! Abundant peace!
         I decree that Daniel’s God shall be worshiped and feared
   in all parts of my kingdom.
         He is the living God, world without end. His kingdom
   never falls.
         His rule continues eternally.
         He is a savior and rescuer.
         He performs astonishing miracles in heaven and on earth.
         He saved Daniel from the power of the lions.

So, another great Bible story comes to a good end?  Nope; look again.

This is a proclamation to the entire earth from the guy who was the current strongest military leader known at the time.  He was giving credit to God for His evidenced power.  But, look at the way he identifies God.

He is the “God of Daniel.”

Listen, Daniel never did anything for his own credit.  He always gave credit to his God.  And the entire earth came to know Him as the God of Daniel.

I don’t expect to ever be famous.  I don’t have any reason to believe that I’m just about to do something that men will always remember.

But, every day I walk this earth, I do have impact on the people with whom I come in contact.  It can be a positive impact or negative.  I want it to be positive, but not to my own credit.

If I’m going to really make a difference in the lives of the people I meet and influence, it will only be because God is working through me.  And, He does.  I get opportunities every day to make a difference, if I’ll take them, and bring my heavenly Father into the circumstances of my life.

I can work with kids on a baseball team, and their parents.  I can be there for the employees of the company where I serve as a corporate chaplain.  I can visit the sick, speak words of freedom to people imprisoned by the chains of this world and act to improve the lives of the needy around me.  I can do all those things, and you can do things just like them.

And, if we do all these things in God’s name and hold him up in front of us, we WILL make a difference.

People may not remember us, but they will remember the impact of our God in action around them.

I do not aspire for Pastor Joe to be remembered, but I DO want people to remember the God of Pastor Joe, and many of them are only ever going to see Him through me.

Will people see Him through you?

Let them remember the God of YOU!

Always praying for you, I am….

Your Older Brother,

Pastor Joe

Friends,

Did you ever day dream about how all your problems would be solved if you could just get a large sum of unexpected money?  Maybe you think in terms of winning a lottery, or maybe the Publisher’s Clearing House drawing or maybe you’ve even thought about some long lost relative that you don’t even know leaving you a lot of money in their will and the executors FINALLY locate you and turn over the money.  Don’t try to kid me here; you all know that you’ve had some version of this day dream.

And, it’s not usually about greed so much as the sometimes overwhelming notion of the infinite needs around you juxtaposed against your incredibly FINITE ability to accumulate money.  You feel like you could never catch up to the needs unless some financial ship suddenly comes into the port of your meager finances.

It’s not just individuals who do this kind of day dreaming, of course.  Even in the church, we sometimes see things we COULD do for the Kingdom IF we could just get a little (or, you know, maybe a LOT of) extra money to apply to the needs.  And, we almost always think in terms of the sudden windfall as the “appropriate” way for those needed funds to appear.

A couple of months ago, at a pastor’s lunch, we had a special speaker talking about his business, in which he dealt directly with some churches.  I wasn’t especially interested in his business, but I was very interested in his testimony.  He was talking about how he and his family had left a secure position in England to pursue his business.  As a Christian, he had certainly remembered to pray that God would meet the needs of his family.

As he told the story of how God had answered those prayers, he paused to say that he had learned early in life from Christian parents that God rarely meets our needs by giving us huge windfalls of prosperity, but rather by delivering to us what we need when we need it, as long as we remember to make our needs known to Him and await His provision.

I was interested in that testimony because I’d just returned from our church’s District Assembly, an annual business meeting for churches of our denomination within our geographical area.  During that week of meetings, several speakers had witnessed to God’s provision, AS THEY REQUESTED IT FROM HIM.  One speaker, in particular, shared about his father’s experience as a missionary in praying each year that God would give their mission district “one more new preacher” in order to allow the planting of one new church each year.  God had always answered that prayer, but it was not until a later part of this man’s life that he realized that God was able to do much more, IF WE ASKED HIM FOR IT.  On a later mission district, he had begun to pray for 30 new pastors each year, and still God filled the need.

Listen, the whole world understands this process in a way the people of faith SHOULD understand it.

There’s a automobile assembly plant in our city.  It’s a joint venture of General Motors and Toyota.  The NUMMI plant, as it’s called, had been assembling cars and small trucks for years.  When they first opened, they were considered to be an innovative assembly plant, using lots of new systems and processes.

One of those processes was an inventory control system generally referred to as “Just in Time.”  The JIT principle is actually pretty simple.  Using computerized ordering and inventory control processes, order are placed for needed parts on a basis that insures that they will be delivered just in time to be used, hence the name.

The reason for it is pretty simple.  When a company orders parts, they accept a liability promise to pay for those parts within a reasonable time.  That repayment process doesn’t begin until they have the parts.  If they order the parts far in advance, they become payable before the company has a chance to sell the resulting product, thus they have to pay well before they receive payment for their product.  The later payment for the part is due, the less time they are required to carry the deficit of money.

And, that’s not the only thing they gain.  If you have a bunch of not-ready-to-be-used parts sitting around, you have to have storage space to house them.  And, there are times that you are paying taxes on inventory that is sitting still rather than only having the parts immediately needed to perform required assembly.

