"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.
Healing of Heaven
Today I took a friend of mine to the Springfield Zoo for a special evening they host every year. The honored guests are various people around our city with mental or physical handicaps.
I was torn because there were two emotions at work for me today: the joy of seeing these sweet children and adults enjoying an evening of fun was starkly juxtaposed with the pain of seeing the difficulty they had with walking, communication, and thought processing.
As the evening has worn on I’ve reflected a bit on the day. The more I replay pictures of it in my head, the more I realize my own “handicaps.” In many ways they’re more saddening than the ones on display in the innocent children at the zoo today.
They’re hidden. They’re not immediately obvious. They’re ugly.
I have full use of my legs, my arms, my hearing, and (at least a few would agree) my brain. Though this works out well for me in most situations it also comes with a terrible burden: I’m prideful, egotistic, and deceptive. I’m selfish, apathetic, and shallow.
God has been working out all of these kinks slowly for many years. I am a completely different man than I was even a few summers ago. But one side-effect of God’s sanctification is the stark realization of just how ugly the things I still struggle with are. God has purged me of so much . . . and yet still so much remains.
In heaven the lame will walk. In heaven the blind will see. In heaven the mentally handicapped will rejoice at the sheer brilliance of God’s eternal plan.
In heaven I’ll be freed of the burden of my own shortcomings. The sanctification process that began on earth, that has been painful and difficult, that has caused me to shed tears and long to throw off the weight of sin . . . that process will be complete.
We will all stand before our creator, fully healed of our earthly afflictions to the praise of His glorious grace.
Tonight, as I write this, that sounds pretty good.
Two Worlds
At the time I also realized I’d need to bring in a little extra income while she did this because we have quite a bit of student loan debt from seminary and we also have a decent chunk of credit card debt from not having much money and not always making the best decisions from when we first got married.
I’ll write about this in more detail soon, but I started a web design firm and have been getting quite a bit of business. It’s been great: I’m meeting people in Springfield I wouldn’t otherwise meet, I’m helping them out, and I’m bringing in some extra money for our bills.
But some weeks it’s simply exhausting. In addition to the 40-50 hours I work each week at Milestone, I have weeks where I put in an additional 20-40 hours with the web studio (like this last week). This often means little sleep, a perpetual sense of never being “caught up”, and an unhealthy dependency on 5 Hour Energy.
This is not a gripe; I love my work at the church and I’ve found that my work in the web development community has gone hand-in-hand with being a pastor. After all, I’m getting to know and influence people all over the city that I probably never would have met unless I’d been willing to roll up my sleeves and do some work in the secular world. But I’m trying to find a balance and I feel like it’s eluding me. I often feel like I bounce from one world (pastoring a church) to another (developing websites) and the disconnect between the two can often be jarring. One minute I’m working through difficult issues of prayer and counseling with a church partner, the next I’m explaining to a web client that it’s not a good idea to have 80’s hair band music auto-playing at full blast when someone goes to their health insurance website (yes...true story). One minute I’m organizing mission trips and talking to a local pastor about how he should handle a church member who’s poisoning the rest of his people, the next minute I’m trying to figure out WHY THE HECK THE WEBSITE WON’T DISPLAY PROPERLY IN INTERNET EXPLORER 6!!! (sorry...I get a little emotional about that)
So in conclusion: I’m running low on sleep and I’m in a constant state of whiplash. The church is by far my first love and it’s where the bulk of my time is spent, but I’m still having to invest some very heavy hours into my web business. Maybe the answer is hiring more part-time help, but until Emily is done with school we really need the money.
I suppose if I never figure it all out I can at least take comfort in knowing that it won’t have to be like this forever. In a little over a year Em will be done with school and I can take on a few less projects and not have to work non-stop all the time. Until then, you’ll have to forgive me if this blog gets neglected from time to time (as if that hasn’t already happened).
Poets, Prophets & Preachers: Mini-Entry
I’m currently sitting in the performance hall for Poets, Prophets and Preachers and I thought I’d go ahead and post a mini-entry about one of the things that captured me last night.
Rob Bell said he was speaking with a book editor a few weeks ago. This editor goes through hundreds of books on a regular basis. She told Rob that when she starts going through a new book to see if it’s worthy of publication, she necessarily does so with her editor’s hat on looking for the things that an editor would look for; she doesn’t really get to enjoy and take the book in.
But she told him there are rare occasions where she can remove her editor’s hat completely after the first few well-written pages because she says, “I know I’m in good hands.”
Bell went on to explain that the preacher should be able to evoke the same trust within the first couple of minutes of a message. To put in the hard work required to master the art of the sermon is to allow other people to let down their guard, put away their critique, and “know they are in good hands.”
Poets, Prophets & Preachers: Day 2
I want to apologize in advance for failing. Day 2 of Poets, Prophets and Preachers: Recalling the Art of the Sermon will be impossible for me to recount in any sort of encompassing manner. We listened intently for around eight hours of pure brilliance today; trying to summarize it would be difficult.
So I’ve decided to take a different approach. Tomorrow is the final day of the conference; instead of giving a “play-by-play” I’m going to take tomorrow and Wednesday to process some of the things we’ve been discussing. I’ll then post a few entries to let you know the things that resonated with me most deeply and why.
Please continue praying for us. It’s been a great week, but we still feel like there’s so much more to learn and take in.
