Gravitas

It isn't that these students looked bad. They were sharp, pleasant twenty-somethings who I knew had done well in their coursework. They could probably even play the guitar. There really wasn't a thing wrong with them-and that was what was so striking. As far as I could see, they were only lacking one thing, but one thing that is pretty much a necessity for a pastor. The old pastors used to call gravitas. You just cannot be ordained without it.

Gravitas is a condition of the soul that has developed enough spiritual mass to attract other souls. It makes the soul appear old, but gravitas has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with scars that have healed well, failures that have been redeemed, sins that have been forgiven, and thorns that have settled into the flesh.

It all expands the soul until it is larger than the body that contains it, large enough to hold the truth of the Word of God. And, like gravity, it pulls others not to the pastor but to the holy work that has occurred within the pastor's soul.

This gravity isn't a commodity that can be purchased with seminary tuition payments. It certainly isn't found in a library. A weighty soul has to be developed the hard way.

M Craig Barnes

Postman: the real reason for trivialising religion?

...What we are talking about here is not blasphemy but trivialization, against which there can be no laws.  In Technopoly, the trivialisation of significant cultural symbols is largely conducted by commercial enterprise.  this occurs not because corporate America is greedy but because the adoration of technology pre-empts the adoration of anything else.  Symbls that draw their meaning from traditional religious or national contexts must therefore be made impotent as quickly as possible - that is drained of sacred or even serious connotations.  The elevation of one god requires the demotion of another...

Technopoly, p165

Peterson: prevenience, neurotic cussedness etc

Prevenience is the conviction that God has been working diligently, redemptively and strategically before I appeared on the scene, before I was aware there was something here for me to do. 

The cure of souls is not indifferent to the realities of human lethargy, naive about congregational recalcitrance, or neurotic cussedness.  But there is a disciplined, determined conviction that everything (and I mean, precisely, everything) we do is a response to God's first work, his initiating act.  We learn to be attentive to the divine action already in process so that the previously unheard word of God is heard, the previously unattended act of God is noticed. 

Running the church questions are:  What do we do?  How can we get things going again?

Cure of souls questions are: What has God been doing here?  What traces of grace can I discern in this life?  What history of love can I read in this group?  What has God set in motion that I can get in on?

We misunderstand and distort reality when we take ourselves as the starting point and our present situation as the basic datum.  Instead of confronting the bogged down human condition and taking charge of changing it with no time wasted, we look at the divine prevenience and discern how we can get in on it at the right time, in the right way.

The cure of souls takes time to read the minutes of the previous meeting, a meeting more likely than not at which I was not present...

The Contemplative Pastor p60-61

Peterson: The Reformation

The Reformers recovered the biblical doctrine of justification by faith.  The gospel proclamation, fresh and personal and direct, through the centuries had become an immense, lumbering, Rube Goldberg mechanism: elaborately contrived ecclesiastical gears, pulleys, and levers rumbled and creaked importantly but ended up doing something completely trivial.  The Reformers recovered the personal passion and clarity so evident in Scripture.  the rediscovery of firsthand involvement resulted in freshness and vigour.

The Contemplative Pastor, p56

Quick-reveiw: Out of the Silent Planet

Sadly far less well-known than Narnia, CS Lewis' SF trilogy was one of earliest forays I had into both SF and Christian literature.  And when I say 'Christian Literature' I don't mean a conventional story where someone gets converted; I mean it's part of the weave - if you took the theological thinking out, the story would collapse.

Drawing on his knowledge of medieval cosmology, scientific understanding of the time (late 1930s) and his ability to reimagine Christian thinking in an alien context (as with Narnia) he spins an exciting, page turning and very thought provoking novel.

I enjoyed reading it for the first time in, probably, 30years.  And as he writes elsewhere, on second reading it isn't simply the story you notice but also (in reference to Last of the Mohicans) this time you get the feathers, the details.

Peterson: apocalyptic patience

The grass is not greener in the next committee, or parish, or state.  All that matters is worshiping God, dealing with evil, and developing faithfulness.  Apocalypse ignites a sense of urgency, but it quenches shortcuts and hurry, for the times are in God's hands. Providence, not the newspaper, accounts for the times in which we live.
Impatience, the refusal to endure, is to pastoral character what strip mining is to the land - a greedy rape of what can be gotten at the least cost, and then abandonment in search of another place to loot.  Something like fidelity comes out of apocalyptic: fidelity to God, to be sure, but also to people, to parish - to place. 

The Contemplative Pastor, p48-49

Peterson: pastor poet

The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a relationship, shape beauty,  form  truth.  this is St John's work; it is every pastor's work...
The pastor's task is to shape the praying imagination before the gospel. This revelation of God is a fact so large and full of energy, and our capacities to believe and love and hope are so atrophied, that we need help to hear the words in their power, see the images in their energy...
Communication is a good, but a minor good.  Knowing about things never has seemed to improve our lives a great deal.  The pastoral task with words is not communication but communion - the healing and restoration and creation of love relationships between God and His fighting children and our fought-over creation...