Of course, there are potential problems in a JIT inventory system.  What if the parts don’t arrive on time?  At NUMMI, tomorrow’s parts required for assembly are often right out there on a delivery truck or railroad car today.  If they don’t arrive, tomorrow’s cars don’t get assembled.  A truck wreck or train derailment can cause havoc.  It’s necessary to always be on top of delivery progress.

Additionally, you cannot afford to have incorrect parts delivered since there’s no margin for that error.  You HAVE to get it right the first time.

With that absence of a margin for error, the JIT system sometimes causes anxiety for its practitioners. That’s pretty easy to understand, especially when your job is on the line for insuring that it all works.

Because of that, most of us try to avoid living our personal lives in a just in time paradigm.  We’d prefer to have things established and in order well in advance in order to avoid the little upsets that sometimes make life difficult.  And, there’s nothing wrong with that.  Given the choice, you’d be wise to practice the “ounces of prevention” lifestyle versus the “pound of cure     “ option.  Even within the church, we plan ahead as much as we can and try to be responsible about the business and finances of the church.

However, that is not the way it usually works out in the Kingdom, IF we’re trying to move at God’s speed on the things we do.  Many Christians DON’T try to move at that speed, preferring to move according to their own comfort.  And, that’s not really where God wants us to be.

This is a lesson I’m trying hard to be learning right now in my life and in the church I serve.  We are currently trying to do things that are in accord with what we see God doing around us, believing that to be His invitation to join Him. 

We DON’T have enough money to do all these things.  We DON’T have all the personnel to accomplish all these things.  We lack some of the physical facilities required.  We don’t possess all the ministry skills that will be needed to get the job done.

And, we have a choice.

We could simply stop moving forward because we are not able to see all these needed resources with our human eyes.  We could decide that we just got it all wrong and go back to the familiar and comfortable and wait for a call to do something a little more in keeping with that comfort level.

Or, we could stop moving and wait where we are until our human eyes can see what we think we need to move forward.  Or, alternatively, we could alter the current plan to fit the parameters of our available resources.

OR

We can choose to continue moving forward and depending on God to deliver everything we need, JUST IN TIME.

And, He IS doing that.  Every action step we take in faith is meeting a form of provision for the needed resources.  When we’re moving forward, financial resources, skilled people, ENOUGH people and all other kinds of necessary resources are being made available to us.  Right now, it’s happening on a small scale, but if we continue to learn and grow in faith as He makes the lessons clear to us, He will continue to deliver the bigger and more incredible forms of provision, just in time.

As much as we might wish that someone would hand us a million dollars, functional buildings, skilled workers and a critical mass of available followers, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that God is not planning to move in that way.

And, we are the better for it.

When the church has more money than it needs at the present moment, we usually learn to depend more on our bank account than a providing God.

When we have facilities before we need them, we usually turn their use to things that benefit us rather than the mission field for which He designates them, and once we become comfortable with that use, we cannot see another.

When we have skilled people but no ministry to use those skills, they go elsewhere.

And, if the larger numbers of people come here before we are able to give them a meaningful purpose of ministry, they will find a comfortable pew and begin to believe that to be the reason they came.

God has a plan and a mission for us, and He will provide our needs as they come, if we continue to move according to His vision revealed to us.  Listen to I Peter 5:6-7 from The Message:

So be content with who you are, and don’t put on airs. God’s strong hand is on you; he’ll promote you at the right time. Live carefree before God; he is most careful with you.

This truth does not just apply to Fremont Journey of Faith, but also to every Believer.  As you faithfully follow Him, you WILL have everything that you need.

JUST IN TIME!

Always praying for you, I am

Your Older Brother,

Pastor Joe

Friends,

A friend recently sent me a copy of a farm equipment sale notice back in Oklahoma.  I hadn’t seen one of those for a long time.  These notices usually list the items being sold, as well as the location, date and time of the sale.

We used to see a lot of these when we lived in Oklahoma; there was a sale like this somewhere close by almost every weekend.  Guys who ran farming or ranching operations would read these over like a teenage boy reads those “cars for sale” giveaway papers you see everywhere.  They might not actually need any of the listed items, but they could imagine what they might do with some of this stuff.

But, there was another, more emotional, level to every one of those notices.  While most people would just see them as another sale flyer, there was almost always a story behind those sales.  Older folks, who remembered a day when such notices were usually the sign of a family in distress, were more likely to wonder about the reason for the sale than the items being sold. 

Every sale meant that a season was closing in someone’s life.  Maybe they were just moving on to bigger and better pieces of equipment.  Or, maybe they had come to the end of their ability to sustain a way of life that used to be a lot more common in our country.

The notice I received in the mail was for a friend who has been a successful farmer/rancher for many years.  He recently sold the farm, including the house in which he had lived for many years, a house that was much more than just a place to live.

This family had raised a lot more than just wheat and cattle on that place.  They had raised four great kids, who are my very good friends.  They had grown memories that will last for a long time.  Grandchildren and great grandchildren had come to that home and found a place of belonging and roots.

Friends had come in large numbers to a place where they always felt welcome.  The food was always the very best.  The warmth was a constant, and it was a place of blessing.  There were many hay rides, camp fires, wienie roasts and other fun activities that could never happen in “town.”  More than a few people learned to “noodle” on that place; there’s more than one way to catch a fish.

Of course, there were difficult times, as well.  Making that place a home did not come without sacrifice.  The stories of some of those sacrifices are personal, family stories, but it’s enough to say that everything there was earned.  There were periodic floods, backing up from the nearby Salt Fork of the Arkansas River.  Lots of us got a chance to lend a hand in either loss prevention or clean up, and were happy to pitch in.

