Did you see this very cool ad for Volvo trucks starring Claude Van Damme?
You may also have seen this Chuck Norris take-off. Very good!
It's raining. That's good. And it will continue through most of tomorrow. It's a light rain but we'll take all we can get here in the land of cacti and dust storms.
By this point all the snowbirds have returned in their Buick's with Wisconsin handicap plates, wearing big plastic sunglasses. Add that to the people rushing from store to store hunting down Christmas presents and the traffic is downright scary. Lots of accidents out there.
I met Josh W. yesterday for our monthly "talk shop" breakfast. I always enjoy that and the easy shift we've made from teacher/student to colleagues.
He asked me to characterize my life by decades - the 20's, 30's, and 40's. (He's just coming up to that last one.) He wondered if the flow of our lives would match, specifically with regard to our work as pastors.
As it turns out, not so much. We both were idealistic and naive in our 20's, early in our ministry, but I think that's typical of any profession. More significantly, I began in the late 70's and he started in the late 90's, two very different eras. When I was a young pastor my job was best defined by the word shepherd. I was expected to preach/teach and to care for my flock. Weddings, funerals, visitation... being their pastor.
In between my first churches and his the church growth movement came to dominate the scene, and the pastor went from shepherd to CEO, responsible for building both the numerical size and programs of the local church. Bigger was better, entrepreneurial skills were in demand, and a new term, "mega-church" described the presumed goal of each congregation.
This change brought a whole new set of pressures to the profession. Whereas the shepherd got criticized for not visiting the widow Smith often enough, the CEO caught it for a flat attendance graph. It may be his preaching or his leadership skills, but if he can't produce year-over-year numerical growth his ministry isn't successful. The question, "Is our church growing?" replaced, "Have you been to visit the Andersons lately?" And the How-to authors began to use the word "rancher" to replace shepherd as a way to emphasize the shift from small, parochial ministry to an organizational approach modeled after the business world.
Back to Josh and me. As he approaches his third decade in ministry he's assessing how he feels about this new paradigm. Does he want to be a CEO, always working toward "bigger?" I'm entering my fifth decade (sheesh, that makes me sound old!) and I have no similar questions about my ministry. I've done 'em both and experienced the pressures and payoffs of each. Never mind the (overriding) issue of which paradigm is biblical, one of them beats the other hands down. And talking it through with Josh yesterday only solidified my conviction.
The people are the best part.
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