skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This blog idea began June 08, 2008.
For four Sundays during the month of June, Southview joined hundreds of churches all around the world who participated in an event called One Prayer. The premise was this: If God would answer one prayer for the church at large, what would you pray for?
"God, make us ________."
Pastors from sixty-six churches across the United States and Canada sent in videos of their sermons answering this question. Some of the responses to fill in the blank were "fearless", "magnetic", "dangerous", and "holy". Pastors from the thousands of churches participating in the series would then choose which four messages they wanted their church to see, one each week.
The whole message was based around how he wished God would wake the church up and that Christians wouldn't just sleep through the awesome things God has for us to do. Near the end of his message he spoke about how some Christians "go to sleep" with their time, talents, and money, and how they don't really give any of these to serve the church. He went on to say that if you are not serving in your church (including TITHING!), you are not really a member of that church!
How cool is that? I've never heard someone put it that way, but it's so profound! One stat that he gave was that 69% of Jesus's words were words of application...Jesus wanted us to DO SOMETHING! You can't just roll up to church on Sundays, sit your butt in a pew for an hour, and then go home and call yourself a member! I always hated in school when the teacher would put you in a group of 2 or 3 other kids to do a project, and there was always that one kid who didn't want to do any of the work, but wanted to be a member and take some credit after we got an A. Pastor Young says, "You might have your name on some dusty roll somewhere...but if you're going to be a member, you've gotta become a part." Love it.
This blog idea began June 08, 2008.Question: How do people decide that they should go to this certain church service/event but skip that church service/event? Allow me to explain.Most churches have three services each week: Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. And of course, you've got some form of group Bible study either before or after the Sunday morning service (at Southview it took place after). The problem is, attendance is typically high on Sunday morning, decent on Wednesday evening, and terrible on Sunday evening. Lately I've been wondering why this happens and how people work it out in their minds that this is acceptable (I'm completely guilty of it too, so I'm frustrated with myself just as much as I am with others). Two situations got me thinking about this...The first was during an event called One Prayer that took place in June. I'll explain more about this event in my next post, but it was spread out over four Sunday evenings. The plan for each service was to play these pre-recorded video messages from some of the best preachers in the world, so I was honestly expecting tons of people to show up. The typical Sunday morning count was around 180. The One Prayer evening services brought in around 30 each week. I was baffled (not a word we use enough these days if you ask me!). Maybe we could have talked up the event more, maybe we should have put up flyers around the community advertising the event (even though it was really more for the already-churched than for newcomers). At any rate, the poor turnout made me wonder...The second was when one of the youth told me he was skipping Sunday Morning Bible Study because he had a project to finish for school. Baffled once again. For some reason this tends to happen a lot with youth. It's hard to put my frustration into words here, but when a kid skips an hour of Bible teaching focused directly on them so they can finish their homework (when if they just came to class they'd still have from noon until 11pm to finish it...like that extra hour is gonna make or break their success) it drives me crazy. The same goes for when they have sports practice or just can't miss their favorite tv show. Sometimes I feel like parents severely underestimate the importance of the youth group. Please forgive me if I sound arrogant, but I honestly feel like, in most instances, an hour in a youth class that I'm teaching gets through to kids WAY more than an hour in the "big church" service. No disrespect to the senior pastors out there, but they would probably agree that their sermons are written and delivered mostly with adults in mind. My lessons are specifically designed for these youth. But if you suggested to the parents that this kid skip "big church" and work on the project during that time so he could still come to my SMBS class, I'm betting they'd freak.Hopefully this heap of rambling made some sense. Comments?
This blog idea began on June 06, 2008, a few weeks after I began working at Southview for the summer.
A church member came into the office a couple days ago to talk to Rob (for the purposes of this blog we'll call the man John). Apparently John had had an altercation with someone the previous day in a store parking lot.
Now let me preface the story by saying that John is a big guy who's originally from the south. He's fairly new to the whole church thing, so from time to time he still lets a cuss word fly around the pastors, etc. I'm pretty sure he's ex-military and at one point in his life he spent a considerable amount of time in jail. Oh, and he's HUGE. Muscle huge, not fat huge. He's been in fights before, and he knows how to handle himself, so messing with him is just a bad idea.
Back to the parking lot incident...the other person had cut him off in the parking lot or flipped him the bird or something, which John didn't really appreciate, especially with his wife in the car. John's wife rolled down the window and yelled at the guy, and the guy just yelled back and continued his rudeness by calling her an obscene name. John then proceeded to get out of the car, the whole time yelling and cussing at the guy, and basically telling him he was ready to fight. The other guy, still sitting in his car like a coward, pulled out a knife and showed it to John. John looked him in the eyes and said that he better stay in the car and drive away because, if he got out and tried to cut him with that knife, he would kill him. The guy finally wimped out and drove away.
