I read this on a blog here today — & it really struck me as so, so true. I am going to put a link at the bottom — but have put most of the post here for you to read also:
The wisdom of Eugene Peterson
Many of you know that Eugene Peterson has been a mentor of mine for the past six years. We’ve written dozens of letters to each other. No one has marked me more in pastoral ministry than Eugene…
A few days ago I received a letter from him. I’ve read it about a dozen times and I am still digesting it. I asked him: What are the non-negotiables of being a church planter?
“The one great advantage you have as a new church pastor is that you are forced to start small. Nothing is imposed on you. Determine that you will know every person, their names and whatever of their lives they are willing to let you in on. Be in their homes. Invite them into your home in small groups for an evening or lunch. The killing frost in too much new church development is forming programs that will attract people or serve their perceived ‘needs,’ getting them ‘involved.’ The overriding need they have is worship and that is the one thing that is lowest on their ‘needs’ list. Insist on it: keep it simple – learn to know every last one of them relationally. And call them to worship – and not entertainment worship, but a community at worship. Americans these days are not used to being treated that way, personally and apart from promotional come-ons. Religious entrepreneurism has infected church planting all over the country. When it is successful numerically (and if you are a good salesman and smile a lot it probably will be) you will end up with a non-church.”
I then asked: what is the greatest temptation when planting a church – and how do I avoid it:
“I’d say ambition. Church planters are tempted to do what it takes to succeed. Most of us grow up as competitors, competition is bred into our bones. And most of us are good at it. But the very nature of church – the Christian life – is to stay close to the ground that you are given, the people you are given, the Jesuw ho comes alongside of us. The temptation is to look for ‘leaders’ or ‘winners’ or look at people as ‘resources.’ That is not a mindset that cultivates patiences with losers and the mediocre. Not that we don’t want to do our best, but unchecked ambition cripples us for dealing with the people who are right under our noses, the left-out and ignored. If we hold our competitive instincts on a short leash, we will probably stay small for a considerable time.”
“The idea that the gospel is addressed only to the individual,” chides Anglican theologian Lesslie Newbigin in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), “and that it is only indirectly addressed to societies, nations, and cultures is simply an illusion of our individualist post-Enlightenment Western culture.” Loving God and our neighbor requires addressing social and economic systems, not simply alleviating individual symptoms. Ours is a Big Picture gospel that often challenges the taken for granted.
“For a person is the single most limitless entity in creation, and if there is anything that is even more unlimited and unrestrained in its possibilities than is a person, it is two people together.
Not everyone is as fond of solitude as I have been. And certainly not everyone has seriously entertained the notion of entering the cloister, only to find himself falling in love and getting married instead. But that is how marriage came to me. And marriage comes to everyone, I think, with something of the same surprise, the same reversal of fortunes, the same searching exposure of deep-seated conflict. Not only that, but whatever a person’s temperament or circumstances might be, it seems to me that the conflict which marriage uncovers is always essentially the same one: it is always some version of this tension between the needs for dependence and for independence, between the urge toward loving cooperation and the opposite urge toward detachment, privacy, self-sufficiency. Even to people who have dreamed for years about getting married and who think of themselves as hating to be alone, marriage still cannot help but come as an invasion of privacy. No one has ever been married without being surprised, and usually alarmed, at the sheer intensity of this invasion.” (The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle by Mike Mason, pp. 20-21).
Well, it is Monday, but I feel like I am mourning today for a couple of reasons. One is that I am mourning for the lost days that I have had lately. Days that I will not get back because I have been too sick, to simply get out of bed. Seriously, those days are the most frustrating for me. I look back & I feel like I did nothing, let me repeat – nothing, for 4 days. & today, my whole body is sore all over like I just ran a marathon, or was in some epic battle or something.
The only epic battle that I have been in has been rolling out of bed & shuffling to the bathroom.
The other thing (that i am mourning) is that we took our son Caleb to LAX yesterday (my only trip outside in these 4 days…) I wished I had not been so under the weather on his last day in LA, but regardless he was excited to go off on his big adventure. He is going for 7 weeks to a Spanish immersion school in Chihuahua, Mexico & living with a Mexican family.
I am hoping & expecting that he comes back fluent and that it will be a trip of a lifetime for him. So I’m excited for him but sad for myself. I’m really going to miss him for this many weeks. The house already feels very empty without him.
“A person of faith must never be afraid to explore. We above all others should be driven to question, to examine, to learn. Faith shouldn’t make you less curious but insatiably curious. When you live in relationship to the God of all creation, learning is a given. You are now and forever on a journey involving mystery and discovery. This journey is as endless as God is infinite and eternal. For all eternity we will be not only worshippers but also explorers.” — Erwin McManus, Wide Awake
“Reflections on Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker’” (dwillard.org)
“[E]volution, whether cosmic or biological, cannot — logically cannot! — be a theory of ultimate origins of existence or order, precisely because its operations always presuppose the prior existence of certain entities with specific potential behaviors, as well as of an environment of some specific kind that operates upon those entities in some specifically ordered (law-governed) fashion, to determine which ones are allowed to survive and reproduce. Let us quite generally state: any sort of evolution of order of any kind will always presuppose pre-existing order and pre-existing entities governed by it. It follows as a simple matter of logic that not all order evolved. Given the physical world — and however much of evolution it may or may not contain — there is or was some order in it which did not evolve. However it may have originated (if it originated), that order did not evolve, for it was the condition of any evolution at all occurring. We come here upon a logically insurpassable limit to what evolution, however it may be understood, can accomplish.”
