FEELING AND THINKING

Sometimes, when I am in a counselling session with a troubled individual, I will use a question to help them get a hold of what it going on in their lives.  I will say something like, “What are you feeling?” or “How did (does) that make you feel?”.  A significant number of people will answer the question by saying, “I think…” and then going on to give a reasoned response that tells me two things:  first, they know what they should feel and secondly, they have no idea what they personally feel.  Often, I will keep asking the question, pointing out that they are giving me thoughts instead of feelings until they either tell me to stop or begin to see their feelings.

There are significant and deep connections between what we feel and what we think but they are actually two different processes and two different viewpoints.  We all feel and we all think–and in the long run, it is good to know the difference between the two as well as how they are related and interact.

My feelings affect my thinking–and my thinking affects my feelings.  The less I am aware of my thinking or my feeling, the more complicated the process becomes and the less I am in control of any of it.  For many people, the difficulty is that we don’t recognize or acknowledge our feelings–and that opens the door for those unrecognized and unacknowledged feelings to dominate my thinking.

I am an introvert, a reality which means I tend to be uncomfortable in large groups of people.  The larger the group, the more uncomfortable I feel.  Unless I can be assured of a certain amount of physical and psychological space, I have serious negative feelings.  So, when the possibility of going to something where there will be a lot of people, I need to take that into consideration.

If I don’t consider my initial negative feelings, I can think myself into lots of good reasons for not going:  parking will be a problem; it will be late and I am tired; it will cost too much; a riot might break out; it will be a great spot for a terrorist to strike; someone there might have the flu–well, you get the idea.  When I don’t take into consideration my feelings, my thinking falls into alignment with my feelings and gives me reasons for not doing (or doing) what my feelings want.

Now, when the feelings are about a crowded concert, that is one thing.  But my feelings can have serious affects on all my life.  If I was abused by a school teacher, I can and probably will let those feelings affect my entire view of education–especially if I repress the feelings and pretend that the abuse didn’t happen or didn’t affect me or doesn’t matter.  My thinking gets distorted by the feelings that I haven’t been willing or able to deal with.

From my perspective as a pastor and occasional counsellor, the solution to the issue of feelings dominating thinking is simple.  All we need to do is admit and accept our feelings.  As a pastor and occasional counsellor, I recognize that this can be a very painful, difficult and time-consuming process that is anything but easy.  Sometimes, it can seem to an individual to be beyond their ability, which is why God has given us pastors, counsellors and therapists of various kinds–having someone there to help us through the painful process of coming to grips with our feelings makes a real difference.

In the end, the more we recognize and understand and accept the reality of our feelings, the freer we are to actually live our lives.  Rather than be guided and directed by what we don’t know and thus don’t control, we are able to think better because we know all (or at least more of) the factors that have been causing problems.  We can take into account our feelings but we can also think of ways around them and ways to deal with them and reasons why the feelings can be ignored or deal with in a better way.

Asking people how they are feeling is an important part of my pastoral and counselling processes–and it can be a valuable tool for any of us.  The more we understand our feelings, the freer our thought process.

May the peace of God be with you.

I AM A…

I grew up in a small town that had at least five different denominational congregations with at least one independent congregation.  I also grew up in the era when basically, everyone when to worship on Sunday–as far as I know, we didn’t have any Seventh Day groups in the community.  That meant that everyone in the town “belonged” to some group or another.  It also meant that we generally knew why we didn’t belong to one of the other groups.

Of course, the reasons we didn’t belong to one of the other groups were always because of something our group did much better.  We Baptists, for example, were proud of the fact that when we worshipped, it was under the leading of God, not some canned worship program written long ago by people who obviously weren’t Baptist.  We were also convinced that those groups that actually used wine for Communion were just opening the door to alcoholism.  And of course, we allowed ourselves to be lead by God, not the Holy Spirit because the group that talked a lot about the Holy Spirit was definitely off base.  And we certainly were holding to the true Gospel, unlike that group that was moving off the theological base into liberalism.