Shalom,
Josh
Poets, Prophets & Preachers: Day 1
Rob Bell was tonight’s featured speaker. This session felt like an introduction to the week and, as such, it served its purpose: to build anticipation and lay a little groundwork for the sessions to follow.
Bell began by announcing quite convincingly that the time has come to reclaim the art form of the sermon. He asked a rhetorical question: if you were to petition an average person on the street to share words they associated with “sermon,” what would they tell you? Would they say “exciting,” “engaging,” “life-altering,” “intelligent,” “artful,” “passionate,” etc.?
The obvious answer is “no.” Many words may come to mind for the average person, but the aforementioned list is unlikely to be recited. It’s likely that the average person sees the sermon as something to be endured, evaluated, or disregarded as utter propaganda (often understandably so).
It’s time to reclaim the art form of the sermon.
Bell went on to talk about the “naked vulnerability” that often comes with delivering messages to an audience: doubting whether anyone listens, hearing crickets while sharing a potentially life-altering message, and the baggage that comes from your own body of work. The examples he gave are difficult to fully understand unless you are a regular preacher; they resonated deeply with me.
For those of you preparing to embark on your first pastorate, you likely have some idea that delivering a sermon week in and week out is a towering task. I assure you that doing it with excellence is a much more difficult task than you can possibly realize at the moment. And that’s why Rob Bell’s next statement needs to be well remembered:
We need to stop preaching because we have to say something and start preaching because we have something to say.
People should look forward to the sermon. They should be excited to hear the burning words that have welled up inside of the preacher all week; words that will cause their emissary to spontaneously combust if he or she cannot finally release the pressure valve by spewing forth the message that has been howling to be set loose.
To preach such a message is to:
- witness (testify to the truth you have learned)
- remind (point to the fact that God has more in mind than this)
- return (call for repentance and change)
- sub-vert (show there’s another story going on besides what we see)
- provocate (use loaded language to warn)
If we understand that preaching is a subversive act, Bell points out that we’ll open ourselves up to the possibility of being ill-received. We open ourselves up to the possibility of misinterpretation, confusion, anger, ignorance, fear, jealousy, critique, and agendas.
But...
...we also open up the possibility of truth, light, hope, repentance, comfort, inspiration, solidarity, compassion, revolution, and resurrection.
It’s a beautiful and timeless truth that we can’t bring about the possibility of good if we’re unwilling to open up the possibility for bad. In my estimation the whole of the Biblical account speaks of a God who has worked within the tension of this paradigm since the dawn of creation.
Bell says the words of the preacher can create new worlds for people; new perspectives from which to view existence, new categories from which to gain understanding.
But the message of the preacher shouldn’t stop at the end of the sermon. Bell described a fallacy of the modern age: that the message ends when the public speaker concludes; that the speaker has the power to once and for all finally settle the topic at hand.
Life-changing messages don’t work in this way. Life-changing messages pose more questions; they invite the listener to wade into the great depths and complexities of the preacher’s words. They can’t possibly resolve themselves in the time it takes to deliver them, and thus they invite their listeners to trade passive roles for active ones.
Life-changing talks start talks. They don’t end them. It’s less about the last word and more about the first word.
I arrived this week in near-burn-out mode. Since helping plant Milestone Church a year ago life has been relentless; a pastor is never “off the clock” and that can make for stressful and tiring days. Tonight’s message began a restorative process that I pray will continue for the rest of the week.
Truth be told, my church needs me to be rested as much as I need to rest.
Conference Blogging
All this week I’m in Grand Rapids, Michigan attending a pastor’s conference. It’s being put together by Mars Hill Bible Church, home of Rob Bell, and it’s called Poets, Prophets and Preachers: Recalling the Art of the Sermon.
I’m really looking forward to it. Preaching and teaching make up a big part of what I do at Milestone Church and I’ve definitely discovered something in the last twelve months: preaching 40-50 times a year is a challenging task. It’s difficult to stay fresh and continue to pump out edifying content to grow the saints while keeping it interesting and relevant week in and week out.
I’ve got a couple of weeks of sabbatical coming up at the end of July and the first of August. This conference comes at a perfect time and will hopefully serve to give me some food for thought heading into that period of rest, prayer, and planning for Milestone Church.
This week I’m going to do several “mini-blogs” about the conference and about my experience in processing the information. My friend David Calavan has also decided to come, so as we discuss and work through some of the material I’ll let those of you who are curious in on those discussions.
I think it’s going to be a good week.
It Started With "Rock Band"
Sadly, there’s no denying it: I’m getting older. Yes, I realize I’m only 27 and that, statistically speaking, I still have a lot of years ahead of me. But I’m constantly reminded that my time on this earth is gradually coming to a close: a student from the first youth group I pastored graduates from college, the Cosby Show is on Nick-At-Nite, and none of the teenagers at my church know who Zach Morris is.
But I’ve made a deal with myself and with my wife: I don’t want to ever stop learning and trying new things. I don’t want to be the old man who peaked at 25 or talks about the “glory days” of college and high school until he takes his last gasping breath of air. So in the past several years I’ve taught myself graphic design, web design, and Flash. I’ve learned (but certainly not mastered) Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. I’ve become a bit of an Apple Mac guru who can fix almost any software issue and many hardware issues. I’ve also continued to be a student of Scripture and I’ve increased my understanding of post-modern philosophy and ancient church practices. I’ve taken up video editing to a degree I never thought possible only 5 years ago, using Final Cut Studio and Adobe’s AfterEffects.
