Leadership is a pain!

I am in a meeting with a leadership coach, Kevin Ford, and he's just said something painful: “Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can tolerate.”

How fun does that sound?

But it's true. Leadership always means leading change. But what Ford was getting at is that people can only tolerate a certain level of change before they start to freak out. So, figuring out how much they can handle and neither pushing them too much or too little.

In other words, it is no fun. People will always be unhappy. Or, as Ford said, disappointed. They will always be uncomfortable, because leaders will always be stirring things up, just when they're starting to get comfortable again. I guess the only comfort in this is knowing that this is what leadership is all about. If people are saying they're disappointed, it means that we're doing our jobs well. So, that's nice to know ....

But it's really helpful for me, since I tend to want to be a peace-maker. I don't like to disappoint people. And if I'm going to lead people in establishing God's kingdom (and not their own), they're going to be disappointed. And that has to be OK, because it means that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

The question: How do I know that people are being disappointed by the right things or the wrong things?

Yes, but ...

For the past five years, I have been keeping up with my reading on emerging church books and articles and blogs. And I've picked up lots of interesting things:

• A renewed missional emphasis — the church doesn't exist for itself but is an expression of the kingdom of God for which it exists.
• An embrace of postmodern questioning — don't give us a bunch of pre-fab answers, but let us participate in the questioning.
• A desire for embodied worship — don't just engage my mind, engage all of me.
• An embrace of technology not as the key to success and hipness, but as a component of 21st century culture.
• An end to denominational tyranny — the willingness to work and witness and worship across the previously impervious bounds of denominational walls and to side more with Jesus than denominational pronouncements and structures.

But what I can't stand is the arrogance.

There is this whatever-came-before-sucked-and-must-be-ditched attitude.

Some of it is theological as there are those who believe they need to rethink Christianity from the ground up. But I have yet to discover anyone among their ranks on the level of a Karl Barth, much less an Augustine or an Aquinas, a Calvin or a Luther. I don't get a sense of an intellectual depth, a biblical depth, or a prayed depth that matches any of these.

Some of it has to do with Ecclesiology: The church in its current structure is doomed. At first, when I read these authors, I wondered if I should leave my pulpit and return to journalism. Think of how the money used to pay me could be used! Think of how professional clergy cripple the gifts of the rest of the church by doing everything for everyone, or at least pretending to. And the buildings! We seem to worship our buildings more than the Christ we claim to worship. And, again, think of all the money that goes into maintaining them. And the sermons! What a lousy way to learn the Scriptures — all classroom and no homework. Tear it all down and start over again!

There are some valid critiques. We are way too pastor-oriented. We are way too-building oriented. We are way too sermon-oriented (or at least, we claim to be).

Perhaps it is in fact time for something new. But that doesn't mean that we denigrate the way the Spirit has chosen to work over hundreds of years. Yes, things haven't always been this way. But the Spirit has always blown life through our dead structures.

Much needs to change. But let's not cut down the whole tree, OK?

Word-map of the NT

Wordle.net is a fascinating website. You can enter whatever text you want into the text box and it will pull out the main words and make the ones which occur more often larger than the rest, giving you a feel for word usage — and also because it looks cool. Well, someone did a Wordle of the entire New Testament. It's interesting to see which words are highlighted and whose names make the cut.

http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/27349/NT

Divine appointments

I don't like appointments. They're rarely enjoyable. The usually have to do with painful teeth stuff or medical pokings or tense relationships.

But I had one of those encounters today that we call a "divine appointment."

I ran into and ended up having a conversation with someone who left our church about a year ago. There was a little awkwardness there. But there was a brotherliness as well. We were able to talk candidly and I was able to bless him to his new church (even though he kept saying that it was a temporary sojourn and that he'd be back some time).

I wouldn't have chosen the meeting. I don't like digging up things that make me feel awkward. But I guess that's why God takes things out of my hands and makes the appointments himself.

