Love/Hate

I love being a pastor, and sometimes I hate it. Well, I hate certain parts of it. For the last few weeks, it's seemed pretty manic-depressive, high highs, low lows, and it's been hard to get into a rhythm. I hate the fact that I'm writing sermons long into Saturday night, I hate the fact that I don't see my family as much as I think I should, I hate the fact that this church isn't the way I think it should be yet. I hate the fact that I'm having such a hard time picking hymns that people will know and that I'm spending so much time worrying about it after a couple comments I got. I love the fact that people are excited about church and telling their friends. I love the fact that they're getting the Word of God from my sermons. I love the fact that there's a lot of unity and trust in this church, and even though I get criticism, that people tell me in a spirit of trying to be helpful.

I went on a sermon planning retreat earlier this week. It was an awesome opportunity for the pastors in my circuit. I got to hang out with 2 retired and 2 current pastors in a cabin overlooking Lake Tahoe for a few days. It was everything I had hoped...an opportunity to spend hours uninterrupted in planning, an opportunity to pick at the minds of some men who had served long term pastorates (one for 35 years, one for 42!).

Big conviction of the retreat: I spend a lot of time telling people to do evangelism, but I don't spend a lot of time teaching them how to share the gospel. If that's really what we're all about, I need to lead people to learn how to be all about evangelism. It's easy to say "Just Do It," it's pretty hard to try to explain how.

It's hard work to love people. But it's good work.

Books and Stuff

I've been on kind of a tear as far as reading some books lately...in the last few weeks I've finished Jack Welch's "Winning" and Thom Rainer's "Breakout Churches." Let me just share with you some of the stuff that stood out to me.

Apparently I was reading "Winning" a lot in front of Ali because when we went to Barnes and Noble with Anna last week Ali picked up Winning and gave it to me, saying "Daddy's book?" I got my copy for $3 at Half Price Books, though. One of the things that stuck out to me was his chapter on starting something new, where he said that if you are starting something new, you want to give it every chance to succeed. As I'm thinking about worship services and how we want to approach evangelism for the preschool parents we believe God wants us to reach, it's important to realize that if part of this is going to be a different style of worship service, we're going to have to be fully committed to it. I also found his approach to budgeting interesting, focusing on an "operating plan" instead of setting numbers in concrete...that may take a while to explain to the board.

The other one I read was Breakout Churches. This is the second Thom Rainer book I've read, the first being High Expectations which told me that a Sunday School that works like small groups is the answer to most of my problems. Breakout Churches is a bit more current, and it basically applies Jim Collins' Good to Great principles to churches which have had a period of stagnation/decline and then have "broken out" to achieve significant growth. The book made me want to read Good to Great (so that's on my list now too). The biggest thing that convicted me was something that I knew before but constantly need to be reminded of...all the pastors of the breakthrough churches spend around 20 hours/week preparing their sermons. I've not been close to that, and when I have, it's been time on Saturday afternoon ignoring my family because I haven't put in the effort or time earlier in the week. I can preach a lot better, but I need to structure my time better. I know it's a struggle for everybody. But I've also noticed that some people seem to want me to feel better about not spending this much time on sermons. I'm very wary of these people.

Also, I'm been dabbling again in Mueller's Christian Dogmatics, especially on the area of Church Fellowship. I'm anticipating a possible issue coming up in my church in a few weeks regarding this, so please keep that in your prayers. I start to wonder what percentage of LCMS Lutherans could actually articulate our Synod's stance on the boundaries of fellowship. I wonder how many clergy actually care. Sometimes it's lonely out here.

I've especially been missing the clergy support I had in OC and LA...hopefully this will be remedied a bit next week when I go on our circuit's annual sermon-planning retreat in Lake Tahoe for a few days! I'm looking forward to that.