the postmodern pop pastor

Haven't posted any photos for a while...haven't been taking any pictures. That's not a good sign. Busy writing and have been enjoying that.

Any nut cases interested in helping me out by reading a lengthy chapter and giving me some input?

Labels: missional, neighborhood

In Robert Weber’s surveys, Younger Evangelicals responded with resounding negativity about their view of boomer leadership. They are becoming increasing frustrated with the bureaucracy of traditional churches.[1] They see little or no movement toward generational transition. Perhaps this offers one reason behind the dramatic rise in church planting among twenty and thirty something pastors. If this were a generation gap issue, boomer pastors might respond that buster pastors need to pay their dues and work under a hierarchical leader until they get to the top of their own pyramid. In the liminal transition, where community matters more than power, this understanding is seen as morally offensive.

In the community, pastoral authority is granted, earned, claimed, borrowed, and shared.[2] Where the supreme value is placed upon relationship, power can be increasingly dangerous, especially if it is used in the name of God. Mark Dever writes, “power, apart from God's purposes is always demonic.”[3] He rightfully warns that suspicion of all authority is also very bad. Dever eventually brings it back to trust in God and trust in other image bearers who are gifted as leaders. That is, power is to be exercised in relationship. When we function in this way, we display the image of God.[4]

Instead of the power broker in a church organization, the pastor is truly a fellow traveler in the living body of Christ.[5] Giving up control in this way does so without giving up leadership because of the change of motive.[6] The will to power has been usurped by the will to well being.[7] When the pastor participates in the spiritual community that exists among leaders and lives with and in the community of people and place, true authority leads in the place of power.

[1] (Younger Evangelicals, 149, 151)
[2] (Leadership in Congregations, 128-135)
[3] (9 Marks, 241)
[4] (9 Marks, 242)
[5] (Making Sense of Church, 37)
[6] (Making Sense of Church, 55)
[7] (Forgotten Ways, 219)

Labels: community, leadership, pastor, power

Labels: holiday, tradition, travel

Labels: art, beauty, self

“Poetry happens because we live in a world in which metaphor makes sense.”

Labels: poetry, preaching

By prose I refer to a world that is organized in settled formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos. By poetry, I do mean rhyme, rhythm, or meter, but language that moves like Bob Gibson’s fast ball, that jumps at the right moment, that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion and pace. Poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism, the only proclamation, I submit, that is worthy of the name preaching. Such preaching is not moral instruction or problem solving or doctrinal clarification. It is not good advice, nor is it romantic caressing, nor is it soothing good humor.It is, rather, the ready, steady, surprising proposal that the real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rulers of this age. The preacher has an awesome opportunity to offer and evangelical world: an existence shaped by the news of the gospel.

I find the theology of Walter Brueggemann to be significantly disturbing at times. He removes portions of the Old Testament story from its biblical moorings and at times this causes him to lose the deep connections to the theology of the bible. With that said, few solidly Evangelical writers see the value of the biblical poetry as he does.

Labels: poetry, preaching

This is how I spend far too many early morning and late night hours right now. I do my best not let it take too much time from my family.




This dissertation is going well. Finishing a draft of the literature review, the most research intense portion of the paper, and outlining the theological/ biblical backgrounds. I hope to get the survey out to potential congregations in the next few weeks.

Labels: church, community, dissertation, pastor, writing

My good friends got together and bought me a new IPOD for an ordination gift. (My old one had a little incident with a number of automobiles).

Labels: friends, music

or·di·na·tion
[awr-dn-ey-shuh n] –noun
1. Ecclesiastical. the act or ceremony of ordaining.
2. the fact or state of being ordained.
3. a decreeing.
4. the act of arranging.
5. the resulting state; disposition; arrangement.

[Origin: 1350–1400; ME ordinacioun < appointment =" ōrdinā(re)"> to order, arrange (der. of ōrdō, s. ōrdin-, order) + -tiō -tion ]

My ordination service is this Sunday night. Its been a long road...and I am glad to be here. This means quite a bit to me to receive this affirmation and charge from people I respect and admire.

Labels: church, ordination, pastor

I've been reading so much lately that it feels as if the words are pouring out my ears. There is truly such thing as too many words. These words of Eugene Peterson about the pastoral craft have been water to my soul and give me hope for my future of ministry.

There's a distinction between what pastors do on Sundays and what we do between Sundays. What we do on Sundays has not really changed through the centuries: proclaiming the gospel, teaching Scripture, celebrating the sacraments, offering prayers. But the work between Sundays has changed radically, and it has not been a development but a defection.

Until about a century ago, what pastors did between Sundays was of a piece with what they did on Sundays. The context changed: instead of an assembled congregation, the pastor was with one other person or with small gatherings of persons, or alone in study and prayer. The manner changed; instead of proclamation, there was conversation. But the work was the same: discovering the meaning of Scripture, developing a life of prayer, guiding growth into maturity.

The between-Sundays work of American pastors in this century, though, is running a church. I first heard the phrase just a few days before my ordination. After twenty-five years, I can still remember the unpleasant impression it made.

Behind my back, while my pastoral identity was being formed by Gregory and Bernard, Luther and Calvin, Richard Baxter of Kidderminster and Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, George Herbert and Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman and Alexander Whyte, Phillips Brooks and George MacDonald, the work of the pastor had been almost completely secularized (except for Sundays).

I didn't like it and decided, after an interval of confused disorientation, that being a physician of souls took priority over running a church, and that I would be guided in my pastoral vocation by wise predecessors rather than contemporaries.

A caveat: I contrast the cure of souls with the task of running a church, but I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not contemptuous of running a church, nor do I dismiss its importance. I run a church myself; I have for over twenty years. I try to do it well.

But I do it in the same spirit that I, along with my wife, run our house. There are many essential things we routinely do, often (but not always) with joy. But running a house is not what we do. What we do is build a home, develop in marriage, raise children, practice hospitality, pursue lives of work and play. It is reducing pastoral work to institutional duties that I object to, not the duties themselves, which I gladly share with others in the church.

May God make more of us physicians of the soul.

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Labels: pastor, spiritual formation