Archive - May, 2009

Jack of All Trades: Interview with Ryan Burns

May 29, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media with 2 Comments

ryanI’ve recently come to know Ryan Burns (through Twitter of course). Ryan is a great guy, and really hooked me up with Logos which is whom he works for. As I’ve gotten to know him a little more online, I’ve come to realize just how gifted he is, and how many things he has his hands in. I’ve also come to appreciate the things he has to say on boundaries, priorities, family time, and his advice to “kill your feed reader.” If you don’t know Ryan through his evangelism of Logos, you might know him through the site he founded, Going to Seminary.

So check out this interview with him, and if you have questions about Logos (it’s an awesome software, which I will be blogging more about as I get more proficient at it), then he is your man. Or if you need some wordpress customization, check out Design Simple.

Before leaving for seminary you had spent 8 years as a college campus pastor, and I’m wondering what the best part about working with college students was?  What do you miss about college ministry?

Pizza. I miss pizza.

When I worked on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University there was a pizza joint near campus called Piccolas. I’ve probably had several hundred slices of pizza there, talking with students about life, faith, the gospel, the future… that is the thing I loved the most about campus ministry, student on the cusp of the rest of their lives.  They are at college searching for a degree, a spouse, and a future.  In the midst of that I had the opportunity to point them to the gospel as the thing that defines, drives, and makes sense of all the questions, concerns, and struggles they faced.

The best part of working with college students has to be their zeal.  There is simply nothing like seeing a college student who really gets the gospel. There is a driving passion in their eyes and nothing is impossible.  They pray fervently, they believe deeply, and they fearlessly seek to engage their campus with truth of Jesus Christ.

I could probably go on for a long time about how great campus ministry is, but I’ll simply say what I’ve always believed about campus ministry, “change the campus, change the world.”

I love that the impetus for starting the Going to Seminary website is because you didn’t find the necessary resources needed when you Googled about families going to seminary.  Do you find that a lot of your ideas for projects and ventures come out of looking for something, finding it’s not that, then coming in to fill that need?

I wish all my ventures were so noble.  Most of the time I’m just trying to find ways to pay the bills. When I started GTS it really was because there was nothing out there about families going to seminary.  We were in a place of transition and I thought God was leading us to go to seminary, but I really just wanted to hear what it was like from someone like me… a wife, two kids, and in his 30′s… How hard was it? What was I getting my family into? But I couldn’t find anything.

Over time GTS has grown and changed.  I was blessed to have a great group of folks who started out as regular readers and commenters who ended up contributing to the blog and offering a variety of experiences and points of view.  Now that I’m not in seminary I don’t have the time to devote to the site, but is encouraging to see that it is still very well trafficked and I still get thank you notes from people who have found answers to the tough questions about life in seminary.

As for other projects and ventures that come up… I don’t know… I’m just always looking around at stuff.  I think I have an entrepreneurial spirit and like to start things. Continue Reading…

Go to the Echo Conference for Free

May 28, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media with 2 Comments

thumbphpFaithHighway is giving away 10 free tickets to ECHO!

It’s super easy. Go here, and leave a comment. Best 10 comments win 1 ticket each.

But the contest ends tomorrow, so go do it now.

I went to ECHO last year (this is their 2nd year), and you can read my post about it. As I said in my review, it was a great conference from top to bottom.

Suburban Spirituality: Don’t Knock the Suburbs

May 27, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 0 Comments

I’ve been reading the blogs of Joe Thorn and Steve McCoy for several years now…but in the midst of so many blogs, I just never kept up with all that they have going on. So just this week John Dyer pointed me toward their collaborative site subtext. And yeah, I know, they launched it almost a year ago. So I’m late to the conversation. But nonetheless, perfect timing considering that my last five posts have been on the topic of the suburbs. This is what they write about subtext:

sub•text is a discussion on the preaching and practice of the gospel in the suburban context. Here on the blog we’re sharing out throughts and experiences of living life and ministering in the ‘burbs. We do some interviews as well.

That being said, I love Joe Thorn’s latest thoughts in his post Love and Hate in Suburbia:

I have said all this before, but it bears repeating: I both love and hate the suburbs – and I think this is healthy and necessary. Finding stuff to love and embrace in one’s culture can be difficult, at least for some. Some are so focused on the present evil and corruption that any good has been pushed beyond their peripheral vision. On the other hand some are so in love with (idolize) their culture they ignore all that is wrong with it.

