:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

There are many pressing questions in the world.

Why are we here?

How do dolphins communicate?

How does someone write a bestselling book?

How does someone without a college freshman’s grasp of grammar and sentence structure write a bestselling book?

Where can I find awesome glasses like Rob Bell’s?

However, there are other questions that aren’t all that important but are fun to know just for the heck of it, such as questions about my parody of Love Wins and Twilight, Love Bites with its heralded April 1st release. I mean, why would a writer on a tight budget waste his time writing a silly novella as an April Fool’s joke?

I’m sure you’re wondering what the real dangers of Twilight are and whether Love Bites has a secret message. And the answer to both questions is yes and not knowing the answers I share could kill you.

I’ll be answering those questions and more in an interview with writer and blogger Chase Livingston.

Stop by Chase’s site today to read the interview. If you enjoy it, be sure to find him on Twitter as: @Chase_Liv.

If you want to read the unoriginal, ground-breaking Love Bites E-Book that that didn’t ignite controversy, you can download the full novella (all 15,600 words of it) for free here.

If you can, please consider chipping in $2.99 for an E-Book download from Amazon.com. It’s a huge help to me, and enables me to continue offering fun projects like this at no cost to the general public.

Here’s a link to the original post.

While in seminary I read a lot of job descriptions for pastors and letters from search committees. They usually consisted of bullet point lists that were about as long as any other job description. However, as I read these lists I realized I wasn’t qualified for these openings.

In fact, I’m not even sure if Jesus would have been qualified for the positions at most churches.

I’m sure that someone was eventually hired, but I’m equally certain that whoever took on this mantle of “pastor” let his/her congregation down pretty quickly. Perhaps letting a congregation down is the best thing a pastor can do, since it forces everyone to talk about their expectations and abilities.

There are no simple solutions here that I know of. I wouldn’t dare offer a one-size fits all solution. However, I can offer a few thoughts on what we should aspire for in our pastors and some dangers to avoid.

What Pastors Must Do: Managing Direction

A pastor keeps a group of Christians pointed in the right direction. That applies to big picture stuff and to smaller groups and ministries in our churches. This is a huge task to fulfill, and I know many pastors who do this well.

However, some congregations expect their pastors to do a lot more than this. Whether they’re from a pastor’s personal expectations or a congregation’s expectations, these can contribute to burn out.

The Pastor as A Jack of All Spiritual Trades

Pastors are usually one of two kinds of people: leaders of people or managers of people, both of whom love teaching the Bible and praying for people. However, most churches want a visionary leader/manager/counselor/custodian/communications manager/whatever else needs to be done.

I grew up in a church that had a head pastor and counseling pastor, which struck me as one of the smartest things a church could do. 

The Pastor is Responsible for All Spiritual Growth

Most people go to church hoping to be “fed” in some way. We want something spiritually significant to happen each Sunday, and that is a huge burden that pastors have to carry. In addition, our church service formats place all of the emphasis on the pastor to make it happen.

That is one of the reasons why I don’t put a lot of stock in Sunday meetings. I prefer to view church as a bring your own lunch, with the pastor responsible for preventing a food fight.

Most Churches Want a Visionary, Big-Picture Pastor Who Does Stuff

You can spot a manager pastor by looking at his to-do list. Is he/she involved in every committee in a hands-on capacity? Does he/she take on smaller tasks that should actually be delegated? I’ve found that many churches want a visionary pastor who can see the big picture, but they may feel slighted if that pastor isn’t involved in a hands-on way like the manager pastor.

The visionary pastor and manager pastor are two very different people. A visionary pastor will be more hands off, while a managing pastor will be more hands on. Expecting both qualities in the same person will lead to burn out.

The Pastor Serves “Us” or Else

The hardest part of being a pastor is being placed in a position where he/she must challenge or confront a congregation to move in a new direction. When I look at the ministry of Jesus, he spent a lot of time telling his followers what they didn’t want to hear. Can you imagine what we would say to him today?

“Why do you keep talking about going to Jerusalem so you can put us and yourself in danger? Talk sense Jesus!”

Any pastor who suggested the possibility of death in Jerusalem wouldn’t have a salary for long.