So there we were–at least six separate groups, meeting at about the same time on Sunday morning, listening to each other’s church bells peel around the same time, singing many of the same hymns, reading from the same Bible (although some were using the RSV not the KJV), worshipping the same God of love and grace and working really hard to make sure we all knew how different we were.

Except, we really weren’t that different.  Our Baptist insistence on extemporaneous prayers rather than a prayer book tended to fall apart when you actually listened to the prayers we made–the prayers tended to sound pretty much the same from week to week.  We didn’t have written prayers but we did a lot of repetition and saying the same thing week after week.

And more seriously, we all had our theological strengths and our practical weaknesses.  The “liberal” denomination was trying to actually show God’s love in concrete ways.  The “Holy Spirit” group was trying to open themselves to the movement of God in daily life.  The liturgical worship approaches were trying to tie is together with the deep historical roots of the church.  Our Baptist group, well, we were trying to make sure that there was room for individuality in faith.

Together, we has a deeper, fuller and more complete understanding of what God was trying to show us and teach us and ask of us.  Together, the churches in our community came close to understanding the fullness of the Gospel.  Unfortunately, we were too much interested in our own small insights and understandings to really benefit from the things that we could learn from each other.  We had to be right and they had to be wrong.

I am deeply appreciative of the fact that I live and work in a very different church climate.  I am aware that there are still many places where the church or parts of it are more concerned with division and difference than unity and similarity but I don’t work there and don’t want to be there.

I think the process of moving to a new place began when I started to understand that it was alright to question my own group, to be open about the things that we did and didn’t do that caused problem for the faith.  I moved from there to realizing that others had similar realities–there was some good and some bad.  And I realized that I was free to challenge the bad in my group and import some of the good from other groups.  I didn’t stop being Baptist–but I did begin to realize that before I was Baptist, I was a follower of Jesus Christ.

And as a follower of Jesus Christ, I am united with all other followers and can look at what others do in their journey in a different light.  When their journey helps someone else’s journey, it is great.  So I can borrow printed prayers, new translations, emphasis on the Holy Spirit and couple it with extemporaneous prayers, traditional hymns and grape juice–the goal is God, not Baptist.

May the peace of God be with you.

ANOTHER MEETING

A few years ago, I got is a bit of trouble over a joke.  It seems to me that ministry sometimes consists of going to meetings and at one meeting, I asked the participants how they could know for sure if they were in heaven or hell in the afterlife.  I thought the answer was simple:  if you were at a meeting in the afterlife, you were obviously in hell, not heaven.  I thought it was funny but others at the meeting didn’t see it the same way, but that is a story for another time.

Meetings are a fact of life in ministry.  And because I serve two separate collections of churches, I end up at more meetings.  As a result of these two different ministry settings, for example, I am currently part of two different ecumenical gatherings.  One is an actual council of churches and the other is a gathering of clergy.  Interestingly enough, they both do pretty much the same type of things.  Both meet monthly and both spend time getting to know each other better and working together on a variety of things that help the church as a whole.  And while I don’t much like meetings, the idea of churches and their leaders working together makes up for the necessity of attending meetings, most of the time anyway.

When I attend such meetings, I appreciate the opportunity to meet with other believers from other traditions.  I sometimes get frustrated when I recognize the limitations we face as different denominations but more often, I am more often trying to deal with the differences in personality that always complicate meetings.

Our gatherings do not represent the full Christian presence in our communities.  There are some Christian groups that choose not to take part and depending on the leadership at any particular time, some of the member groups may not have a very active participation.  But in the end, we meet together, we talk together, we plan together, we laugh together, and we support each other in difficult times.  We get to know each other’s individual and ecclesiastical differences.  We learn who does what well and who doesn’t do what well.  We discover who can offer which resources to the work we can do.

And in the process of meeting together, we are doing far more than we sometimes realize. As well as the planning and sharing and organizing that we do, we are also presenting our communities with a vision of the church as it is meant to be.  We aren’t planning to merge all our churches and become one.  But we are practising and showing an essential and basic unity of the faith that cuts across our denominational differences.  We are showing our communities that we might worship in different ways in different buildings at different times but we are all actually worshipping the same God because of the same Christ in the power of the same Holy Spirit.

