Author Archives: scott

Bull!

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Living in the country has it’s own unique style or mood to it.  The rythm of life seems to be closer to the natural patterns of the seasons.   We dont’ have to deal with traffic jams, noise pollution and big crowds.  But we do occassionaly have to deal with roaming ‘critters’.  Yesterday afternoon as I was walking to the church for a session meeting, oblivious to the world around me thanks to my iPod and Eric Clapton.  Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a rather large, solid black bull loose in the field beside the church.  When you realize you’re a few yards away from one of these with no fence to seperate you, you come to your senses no matter how loud the volume is, they also are twice as big if there’s no fence.  The bull of course was much more interested in the grass than me. 

We’ve had flying squirrels loose in the sanctuary before.  A donkey in the front yard of the manse and deer have been known to charge their reflections in glass doors.  And that’s not mentioning the strange sightings…

Church Bull  Bull

Starting the year off right

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About a year ago I discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I was feeling completely overwhelmed with my PhD research and this guide to productivity really helped me get a grip on what I was doing. It is also a very effective system for a pastor, especially the idea of dividing lists of things to do into contexts so that you only look at what needs to be done when you are at a place you can do them. Since ministry can be so ambiguous, take place in so many settings and inherently based on responding to crises and being available to people with all sorts of needs Allen’s concepts are especially fitted for this type of work. To begin the year, I’ve been doing a review and check up on my system.

There’s all sorts of resources and discussion on the net, apparently GTD has become popular among IT type folks as well. Lifehacker.com, one of my favorite sites to follow recently posted this GTD Roundup.

K.I.S.S.

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I’ve been trying to apply the mantra Keep It Simple Stupid to my sermons since returning to the pulpit.  I don’t know if it has improved my preaching but I plan on continuing to focus on simplicity.

You see, the big temptation I have is to try to be creative or put a new spin on a text, or look at it from a fresh perspective.  This is understandable, given that sermons (especially following the lectionary) can get as repetitive, boring and stale to preach as they can be to listen to.  So I find myself tempted to makes something more interesting by developing a more complicated sermon structure or approaching a text from a less obvious way, looking at inferences or subplots rather than the main point.  The problem is that complexity makes a sermon more difficult to follow and the less obvious bits I seem to pick up on can tend to also be less important; there’s a reason the main point of the text is the main point.

So I’ve committed myself of a year of preaching the most basic, simple and obvious message of each Sunday’s text in order to serve the meat and potatoes instead of intellectual delicacies and creative, theological tidbits.  As I do so I find myself pushed to make things more interesting by focusing more on presentation, illustration and clarity.

This seems like an obvious thing to do, but when you come to a story for the 10th year in a row the first question seems to be, ‘How can I deal with this that isn’t just like what I’ve done the past three times’ rather than ‘What does this say to us, here and now?’

Gosh!

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Touchstone ran an article on one of my favorite movies: Napoleon Dynamite.

The point of the movie seems to be this: “Flying solo,” that is, the individualistic pursuit of one’s own happiness apart from the good of others, culminates in misery, and the only way to grow as a human, or even to become human, is through a thick community of support, responsibility, and love. Playing by oneself, as Napoleon is wont to do at the tetherball pole, is unrewarding and pitiful.

Read it Here. Discuss.

St Andrew and Billy Graham

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I preached on the story of the calling of the first disciples from John this past Lord’s Day.  (I’ve been using the historic one year lectionary.)  I introduced the sermon by asking what people think of when they hear the words ‘evangelist’ or ‘evangelism’.  I used examples of people knocking on strangers’ doors, handing out the ‘four spiritual laws’ on the beach or a slick-looking TV preacher. 

As I continued the sermon the point I made was that evangelism is usually something simple like sharing the gospel with a neighbour, like Philip and Nathaniel in the town where Andrew and Peter were from, or sharing with a relative, like Andrew with his brother Peter.  I went on to explain how Peter had a prominent position among the disciples, but it was throught he invitaton of the lesser disciple Andrew that he came to Christ in the first place.  The point I tried to make was that through the seemingly small act of inviting someone to ‘come and see’ the Lord, we can have an even larger impact than we imagine.  To further illustrate this point I said that someone, somewhere once invited Billy Graham to meet Jesus.  Most of us don’t remember who that was, we couldn’t name them, but God called Billy Graham through someone’s invitation.

Anyway, as I was greeting folks on their way out someone told me that when I asked for what came to mind when I mention ‘evangelist’, they thought of Billy Graham.  I felt like there was a point in there somewhere.

Children, Community and the Little Red Hen

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I went to the elementary school this past week for their ‘reader’s theatre’ where I witnessed a stellar rendition of ‘the Little Red Hen’ featuring my own 5 year old daughter.

While there I shared small talk with other parents and grandparents who I normally wouldn’t have run in to.  As other grades performed their skits I thought about how the common interest of our children brings a community together.  I’m in a room with folks I don’t have much else in common with, certainly no abstract ideals or causes, just a shared interest in the welfare of our children.  It made me wonder how much of our national polarization and breakdown in our communities is a result of our lower birth rate and selfish attitudes of children as a ‘choice’.  Just pondering…

Autumn

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The trees this year have been as nice as I have ever seen. The picture at the top of the site was taken from my back yard. A good bit of the leaves have fallen now but the past few weeks has been an incredible display of color. As I drove into Memphis this past Monday there was some road work and traffic was backed up. I’d rather be stuck behind a slow moving tractor on a road surrounded by explosions of red and orange than behind a construction crew surrounded by a river of angry commuters anyday.

Not completely unrelated, here’s a picture of a view from the back yard of the Bemerton Parsonage, where George Herbert lived.

Bemerton Parsonage