Selling that family place is the closing of a season.  For all the ups and downs involved, it would have to be viewed overall as a great season, but like all seasons, it has an ending.  The equipment sale, on May 31, 2009, is just one more marker defining the end of that season.

Our lives all have such seasons.  They may not all be as long as the one described here, but they are all meaningful in our lives.  The parameters of those seasons may be defined by weddings, funerals, birthdays, arrivals and departures.  We often get so tied up in the specific occurrences of a moment that we fail to see these broader seasons beginning and ending.

And, we start to think that these events are what life is all about.  We even get caught up in our own importance, and fail to understand that there is an even bigger picture than us and what we’re all about.

Scripture speaks to this, in a most familiar passage.  The Book of Ecclesiastes includes some words that many people discovered not in a Sunday school class, but in a popular song.  It’s in chapter 3 of that book, and in The Message, it reads like this:

There’s an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on the earth:

A right time for birth and another for death,
   A right time to plant and another to reap,
   A right time to kill and another to heal,
   A right time to destroy and another to construct,
   A right time to cry and another to laugh,
   A right time to lament and another to cheer,
   A right time to make love and another to abstain,
   A right time to embrace and another to part,
   A right time to search and another to count your losses,
   A right time to hold on and another to let go,
   A right time to rip out and another to mend,
   A right time to shut up and another to speak up,
   A right time to love and another to hate,
   A right time to wage war and another to make peace.

But in the end, does it really make a difference what anyone does? I’ve had a good look at what God has given us to do—busywork, mostly. True, God made everything beautiful in itself and in its time—but he’s left us in the dark, so we can never know what God is up to, whether he’s coming or going. I’ve decided that there’s nothing better to do than go ahead and have a good time and get the most we can out of life. That’s it—eat, drink, and make the most of your job. It’s God’s gift.

I’ve also concluded that whatever God does, that’s the way it’s going to be, always. No addition, no subtraction. God’s done it and that’s it. That’s so we’ll quit asking questions and simply worship in holy fear.
Whatever was, is.
   Whatever will be, is.
   That’s how it always is with God.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 The Message

The significant part of this passage is that, in the end, the only thing that truly matters is how God fits into the seasons of our lives.

Some of you are in difficult seasons of life right now.  It may be economic stress, job related stress, relational stress or physical stress.  It would be easy to conclude that the difficulties you face now are the conclusion of everywhere you’ve been and everything you’ve done in life.  You may be thinking, “So, this is what it all comes down to.”

And, in fact, the circumstances of your life probably have played a role in the place you are now.  If you’ve made bad decisions (haven’t we all), you may be reaping some consequences of those decisions.  It could be the choices of others that have brought you to where you are.  Or, it could be pure chance that has placed you in your current situation.

None of that matters.  What does matter is how you’re going to deal with it, and whether you intend to do it alone.

Listen, if you have trouble in your life right now, do NOT start to think that God had created that trouble to teach you a lesson.  He doesn’t work that way, and I don’t care how many well intentioned people in your life have said or implied that He does.  God is not the creator of trouble or the author of confusion.

He is the Author of the seasons of our lives ONLY when we invite Him to be and then follow Him.  And, regardless of the genesis of our current circumstances, He IS the Redeemer of our circumstances. 

Has it been a bad season?  Then, it’s time to start a new one, only THIS time, start it with Him.

Are you in a good season?  Good for you, but don’t start thinking that it’s all because of something you created or did.  Give Him the credit and commit it back to Him.

As for me, God began a brand new season in my life about four years ago when He brought me back to Fremont.  He is continuing to do great things here, and I am constantly amazed at how He is supplying our needs.  I have no idea how long this season will last, but I am determined to keep giving it back to Him.  My young friend, Sarah Lam, describes this as “throwing my life back at God” and I kind of like that.

How about you?  Are you giving Him your seasons?  Throw it back to Him and, as I’ve also been learning to say, imagine what God will do.

Always praying for you,

Your Older Brother,

Pastor Joe

Friends,

God is doing some pretty great things here in Fremont, and I think it’s time that I shared them with you.  My intention in this blog has always been to give people a chance to “look over my shoulder” at what God is doing in my life, and right now is a time that His hand is moving.

Fremont Journey of Faith is a church in transition.  That shouldn’t be a big deal; the church should ALWAYS be in transition.  God is always on the move, we ought to be constantly seeking for what He is doing around us and joining Him, SO our journey should be one of constant transition to follow Him.

Our transition is a major one.  I believe that God is calling us to help create the “Church of the 21^st Century.”  We’re not doing this alone; I think God is moving among His people all over the world to make this transition, but I don’t believe that every church is trying to do this.  There are many churches content to continue following the patterns they’ve followed over the years, believing that the safest course is the most familiar.

And, it certainly SEEMS safe.  After all, if you’ve done the same things many times and watched to see the results of doing those things, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the results of such actions would continue to be the same.  Unless, of course, the world is changing.  Oh, wait a minute, …IT IS!

God is unchanging.  We know that.  But, the world He created is not.  It ebbs and flows according to the desires and actions of the people in it, and those are changing all the time.

Do you wear your hair the same way you did ten years ago?  Do the clothes you’re wearing look the same as the ones you wore 20 years ago?  How about the way you view the world around you; is that view identical to the one with which you grew up?