We are telling our communities that no matter which building we worship in and no matter which style we worship in, we are in agreement and we are all heading in the same direction and we aren’t competing with each other.  And so when I have prayer with the Anglican lady who I see in the hospital during my visit with my Baptist people, she and her pastor know that I am not trying to steal anyone–and the community knows that we are all working for the same God.

And this is important because the more fragmented and fighting the church is, the weaker our witness.  If we who follow Christ in our different ways cannot get along, how can the world expect much of the faith we proclaim?  Our bickering and competition serve to give outsiders a reason for not considering faith–we undercut our mission and make to task of the Holy Spirit much harder when we aren’t willing to work together.

And so, I will attend the meetings–not because I love meetings.  I am still convinced that one of the joys of heaven will be the absence of meetings.  But I will continue to meet with fellow believers because that which we share is much deeper and much more significant than that which separates us.  We are joined together by our faith  now and forever.

May the peace of God be with you.

WHO ARE WE?

One of my Bible study groups just started a new topic.  Last year, we had planned to do a study of basic Christian doctrine and follow that up with a study of our specific denomination.  We got a bit sidetracked and spent several months on a study of the Holy Spirit but in both the Bible study groups I work with, getting sidetracked is one of the most exciting parts of the study process.

But this particular diversion meant that instead of going right from a study of Christian theology into a more specific denominational approach, we had a gap.  I had a concern that the gap would mean that we would lose sight of the connection between the two studies.  My original plan was to move right from one to the other, which would help us see ourselves as believers in a specific context within the wider church.

I think our study group will be able to make the connection–but just to make sure, I dug out and passed around a 2 page summary of Christian history that I developed years ago with help from a variety of sources.  But on a wider scale, one of my concerns throughout ministry has been that we believers have a terrible tendency to forget the big picture.

Because I belong to the Baptist segment of the church, I have a tendency to think that the rest of the church is somehow off course.  There are also people within this tradition who are absolutely convinced that anyone who isn’t a Baptist really isn’t part of the Church.  If such thinking were confined only to the Baptist segment, that would be a serious but somewhat manageable problem–the rest of the Church could ignore our thinking and get on with its business.

Unfortunately, the inability to contextualize denominational stances within the wider church seems to be one of the defining characteristics of  the church as a whole, at least in North America.  You would think that at a time when the whole Christian faith is experiencing a decline in the West, we would be more willing to pull together–but instead of pulling together, we are often doing our best to put each other down.

We even spend more time than any of us want to admit trying to convince believers from other segments of the Church to join our segment.  While some might call this evangelism, it really isn’t.  We are just rearranging the seating plan, not reaching into the darkness to rescue people as we are called to do.

But the reality is that we believers need to deal more effectively with all the other branches of the faith that we do at this point.  It is simply wrong to assume that everyone outside our particular brand is either wrong or needs to switch.  Christianity isn’t a competition to see who can capture the most from the “other side”.  The Church is a wide and diverse gathering of believers whose actual expression of the faith takes many forms and many styles, none of which is perfectly right or perfectly wrong.

Jesus died and rose to life for the sake of all humanity and instituted the Church as a place where those who follow him can grow and develop and fellowship and enable each other.  And he died and rose to life and instituted the church for Baptists and Catholics and the Africa Brotherhood Church and Brother Joe’s Independent Chapel and all the rest.  I may not feel particularly comfortable in Brother Joe’s Independent Chapel and I am much too happy being a married pastor to consider being a Catholic priest but I am joined to Brother Joe and the Roman Catholic church is deep, powerful and eternal ways that I need to recognize and strengthen.

The things that tie me to the rest of the church are important and basic.  The things that differentiate me from the rest of the church are also important–but nowhere near as important as the love and grace of God shown to all through the crucified, risen, living and someday to return Jesus Christ.  When I look at the Church through the lens of Jesus Christ, many of the things that separate me from other believers really aren’t that important.  So what if Anglicans use wine and Baptists use grape juice and the Africa Brotherhood Church uses some local dried powder reconstituted with questionable water?  We all see it as the blood of Christ, which ties us together with an unbreakable bond.