And that’s the problem: our pastors serve US. If they don’t give US what we want, we can cut them loose. Even worse than that, if pastors don’t meet our unrealistic expectations, we may view them as failures.

Maybe some pastors have issues. I’m not here to discuss that. All that I can see for certain is we pay some very ordinary people very little to do some very extraordinary work—work that requires incredible dependence on God.

The fact that most congregations have some kind of financial power over their pastors is perhaps inevitable. I don’t know if there’s a better way to compensate pastors through freewill offerings or some kind of tent making hybrid—I’m sure there are advantages and disadvantages.

However we set up our compensation for pastors, we need to remember that we are putting quite a lot of pressure on the men and women who serve as pastors and that we hold tremendous power over them. This is a power we can use to bless or to curse.

I’m not really sure I can write the following post without offending some people. However, this issue comes up often enough, that I think it’s worth addressing head on. I’ll do my best to speak of my personal experiences, and I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to judge or condemn anyone’s calling.

About ten years ago, I thought I would enter into full time ministry on staff at a church. I never thought I would end up writing full time, though I had hoped to one day write a book. The more I thought about the dynamics of ministering on staff at a church in a salaried position, the more I became personally convinced I should not go down that road.

I hope that every church handles money, power, and ministry well, and therefore I think we need to talk about it. There’s a huge elephant in the room, and we don’t always address it: Churches hire pastors to do a job for them. If a pastor lets his people down, the congregation can fire the pastor.

Perhaps a little context is in order.

I heard horror stories in seminary about the way churches handled their pastors. I ate lunch with pastors who lived under the threat of losing their jobs because their eschatology wasn’t quite right, they didn’t succeed as counselors, or their congregations didn’t like the new praise songs.

In a rather extreme case, a pastor who lived in a parsonage was fired and told to vacate immediately—leaving him and his family in a terrible position.

I know that there are plenty of good stories about happy pastors and churches. I’m not out to drag anyone through the mud or to question anyone’s calling. What I do want to talk about is money, ministry, and how the two work together in the power dynamics of the church.

I’m not out to justify myself or to criticize anyone specifically. My beef is with our system, which may work in some circumstances, but has clearly proven less than satisfactory often enough. We stand to gain quite a lot if we can talk about these dynamics openly.

I’ll lay my cards on the table up front by saying that I support a particular ministry financially. That ministry relies on freewill offerings. In addition, there are some folks who send me free will gifts to support my writing ministry. I have no problem with financially supporting someone who is in the ministry.

However, we could run into problems when a Christian minister counts on a group he or she serves to provide a set amount of money as a salary. There is an unspoken power dynamic that may come into play when a minister is relying on specific people to provide a set amount of money. I’ve seen churches handle it well, and I’ve seen churches handle it poorly.

I’ve felt compelled that I personally, at this point in my life at least, can’t take an officially salaried ministry position. I have good friends who minister quite well as salaried pastors, and for that reason, I want to ask, “What makes a salaried ministry position work?” and “What do we need to watch out for when we have a salaried minister?”

Tuesday’s Post: What’s at Stake for Pastors

Wednesday’s Post: What’s at Stake for Congregations

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Christianity after growing up with it, studying it in college, really studying it in seminary, and continuing to read extensively after seminary, it’s this one simple thing: I’m always wrong about something because I’m always changing or shifting one belief or another (usually small stuff, but still…).

Error is inevitable for every Christian.

N.T. Wright, the patron saint of theological awesomeness, often tells his students that significant bits of what he teaches them are wrong, but he’s not sure which bits are wrong.

I used to imagine God sitting up in heaven with the Westminster Confession or Ladd’s Theology of the New Testament and a scantron sheet with a pile of number two pencils. Perhaps he’d whip out a Wesleyan hymnal for an examination on classic hymns.

Perhaps he’d just tell me, “That bridge to life explanation of the Gospel was a good try, but you didn’t quite know enough about how the cross works. Sorry pal. If only you’d done a better job on your seminary homework…”

While I have no doubt that I’ll be amazed at how far off some of my beliefs are, I also have no doubt that God will be merciful to us even though we’re stupid.