Believe me when I say I still have a long way to go in mastering these things; but I’m broadening my horizons and the joy has certainly been in the journey. I’m always open to trying new things.
About a year and a half ago, my wife and I purchased the video game Rock Band for the Xbox 360. It turned out to be a really fun party game and we enjoyed hours of playing it with friends in Chicago. And in the midst of all the fun, I noticed that I picked up the drums considerably faster than most people and really enjoyed the new challenge of hand-eye-foot-coordination.
So about 8 months ago, shortly after moving to Springfield, I bought an inexpensive electronic drum kit. Purists will say I should have purchased an acoustic set, but given that we lived in an apartment at the time it really wasn’t an option.
I admit I haven’t had as much time to play and practice as I’d have liked, but I’ve gotten considerably better in the time we’ve had it. In fact, I’d say playing the drums at the end of a stressful day has been a great way to blow off some steam and have fun while doing it.
Last week I had the opportunity to play with my dad and my brother at a Christian youth conference in Georgia called Wow Weekend. It was my first real time to play with a band and I think I did pretty well (though I’m certainly not 1/4 as good a drummer as Philip Ellis). It certainly didn’t hurt that we were playing on a $200,000 sound system; I could literally feel the bass drum in my bones when I played it (which of course made me want to play it as often as possible).
It was more fun than I’ve had in a while, and it was great seeing my family and my good friend Sharon.
I’ll keep practicing on my own and enjoy any chance to play that I get. I don’t have any real aspirations, but maybe someday I’ll play in a little garage band that also has no real aspirations. It really doesn’t matter: the joy is in the journey and the journey is full of joy.
You can check out more photos from the conference at my online photo gallery.
Why I Walked Away From Seminary, Pt. 2
I arrived at East Texas Baptist University in the fall of 2000. I remember not being entirely sure of how this whole college thing would work out. My parents had both started college, but neither had graduated and they seemed to be perfectly happy and quite intelligent. So I didn’t actually know if I was going to finish because I kind of assumed that at some point I would start traveling and preaching or leading worship; if college got in the way of that, I’d just quit.
Needless to say, entering into college with that kind of attitude doesn’t exactly lend itself toward putting your best foot forward in your studies.
But why did I need to worry about that anyway? After all, I was majoring in religion, a subject I practically already knew frontwards and backwards. Though I never would have said it out loud, I had grown up in church and been to Sunday School more times than I could have possibly kept track of. What on earth could my professors possibly teach me about the Bible that I didn’t already know?
And then I found out that angels may have had sex with humans.
That’s right: Genesis 6 threw me for a huge loop on my very first day of class. My Old Testament professor at ETBU was walking us through the syllabus and going over a rough outline of what we would be studying for the semester when he casually mentioned the passage.
“And in a few weeks we’ll look at the flood narrative,” he said, “which starts in Genesis 6 with the unusual prelude, ‘When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.’ We’ll be talking about what that means and the fact that many biblical scholars understand it to mean that angels intermarried with human women. If that is understood as true, it would be considered one of the evils that angered God to the point of destroying nearly every living thing on the earth.”
So imagine being little Mr. Know-It-All from Grand Saline, Texas. Mr. Future-Conference-Speaker. Mr. Sunday-School-Is-My-Middle-Name.
Now imagine having angel sex thrown in your face on your first day of college.
To an outsider, it would have seemed small and insignificant. An inconsequential fact mentioned merely in passing. An interesting bit of Bible trivia.
But it rocked me to the core. Because if I didn’t know about that...if something mentioned in the first five minutes of my first class while we were just looking over the syllabus was that alien to me...
...what else did I not know?
*part 3 will be posted on Monday
Why I Walked Away From Seminary, Pt. 1
We moved over 1,000 miles, we took on a huge financial burden, and we threw ourselves into our work with vigor and determination. Within two years I had a supremely healthy GPA and was well on my way to graduating.
And that’s when I walked away from seminary. This is the story of why.
But to understand it, you’ll have to have a little background.
A Tale of 2 “Josh Crain”s
At the age of 16, I walked down the aisle of Main Street Baptist Church and announced to my pastor and my church family that God had called me to “the ministry.” Looking back, I realize I didn’t know exactly what that meant. In fact, I probably assumed that I was either supposed to travel and lead worship or travel and preach. My father had done those things for years, and I suppose I could see myself preaching to thousands of teenagers at “Youth Evangelism Conferences.” After all, that’s where the “real ministry” happened.
To be honest, it wasn’t that much of a stretch. Because of the opportunities my father had been blessed with, I’d already been leading worship in front of thousands of people each summer. And in a little over a year from the time I walked that aisle at 16 I would have the opportunity to lead worship with my dad and brother at YouthLink 2000, an event held on New Year’s Day of 1999 where we would stand on stage in front of 25,000 students.
At the age of 18 I felt like I was living a double life. There was the “Josh Crain” who attended tiny Grand Saline High School in east Texas: generally respected and mostly well-liked, but certainly not the star athlete or the most popular kid in school.