Right now it’s cool to love the city and loathe the suburbs, but I do not believe this reflects the heart of God. I believe God has a love/hate relationship with this culture. My culture. And I’m working hard to maintain that balance in my own heart.

I needed to read this post, and I’m thankful that Joe posted it, as this is something that I have really been wrestling with. I love his line, “Right now it’s cool to love the city and loathe the suburbs, but I do not believe this reflects the heart of God.” So, so true. Lots of people bashing on the suburbs these days…and always talking about needing to live in the city, in the hip, cool, urban lofts and other areas. Thanks for the reminder Joe.

Stay tuned, cause my next post will look at a hermeneutic for the suburbs. A hermeneutic I learned in the city of Mexico.

Suburban Spirituality: Church Shopping

May 22, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 7 Comments

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[image from wearitdotcom]



When someone says it better than I can, then my philosophy is…let them say it. So the following is a long quote from the article Suburban Spirituality: The land of SUV’s and soccer leagues tends to weather the soul in peculiar ways, but it doesn’t have to.

For all of its foibles—which at its worst include lousy preaching, political infighting, self-centeredness, stagnation, a gaggle of special-interest groups—the poky local church (C. S. Lewis referred to the pokey little church in the Four Loves) in suburbia is still the most fertile environment for spiritual development there. Genuine spiritual progress doesn’t happen without a long-term attachment to a poky local church. I’m all for improving the organization of a local church to make it more biblically effective, but the maddening frustration that prompts someone to leave one church for another may be the precise thing that holds great potential for spiritual progress—if one stays. “Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote. “Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.”

Disillusionment with one’s church, then, is not a reason to leave but a reason to stay and see what God will create in one’s life and in the local church. What I perceive to be my needs—”I need a church with a more biblical preacher who uses specific examples from real life”—may not correspond to my true spiritual needs. Often I am not attuned to my true spiritual needs. Thinking that I know my true needs is arrogant and narcissistic. Staying put as a life practice allows God’s grace to work on the unsanded surfaces of my inner life. Seventeenth-century French Catholic mystic François Fénelon wrote, “Slowly you will learn that all the troubles in your life—your job, your health, your inward failings—are really cures to the poison of your old nature.”

I would add “your church” to his list; that is, all the troubles in one’s church are really cures to the poison of one’s old nature, or, as the Apostle Paul put it in Romans 7, the “sinful nature.” The biggest problem in any church I attend is myself—and my love of self and my penchant to roam when I sense my needs aren’t being met.

Staying put and immersing oneself in the life of a gathered community forces one into eventual conflict with other church members, with church leadership, or with both. Frustration and conflict are the raw materials of spiritual development. All the popular reasons given for shopping for another church are actually spiritual reasons for staying put. They are a means of grace, preventing talk of spirituality from becoming sentimental or philosophical. Biblical spirituality is earthy, face-to-face, and often messy.

Comments?

Parenting: And Do You See Your Kid As A Problem To Be Fixed

May 21, 2009 in Marriage-Family with 2 Comments

51fiyqjwwxl_bo2204203200_pisitb-sticker-arrow-clicktopright35-76_aa240_sh20_ou01_1I’m currently writing up outlines for a parenting class I will be doing over the summer at Highland Park Presbyterian Church. The class will meet once a month through the summer and will be focused on the book by Chap and Dee Clark, Disconnected: Parenting Teens in a MySpace World.

As I was working on these classes, this quote really jumped off the page for me.

“Your child is not a problem to be solved, but a creative, talented, and unique gift to be understood, embraced, and ultimately set free. (pp. 18)

I think it jumped off the page for me because parents often bring their kids to their youth pastors or to therapists so that they can be fixed. Being both in youth ministry and a therapist, I have come to realize that when a parent brings in a child and says that to me, that is usually a sign that there are larger issues going on in the family, and often the child has become the identified patient.

If you are a parent, what do you think about this quote? What sticks out for you?

Suburban Spirituality: What Is Your Mission?

May 20, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Ministry-Theology with 0 Comments

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[image by e453753]



Over the last couple of posts I have looked at the primacy of finances and family as to reasons why people often move to the suburbs. Those are two of the reasons we consider very important as well. And let me remind my readers that suburban life is not the only place this happens…it can happen in urban areas, hipster loft living, etc.