Perhaps you think I’m overstating the stupidity of humanity, but scripture is quite conclusive on the matter. God declares, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” and then for good measure he adds, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

We may think we have a solid grasp of God, but it will always be a dim, imperfect sketch of God’s full-colored reality.

To my utter amazement, God seems OK with this.

Whether we rely too much on grace, the cross, God being a pushover, God being a wimp, sacraments, the Bible, icons, meditation, emotional worship songs, fixed hour prayer, incense, creeds, theology, or whatever else, God is still able to save us.

I’ve been switching between the New and Old Testaments quite a bit for the past few years, and I continue to notice over and over again the same theme loud and clear: Love the Lord.

Isn’t that refreshing in its simplicity? It’s as if God knew we are hopelessly stupid, that we would mix up our theology, that we would confuse worship of God and worship of country, that we would commit sins that we’d never see on this side of heaven, and that we’d need to repent times without number.

Loving God and letting him change us overshadows our faltering efforts and the times when we mean the best and still stumble into error.

A few years ago I began to wonder what a parody of myself would look like. It was a bit painful to consider at first.

Why would I put myself through such pain?

I felt like I was taking myself and my beliefs way too seriously. I feared that I was losing my balance and not putting enough of my faith into practice. I had shifted from the more conservative (possibly fundamentalist in some ways) end of evangelicalism into the more progressive end, and I sensed myself making the same mistakes under a different banner.

A parody of myself would force me to look at myself in a different light, take some of my beliefs to their extremes, and help me figure out where I needed to change and what needed to stay the same.

As I grew more comfortable with the concept of a parody, I began to experiment with a series of posts called “Sarcastic Saturday.” It was quite hard to do, and it didn’t quite pack the punch I wanted as a parody of myself.

So I sat on the idea for a while.

In the midst of the Rob Bell “HellGate” debate, the wheels began to turn.

I began thinking of a parody that would hopefully help all sides step back, laugh a bit at themselves, and hopefully cool things off a bit. At the very least, a parody helps us step back and take ourselves less seriously for a moment. That has done me a world of good in making me a more loving and open conversation partner.

Out of the ideas swirling in my mind, I mashed together a parody of Bell’s book Love Wins with a parody of Twilight and all of the other vampire TV shows and books in pop culture and wrote a novella e-book that I titled Love Bites (you can still download the whole 15,600 word e-book). I didn’t have an agenda other than helping us step back from the angry debates, laugh a bit, and hopefully returning to our conversations with a little less… well… bite.

I want to make it clear that I really like Rob Bell. His book Velvet Elvis echoed many of the things I’ve been thinking (you could say it’s a more accessible take on some of the stuff I say in Coffeehouse Theology).

Hopefully everyone who reads the book noticed another character: Ned Ciwinski. Ned is a parody of myself: a bumbling, dorky writer obsessed with being relevant with theology and culture. One of my friends thought he was the hero of the story, but that was purely a mistake on my part if anyone thought that. I really wanted Ned to just provide comic relief, to get lucky at a few key points with his half-witted ideas, and to provide that parody of myself that I’ve longed to put together.

Ned Ciwinskiy reminds me that I can get lost in my theology and isolate myself to the point that I end up forgetting how to relate to others. To a certain degree, Ned was my round-about way of getting to the excellent point made by Don Miller that Jesus doesn’t need theology experts to advance his Kingdom. Sometimes the theology experts can lose their way.

I currently have a book proposal that I’m sending around that examines what we can learn from the people who rejected Jesus. The majority of those who rejected Jesus were the theology experts of his time. I’ve often written on this blog that the New Testament reads like a horror story for seminary students.

I have a feeling that Ned wouldn’t want to read a book like that, which is why I needed to write a silly story about our theology debates with vampires and a self-absorbed and self-proclaimed theology and culture expert named Ned fumbling his way through the story.

Ricky Gervais once said to Steve Carrell (who plays Michael Scott on The Office), “If you don’t know someone like Michael Scott, then you are Michael Scott.” Along similar lines, if I couldn’t write that story with Ned in it, then the truth is that I could very well become just like Ned—without the vampires I hope.

There’s a certain kind of blog post out there that I have both written on my own blog and have read on others. It usually has a title like this: “Why I don’t go to church.”