Then there was the “Josh Crain” who got to stand in front of hundreds and thousands of students and play electric guitar, sign autographs, and have a ton of cute girls from youth camps try to get his phone number. No one from high school got to see that side, and I always wondered how weirded out they would have been to see that going on in the summers.
Thankfully my parents did a great job of not letting some silly “youth camp celebrity” go to my head and I was able to get through high school as a mostly humble, if not a little self-righteous, 18 years old kid.
And what does a self-righteous 18-year-old kid who’s called to “the ministry” do when high school ends? Well, I suppose he goes to a Christian college to prepare himself to preach to thousands of teenagers at Youth Evangelism Conferences.
*part 2 will be posted on Friday
Random Update
The church I pastor, Milestone, has been incredibly encouraging as of late. We had so many initial tasks to accomplish being a new church plant and so many hurdles to jump...but we finally feel like we’re on the other side of it. We have a worship pastor coming on board within the month, we’ve been heavily involved in missions and community projects, and we’ve almost finished up our church bylaws. We’ve had a few new families join us recently and we’ve absolutely fallen in love with them. We’re going to have a “relaunch” of sorts in the fall where we stress our missional objectives anew and focus on bringing more people into the fold through evangelism and community. It’s an exciting time in the life of our church.
I started a business a few months ago that’s taking off. I’ve been doing graphic design and website development on the side for several years, but decided to officially pursue that in order to supplement our income and keep the church from having to crank my salary up. I really enjoy doing it and it seemed like a natural fit; I’m pleased to announce that business has been picking up quite a bit in recent weeks and I’ve got several exciting projects I’m working on now. The business is called Authentic Studios, and unfortunately I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had the opportunity to finish up the company website.
Emily and I took a vacation in March. We hung out in St. Louis for about a week and had a great time. I love her more and more each day, so getting away for a while was a real treat and it had been way too long since we’d managed to do that. You can check out some photos of our trip in my online gallery at this link.
I recently returned from Oaxaca, Mexico. Milestone Church sent a few of our guys down there for a mission trip. There’s a LOT to say about that, but I’ll save it for a future post I hope to get around to someday soon. I guess we’ll see.
Emily just finished up her first semester of nursing school. She worked super hard and pulled in some great grades. I’m really proud of her! She’s got summer classes now, so we’re enjoying her time off before she starts again in about a week.
Finally, we’re probably about to buy a house. We’ve been thinking about it for a while: we love Springfield and we’re starting to feel very settled here. For the first time in our married lives we’re able to pay the bills without major stress, and it feels like the right time.
So that kind of sums up the last couple of months. We’ve had a lot going on, but life’s an adventure and we’re excited about where God is taking us.
God Loves the Ku Klux Klan, Part 2
After presenting us with his grand theology of hatred, Mustache stared my wife down as if she’d slapped his baby. He stepped a little closer to us and I was afraid things were about to get ugly.
And then, like a light piercing the darkness, like a cool breeze on a scorching summery night, like a splash of milk on a dry Frosted Flake...it happened.
The Klansmen seemed to part and from behind stepped their leader: Big Beard.
Now I can only assume that in the Ku Klux Klan, your leadership is represented by the size of the mop attached to your face. And Big Beard had quite the mop: course grey and white hair that flowed a solid six inches past his chin.
He resembled an evil Santa Clause.
Apparently Big Beard was tiring of our shenanigans and wanted us gone. He finished up the explanation of their grand theology of hatred where Mustache had left off, going on about the abomination of the “mud people” and how whites are the only true descendants of Adam. He ripped the Jews as the Satanic offspring of Eve and the Serpent (no, I’m not making that up).
Finally, after a loud and great ending to his theological ramblings, he looked at us awaiting a response.
And that was when I started laughing. Hard.
I couldn’t help it; everything he said was so absolutely insane that I didn’t even know where to start. I quickly rebutted some of his idiotic statements and dispensed a little Bible trivia I thought would irritate him:
- Having studied Genesis, I know that the meaning of “Adam” is quite uncertain. Most scholars believe its meaning is related to “ground” or “earth.” Some believe it means “to be red.” But even if we go with the second meaning, drawing the conclusion that it points to one’s ability to blush is an absolute fallacy: the premise doesn’t prove the conclusion. If we take it at it’s literal meaning, “to be red,” Adam would have to be a Native American or a Teletubby.
- Moses’ wife Zipporah was probably black since she was a Cushite.
- It’s extremely likely that the Ethiopian Eunich in Acts was black: a man who Philip leads to Christ and then baptizes.
- Jesus was a Jew. Seriously.
Well it was at this point that they all started talking so loud we really couldn’t understand what they were saying anymore.
So more giggling ensued on our part.
After a few more minutes of discussion (and by that, I mean them yelling at us), we decided that we’d accomplished exactly what we set out to accomplish. Emily, Carnes, and I turned around and left the angry mob of Klansmen alone with their “God Hates Fags” protest signs. They were flaming mad.
Ironic, eh?
God Loves the Ku Klux Klan, Part 1
It’s not every day that I get to have an argument with a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And yet I found myself doing just that in downtown Chicago, surrounded by curious onlookers, my wife, my good friend Josh Carnes, and a cluster of homosexuals. But maybe I should back up a little bit…
Since our recent move to Chicago we’ve had quite a few family members and close friends come up to see us and to experience the city for the first time (it really is incredible). Slowly but surely Emily and I have begun to plan out our official “Chicago Tour” for company when they only have a couple of days to spend with us. Currently we have the “Nice” tour (for people who have money and are willing to buy our tickets since we don’t—mainly our parents) and the “Cheap” tour (usually consists of four hot dogs and watching a Cubs game in our apartment—mainly utilized by our other friends).