So, be honest; some of you are saying that you DO wear your hair the same way, but I’ve been looking at you and you don’t even HAVE as much hair as you did 10 years ago.  You may be combing it in the same direction, but that’s not the same thing.

The truth is that the world around us is constantly changing and if we (the church) are going to be ministering to it, we have to adjust ourselves, as well.  Please don’t hear me saying something I didn’t say; I never said that we have to change our fundamental beliefs, but we DO have to change the way we relate to our world.

At Journey of Faith, our mission method is simple; it’s a direct response to the Great Commission.  We’re supposed to be “making disciples,” and to do that, we need a game plan, and here it is:

·         We’re Engaging the Culture; serving people where they have needs in order to allow them to see Christ in us.

·         We’re Creating Redemptive Relationships; making sure that these people we’re meeting through our service will hear Christ through us when we speak.

·         We’re Making Disciples; this is the simplest step of all, because we simply point people to Him when He draws them to Himself through our relationships.

It all starts with engaging the culture through our service, and that’s where we’re doing most of our work right now.

We’ve launched a Compassionate Ministry we call Generous Life (GLCM).  We’re operating on the assumption that if we’re going to reach our world for Christ, we’re going to need a plan other than having church every Sunday morning and expecting people to “see it our way” and come on in.  Let’s be honest; if that approach was going to work, we’d have more people in churches that we could handle.  Very few congregations have that problem, so there must be a better way.

And it has to be something better than applying the ministry “flavor of the month” to our church.  Over and over, the church has sought to copy whoever seems to be having success at the moment.  Most of the things we copy (please note: MOST) began with a solid root and reason, …FOR THEIR COMMUNITY.  Some strategic thinking Believers looked at the mission field to which they had been assigned and recognized both a need and a way to meet it, and that’s what they did.  Then, someone wrote a book about it and hundreds of other churches tried to replicate the same exact program, or something very like it.

I’m not bad mouthing these great ministry successes.  Most of the time, what we’ve seen is God blessing some group who followed Him.  I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with what they’ve done.  I’m just saying, not every problem can be resolved in 40 days, no matter how purposefully we approach it, and “one size does NOT fit all.”

We CAN learn from the principles that were applied in all these models.  But the first principle in almost every case was a Body who sought God’s will for their situation and then followed it.

At Journey of Faith, we’ve been seeking God’s will.  We sought it when we renamed our church.  We sought it when we wanted to find our local ministry path.  And, He has been leading us to be people who lead generous lives.  And so, Generous Life Compassionate Ministries is the result for US.

What is GLCM?  Well, right now it’s several things.

It’s a Basic Amenities Pantry.  This is like a food pantry, only with non-food items.  We collect, through the generous contributions of the people in our church and beyond, these items.  A volunteer team logs them in and organizes them.  A variety of community organizations, primarily connected with City Serve Compassion Network (CSCN), make referrals to our pantry from among their clients when they have need of these items.  CSCN is the result of many churches in our area working together to coordinate our various compassionate ministry efforts.  CSCN is located in the Fremont Resource Center, a city building housing many service groups working for the good of the community.  In addition to CSCN, our Amenities Pantry gets referrals from other FRC groups and from City Serve member churches.

When someone comes to us for help, a staff member does a brief intake (many organizations provide this information in their referral) and then assembles a bag, or bags, of items required to meet the need.  Some clients return multiple times; others visit us only once.  Through this effort, we are able to meet a need and also meet the person or family behind that need.  Our staff members use the time to determine if there are other needs we could meet, and also check to determine whether these people have a support group, particularly a church family.  If they don’t, we recommend local churches that could help them with their larger needs; sometimes it’s our church, other times, it’s not.

GLCM is also a community garden.  This garden raises fresh fruits and vegetables for people who need them in their diet.  Many food pantries can only provide canned and commercial food sources, with maybe milk or bread.  Few have the chance to offer fresh vegetables for the tables of these folks in need, and their diets often lack that important part.

The GLCM garden is growing.  This year, we’re teaming with another local church, Mission Springs Community Church, to significantly enlarge our gardening effort.  With the partnership of this like-minded congregation, we expect to not only provide these food items for referred clients, we’re also hoping to gift some of this good food to a couple of church sponsored feeding programs in town that work with donated food.  Centerville Presbyterian Church and Irvington Presbyterian Church each serve multiple meals each week, usually to 200 or more people at a time.  They get some support from municipal sources, but also depend on donated food items.  Our garden may enhance their menus this summer, if we’re successful.

Last summer, GLCM conducted a feeding program of our own.  We discovered that there was a gap in the available feeding programs on most Wednesday evenings, so we jumped in with our Hot Dog Outpost, serving hot dogs, chips and drinks to all comers.  It was a humble meal, but for some was the only option they had for eating before they went to bed on Wednesday evening.  But, we didn’t just offer food.  Hot Dog Outpost only required a few workers; we had the rest of our people come and eat with the folks who came.  No one felt like a charity case at Hot Dog Outpost; they became a part of a community of friends eating together.  Many stayed for our prayer time that followed, though it wasn’t required.

All of that is only a start.  We’ve spent the last year or so meeting people through our efforts.  Over the winter, we prayed and brainstormed about what God would have us do in a more holistic ministry, and this year, we’re working to launch a ministry specifically to single moms in our communities.