The author typically says church services are overly produced, inauthentic, insular, and generally ineffective. In addition, greater attention to church services has led to Christians investing their time and money on themselves rather than the commission to go and make disciples.

These critiques are often legitimate. The spirit of them is not always (perhaps rarely) constructive, but regardless, the number of affirming comments and links to these posts prove that such views are wide spread. There are many Christians who are fed up with church services and who have stopped attending, even if they still cling to Jesus. Others attend church services, but only because they have no other option. Still others have started house churches.

I’m not interested in debating whether these folks are right or wrong. In fact, I identify with them in many ways. I didn’t attend a church service regularly from 2002-2009, though I still gathered with Christians for prayer and fellowship in addition to trying out a bunch of churches for various stretches of time.

Living in southern Vermont for four years didn’t help us find a church that matched our beliefs.

Starting next Friday, I’m going to post a series of reasons why I now go to church. In the midst of our debates, we run into a lot of critique that isn’t constructive and arguments for the church that run something like this—you’ve got to just settle.

We can do better. I hope to advance some good reasons why we should go to church, while remaining open to the possibility that sometimes attending a traditional church service isn’t what God has called some of us to do. In fact, if we’re going to attend a church service at all, then I think we should have some good reasons for doing so.

I hope to supply some good reasons.

Next Friday: In kicking off my series, my first reason why I go to church right now is because I have found a church where I can find sacred space to meet with God. I’ll discuss the difference between actually meeting with God in the midst of a worship service as opposed to only singing about and learning about God in a worship service. There is a world of difference between the two.

Next Week’s Series: As of Monday I’ll begin a new series I’ve entitled, “What to Do When the Bible Disturbs You.”

Some days I want to just want to wake up and feel joyful.

Is that too much to ask?

It’s not like joy is a nonrenewable resource. Don’t you think God could be a tad more generous in doling it out, making for happier people who enjoy their lives and aren’t moping about?

Sometimes I wonder if God is stingy with the joy he gives.

However, it’s far more likely that the problem is that I’m stingy with the joy he has given to me. And that gives us something a bit more constructive to talk about…

I’m not a big fan of pat solutions or those holy hand grenades that go something like, “Just read the Bible and Jesus will make it better! or “Pray to make it go away!” or “We have the Holy Spirit, so what else do we need?”

No human being can actually live in our complex world for long on those mantras without going insane. It feels insultingly elementary to suggest that joy is readily available for me from a God who gives it freely.

I mean, are all of the problems in the joy pipeline a result of me plugging it up?

I can’t speak for you and your situation, but from what I can tell, that may be the case. I can’t remember who told me this first, but I’m guessing it was my mother-in-law. She said that we find victory in worship.

It’s like we’re hardwired to worship God. When we worship God and experience him, we’re running on the right kind of fuel that brings us joy and puts us in the place God intends us to be.

Can you imagine trying to run a car on old motor oil or vegetable oil? It’s not like either will work just because they are a kind of oil. Cars will sputter and go kaput without the right kind of fuel.

And therefore, if joy is our destination, it’s not like we have a lot of different options in order to attain the true joy that God offers us. It’s not like we can pursue money, pride, or career advancement all week and then drop a complaint in the comment box at church when we don’t have the joy of God in our lives.

We reap what we sow. That’s the hard, but simple truth that Christianity pounds into us.

If we desire the joy of God and we don’t have it, then the chances are that we are either distracted by something else or not clearing a space to be with God for times of worship and devotion. I can’t speak for everyone on this, and Christianity rarely boils down to one-size-fits-all answers. However, if we want to experience the joy of the Lord, I think we at least know where to start.

Looking for more posts about joy? Drop by Bonnie Gray’s Faith Barrista blog now for more thoughts on joy and a blog post that actually manages to fully develop only ONE metaphor.

I’ve been waiting for something to happen. I’m not quite sure what, but for a long time I knew it hadn’t happened yet.

A little while back someone was praying for me. He shared a promise from God. I thought it sounded pretty good, so I’ve been on the look out for it. I had some thoughts on what the fulfillment of that promise would look like, but nothing much materialized.