I knew Josh Carnes would love the Field Museum, so we headed that way. It’s close to Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears and a massive parking garage where we left the car for the day. On our short walk over to the museum from the stadium we saw a group of eight men standing on the corner of the sidewalk and holding signs with loving messages such as, “God Hates Fags,” and “‘I Apologize to Sodom’ -God.”
Now I had heard about a “church” from Kansas that did this on a regular basis and even had a website devoted to spreading their propaganda. So, naturally, I wanted to chat with these men and see what organization they were with.
I looked at Josh Carnes and asked, “Hey…wanna go talk to them?”
“You know you’re not going to change their minds, man,” he said.
I laughed. “I know…I’m not trying to change their minds. I just want to go poke the bull.”
And so we did... Read More...
Vacation Time!
We’re excited about some time off and I’ll be posting pics and videos when we return. Hopefully this trip will be as much fun as our last big adventure.
Catch you guys in a week!
Houston...We Have Facelift
Joshcrain.com has had quite a few evolutions since I started it in 2005. With each shift we’ve added more features (or taken away useless ones), but the goal has always been the same: writing and discussion that isn’t afraid to celebrate, ponder, question, and rethink the Christian faith. Authenticity. Honesty.
In order to better facilitate that, we’ve eliminated the old forum. It hasn’t been used much since we were forced to lock it down due to constant spamming by online bots. We’re considering adding it back with a much sleeker version, but that will have to wait for some time.
There is a new Essay section that has much more in-depth articles than our blog entries could ever hope to accomplish. We’re starting with only four articles, but we’ll be adding more over time (though certainly not with the frequency of our blog posts).
And speaking of frequency...the blog hasn’t been updated lately due to the mountain of work that was involved in finishing up the website redesign. With that behind us blogging should be much more consistent.
Finally, our Podcast page actually has podcasts on it now. For too long it only contained a handful. It currently has 8, with several more to be uploaded later this week and then weekly after that.
Thanks for checking out the website refresh. I look forward to conversing with you guys in the coming weeks and months.
"Take Back Halloween" 2008
"Take Back Halloween" started four years ago and it's generally gotten a little bigger and a little more extravagant each year. After some churches in the town we grew up in tried to steal Halloween from the fun and spooky time it used to be with their "Fall Festivals" and "Best Biblical Character Costume" competitions, my friend Josh Carnes and I decided the best thing we could do was reclaim it.
So the first year Carnes came down to Dallas and we've done the last two years in Chicago. This year we're doing a combination of Kansas City and Springfield. Basically we take 3-5 evenings in a row and go non-stop with haunted houses, horror movies, and candy. Lots and lots of candy. We typically eat at delicious restaurants, spend at least one night doing almost nothing, and this year we'll even be having spicy steaks (I can FINALLY get a grill where I live!).
Past guest appearances have been made my brother Caleb, Ashley Bergeron, Alyssa Meadows, and a host of other fine folks. My friends Dave and Anna have typically shown up when they can and my wife even gets in on the scary action. This year we'll be adding a couple of others to the festivities as well. It's one of my most relaxed and favorite times of the year.
To check out photos of our fun times from this year, take a look at our Halloween 2008 Photo Album, which will be updated nightly.
What's the Worst That Could Happen?
So a while back I wrote about the fact that I’d dropped some weight and began running on a regular basis. In March of this year my friend Josh Carnes and I completed a half-marathon (and my lovely wife Emily even participated in a 5k, her first run since high school).
The goal all along has been for us to run a marathon before Carnes turns 30 years old. Frankly, time is running out.
So we’ve signed up and paid our fees to enter the annual Disney World Marathon to take place this January 11, 2009. Given the fact that I’ve blown off running and working out since our half-marathon in March, I have exactly 16 weeks to prepare myself for this bad boy of 26.2 miles.
I figure that in the worst case scenario I’ll underprepare, suck up the race, and get consoled by Snow White and some dwarves. I’ve been through much worse in life, so no worries.
Pastoring Without a Handbook
I’ve been a senior pastor for 2 1/2 months now. There isn’t really a handbook for how to handle every situation you come across and I think it’s okay to be honest about something: there isn’t a great solution for every problem you’ll face. So sometimes you just prayerfully do the best you can.
Get comfortable with the fact that you won’t always know the perfect course of action to pursue in any given situation. Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s difficult to know all the repercussions of any single decision that you’ll be forced to make.
I say all this (vaguely, I realize) to encourage other pastors and church leaders. You will face some difficult decisions over time and you will face opposition from people both in your church and outside of it. The best advice I can give you is simply this: follow after Jesus Christ with all of your heart in everything you do and every decision you make. Filter everything through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you do that, if you honestly try to follow hard after Him in everything, then you can irreproachably sit back and let the chips fall where they may.
As a church leader, your integrity is everything. Don’t compromise it.
Even when it’s hard; even when it may cost you your job.
