Laughing and crying at the same time

I follow a bunch of websites and The OOZE" is one of them.  See the article " 7 Things your Pastor Wants to Tell You but Doesn't Have the Guts. "  by  Walter Thomason. LOL! I've been following (stalking?) Spencer Burke and this crowd for years.  If I were ten years younger, I'd follow them more closely, but as it is, I have enough trouble just following Jesus. Thanks, Walter and Spencer, for saying all things out loud!

What’s a Pastor to do?

I just finished reading the spiritual auto-biography of Eugene Petersen, The Pastor, given to me by parishioner Ed Dillery.  Ed and Marita are good friends of Pastor Petersen and have known him for quite some time.  Petersen is the author of the runaway best seller “The Message” a paraphrase of the Bible.  He started paraphrasing parts of bible passages for his own congregation in suburban Baltimore, Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, a congregation he founded as a new church development within the Presbyterian denomination and from which he retired after 29 years to teach at Pittsburg Theological Seminary.  Petersen grew up as a Pentecostal, but then was wooed by the Presbyterians in seminary.
Presbyterians have high expectations for their pastors, and Peterson was certainly one of the best.  I had read many of his books before, and my own mentor in Coral Gables FL gave me one of Peterson’s books. It began to form my own pastoral practices.  Peterson became a mentor himself for many pastors.  But his own standards remain impossibly high for me.  I’ll never live long enough to gain the mastery over ancient languages, or the wisdom of 29 years in pastoral practice!
A report produced by the Presbyterian Church (USA) sums up a congregation’s expectations of their pastor:  “The Bible describes a variety of forms of ministry leadership.  Evangelists served a critical role as the early Christian church began to organize.  In the Middle Ages, the pastor as mediator of sacramental grace became primary.  The sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant Reformation’s principles of sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers, among other things, elicited the pastor as preacher and pastor as ethical guide models. Around 1900 and with growing literacy new images and metaphors for pastoral ministry began to emerge, especially after the First World War. In no uniform order or pure forms, pastoral ministry models of professional educator, psychologist/counselor, agent of social change, and manager of the church surfaced as ideals. Recent research shows many congregants expect their pastor to master each of these models; to be an expert in each of these roles.”
YIKES! Who could live up to all of this?  Dr. Peterson, I love your book, but you’ve made life difficult for all us ordinary pastors.

scriptural interpretation

We all know the joke: Fred was experiencing a very tough time in his life. He felt his faith slipping and was desperate. He pulled out his Bible and decided to open it  randomly  to get a word from God.
So he flipped pages and stopped at Matthew 27:5, which says, "Judas went out and hanged himself."
He thought he'd try it again and Luke 10:37 came up, where Jesus said, "Go and do thou likewise."
So he quickly flipped to another verse and landed on John 13:27, which says, "What you are about to do, do quickly."
This humorous take on an "inerrancy" reading shows up the self-destructive nature of shallow and tangencial engagement with the Word of God written.

What to do about Bible reading?  In an age where biblical illiteracy is expanding as rapidly as the federal debt, churches who encourage communal bible study and reading are really swimming upstream.  Yet this foundational text of Western civilization can hardly be consigned to the ivory tower or the fringes of Christian life for it to have the life-giving effect that it promises.  Disciples must study scripture together if our common life is to have meaning. So I'm really happy to have a small group of pilgrims ready to re-engage with the bible in our little church.  Reading through the Bible in 90-days was good.  Studying together is really better.  We'll use Disciple .  Beginning Thursday, May 5 at 7:30 pm.