Many of the people who have benefitted from what we’ve done up to now have been single moms, and that’s not really a surprise.  Single moms in our communities are more likely than others to be living below the poverty line.  That’s true almost everywhere.

And, of course, it’s not just the moms.  By definition, that means children growing up in poverty, right here in a place of wealth and prosperity.  We want to do something about that, and we want that something to be a plan that does more than just give them charity.  We want to address the reasons for their condition and assist them in changing that situation.

We don’t know what all that will mean.  We have lots of ideas, but we want to do what the people we’re serving really need.  We’re seeking to grow this ministry by starting with the first thing, prayer.

We’re praying that God will show us what is really needed.  We’re praying that He will show us how to meet their perceived needs AND how to meet their real needs in Him.  We’re praying that He will provide the resources we need to do all this, and we entered that prayer journey by asking Him what He wanted US to do.  Our church has committed to grow in the area of our resources right in the middle of this economic crisis.  We’ll only be able to do that if God directs our steps.

Here’s the goal we have in order to become that 21^st Century church.  We’re going to be Journey of Faith to the Church of the Nazarene and to the other churches with whom we work.  But, to the community, we’re going to be Generous Life Compassionate Ministries.  We’re not trying to build our church; we’re trying to build the Kingdom.

We’re engaging the culture so we can create redemptive relationships so that God can work through us to make disciples.  And we start by living generous lives.

Read these words from Matthew 5:48:

In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.

Matthew 5:48 The Message

So, that’s what God is doing here.  What’s He doing where you are?  He has a plan for ministry right where you are; all you have to do is ask Him until He shows you, then go do it.

Always praying for you,

Pastor Joe

Friends,

If we were seeking details about mentoring, we’d have to look no further than the relationship of Christ and His disciples.  But, what we’re seeking here is a model of mentoring that we can take to heart for our own lives, given to us through the lives of other mere men.  That story has been replayed many times through the history of the followers of God, and we could look at any of those examples.

Here’s my story.

People who’ve known me for long might assume that my ministerial mentor was my own father; I’m a pastor’s kid.  But, God did not call me to a life of full time ministry during my father’s lifetime.  While his example has often inspired and instructed me, I never had the opportunity to ask him the questions of the how and why of a life of ministry.  I was only 21 when he died.

And, while I was 40 years old before God called me to full time ministry, my life has been enriched by an incredible string of mentors.

After my father’s death, I knew that my wife and I needed to change churches.  My dad was pastoring a small church in Ponca City, OK when he died.  As they looked to call a new pastor, I knew that they did not need me hanging around to complicate the process.  Fortunately, my dad had recognized his situation and had arranged in advance for the pastor of a neighboring church, Ponca City First Church of the Nazarene, to come and get me.  Reverend Dean Galloway gently approached me and let me see that connection for myself, and Margie and I made our way to that church.

I was a fatherless son at age 21, recently married to an 18 year old bride, and just getting started on the road to actually growing up.  It was a tough time to not have a father.  But, at Ponca City First Church of the Nazarene, God had a marvelous gift in store for me.

That was a church filled with older men who had much to give to a younger man seeking to become what God intended him to be.  I can name their names and what they gave me, even today, 35 years later.

Frank Wilkerson taught me how to be a church supporter, in a financial sense.  He trained me to be a church treasurer at age 22, and stood by me while I made all the normal mistakes.  I learned that the church has more than enough resources, and that God allows us to be those resources, if we are faithful.

Royce DeWitt taught me how to really worship.  I was the worship leader at that church for ten years.  I was confident about being in front and pretty comfortable about leading the music.  But, when I was uncertain of the actual state of worship in the congregation during any service, I only needed to look at Royce DeWitt to know where we really were.  Royce was a quiet guy; his daughters all sang and I guess maybe he had a singing voice too, at one time.  But it wasn’t his voice that trained me; it was his worshipping demeanor.  When we were really engaged in worship as a congregation, it showed on his face.  I learned that true worship was more than performance excellence, but was a matter of complete release to our heavenly Father.

Clarence “Bull” Mullins taught me that a Believer can function in the real working world.  Clarence was a head operator at the Conoco oil refinery than would eventually employ me.  It was a difficult place for a Christian to work, filled with obscenity and godlessness.  But “Bull” Mullins was a leader of men in that place, and didn’t have to give up anything.  He didn’t walk around with a “holier than thou” attitude; he was popular among the men there, but he accomplished that without having to lower his standards.  He never acted like a super righteous man at church, and he never acted like a totally secular man at work.  He was the same wherever he went.  I learned that to engage the world, a Believer had to live a life that would work everywhere.

John Maker taught me to be a Believer in front of the community.  John was a leader in our church, a businessman of good reputation in the community, a member of the Board of Directors for the local Salvation Army, and a Gideon.  He taught me that a Believer can make a difference in the community.  My community activism was never the same as John’s, but from him, I learned that Christians can make a difference in our world; we don’t have to be separated from it.

Lee Pierce taught me about being a churchman.  My story with Lee is too detailed to include here, but suffice it to say that through some adversity between us, Lee Pierce turned out to be a person who genuinely passed the life of blessing as a churchman oon to me.  I learned that God has a plan that’s better than the one I usually think I have.

