Self-Discipline.Today President Obama fired Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM. I'm not sure which is spookier - that the President can fire the head of a publicly-held company, or that he fired Wagoner and didn't fire the CEO at AIG or Citigroup.
I think it's now clear that these years are going to be remembered for at least two things. The first and most obvious is the economic crisis and its causes. People will talk and write about the mortgage mess and the wave (not ripple) effect it had on the whole economy. Hey, the global economy. (When the U.S. sneezes the world catches a cold.) We obviously haven't seen the end of this mess.
The other focus of the coverage of the current situation will be, IMHO, the government's response. The distance of a decade or more will give us some perspective but I suspect we'll look back and say that the govt. took unprecedented and almost unthinkable steps in an effort to fix the problems. Billions of dollars given to bail out companies, billions more spent to stimulate the economy, and (methinks we'll be seeing) legislation passed to address the perceived root causes of the crisis. Will history conclude that the govt. response was appropriate and effective? Or that it created greater problems than it solved?
On NPR yesterday I heard a guy say some European economists are very worried about the way the U.S. government is responding. They think the result of these govt. interventions will be massive inflation, and that's the problem that plagued Germany just before the rise of Hitler. This afternoon another economist warned that when things get really bad and all the experts disagree, the conditions are ripe for extremists of one sort or another to put forth overly simplistic solutions that people latch on to just because they can understand them. And those solutions usually vilify a segment of the population as the cause of the problems.
That sounds like sky-is-falling paranoia to me, but I do wonder if we won't see that the cure was worse than the disease.
This morning I worked at a rental for one of the guys in San Diego I used to collect rent for a year and a half ago. He and a buddy each bought three houses here at the apex of the bubble (mixed metaphor?) on the advice of a shyster realtor who made a killing on commissions. The first guy is already in bankruptcy and the bank owns his houses. This second guy called me Saturday to tell me he's in the process of bankruptcy and the bank will own his houses in a matter of a couple of weeks. But in the meantime he's rec'd nasty letters from HOA's about overgrown front yards, threatening liens if he doesn't clean them up. He's a nice guy and hired me to go clean up the yards. I'm thinking he should throw the letters in the trash and let the HOA deal with the bank that will own the houses real soon, but this guy just can't do that. So we agreed on a very nominal fee for clean-up. I did the first house today and I'll do the other one tomorrow afternoon.
These are the stories behind the numbers. Two guys who put up everything they had, including taking out seconds on their own homes, because somebody convinced them they could get stupid rich by buying investment homes sight-unseen in a city 600 miles away that they'd never been to. Now they have nothing.
In our study of 1 Corinthians we've just finished chapter seven. We've seen that in two different sections of this chapter Paul tells the believers to be willing to stay in whatever state they were in when the Lord called them. For the believer life is not about getting ahead, improving our lot, rising above our current status. It's about loving and serving the Lord. Doing that doesn't require a better "life" than we currently have. In fact, striving for that better life can easily get in the way, consuming resources and energies that would otherwise be God's to use for his glory.
When I saw how he did this I thought, "Well, that's lame!" But at the beginning he had me sucked in. So I guess it works.
Cup Levitation
The people are the best part. No question.
So, what do pastors of very large churches do? I can't imagine they have significant contact with their people when there are that many. And they have associates and assistants who interact with the people as part of their responsibilities. Maybe for those mega-church pastors it's not the people. Maybe for them it's the leadership role and the administration of an organization that energizes and fulfills.
Which makes me wonder how big a church gets before the shift has pushed the pastor's ministry into that arena. Yes, it happens gradually over a range of the growth curve. But at some point the balance has clearly shifted.
Not something Pathway has to worry about in the forseable future. I'm just curious.
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