Why didn’t God fulfill this promise yet?

I began to worry and even doubted a little. Then I repented and began to wait… and wait. And then the overanalyzing began—the part in the story where people of faith really are screwed.

When bad things happen or good things are delayed, I usually try to figure out what I did wrong. Clearly God was punishing me. If I could just get my act straight, he’d open up the gates of blessing.

I imagine there’s this huge file of blessings in heaven piled up on the Holy Spirit’s desk, and God storms into the office demanding why the blessings are so far behind, asking why the Holy Spirit hasn’t followed through on his promises, and threatening to take away his tongue of fire privileges.

The Holy Spirit patiently waits for his turn, and then pulls out an official-looking memo with “Ed Cyzewski” across the top and a brief, but damning bullet point list of my flaws that are preventing me from receiving his blessings. God, in a fit of frustration, crumples up the memo, tosses it in the air, and zaps it with a lightning bolt.

“Tell him to get his act together!” he booms as he storms out of the office.

Now before an ultimate-fighting pastor calls this post Satanic because of its depiction of the Trinity, let’s just make it clear that God doesn’t work like that. God or the Holy Spirit would never write a memo.

So here’s the thing…

I think part of that promise I received has started to be fulfilled.

I’m not 100% sure, but it seems that way. I feel blessed and cared for, but I also know that I didn’t do this. I didn’t do anything all that different beyond trusting in God. I was trusting God when things looked bad, trusting him in this time of uncertain progress, and will continue trusting him whether things get better or worse.

Trust and obey our loving God: this is the daily drum-beat of Christianity. Get used to it.

Our actions can alienate us from God, but I don’t think God plays games with us. He’s not withholding treats from us unless we have a certain measure of faith or attain a certain level of Christian awesomeness. Sin can separate us from God, but when it comes to the fulfillment of his promises, waiting patiently in faith is all we can do.

Thankfully, that’s exactly what God wants from us.

UPDATE: Yes, this is an April Fools joke. But it actually is an ebook that you can download and read! (as of 4.15.10)

It is with great pride that I announce the release of my next book project. Click on this link to download: The Lost Tweets of Jesus: Uncovering the World’s Greatest Ancient Digital Mystery, a work of carefully researched contextual theology explores the teachings of Jesus in brief, 140-character tweets.

Never before has one book composed such a culturally bound exploration of the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, or @NazarethJesus.

Though Jesus never wrote a book, he certainly communicated much to his disciples. If he had Twitter, there is no doubt that he would have used it. This book is committed to a fresh exploration of Jesus through 140-character tweets, uncovering the digital legacy in this work of ancient digital linguistic social media archeology.

Based loosely on a few events in the Gospel of Mark, The Lost Tweets of Jesus encounters the life of Jesus through a series of tweets that incarnate the Messiah into today’s technology.

This book is a free download that is perfect for study or meditation during Holy Week. If you’re interested in interviewing me regarding this stunning new release, please consult my publicity kit.

Incidentally, I have also released a free ebook of meditations on the Gospel of Mark titled: Prepare the Way of the Lord.

Staring at a dryer and two baskets full of laundry to fold, I cursed the curse of laundry. I hate folding laundry, even if I must confess my love for neat and orderly drawers of the stuff.

I began to ponder how laundry is like some kind of terrible affliction. And then I considered the fall of humanity into sin and the ramifications of Genesis 3:21:

“The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.”

It’s as if God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden and into a laundry mat. While handing over the animal skins, I imagine God saying, “This is going to annoy you a whole lot more than it’s going to annoy me.”

Oh, for the days of the fig leaf.

In the end, the stubborn rebelliousness of humanity, our penchant for seeking power and control ensured that we would spend countless hours washing, folding, and putting away our clothes. How ironic it is that one residual effect of the fall into sin ensures we have one more tedious thing to do.

While standing in the garden last night in the cool of the evening, checking on the progress of our tomatoes, lettuce, and swiss chard, I sensed so much peace and comfort. It was as if Eden had come again to our yard, with blossoming irises, cosmos, marigolds, and pansies. And then I looked down at my mud-smeared jeans and thought of those cursed laundry baskets waiting for me.