But, the main person that God brought into my life was Harold Mullins.  Harold was a farmer/rancher who was a leader in our community and a surrogate father to me.  His family enveloped Margie and I through those first years and the births of our two older sons.  They taught us how to be a Christian family and Christian parents.  They ensured that we would never feel alone.

But, more than that, Harold Mullins convinced me that God had a significant plan for my life.  He never pushed me toward the ministry; we had left Ponca City before God called me to that.  He was never surprised that God HAD called me to ministry, and to this day continues to encourage me to move forward.  I don’t talk to him very often any more, but I know without a doubt that every good thing that I am can be traced back to his confidence in me, his words of encouragement to me and the doors he continually tried to open on my behalf.

And, one much more important thing, Harold Mullins planted in me a lifelong desire to “pay forward” that relationship in my life.  There have been two significant outcomes from that.

First, I have ALWAYS sought to maintain mentoring relationships in my life that hold me accountable for the person I’m supposed to be.  We’ve moved many times, and I’ve spent time in numerous Bodies of Christ, some of them as the Senior Pastor.  The first thing I have always been on the lookout for, however, was where I could plug in to some older man as a mentor for my life.

And, I’ve always found them.  God has continued to place those mentors in front of me, when I sought them.  They’ve often not been the most likely persons, but they’ve always been the right people.

I spent many a Monday morning drinking cinnamon tea at Hobie’s in Fremont with Al McNew.  Al was guy who’d lived a long time, and not all of it as a Christian.  He’d made his share of mistakes and learned from them all.  He lived long enough to become a victorious Believer, and he did something that many such older men would be reluctant to do.  He took a younger pastor into his confidence and told me the truth about the mistakes he’d made.  He helped me, as much as any man I’ve know, shape the marriage relationship that my wife and I now enjoy, because he warned me about the pitfalls of marriage, many of them from hard won experience.

I spent a lot of hours with a guy named Ken Reese in Santa Rosa.  Ken was a funny guy; he had lots of profoundly held beliefs, some of them actually correct.  He liked to tell people what he thought.  Some people veered away from Ken because he could really get in your face if he disagreed with you, and he often disagreed with me.

But, if you’d invest the time, you’d also find a man who was profoundly loyal to his friends and a true encourager.  He was no “YES” man, but he never left your side when he disagreed.  I learned to see Ken as a pretty good mirror of how I was coming across to the congregation, and he made me a better pastor.

I’ve had many peer relationships, as well, which have helped me to grow, and I’ve had times when I had to look hard for mentors, but this has all led me to the first great truth about mentoring that I believe every would-be mentee has to learn:

If you really want a mentor, you’re probably going to have to recruit him yourself.

You’d think it would be the other way around.  You’d think that mentoring relationships should be created by qualified mentors, but that has not been my experience.  The truth is that most older men believe younger men do not value their experience and believe they’d be rejected if they offered it.  Many times, I’ve heard an older man my age say that he’d like to come alongside some younger guy having trouble, but they assume they’d be rejected and therefore never offer.

And, they’re probably right, most of the time.  The greatest downfall I’ve seen in young pastors throughout my life has been the assumption that everyone older than them is a failure in life and therefore unworthy to ask advice from, except in not so veiled attempts to act humble.  Every generation assumes that the world pretty much came into being around the time they came of age and younger people often discount the value of the voice of experience.

But, they’re wrong.  You don’t have to be a success to be a good mentor; some of the best I’ve had taught me the most from their life failures.  If you really want a mentor, you’re going to have to genuinely humble yourself before the voice of experience and ask for the relationship. 

Most men are honored by that request, and few will reject it, as long as there’s some reasonable basis for it.  This is no call for every aspirant preacher to run to the area District Superintendent and request that he be their mentor.  There’s someone closer to your life that is capable to do the job and would be honored to do so, if asked sincerely.

How do you find them?  That’s the easy part.  You ask God to show them to you.  It’s a prayer thing, and you stay with it until YOU understand His answer.

The Second outcome of my mentoring experiences has been a lifelong commitment to BE a mentor.  II Timothy 2:2 (any version) tells you have this works.  Here it is in the NASB:

The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

II Timothy 2:2 NASB

This verse has long been a personal life verse for me and was quoted to me again by Dr. John A. Knight when he ordained me.  I believe it to be the assignment for every Believer, and it becomes a vital message to anyone fortunate enough to have had an intentional mentoring relationship in their spiritual life.

The verse says it all; whatever you’ve been given, you’re responsible to give to others who will pass it on.  Here’s the way that works out in my life.

I believe God has enabled me to be a mentor to seven men at a time.  As a pastor, the second thing I look for in a new church is this: which men will be among that seven.  The amount of time spent with each will vary, but the pattern never does.  Here it is:

·         When I find one of these guys, I commit to meet with him on a regular basis.  (By the way, it probably needs to be said; men mentor men.  Women mentor women.  No variances on this rule, and every pastor should learn it and burn it into their heart.)  That regular basis may be monthly for some and weekly for others.  It may be coffee, a lunch, taking a walk or some other physical activity, but it has to be on a regular basis that is a priority for both partners.

·         Every time I meet with my mentees, I ask them how I can pray for them; then I actually do it.

·         I commit to pray for that mentee and his family by name on a daily basis.