Atonement — Beyond the movie to something real

We watched Atonement last night, a movie version of Ewan McGregor’s book, starring Kiera Knightly. (Spoilers ahead.)

A 13-year-old girl feels rejected by the young man she has a crush on when he saves her from her rehearsed drowning and is angry with her instead of being her hero. So, she chooses to see things in a new light, where he is a sexual predator instead of the loving suitor of her older sister. This interpretation of reality leads her to provide the key witness against him in a rape trial. Ultimately, he dies in France and her sister dies in a war-related accident in London — the two never able to marry or share their love for each other.

The girl grows up to be a respected and successful novelist. Her final novel is a telling of the truth about what she had done. It exonerates the man, taking the blame for what she had done. But it goes further. In the book, she has her sister and her lover reunite, marry, and live a full life of love. What had been stolen is returned.

But is it really? No. It’s too late. There’s no real atonement. Nothing is made right. The dead are not raised. No novel can do that — at least, it can’t do it for the dead. The only one who has any feel of atonement is the girl, now an old and dying woman.

What the story highlights is our inability to atone for our sins.

There are things we simply can’t make right. Atonement is beyond us. We can’t raise the dead and give them the ability to live happily ever after.

Instead, we are left with regrets. And here, this girl throws herself into the thick of World War II as a selfless nurse, trying to win atonement through service. But that doesn’t work. The soldiers keep dying anyway. So, all she’s left with is writing and rewriting her regrets throughout her life, never achieving forgiveness or reconciliation.

None of us can atone for ourselves. There are moments of making things right. But there are so many regrets that we have no opportunity to do anything about.

Atonement has to come from outside of us. We just don’t have what it takes to generate it ourselves.

That is why, as a Christian, I surround myself with the image of the cross. For in his death, Jesus has in fact dealt with all the stuff of the past. And in his resurrection, he has paved the way for something better and more beautiful in the future. Not a future of fiction and what-ifs, but a future guaranteed by the presence of the Holy Spirit this very day, a living hope.

Garfield WITHOUT Garfield

I was pointed to this website recently: http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/?loc=interstitialskip

It's a fairly twisted take on the Garfield comic strip. What's twisted is that when Garfield is removed from the comic, John Arbuckle (his "owner") starts taking on a fairly freaky personality. When Garfield's image and thought bubbles are removed and John is left by himself, he starts seeming desperately lonely as he talks aloud to himself and depressingly hopeless about life.

As I looked through the images, it made me think of the Christian "life" without the presence of the Holy Spirit.

I won’t say that Garfield is the Holy Spirit. Heaven forbid! But those comics don’t make sense without Garfield. They are grim and empty.

Garfield is the spark, the life, the power without which John Arbuckle lives a meaningless, hopeless, purposeless life — a shadow life. But when Garfield is added, John’s life is a wild adventure, never lacking in energy and motion. You never know what’s going to happen. You may not like what goes on all the time, but there’s never a dull moment.

Now, the Holy Spirit is a far cry better than a fat, selfish, lazy, mean-spirited cat. He is the one who causes us to bear the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He is the one who makes it possible for us to live the Jesus kind of life, the real life that Jesus has opened up for us by saving us from our sins.

Our sins are what we’re saved from. But life in the Spirit is what we’re saved to.

A picture of our torn up praise

I came across a song by the band Phosphorescent called "A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise" and it has intrigued me ever since — not the song, just the title.

Doesn't our praise often feel torn up? It's as if we're reaching for something (Someone!) and never quite getting there because of something about ourselves or the people we're with or the setting or something. But we just end up tearing it up or at least getting it smudged and tattered.

It amazes me that God is interested at all. That he keeps on showing up for it. That he actually smiles at it. It reminds me of a poem by Billy Collins called "The Lanyard." I include it below, because it is "a picture of our torn up praise" that shows why God might not only accept, but cherish, our tattered and smudged prayers and songs.

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.