One of the questions my wife and I asked ourselves when we were first married and purchased our first home in the suburban neighborhood Pasadena…was, what is our mission in this neighborhood? Or how could we help transform the community we were living in? When we first moved in we had lofty aspirations, but dual incomes, graduate school, 3 hour work commutes, and a new baby…slowly killed the dreams we had to live more missionally in our community.

What happened? Was our desire for freedom and autonomy battling with our desire for community and service? We don’t know. But we hope to continue to learn, ask questions, and experiment with how to have more of a mission for our neighborhood and community that we settle down in.

In an Out of Ur blog post from April of 2006, The Brutal Burbs: how the suburban lifestyle undermines our mission, the writer quotes Matzko McCarthy from his book, Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household.

The dream of the suburbs is a self-sufficient home, inhabited by affable kin and grace with plenty of yard to provide a buffer between neighbors. The aim of suburban life is to choose a home and neighborhood where we can be happy, where people work hard and respect the ways of others, and where families get along on their own and come together for recreation and leisure….The great pleasure of home ownership is freedom and autonomy.

So as you think about moving, where to settle down, or thinking about life where you currently live…my question for you would be:

Do you and your family have a mission for your neighborhood and community? What is it?

David Fitch finishes his blog post by saying the following:

… evangelical Christians must consistently invite our neighbors into our homes for dinner, sitting around laughing, talking, listening and asking questions of each other. The home is where we live, where we converse and settle conflict, where we raise children. We arrange our furniture and set forth our priorities in the home. We pray for each other there. We share hospitality out of His blessings there. In our homes then, strangers get full view of the message of our life. Inviting someone into our home for dinner says “here, take a look, I am taking a risk and inviting you into my life.” By inviting strangers over for dinner, we resist the fragmenting isolating forces of late capitalism in America. It is so exceedingly rare, that just doing it speaks volumes as to what it means to be a Christian in a world of strangers.

Loving the Questions

May 18, 2009 in Marriage-Family with 1 Comment

rainer_maria_rilkeThe below quote has always been one of my favorites since I first read this amazing book in 1999. It has been a wise guide in my life, and my former classmate and friend, Bernie Newton, reminded me of it’s importance in our work as therapists. The stance that Rilke suggests is not only very helpful to our work, but should be helpful to all of us in life.

This is an excerpt from Letter Four:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
–Maria Rainer Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

What do you think of what Rilke has to say?

What sticks out to you?

Suburban Spirituality: Church Before Family

May 18, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 14 Comments

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[image by Pink Sherbert]



I mentioned earlier last week that my wife and I are thinking through where we want to move in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex when our lease is up in August.  And I stated that as we contemplate this move all sorts of questions have arisen in our mind (stewardship, finances, mission, family, vocation, etc.)…put those all in the mix and they will help determine where we want to settle down.

On Thursday I took a look at the issue of financial stewardship as a reason for why people often make a move to the suburbs.  For all the jokes and criticism suburban life gets, there are legit reasons why families move there and often finances is one of the top reasons. That’s one of the reasons why we are possibly thinking about settling down there.

Another reason for why families often make the transition to the suburbs is because of family. They are trying to keep the family life intact, and hoping that life in the suburbs can guarantee that with its good schools, convenient ball fields, central shopping and lots of churches to choose from…family life will remain central.

That seems like a great thing…so you might be surprised to find critiques regarding that value. As a Marriage and Family Therapist, family life is obviously very important to my work, and what I believe as important. That’s why I struggled with my reading through the really great book, Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options by Rodney Clapp.  He says this:

In the postmodern world the market and its ways have swallowed our lives whole, so that living in genuinely Christian family is almost a lost art.  Recovering the purpose of Christian family, on the distinctive terms of the Christian story, requires two declarations–one negative and one positive.

The negative declaration: The famly is not God’s most important institution on earth.  The family is not the social agent that most significantly shapes and forms the character of Christians.  The family is not the primary vehicle of God’s grace and salvation for a waiting, desperate world.

And the positive declaration: The church is God’s most important institution on earth.  The church is the social agent that most significantly shapes and forms the character of Christians.  And the church is the primary vehicle of God’s grace and salvation for a waiting, desperate world.  Putting the church first, of course, runs counter to the interpretation of many evangelical traditionalists.  They put the biological family first.  They emphatically place family at the center of God’s purposes and work on behalf of the world…..