For the last 2 1/2 months I have faced challenges that are completely unique to my church. Without going into details, I’ll just say that there was a lot to do when I started here and a lot of very difficult decisions to make. I feel that we’re through the worst of it, however, and we’re now in a place where we can simply move forward and minister to our community and our world without the distractions of the past. This is more than a “positive” step forward; this is the beginning of a new era and a fresh start for our church.
In the last month we’ve gained a new name, a new facility, and a new website. We’ve left the problems of the past exactly where they belong: in the past. We’ve started fresh and I’m so excited to see what God has for us moving forward. It’s truly an exciting time.
Last week I spent countless hours (countless because I was half asleep for many of them) working on our new website, and I’m happy to announce that it’s now up and running. We’ll be adding new content to it over the coming weeks and months, but it’s now officially open to the public. Check out the new website if you’d like, and let me know what you think about it. You can view it at this link.
I’ll try and post a little more later this week about the series we’ve been doing and how it’s affecting our thought process going forward. In the meantime, I hope everyone had a happy Labor Day.
Be blessed and be a blessing.
Eat a Blizzard
I have a very personal interest in this as my younger brother was diagnosed with cancer before his second birthday and wasn’t supposed to live to see his third. Thanks to the grace of God and the work of the Children’s Miracle Network my brother Caleb is alive to this day and serving at a church in Durango, Colorado as worship pastor.
I realize that many of my readers are broke and can rarely donate extra money to good causes like this. That’s fine. But it’s hot outside and surely you can afford to purchase a Blizzard to cool off and give a little money to a very worthy cause.
Besides, Strawberry Cheesecake Blizzards are good for you. They have fruit in them!
Top 5 Embarrassing Songs I Work Out To
I was running a few days ago. A good friend and I have decided to run a marathon in January and the time has come for training to begin in earnest. As I was running a song began playing that I thoroughly enjoy running to, but that I’d be flat out embarrassed for anyone to know was on my iPod. I realized I had several songs like that on my iPod Running playlist.
So I’m now doing the only logical thing: posting five of them on the internet for the entire world to see (because they all read my blog).
In no particular order, here are the songs that I am embarrassed to run with but just can’t bring myself to remove from my iPod:
1. Crazy for This Girl, by Evan & Jaron
2. Don’t Cha, by The Pussycat Dolls
3. With You, by Jessica Simpson
4. Why Not, by Hilary Duff
5. Stars Are Blind, by Paris Hilton
I have to admit that it was difficult to come clean of the Paris Hilton song. Now I know what it must feel like to confess to murder.
Exhausted and Encouraged
After preaching at my church Sunday evening, Emily and I rushed home to pack up our clothes, drove to Kansas City, and jumped on an airplane to Panama City Beach, Florida. This may sound like the beginning of a vacation; it’s not.
We didn’t get to sleep at all before our 6:00 a.m. flight and then we didn’t arrive in PCB until 11:00. We drove straight from the airport to a youth camp where, since Monday, I have preached three different messages every day.
I’ve preached over 10 messages this week and I’m exhausted. But you know what else? I’m excited. The students that we’ve worked with this week have been fantastic and they give me a lot of hope.
Last week while I was preparing for all the messages I had to deliver this week, I began doing some in-depth research on the status of the Christian church in the United States. Between 3,500 and 4,000 churches are closing down every year. Eighty percent of all church are either in decline or have plateaued and are showing no signs of growth. Of the 20% that are growing, only 1 in 20 are growing because of conversions. The others are growing because people are leaving other churches to join their church.
The church has simply not done a good job of being relevant in today’s world. We just haven’t. While some of us are currently trying to rethink the way we do ministry in order to better reach a progressivly more postmodern mindset, many churches have decided to be content with doing the same thing and focusing more on their programming than the people.
What we desperately need to recapture is the biblical concept that Christianity is a way of life. Not something we do once a week on Sundays, not a list of rules that we live by, not even a “life style.”
The way of Jesus is life.
The reason I’ve been encouraged this week is because I saw the light come on in the heads of some students here. After pushing them all week to see their faith as a way of life and not just supplemental to it, I saw the fire in a few of their eyes.
They get it.
Statistically, many churched high school students will stop going once they begin college. Typically this is because they have never taken ownership of their faith and the waltzed through junior high and high school only attending their youth group because their parents made them or they had friends who attended.
But if these students can take hold of their faith now, if they can understand right here and right now that the Way of Jesus is their way of life...then the sky is the limit on how God can use them now and once they leave for college.
I’m exhausted...but I’m excited. It’s 4:00 a.m. and I can hear the waves lapping the shore. The very God who set their boundries in place is the one who has been working in the lives of these students this week. To Him be the glory, the honor, and the praise.
A New Day
In January of this year I began putting out resumes for a full-time senior pastor position. I'd been co-leading a church plant in Chicago for the past year and a half and, through a variety of different events, felt that God was leading me to a full time pastorate.
After spending countless hours scouring through thousands of churches with openings, Emily and I decided to send resumes out to a small handful that we felt would possibly be a good fit for us. I wasn't just looking for "a job," but I wanted to go wherever it was that God would lead me on this journey and find a church that I would fit in well with.
To make a very long story as short as possible, after lots of interviews, visits, and prayer, my wife and I finally landed at a new church. It was a grueling process, but now that we've come out on the other side we are extremely excited about where God has brought us.