May the peace of God be with you.

WWJD

Every now and then, I am struck by the wonder and breadth of the Christian church.  The Church worships God and that worship comes from many places in many languages and in many forms.  Whether it is a formal, liturgical English service or a relaxed, informal Kikamba service, God is worshipped and it is still the church.  While some lament the fragmentation of the church into denominations, I actually rejoice in the diversity of the church–since we are all different as humans, it makes sense that God would allow the Church to develop structures and forms that allow everyone to have a place to comfortably worship God.

That aspect of our diversity excites and encourages me.  It says that God speaks our language; that God accepts our worship in all its diversity; that God cares about who we are and what has meaning for us.  We may struggle with human diversity but God seems to celebrate and encourage it.  I appreciate the ability to worship in different styles and languages with different approaches to music and liturgy and preaching.

But there is a dark side to our diversity.  The dark side begins when we become aware of our differences and begin to think that different automatically means that we are right and they are wrong.  It occurs when we begin to think that Jesus must have done things the way we do things and that he must somehow have put his stamp of approval on our ways.  When  we begin to claim that Jesus is on our side, we have moved into the darkness.

While I would like to think that Jesus was a Baptist, the reality is that Jesus was non-denominational.   He wasn’t Baptist or Catholic or Pentecostal or Anglican–but at the same time, he is all of these and more.  And so, while I read the New Testament with my Baptist bias and find support for believers’ baptism by full immersion, I need to realize that there is also support for other forms of baptism.  Would Jesus practise immersion or pouring or sprinkling?  Well, since there is no record of Jesus actually baptizing anyone, we can’t say for sure what he would have done.

And if we can’t say for sure what he would have done, we probably need to have a more open mind on baptism that we generally do.  That reality generalizes to most of church life.  We don’t have a clear and definitive model of the church in the New Testament.  Sometimes, it acts congregational, as it did in Acts 15 when the church was dealing with the issue of how to deal with the influx of Gentile believers coming from  Paul’s ministry. At other times, it acts as a hierarchy,  with the apostles exercising considerable authority, as we see in other places in the book of Acts and in some of Paul’s writings.

I am not sure that Jesus had any particular denominational approach in mind when he set up the church.  He wanted the church to be the gathering of the faithful, a place where believers could help each other and reach into the world.  He wanted the church to be known for its love to God and its members.  He wanted the church to show the world a better way–but whether we should have a congregational or hierarchical system of government didn’t enter the picture.

He wanted the church to be his agent in the world–but didn’t tell us how we should structure our worship, what language we should worship in, what type of music we should use, who should preach, what style of preaching we should use, how long the worship should be and so on.  Most of the things that we look at and consider important in the church don’t even rate a mention in the New Testament, which should tell us a lot.

Rather than  try to make the whole church the same or waste time fighting over our differences, we in the church need to remember to worship God, love each other and show the light to the world.  Beyond that, we can enjoy our particular spot in the diversity that is the church while appreciating and maybe even borrowing from the rest of the church.

May the peace of God be with you.

WHAT NOW?

Recently, several things have come together to suggest that I am not where I used to be.  It began one morning on vacation.  Our almost six year old granddaughter was playing with sidewalk chalk and decided that it would be great fun for her to draw my outline on the pavement.  I thought it would be fun as well, until I remembered that while I might get down on my back on the pavement, I probably wouldn’t get up, at least not without serious complaining from my knees.

I also spent some time with a friend who is planning a major week long wilderness hike along a trail that I had done a few years ago.  He gave me a serious invitation to join the group, an invitation that I very quickly turned down–it my knees can’t deal with getting up off of pavement, they are definitely not going to deal well with that hike.

Then, after getting back, I was catching up on some bits and pieces including looking at our denominational website.  I clicked to the page telling about various pastoral changes and discovered that a lot of pastors were retiring this year.  Some were part of my peer group and some were actually second career pastors whom I had taught during my various teaching stints.

