Gut Wrenching

God is using the book I am reading, The Art of Pastoring by David Hansen, to really rip and tear at my insides.  Already the book had moved and touched me enough that I got it for all the deacons and pastors as well as some of the other men I mentor and work with.  Yet God keeps ripping deeper.  Today I read while the kids were in swimming lessons and I found my own head swimming.  Man, this is going to require more prayer and thought, not on IF I should apply it or HOW I should apply it, but just on summoning up the honesty and courage to apply it.  There's no mystery to figure out.  Its clear cut.  I just need to be obedient to the Spirit's teaching.  I love His work, but I hate it.  When God really works, it is a crucifixion.  "If any man comes after me, let me deny himself, pick up his cross, and follow me."  Those are real words describing reality, not some vague spiritual nonsense.

Some Quotes

"Worship as entertainment, defined as the ritual excitement of the central nervous system to temporarily relieve boredom, is a shortcut to the believer's soul-deep satisfaction of serving God through vertically oriented worship." ..."If we entertain people, our church will grow.  If we lead in worship, our church may shrink until it is composed of  a group of people who want to worship.  The church that worships will have many visitors who never come back, and a few who cannot stay away."

"People don't want to be led through the valley of the shadow of death; they want the valley of the shadow of death to be managed for them. ...In the management model, churches don't have sins.  Rather, the church is the victim of the chaotic world it lives in."

"A leader lives with the church through every ugly bit of its corporate life, whereas the chief concern of management is to avoid every ugly bit of its corporate life.  The strategy of management as ministry is to avoid the pitfalls of the corporate life of the church by abstracting the pitfalls and following a program to avoid them.  But in the Christian life we are not meant to avoid pitfalls; we are meant to live our lives through the pitfalls as the actual stuff of life in Christ."

"The soul of the church is being lost to a pandering pastorate.  The church needs pastors who lead the church in repentence with love.  The church needs pastoral leadership that refuses to take shortcuts and has the courage to allow the church to suffer so that the whole church can be a parable of Jesus.  When the pastor takes the church off the Way of the Cross, the church stops being the parable of Jesus, the body of Christ."

"We think we pander to people because we are insecure.  We flatter ourselves with our psychological shortcomings." (right between my eyes!) "We excuse our sin by saying we have a need to be liked.  But pandering is not a psychological problem.  Pandering is a moral problem.  We pander to people's desires for shortcuts becasue we don't want to walk the Way of the Cross with them." OWWW!  Man, that hits me.  That is me.  Oh Lord, may I learn repentence more than boldness.  May I have my eyes on you, not the people.  The Way of the Cross is sooo much harder, but I want no other way.  Other ways seem so much easier and more attractive (Luke 4), but the devil is a liar.

There's more, but that's enough for one blog post.