The Contemplative Pastor, pp44-46

Sophisticated people

I well remember a conversation I had with an elder in our church when I was a young pastor. "It's rather frightening," I said, "to preach to a congregation of people who are much better educated and far smarter than I am. Sometimes I feel intimidated." His response has remained with me throughout the years.
"You'll soon discover, Gordon, that many of these people can help put a man on the moon and build the most sophisticated computers, but they struggle to love their spouses, relate to their kids, and build solid friendships. Smart? Yes. But wise? Not really. Spiritually discerning? Don't bet on it! That's where you can make a contribution. Teach us to be wise and godly. Smartness isn't getting us that far."

Gordon MacDonald

Leadership

Peterson: garden makeovers & apocalyptic prayer

Most pastoral work actually erodes prayer.  The reason is obvious: most people are not comfortable with God in their lives... 

And so pastors, instead of practicing prayer, which brings people into the presence of God, enter into the practice of messiah: we will do the work of God for God, fix people up, tell them what to do, conspire in finding the shortcuts by which the long journey to the cross can be bypassed since we all have such crowded schedules right now.  People love us when we do this... 

If we have even an inkling of apocalypse, it will be impossible to act like the jaunty foreman of a home-improvement work crew that is going to re-landscape moral (or immoral) garden spots. We must pray. The world has been invaded by God, and it is with God we have to do.

The Contemplative Pastor, p43

Peterson: apocalyptic pastor & obese religion

Early church Christians believed that the resurrection of Jesus inaugurated a new age.  they were in fact - but against appearances - living in God's kingdom, a kingdom of healing and truth and grace.  This was all actually present but hidden from unbelieving eyes and inaudible to unbelieving ears.
Pastors are persons in the church communities who repeat and insist on these kingdom realities against the world appearances, and who therefore must be apocalyptic.  In its dictionary meaning "apocalypse" is simply "revelation", the uncovering of what was covered up so that we can see what is there.  But the context in which the word arrives adds colour to the black-and-white dictionary meaning, colours bright and dark - crimson urgency and purple crisis.  Under the crisis of persecution and under the urgency of an imminent end, reality is revealed suddenly for what it is.  We had supposed our lives were so utterly ordinary. Sin-habits dull our free faith into stodgy moralism and respectable boredom; then crisis rips the veneer of cliche off everyday routines and reveals the side-by-side splendours and terrors of heaven and hell.  Apocalypse is arson - it secretly sets a fire in the imagination that boils the fat out of an obese culture-religion and renders a clear gospel love, a pure gospel hope, a purged gospel faith.

The Contemplative Pastor, p40-41

Packer: peace

...God's peace brings us two things: both power to face and live with our own badness and failings, and also contentment under 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' (for which the Christian name is  God's wise providence)...the basic ingredient, without which the rest cannot be, is pardon and acceptance into covenant - that is adoption into God's family.  But where this change of relationship with God - out of hostility into friendship  out of wrath into the fullness of love, out of condemnation into justification - is not set forth, the gospel of peace is not truly set forth either.
The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God;  it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us.  No account of God's peace that does not start here can do other than mislead....
The peace of God, then, primarily and fundamentally, is a new relationship of forgiveness and acceptance - and the source from which it flows is propitiation.  When Jesus came to His disciples in the upper room on his resurrection day, he said, "Peace be with you"; and when he had said that, "he showed unto them his hands and side" (John 20:18-20 Phillips)...

In My Place Condemned He Stood, p48-49

Thomas Adams: watching the enemy

Let us watch Satan, for he watches us. There is no corporeal enemy, but a man naturally fears; the spiritual foe appears less terrible, because we are less sensible of him, Great conquerors have been chronicled for victories and extension of their kingdoms; Satan is beyond them all. Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands; but Satan his millions. He that fights with an enemy, whom nothing but blood can pacify, will give him no advantage.

Thomas Adams, A Golden Puritan Treasury, p75

Dying to listen

For me, what most resists dying is the idea from leadership seminars to scrutinize the time we spend with people and do a sort of cost/benefit analysis: Will this person become a key leader, giver, or server? In leading, time is an investment. But in pastoring, time spent with a person is a gift, a grace, a broken bottle of perfume. To listen without filtering is to give our best time and energy to this person, right now, knowing full well nothing may come of it for my organizational agenda, and that's okay.

Leadership

So great a salvation

This has sprung from me reading Hebrews this morning- I haven't looked at the Greek nor checked any commentaries...just wanted to give a disclaimer.

Hebrews 2:1-4  
The writer warns against drifting from the faith and, it seems to me, gives at least two motives for not doing so.

The first is: things will go very bad if we do.  If, under the OT period, departing from God's revelation was punished, just think how things will work out now if you abandon the gospel.   Straight forward, and perhaps a common way of speaking to congregations about the dangers of drifting from Jesus.