But what probably tied these things together was the fact that I turned 65 during our vacation–one of the few birthdays I have been able to spend with at least some of our kids in a long time.  Normally, I am not too concerned with age but culturally, 65 is a significant point.  We get to retire, start drawing pensions and enjoy senior discounts.

But since I had decided a while ago that I was wasn’t ready to retire this year and so have deferred all my various pensions, I didn’t expect to pay much more attention to the birthday than any other.  The senior discount is a nice perk, but I am discovering that there are enough restrictions that even that may not be all that great.

So, I am 65.  In some ways, that doesn’t make any difference–I couldn’t have been a chalk model for my granddaughter last year or two years ago.  While I could retire, I am committed to the churches I work for a while yet–we are involved in things that will take more time to process.

But at the same time, it does make a difference.  I am discovering that I am not what I used to be and not what I see myself as.  Mentally, I have tended to see myself as some indeterminate age between 40 and 55–an age where I have few physical limits, good career prospects and lots of options.  But the reality of 65 is that I have serious physical limits, mostly associated with arthritis and other age-related issues.  My career options are limited–most congregations aren’t looking for 65 year old pastors and other options want the potential for a longer commitment.

On the other hand, I am 65.  I am doing what I am called to do to the best of my ability.  I might not be able to do a week long wilderness hike or lie down on pavement but I can use the exercise bike and find other ways to play with my grandchildren.  I might not have all the career options I once had but I am comfortable with the calling that God has given me right now and an content to let tomorrow take care of itself, or rather, to trust that God is at work taking care of tomorrow.

I am 65–do I feel 65?  Sometimes, I do–and sometimes I don’t.  In a week or two when the newness of 65 wears off, I am  probably going to treat my age as I always have.  It is there, it is a reality and I don’t need to let it have too much effect on me as I deal with the realities of my life.  There are things a lot more significant to deal with than the number of years I have accumulated.  But, if the senior discount is a good one, I will flash the 65 to get it.

May the peace of God be with you.

MOWING THE LAWN

            One of the last tasks I had to do before we left for our vacation was to mow the lawn.  One of the first tasks I had to do after getting back was to mow the lawn.  There was a time when I enjoyed mowing lawns–I remember when the first lawn mower showed up at our childhood home.  It was a push mower–no, not push the motorized mower rather than sit on the ride one mower.  It had no motor except for the person pushing.  I really wanted to mow the lawn when that mower showed up.

But after pushing the things for a few minutes, I discovered that mowing lawns was not a particularly good source of entertainment or fun.  Unfortunately, it became one of those things that needed to be done whether I wanted to do or not.  Even when I finally managed to end up somewhere where there was a mower with a real motor, the process of mowing lawns never really got beyond a have to.  As the mowers got older and broke down, there was some fun working on them to get them going again but a repaired mower is good for only one thing so even doing repairs lost some of its fun.

When we moved into the house belonging to the church my wife pastors, one of the men who looks after the house told me that they normally asked the minister to mow the lawn but that I should probably see that as my job–secretly, I was hoping that maybe they had planted spiritually mature grass that didn’t need mowing.  They graciously provided the mower and I less than graciously mow the lawn at regular intervals, including right before and right after vacation.

It is a duty, I guess–and duty has become something of a negative thing in our culture.  If we aren’t excited, thrilled, edified, fulfilled or something like that, the cultural pressure is to avoid it.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that cannot be avoided.  Like mowing the lawn, a lot of life needs to be taken care of, no matter how unfulfilling or unedifying or unfun it actually is.

I think the issue of “duty” has some significant spiritual roots.  Our relationship with God and our service of God doesn’t always thrill us.  When I was doing the work associated with my ninth funeral in three months, I didn’t get much of a thrill out of the process–the accumulated time and fatigue associated with so many funerals in such a short time meant that in the end, I was doing it because it was my job (or duty).  I gave it my best, I used all my pastoral abilities, I worked hard–but given a choice, I would have preferred to watch TV.

The sermons I preached just before vacation were done the same way.  I like the people I work with; I worked hard on the sermon preparation; I used my best presentation processes; I gave the sermons everything I normally do–but I would much rather have been starting the vacation a day early.