We are in Springfield, Missouri. Our church is in a transition period right now: we're about to come up with a new name, location, meeting time, and website. In a lot of ways, we're planting a church with some resources and a committed body of believers already in place. The people in our church are wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ who have a heart for living out the Kingdom of God: right here, right now. Though I'm not a huge fan of labels because of the preconceived ideas that often accompany them, we would be considered an emerging church. Emily and I couldn't be more excited to join them on this journey and see what God has in store for us all.
I'll be continuing to use this blog for personal updates and occasional theological thoughts. But I'll also begin to share my thoughts on pastoring and some of the difficulties and challenges in being a Kingdom community. I want this blog to be a resource and a learning tool for young ministers and a progress report on the growth of a very young emerging church that's finding it's identity and working to become an earthly representation of our heavenly Father.
This week marks the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. Emily and I are excited to have you all joining us on the journey.
Update From the Road
We've been updating it regularly with stories from the road and I'd love to see your comments on it.
Have a great week and I'll catch you all soon!
Cheers from New York City,
Josh
Gasoline
The Launching Pad
Well, according to our Road Trip USA book, the first side stop we would want to make would be The Launching Pad, a nifty little hole-in-the-wall diner with a gigantic Space Man Wrestler Rocket Holder guy outside.
Inside the young woman who took our order was nice, but not very helpful in guiding us toward a dining decision:
"What's good?
"Everything!"
"Okay...well, what gets ordered the most?"
"Everything."
"Okay, we'll have that."
*blank stare...blinking...
"Okay, I'll take a bacon cheeseburger and a chocolate shake."
To be fair, the food was pretty good...
Eddie Izzard
The guy is an absolute genius: a rock star among his fellow comics. The show started with bright lights and loud music; Eddie walked on stage and bowed to either side of the audience amidst what had to be some of the loudest applause I'd ever heard.
From there he said he wanted to talk "about everything that has ever happened." And he did.
He talked about hamsters, badgers, and giraffes. He mimed dinosaurs going to church, Noah's wife trying to keep the ark clean, and Latin-speaking people trying to conjugate their language quickly enough to warn each other of danger. He made mince meat of a few hecklers, he showed us how the stone age began, and he explained why there are very few movies about farmers ("farming is so dull...'Earl, you killed by cabbage! I'm gonna poison your asparagus'").
I've been a fan for a long time, and getting to see him in person was an awesome treat and one more thing I can check off my "bucket list."
Patrick the Crazy Guy
As we boarded the Metra train to ride into Chicago and see Eddie Izzard perform, what appeared to be a kindly middle-aged man looked at my wife and said...
"HELLO, LOVE!!!"
To which my wife politely responded, "...well, hello."
And then he sang for us. A whole song. Loudly.
His voice must have been really bad when he first started practicing.
The Lumpy Places
So there's this book, and it has several wonderful conversations contained within its pages. One conversation goes something like this:
The last couple of months have been absolutely dizzying. After an enormous amount of prayer, counsel, and discussion, Emily and I have decided to accept an offer to come as lead pastor of a church that is not in the Chicago area. We're extremely excited about the opportunity and I'll have a lot more details to share with all of you in the coming days.“Where will you go?”
“America.”
“We’re in America right now, Don.”
“Yeah, I know. But there are other parts to America. I’d like to see the other parts. I was looking at a map the other day, you know, and Texas was sort of brown with some green, a few hills, but then there were other places that were more green with big lumpy mountains. I'd like to go to those places.”
“Do you think God is out there somewhere? Out there in the lumpy places?”
“I think God is everywhere.”
“Then why do you have to leave?”
“Because I can’t be here anymore. I don’t feel whole here. I feel, well, partly whole. Incomplete…..Something got crossed in the wires……Do you know what I am talking about, about the green lumpy places?”
The conversation went on like this for about an hour. I went on and on about how the real me was out in the green lumpy places. I wasn’t making any sense. I can’t believe my pastor didn’t call the guys with the white coats to take me away.
In the meantime, I'm headed to the "lumpy places." Me, my beautiful wife, and my friend Josh Carnes have decided to take an amazing road trip to finish off this chapter of our lives and help us prepare for the next. We'll be driving through Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., Ocean City, Atlantic City, Trenton, New York, Boston, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and a host of other places. We'll be seeing baseball bat factories, Hershey chocolate plants, Dinosaur World, the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, and a host of other stuff.
And we're leaving tomorrow. But wait, there's more...
We'll be blogging, photographing, podcasting, and filming the lumpy places. You can check out our trip website at www.LumpyPlaces.com.
I may be posting updates on both sites, and thanks to some cellular wizardry we'll be able to publish new entries from the comfort of the official Lumpy Places Jeep (which, sadly, just received $1,200 worth of repairs...sigh). Check in often for tales of amazement and wonder (as well as embarrassing snapshots and humiliating videos).
How I Fell In Love With the Church Again, Part 1
But when I got older, she turned on me. Her warm smile disappeared and the light in her eyes grew dim as she pushed me away time and time again. She stabbed me in the back, she rejected me for petty differences, and she withheld the love and the comfort that she had lavished on me as a child.
