This week Anita and I are attending a pastor’s conference in Hamilton, Ohio, down near Cincinnati. I’m writing this before we leave, but I know what will happen there. We’ll bump into old friends we’ve built relationships with over many years. We’ll ask each other how things are going in our churches, and we’ll all say how great it is going.
No one wants to say, “Things are going really badly”, or “We’re”, losing people weekly”, or “I’m so discouraged I’m thinking of resigning.” So, we preachers just lie to each other about how wonderful things are, when they’re really not. Ministers dress up like we’re successful and smile like we’re confident. Call it faith if you want, but I still think its a lie. Why do we do this?
In the church world, we don’t want to admit our weaknesses. So, we don’t bring our real lives, just what we want others to believe. Many lay-people do the same thing in church on Sundays. They come, but they won’t open up and share their pain. I still think that’s a lie.
We do have a few friends who are honest, and know they can trust us with the truth. That’s genuine Christianity, and we go to reconnect with these people. Pray that God will use us to encourage other pastors and their wives.
Tags: care
In his book One Anothering, Richard C. Meyer recalled this incident:
I was a student minister at a little church up on the Hudson River – I’d go up every weekend from Princeton, where I was in seminary. I met my wife in that church, in fact. “Fellowship” consisted of a monthly meeting of the women’s association and an occasional men’s breakfast, where you had a baseball or football player come in and give his testimony.
Then one weekend, I found out some shocking news: a teenage girl in the congregation had left town to go to her older brother’s. She was pregnant. I said to the dear woman who told me, “Could I go and see her?”
“Oh, no,” she replied, “You’re the last person she wants to know what’s happened.”
Suddenly it hit me: That’s what’s wrong with the church in our time. It’s the place you go when you put on your best clothes; you sit in Sunday school, you worship, you have a potluck dinner together – but you can’t bring your life! You leave behind all your pain, your brokenness, your hopes, even your joys.”
How do you think New Hope is doing in that area?
Tags: care, church, grace, mercy
In a Bill Moyers interview, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., made reference to the work of Marshall Klaus, one of her former colleagues at Stanford Medical School. Klaus, who was chief of the intensive care nursery, conducted an experiment in which half the babies in the nursery would be treated as usual, that is to say with high-tech incubators and millions of dollars of equipment, and the other half would be touched for fifteen minutes every few hours. Nurses would simply take their “pinky” finger and gently rub it down the backs of these tiny infants.
This was out of the ordinary as these intensive care babies were not often touched for fear of getting germs on them. The results were astounding. They discovered that the babies who were touched survived better. Dr. Remen said, “No one knows why. Maybe there’s something about touching that strengthens the will to live. Maybe isolation weakens us.”
What do you think is the secret of these babies’ increased survival?
Tags: babies, care, fellowship, touch