Duty and discipline may be out of favour in our culture of self-gratification and feeling good but they are an essential part of life and faith.  I don’t always feel like doing the Christian thing–but part of my commitment to God is a commitment to doing what he asks of me, even if I don’t want to or won’t feel uplifted because of it.  Sometimes, we need to do things just because they need to be done and we need to be the one doing them.  Some suggest that the self-gratification comes from knowing that we have done the right thing–and that sometimes works.  But in the end, the ninth funeral has to be done no matter what I feel and I have to do it because that is my commitment to the church and to God.  Part of my commitment to God was a commitment to accept Jesus as Saviour and Lord–the Saviour part I like but the Lord part I sometimes struggle with, since it means that I have made a commitment to putting God first, not me.  But then again, wasn’t the initial separation between God and humanity a result of humanity putting themselves first?  That didn’t work out too well for anyone.

Anyway, the lawn needs mowed again–back to duty.

 

May the peace of God be with you.

TIME

            Both my Bible study groups recently had a discussion of time–that may have something to do with the fact that our average age clearly indicates that we have all accumulated a lot of time here on earth, an accumulation that adds an interesting experiential flavour to our discussions.  One benefit of the discussions was that I got to pass on one of the few bits of Biblical Greek that I have managed to retain in the long period of time since I studied Greek for two years as a student.

In the Greek New Testament, there are two words translated as “time”.  One of them refers to time in the way we commonly use it–time measured by the clock and calendar.   The Greek word is chronos, and supplies the base for our word chronometer.  Much of our lives are controlled by time.  We wake up when an alarm tells us it is time to wake up.  We eat when a clock tells us it is time to eat.  We work when the clock tells us it is work time.  We watch TV when the schedule tells us the show is on, although with streaming that isn’t as true anymore.  We relax when  the calendar tells us it is the day to relax.

The other Greek word for time describes a different kind of time.  It is used to describe a context where everything is ready, such as the time for Jesus to be born.  The Greek word is kairos and it is a very different kind of time.  When all the right conditions are met, when all the pieces come together, when all the actors are ready, when all the obstacles are gone or moveable, then it is kairos time.  This time has a connection to clock and calendar time but only a tenuous one–kairos can’t be predicted or scheduled with chronos.

So, what is the point, beyond the fact that I actually remembered something from a university class 40+ years ago?  Well, part of the point is that I am fairly chronological in my approach to life.  I have a schedule and like to keep it as much as possible.  Looking at my watch not only tells me what time it is but also what I am supposed to be doing. If it is 4:30 on Tuesday, I should be preparing supper.  At 7:30am on Friday, I should be posting something on this blog site.  If it is 7:00am on Saturday, I should be sleeping because that is my sleep-in day.

If you are reading this and aren’t overly scheduled and structured, it may sound like I am an overly rigid and even uptight individual.  But I am not.  I can and do relax–my schedule requires me to do so regularly.  Actually, I find having a schedule allows me the freedom to relax that I might not have otherwise.  I know when I will get to whatever I need to get to and so can allow myself time to take it easy.

The real point of this post, however, is that although I am basically a chronos individual, I am called by God to work in a kairos context.  A big part of my calling is anticipating, understanding and responding to the kairos moments in the lives of the people I serve and the churches I pastor.  I need to be aware of what is going on, looking for the convergence of circumstances and issues and people and stresses and read it all well enough to respond properly when the kairos arrives.  A sermon preached before or after its kairos doesn’t do the church much good.  A pastoral visit before or after the kairos might as well not happen.

So how does a pastor who prefers clock time deal with the flexibility and unpredictability of kairos?  Well, the short, quick and only answer is that I depend a lot on God.  I try to work at being open to where and what God wants, whether it is the next sermon series or who to visit.  Fortunately, I have learned that God speaks to me in a variety of ways, often using the people I work with the give me clues to the kairos realities that I need to know about.

A minor point of this post is that the kairos and chronos for our vacation has arrived so I will be taking a break from work and blogging for a couple of weeks.

May the peace of God be with you.