Lady Lou, Lady Lou, all I want to do
Is Just sit and be held by you
Lady Lou, Lady Lou, no matter what I do
You turn away, you walk away from me
So I try and I fail, 'cause I don't know, I can't tell
What you want, my dear Lady Lou
But I'm starting to know, 'cause it's starting to show
You're not the dear I thought you to be
Lady Lou was the most hurtful person in my life because it's brutally painful to have someone you love turn against you.
Lady Lou was my metaphor for the church.
Through my employment on three different church staffs I saw how ugly the church can be. I witnessed the political maneuvering and the backbiting. I observed people who were more willing to shout charges of heresy than to sit down with their perceived enemies to discuss their differences. I saw pastors turn on staff, congregants turn on one another, and cliques fighting other cliques over the most ridiculously shallow things you can imagine.
I saw others targeted and I was targeted myself. And throughout all of this, I began to grow more calloused toward the church. The church that I revered, loved, and had committed to serve for the rest of my life seemed as if it were trying to push me away. "Unwanted." That's how I felt. There are deep scars from all of this conflict.
For the last two years I have struggled through all of these issues. At times I've thought about it too much, to the point that it was unhealthy. And then God began to pierce through my calloused heart and heal me from the inside out.
I'll write more about that journey in Part 2.
The Best Service I've Been a Part Of
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An Update...Finally!
Thankfully, I spoke with both of those people on the phone this week and they were very understanding.
For those of you who I don't know quite as well, here is what's been going on lately...
Totally Random
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"It's nothing personal...": Failed Evangelism
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Enjoy the Day...
We'll be headed off to (what else?) a cookout! Looking forward to the meat, I gotta say.
Read More...
Allow Myself to Introduce...Myself
The first Josh Crain who contacted me was a Calvinist college student who disagreed with my critiques of Albert Mohler's handling of the Katrina hurricane. This Josh Crain is a tattoo artist from Oklahoma, but I welcomed both emails all the same.
Fire in the Hole
“Hello?”
“Hey, man.”
“Hey! How’s it going?”
“Oh, it’s okay. I just thought I’d give you a call and let you know that my apartment’s on fire.” Read More...
My Hero
Read More...
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...
I knew this was coming, but I was thinking mid- to late-Novemberish. Growing up in the Dallas area, you really only expect to see snow about two or three days out of the year at most, so I know this is going to be a change for us.
The good news? Emily’s family has a tradition where her grandma makes homemade doughnuts at the first snowfall every year. Since we’re a long way from home, Emily called her grandmother to get the recipe and then made a LOT of doughnuts that night; probably 45 in all. No wonder her grandmother always has the whole family over-it’s a BIG recipe!
I’m currently trying to change the tradition from doughnuts at the first snowfall to doughnuts at every snowfall. That way we can finish the winter up 20% happier and 45 pounds heavier.
God bless doughnuts...
Scuba Away the Troubles
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Whirlyball
Read More...
Life Without Soda
We both gasped for air; her lungs and immune system were shutting down because of a difficult battle with Parvo and I was retching because I couldn’t stand to see my little dog, my buddy, my companion go like this. Only six hours earlier I had reassuringly pat her on the head and let her know that she would be okay. I had assumed that she had a stomach virus and would pull out just fine; she was young and vibrant. She was beautiful.
I don’t think I ever could have imagined just how strongly I would react to Soda’s passing. In the hours that followed I cried harder than I have in many, many years. I didn’t understand that; wasn’t she just a dog?
I felt childish and selfish; thousands of people have recently lost loved ones or homes in a terrible disaster along the southern coast of the United States and here I was grieving over an animal I had only known for a year. I should have been comforted by the fact that I still have my wife. I should have been comforted by the fact that I still have my parents and my brother. I should have been comforted by the fact that I still have relatives and friends and a church body that I dearly love.
But I wasn’t.
It’s never selfish to grieve over something you love. My wife and I loved Soda. She was a joyous animal who loved us back. She played with all of her might and she was always there. Have a good day at work? Great!, she seemed to say when you came home. Let’s play! Have a bad day at work? Let’s play! When people doubt your motives, your heart, your theology, or your dedication it’s great to have a Soda to come home to. She just wanted to be with us, to play with us; and for no other reason than she loved us. That is something I feel that I can take from her short life, and it’s as simple as it is profound: she just loved us.
Soda was the first dog that my wife and I had together. In reflection I realize that one of the reasons I loved her so much was because I love my wife so much. Soda shed a lot. She liked to get dirty outside and she would even try to drink out of the toilet if you weren’t looking. She wasn’t a perfect dog, but she was our dog. She was the dog I thought that our children would play with and the dog that I believed would move with us to any place in the country the Lord leads us.
Now she’s gone.
Late last night I went into the kitchen and saw her food bowls sitting on the floor next to the counter. In my mind I had an image of her standing over the bowls, munching away with her ears pinned back and her eyes making contact with mine as she crunched vigorously. As the memories came flooding back, so did the tears. It’s going to be a hard week, but I’m so thankful for those memories.
I find that as you grow closer to Christ, you begin to see the world the way He does. Because of that the joys are more joyous…but the pains are more painful. The difficulty that I have had with her passing can only be surpassed by the happiness that she brought us over the last year. If it’s silly for me to greave the death of our cherished little dog, then I’m okay with being silly. I simply cannot stop or mask how badly my heart hurts.
Soda, thanks for loving us; we loved you, too. Goodbye, girl. You are dearly missed.
on the side...
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