Now the point of this post isn't to question his actions. It's not even about him specifically. The point is to ask a generic question about counseling. When people come in to speak to a pastor or therapist or whoever, what do they expect to happen? Are they looking for someone to just listen? Or are they looking for someone to tell them where they went wrong, what they should have done, and WJWD (What Jesus Would Do)? I find that if you throw a topic my way, odds are I'll have a pretty straightforward opinion about it (thus the name of this blog). However, I've been in situations where people are having a tough time and they just need someone to whom they can let it all out without responding. If there's one thing the whole world has in common, it's hating being told that they're wrong. On the other hand, the person may be desperately looking for someone to give them guidance. Over time I've come to realize two things about this topic:
1. Both types of people rarely verbalize what they need. They talk, and then it's up to the counselor to figure out the next move.
2. If you mix these situations up and speak when you shouldn't, or stay silent when you should speak, things simply don't end well. The person leaves with a feeling of "Man I was looking for something more" or "Hey why are you all up in my grill?!".
I suppose it comes with experience, but so far it's been tough for me to discern between when my thoughts are needed and when I should just keep my big mouth shut.
Wow it's been a pretty long time since I've posted anything here. So to make up for that, over the next couple weeks I'll be writing several blogs from my summer experiences working at a church in northern Virginia. At the beginning of the summer I purchased a voice recorder, kinda like those old mini-cassette recorders, except smaller and way better. I tried to carry it with me as much as possible, especially while driving, so that when I'd have a random amazing thought I could capture it instead of letting it float off, like I've done too many times in the past. It actually worked out pretty well, and hopefully you can appreciate some of the fruits of my labor (if you call talking to yourself in the car "labor"). Some of the posts may relate to church work, some of them may relate to getting terrible service in a restaurant, some will just be rants...you get the idea. Hopefully the first few posts will be up today or tomorrow.
The past few weeks I've been watching the 20th season of the Real World on MTV. I've never really watched it that much in the past, but there's something about this season's cast that intrigues me. Two weeks ago I was watching and I saw one of the most intense and heartbreaking moments I've ever seen on tv. Joey is one of the roommates on the show, and he's this big guy, really good looking, has a bit of a temper, works out several hours a day, etc. He never really had much of a family growing up, so in his searching for attention he got involved with the wrong people and ended up doing drugs and becoming an alcoholic. A few months before the show started filming Joey had had enough. He severed ties with those friends who were bad influences and basically broke away from the whole party lifestyle because he was tired of living that way. He was in search of something more. He was sober up until the show began, but moving to Hollywood and being in a house with 6 roommates proved to be too much for him and he began slip back into his old lifestyle. So I was watching this episode and Joey had been drinking all night and he seemed to turn into a completely different person. He got angry and started threatening the other people in the house. He talked about how he didn't want to be on the show anymore, and at one point stated that he didn't even want to be alive anymore. It continued to get worse and worse, and the other roommates, especially the girls, are actually scared that he might physically harm them. The next day the roommates tried to talk to him about getting help for his alcoholism; he didn't take this well and responded by calling the producers and telling them he wanted to go home. The producers arrived at the house a little while later and took him off to the side to try to convince him to stay, and this is when a beautiful thing happened. The producers ask Joey if he wants to work through this and stay on the show and he says, "I don't care anymore, I really don't." One of the producers responds by saying "I do think you care, and we care about you." Joey says, "No, no one cares about me." They decide to give Joey a choice to go to rehab for 30 days and then return to the show. At this point Joey starts openly weeping and says "You'd do that for me?" I literally got chills when he said that. Imagine living your whole life where you have a crappy family, friends who are bad influences, and nobody who seems to care if you live or die, and suddenly someone says "Hey we're gonna take care of you, because we care about you and want the best for you." If that's not a picture of God's love for His children then I don't know what is. I've seen reactions like that many times in the past when dealing with youth. All they need is for someone to tell them that they are loved. When you see how Joey was acting while he was drunk it would be easy to write him off as a loser and not want to have anything to do with him. The producers looked past that...yeah he's being a jerk right now and yeah he's causing all sorts of problems, but he needs to know that we're here for him no matter what. And the sad part is I'm pretty sure that these two guys aren't even saved, yet they still recognized that Joey needed saving. As Christians we are called to go beyond our first impressions and superficial thoughts and tell people that someone loved them enough to give their life for them. It's tough sometimes. People have messy lives and we don't want to get involved or intervene. Thank God someone intervened for me.
Pastors from sixty-six churches across the United States and Canada sent in videos of their sermons answering this question. Some of the responses to fill in the blank were "fearless", "magnetic", "dangerous", and "holy". Pastors from the thousands of churches participating in the series would then choose which four messages they wanted their church to see, one each week.