·         I make my list of seven priorities in my ministry.  If I have a secretary, I give them the list and tell them, “If any of these guys calls, put them through to me.  If I’m in a meeting, ask them if it’s urgent.  If it is, pull me out of the meeting, without regard to whom I’m meeting with.”  I share that commitment with my guys, so they know what it means to say their need for me is urgent.

·         I ask only one thing from each of my guys.  Once they’ve entered into this relationship with me, I ask them to be on the lookout for guys they can mentor in the same way.

Now, this is my pattern, and not necessarily replicable for every person.  I don’t always have my list of seven full, in which case I’m looking and praying for the next guy.

But, while the pattern may vary, the principle does not, and here it is:

If you want to be mentored, you must commit to BE a mentor.

That opportunity may not come immediately, but it will come.  From the time I spent with Harold Mullins, it’s been evident to me that God’s blessings are intended to be passed on.  We are, and have always been, (Genesis 11; check it out) blessed to BE a blessing.

Always praying for you,

Pastor Joe

Friends,
I don’t often do this, but I need to do it now.
From time to time, I’ll tell you about a time when God laid it on my heart to pray for someone. Sometimes I know why; other times, I don’t
And, sometimes, some of you will say to me that you’ve never experienced that. I’ve even had people tell me that they aren’t sure when God is speaking to them and when He isn’t.
Well, this time you don’t have to wonder. He’s speaking to you, ….through me.
I have a prayer need, and I need to call some of you to pray with me. I can’t tell you everything, but I’ll give you a little to go on.
There’s a couple in Texas that need our prayer. He’s a pastor, and his wife is a young woman that I’ve known pretty much all her life. They’re in a crisis not of their own making.
The adversary is working against them, and he appears to be having some success. They’re in pain and discouraged. This excellent young minister is considering walking away from the calling God placed in his life because of the pain. They’re considering right now resigning from the church they’re serving to avoid dragging their family through an ugly confrontation caused by the adversary.
God whispered their names to me and I contacted them. I heard the basic facts of their story, and God has planted in me a desire to see the adversary defeated in this devious plot.
So, I’m going to prayer, and asking some of you, as God directs you, to join me. Begin as soon as you read this. Don’t worry about the details; we don’t really need to know them. It’s sufficient for us to follow the model prayer Jesus taught His disciples and simply pray, in THIS circumstance, that His Kingdom would come, right here and now, and that HIS will would be done in this situation.
Prayer changes things, because the Body of Christ releases our free will and ushers Him into this realm. We’re not telling god what to do; we’re inviting Him to come and do what HE wants to do.
The heart of God is breaking for these kids that He created, and loves and called to labor for Him. Our hearts should break for whatever breaks the heart of God.
Church, it’s time to get to work!
Always praying that you’ll do what He calls you to do,
Your Older Brother,
Pastor Joe

Friends,

There’s probably no one reading this post who hasn’t felt the pinch of the current economy.  People are losing their jobs.  Families are losing their homes.  Even if nothing like that has happened to you, you may feel a sense of dread that something bad could be lurking just over the horizon, and your turn is coming.

There’s no easy or quick answer to any of this.  The current problems took time to create and they’ll take time to resolve.  That’s scant comfort to people who are struggling now. 

There’s a story from the era of the Great Depression in which a U. S. Senator was lecturing a witness before his committee.  The witness was advocating for changes to help people suffering from the economic woes of that time, and the senator, who was opposed to the changes being requested, went to great pains to inform the witness that the plans being requested were only short term fixes and that, with patience, things would work out better “in the long run,” if no changes were made.  The witness is said to have replied, “Senator, people don’t eat in the long run.”

While I don’t have any great answers about how to weather this economic storm, I do have some thoughts about how we got here.  There are basically two great causes for the current situation, one of them the fault of wealthy people, and the other the fault of the rest of us.  They could be lumped together, but they occur differently.

The overriding issue IS one thing, and that one thing is greed.  It is an ongoing fault of the sin-diseased human condition and all of us are guilty of it, at one time or another.  It would be wrong to say that greed was a new thing, or that it had only recently begun to occur, but the fact is that the last 40 or 50 years have seen an ongoing rise in the way we respond to our sin-natural inclination to greed.

Among the truly wealthy of our society, there has certainly been an unleashing of the limitations to the practices prompted by feelings of greed.  It’s not uncommon for people possessing great wealth to continue to want more.  It’s a specific tendency easily observable among human beings.

But there has long been a principle that ran counter to that, the idea of noblesse oblige.  In general, noblesse oblige simply means that with great power or material wealth comes a social obligation to consider those less fortunate than you.  Some of the great philanthropic families in the history of our nation have been avid practitioners of this principle.  Even if they have been aggressive and sometimes unprincipled in the way they built their wealth or power, they never lost sight of the need to “give back” to the society from which they gained those things.

In recent years, that idea has been not so much lost as laid aside by many who came more recently to their material wealth.  While some of the wealthiest of Americans are extravagant in their philanthropy, there is certainly an “under class” of the wealthy who give nothing back.  In fact, they do not view those with less as being “less fortunate.”  Rather, they view the rest of us as simply being too lazy and unmotivated to “get ours” and, therefore, undeserving of any share of what they’ve amassed.

True wealth is, in fact, a finite commodity.  In order for one person to gather a great deal of material wealth, others must surrender any claim to that same wealth.  “Make believe” wealth, gathered from “made up” values like the recent mortgage bundling process will always wither in a storm or under scrutiny.  But while many have lost great amounts of such “make believe” wealth, rest assured that others have garnered the true wealth that was available before and difficult to locate now.