But this idea works because it is lesser-to-greater (in one sense): if that's what happened before then how shall we escape with so great a salvation as has been revealed in Christ?  Which means, it seems to me, that the other way we help prevent drift is:

Secondly, by showing the greatness of salvation.  He wants us to concentrate on the details of this salvation (v1) which is great (v3).  We warn of the dangers of drift BUT we also make it harder to permit drift by magnifying the greatness of salvation - it's wonder, splendour, mind-boggling dimensions and costs, and the Man at the centre of it.

We try to prevent drift by telling people not to let go, don't orbit too far from the Star. And by increasing the gravitational pull of that star, so that its sheer attraction makes it a very hard thing to leave behind.

Dyafink?

Peterson: prioritising the central = time for everything else

I can't listen if I'm busy.  When my schedule is crowded, I am not free to listen:  I have to keep my next appointment;  I have to get to the next meeting.  But if I provide margins to my day there is ample time to listen.

"Yes, but how?"  The appointment calendar is the tool with which to get unbusy...The authority once given to Scripture is now ascribed to the appointment calendar.  The dogma of verbal inerrancy has not been discarded, only re-assigned.

The trick of course is to get to the calendar before anyone else does. I mark out times for prayer, for reading, for leisure, for the silence and solitude out of which creative work - prayer, preaching, and listening - can issue.

I find that whenever these central needs are met, there is plenty of time for everything else.  And there is much else, for the pastor is not, and should not be, exempt from the hundred menial tasks or the administrative humdrum.  These are also pastoral ministry.  but the only way I have found to accomplish them without resentment and anxiety is first to take care of the priorities.  If there is not time to nurture these essentials, I become a busy pastor, harassed and anxious, a whining and compulsive Martha instead of a contemplative Mary.

The Contemplative Pastor, p22-23

Community against easy stragglers

Is that struggle something each of us has to do for himself or herself?

No. Satan is best fought within the community of the church. When I've preached on the shield of faith I was told shields in those days were beveled. They were linked together, so that one warrior was next to the other. It was like a wall going into battle. In the same way, I believe that it is in community where there is deliverance. It's in the context of community that we can find help, and where there is intercessory prayer, we fight together. So it isn't just you and the devil. It's you and other believers against the devil.

The other day I was watching the Animal Channel, and I saw something that really struck me. There was a huge herd of buffalo and about six or seven lions. And the lions were plotting to have a buffalo for dinner. Well, they found one buffalo that had strayed from the herd, maybe a couple hundred yards, and they went after that buffalo. So how do a few lions stop a buffalo? Well, as it happened, one lion grabbed the heel of one back leg of the buffalo, the other on the other back leg. And they just hung on until that buffalo slowed to a stop. Then one lion hopped on his back, another went after his stomach. And from there on you can just visualize what happened. It was gruesome.

But here's what shocked me. There were perhaps 100 buffalo, if not more, all standing and staring and watching this go down. I don't know if buffalo can think. But if buffalo could think, you know what they're thinking? Boy, am I ever glad that's not happening to me! Imagine if this herd had decided we're not going to let those lions get away with anything, and together they ran thundering in that direction with their horns down. Those lions would have scurried away immediately. The lions would never have a buffalo for lunch, if the buffalo stuck together.

There's a lesson for us there. First of all, Satan separates somebody from the herd. He makes them mad at the church and Christians, or angry because of some other reason. Once they're away from the herd, he intensifies his attack. And then when we hear of the spiritual/demonic struggles that a person faces we say to ourselves, Boy, am I ever glad that's not me! What we have to do as a congregation is to hang together. We have to close in and say we will not allow the devil to do this to our people.

Erwin Lutzer, Leadership

Postman: the statistician who drowned

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.  That is to say, in a culture that reveres statistics, we can never be sure what kind of nonsense will lodge in people's heads.

Technopoly, p132

Prayer: detachment from the insatiable self

I know it takes time to develop a life of prayer: set-aside, disciplined, deliberate time.  It isn't accomplished on the run, nor by offering prayers from a pulpit or at a hospital bedside.  I know I can't be busy and pray at the same time.  I can be active and pray;  I can work and pray;  but I cannot be busy and pray.  I cannot be inwardly rushed, distracted or dispersed.  In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than my clamouring ego.  usually for this to happen there must be a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day, a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self.

The Contemplative Pastor, p20.

Peterson: first-hand prayer

Peterson asks what would I do as a pastor if no one else asked me to do anything?  His first answer is:

I can be a pastor who prays. I want to cultivate my relationship with God.  I want all of my life to be intimate - sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously - with the God who made, directs, and loves me.  And I want to waken others to the nature and centrality of prayer.  I want to be a person in this community to whom others can come without hesitation, without wondering if it is appropriate, to get direction in prayer and praying.  I want to do the original work of being in deepening conversation with the God who reveals Himself to me and addresses me by name.  I don't want to dispense mimeographed hand-outs that describe God's business;  I want to witness out of my own experience. I don't want to live as a parasite on the first-hand spiritual life of others, but to be personally involved with all my senses, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good.

The Contemplative Pastor, p19-20

Peterson on Lewis on laziness

It was a favourite theme of CS Lewis that only lazy people work hard.  By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us;  then we find ourselves, frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone.

The Contemplative Pastor,  p19