Yet, we cannot put Jesus first and still put family first. (pp. 67-68)

So as my family and I ponder our move, one of the questions we have been asking ourselves is, “Is our desire for a certain way of family life taken the primary importance of God’s mission or call on our lives?

What do you think about what Clapp says?

How do you wrestle between call and family in your own life, and where you choose to live?

Suburban Spirituality: Being a Good Steward of Your Finances

May 14, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 6 Comments

After college and their roaring 20s, many Americans find themselves in a subdivision with a lawn and a mortgage and a couple kids. Hip twentysomethings may mock the suburbs and its bourgeois values, but when their first child arrives the nesting instinct sets in. A neighbor and her husband lived on the north side of Chicago until the kids came; then they moved to a western ‘burb for safety and quiet. “I miss the energy of the city,” she says five years later. “In fact, when we moved to the suburbs, we had a hard time sleeping at night because the neighborhood was so quiet.”

That quote has always caught my eye. When I first read the article I was single…not even dating. At each new reading I have found myself in a new place (dating, engaged, married, parent, changing vocations, etc). So I read that quote with different eyes than before.

I think Goetz is dead on. Many twentysomethings, hipsters, etc. do tend to mock the values of the suburbs. I did a little. I couldn’t stand the cookie cutter houses, the strip mall (you know the one w/a Barnes and Nobles, Starbucks, Macaroni Grill, etc.) that is planted in different places all over the country. Even though I mocked at some points, I grew up in the suburbs. And I loved where I grew up. It was not the kind that has their own built in walking trails, parks and pools, but it was the suburbs nonetheless. Honestly, isn’t anything that is not out in the wild, the suburbs. I mean, can’t you picture the early settlers in the cities mocking those who moved out into the country…or maybe it was vice-versa…mocking those who left the outskirts for the comfort of the city.

Since my post college years I have primarily been living in locations within walking distance to the mountains, oceans, grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants and downtown areas…places like Pasadena and Brentwood. But now my wife and I are living in a leased house in the North part of Dallas, contemplating where we want to settle down. And new questions have arisen for us during this journey.

Let me begin with one question we have been asking:

What does it mean to be a good steward of our finances? Continue Reading…

Suburban Spirituality: Contemplating Through a Move

May 13, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Ministry-Theology with 8 Comments

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[image by jdnx]

Transitions
I decided I wanted to write something a little more personal over the next few weeks…something that has been on my heart, raised questions, and has me awake at night…sometimes.

For those of you who don’t know, my wife, baby daughter and I have been living in Dallas since August of 2008. We moved here from Los Angeles, and have been excited about this phase of our journey. But there are lots of adjustments as one would expect.

Where to live? Career changes? New friends? New church? Etc? It all becomes pretty tiresome and weary. My wife and I talked the other day about how we haven’t had much constants in our marriage life. It’s been crazy busy with graduate school early on, new baby, moving, new jobs, etc.

Where to Live in DFW Metroplex?
And now we are in the midst of a new decision. Where to live in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex?

That may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Because where we plant down roots can/will have strong influence about what our life looks like in some way. The friends we make. What my new private practice will look like. Settling down in a church. Whether my wife needs to continue working or not. Spirituality.

The Article That I Keep Thinking About
And as we contemplate this decision I can not but keep hearkening back to an article written by David Goetz for Christianity Today…way back in July of 2003. The article is Suburban Spirituality: “The land of SUVs and soccer leagues tends to weather the soul in peculiar ways, but it doesn’t have to”.

If you have not read this article…you must!

I’m going to be playing off this article for the next few weeks, and focusing on various topics and questions that have been raised for me:

  1. What does it mean to be a good steward financially?
  2. What does it mean to be content with where you live?
  3. How do we faithfully live out where God has placed us?
  4. What does it mean to be planted in a church community and not shop around?
  5. What does it mean to not be judgmental towards suburbanites or urbanites?
  6. What happens in our thinking from being single, to marriage, to having kids, as far as influencing where and how we want to live?
  7. What can we live modestly/frugally, wherever we live?
  8. How can we be creative with our finances in helping support others?

I have other questions, but let me just stop there for now.  These questions will in fact take on new life and new forms as I write, but I just wanted to give you some food for thought. And I’m lining up some guest bloggers who have written passionately on some of these things.

There are many factors and life experiences that have shaped me into who I am, and as I wrestle through this move, my desire is that I continually strive to be more faithful to who God desires me to be and how he wants me to live.
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