So, there are winners and losers in any economy, and the divide between those groups has grown radically in recent year, with far greater percentages of the available wealth of our nation being held in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.  That’s not an outcome that just occurred as the stock market fell in recent months; that’s been happening over the last 15 or 20 years, and has accelerated in the last 10.

As a result, we could blame our current mess on rich people who’ve made it harder for the rest of us, and there would certainly be SOME truth in that claim, but it would not be the whole story.  There’s another significant cause to the current mess, and one that has helped to bring it to the crisis level.

Every economy needs two sides to exist.  There are producers and consumers.  It doesn’t matter what is being produced (well, it DOES, but that’s not the point of this posting), it only has value if it’s being consumed, or purchased, by someone.

When Henry Ford began his manufacturing process of his first automobiles, he recognized an important factor that was the main reason for his success.  Cars were a luxury, and the first cars were as much technological toys for the wealthy as buying a ride on the space shuttle would be today.  No one actually NEEDED them; there were other ways to get around.  But, if you had the disposable income to purchase one, well, why not?

Ford knew that mass production of autos was only viable f they were inexpensive enough to be purchased by regular people, and if those regular people earned enough to justify such a purchase.  His first production lines were practically self-contained.  He reasoned that he needed to balance what he paid his workers with the cost of the cars so that his own employees could afford to buy the cars they were making.  It seems so logical in retrospect, but it was innovative at the time.

Ford created consumers for the products he was making.

There’s nothing wrong with being a consumer.  We’re all consumers, to one degree or another.  Even the most self-sufficient among us purchases some things.  Paying others to produce things we need is being a consumer, and our society is actually enhanced by a certain degree of specialization where we each produce what we’re best at, and use the profits of our production to purchase the products of others better suited to produce those things.

The problem is that greed has made most of us into super-consumers.  We cannot seem to get enough of the stuff of our society.

I’m not looking down my nose at the rest of you from my lofty position of holier than you.  I’m a super-consumer, too.  I’m sitting at my desk typing on my state-of-the-art computer, taking calls on my iPhone and thinking about the football games I’m going to watch on my big screen TV this weekend.  I don’t have a great deal of wealth, but compared to the rest of the world outside the US, I live like a king.  And, so do most of you.

I’m not begrudging you the nice things you own.  I’m not saying that you were wrong to buy them.  I’m certainly not saying that you should give away all your material possessions and move with me to a rural hillside where we would all live in a self sufficient agrarian culture devoid of the evil presence of modern consumer goods.  If you do that and go there, you won’t find me there.

But, here’s the thing.  When we sit around despairing about the sorry state of the current economy, we have to at least include ourselves in the list of people responsible for what has happened, because we ARE part of the problem.

We’ve become a consumer nation, spending more and more to own every last one of the latest and greatest examples of everything.  Our kids have more toys than they could ever play with, more clothes than they could ever wear and more opportunities than most of them will ever even comprehend, much less take advantage of.

And our kids are just the recipients of all this.  It’s US that’s doing it, and we have not left ourselves out.

Look in your closet and see how many clothes you own.  How many do you actually wear?

Look in your pantry and see how much food you have on hand.  How much do you actually need to eat?

Do you have more room in your house than you actually need?  Be honest; I didn’t say than you WANT.  I said more than you NEED.

Is the car you drive a basic transportation necessity?  Listen, I drive a 2003 Chevy Impala, hardly a car that is making any of you envious of me, but be honest, could I get by with less of a car, or with no car, at all?  I’m not saying it would be easy, but is it actually necessary?

We have accumulated vastly more than we need in this life.  Not some of us; all of us.  Maybe you haven’t personally got there yet, but for those of you who don’t have all you want, are the things you want really the things that you NEED?

Here’s what I’m trying to say.  Our consumer driven economy is the symptom of the greed we all have given place to in our lives.  We cannot look at the Gordon Gecko characters of this world (if you don’t know who that is, Google it; it’s from an old movie and you’ll understand when you see it) and blame everything on them.  We are, and have been, their willing accomplices in the greedy deconstruction of the economy in which we live.  It’s our own fault.

And the church is NOT free from this.  My next post, which is really the direction I’m going here, is going to be about the Consumer Driven Church.

But we won’t understand the issue there, until we understand the issue HERE.  We were not made by our Creator to be greedy consumers.  Christians have been as guilty of this as the rest of society, but we have more actual guilt because our greed has existed in complete defiance of the God we claim to serve.

Understanding all this WON’T make the economy get better this week or this year, but it WILL begin to prepare us to live better and differently in the weeks and months and years to come.

The mission of the Body of Christ is suffering today because Christians took their eye off the ball and threw in with everyone else in this “grab-fest” of consumerism.  It’s time to repent.

Maybe you’ve already started this process.  If so, good for you, and praise God.

If not, it’s time to get face to face with this.  God is asking you to do things with your life that you will not be able to do while encumbered with the attitude of greedy consumerism.  You need to get face to face with Him and hear His voice.  Don’t take my word for it; ask Him.

If you want to respond about this, feel free to comment back to me.  Maybe we can open a conversation that will benefit us all.  But, make sure that you have a conversation with Him.  He’s waiting to hear from you.

It’s about time….

Always praying for you,

Pastor Joe