Discernment

Hearing God

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Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." And he said, "Here I am, Lord." And the Lord said to him, "Rise and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul, for behold, he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight." But Ananias answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints at Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on your name." But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name." So Ananias departed and entered the house. And laying his hands on him he said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit."
—Acts 9:10-17 ESV

While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off. So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus.
—Acts 13:2-4 ESV

And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. So, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.
—Acts 16:6-8 ESV

Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." So Abram went, as the LORD had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
—Genesis 12:1-4 ESV)

And [Abraham's servant] said, "O LORD, God of my master Abraham, please grant me success today and show steadfast love to my master Abraham. Behold, I am standing by the spring of water, and the daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water. Let the young woman to whom I shall say, 'Please let down your jar that I may drink,' and who shall say, 'Drink, and I will water your camels'—let her be the one whom you have appointed for your servant Isaac. By this I shall know that you have shown steadfast love to my master." Before he had finished speaking, behold, Rebekah, who was born to Bethuel the son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham's brother, came out with her water jar on her shoulder. The young woman was very attractive in appearance, a maiden whom no man had known. She went down to the spring and filled her jar and came up. Then the servant ran to meet her and said, "Please give me a little water to drink from your jar." She said, "Drink, my lord." And she quickly let down her jar upon her hand and gave him a drink. When she had finished giving him a drink, she said, "I will draw water for your camels also, until they have finished drinking."
—Genesis 24:12-19 ESV

One of the interesting byproducts of reading through the McCheyne Bible reading program is that it daily shows four timelines of redemptive history. The past couple weeks covered Genesis, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Matthew, and Acts, and the one thing that is inescapable from these readings is how God moved people around to accomplish His will. YieldHe speaks to Abram and the patriarch moves out of what he knows into a foreign land. Ezra and Nehemiah are commissioned by Persian kings to journey back home to rebuild the temple and Jerusalem. God uproots Esther from her home and places her in the king's palace, proving how she was born to petition on behalf of her people in that time and place. Jesus is driven by the Holy Spirit out into the wilderness. Ananias is even given the right address for finding the man that God says he must meet. And Paul and Barnabas are selected by the Spirit and sent on the exact mission He directs.

I think it's been almost twenty years since Gary Friesen's Decision Making and the Will of God first came out. Almost every person I knew was reading the book back then, so I had to also just to see what the buzz was about. The feeling I got upon finishing the book was that it seemed to have a disparaging view of God's special and particular guidance of individuals.

Having put twenty more years on my faith in Christ, I can't escape the reality I've seen with my own two eyes in that time and the empty feeling I had in my heart upon finishing Friesen's book. To believe that God does not guide individuals at times by His voice today is to ignore the means by which our immutable God has spoken to people throughout redemptive history. Friesen's Way of Wisdom (as he calls it) seems to apply only to the moral guidance of God (the "do this, don't do that" admonitions we find in Scripture) or to application of general Biblical principles to specific situations.

I have no quibbles with Friesen's contention that God may have no specific opinion about a fork in the road before us. If that's the case, then relying on the wisdom of others or one's accumulated Scripturally-accurate wisdom is a legitimate means of following God's will.

But it's Friesen's argument against specific guidance that bothers me.

I included several interesting passages out of the McCheyne listings that kept hitting me over the head concerning the issue of God's unique guidance to unique people at a unique time, something that Friesen maintains is somewhat extraordinary for the common man.

Yet in Acts we see a common man, Ananias, not revealed here as prophet or an apostle, but as a "generic" disciple of the Lord. It's hard to escape the stunning specificity of the message the Lord speaks to him. Names, places, acts to be performed—even what the "target" is doing at the time. God lays it all out.

Too unusual? Not for today?

When Paul and Barnabas are commissioned, they are called out specifically by the Holy Spirit for the general work of making disciples in a specific place. While some may argue the place was not specifically given, I would contend that the fact that the two hopped a ship for Cyprus is quite another thing than to go to the nearest town and make disciples. The two apostles were acting under specific guidance in light of a general command.

That specificity is raised again in Acts 16 when Paul and Timothy avoid Asia for other parts, having been specifically told by the Holy Spirit not to go there. Matthew Henry's commentary is interesting here:

It was the Holy Ghost that forbade them, either by secret whispers in the minds of both of them, which, when they came to compare notes, they found to be the same, and to come from the same Spirit; or by some prophets who spoke to them from the Spirit.

Either way, that's specific guidance for a specific reason known only to God. Whether Greater Asia was not ready or that God had a more pressing need for them to go elsewhere is hard to say. All we know was that He revealed that Asia was off-limits. I personally like the contrast here when we dig deeper for the second blockade appears to be more one of circumstance. They tried to go but were prevented. The first blockade appears to be known beforehand, not being one of circumstance, but of objective revelation.

From there we go from the beginning of the Church to the beginnings of the Israelites. God speaks to Abraham specifically, but His revelation is general in that He does not tell Abraham where he should go, only that he must. In this way, the leading of Paul and the leading of Abraham affirm God desire to guide people in a certain way. From the beginning of the Book to the very end (John's specific revelation), God guides individuals in a specific way at a specific time through specific revelation to accomplish His specific will.

I'll end this analysis of Scriptures from McCheyne's list by noting the specific way in which Abraham's servant prayed for specific wisdom so that he could bring back the right wife for Isaac. His appeal is to God's promise to Abraham, interestingly enough, because Isaac needed a wife to fulfill God's covenant with his master.

In Genesis and Acts we see dozens of instances of God imparting specific guidance to specific individuals for a specific purpose that accomplishes God's specific will. Why should we expect any less of our unchanging God today?

What follows is just one story, and not the most earth-shaking of the things I've seen, but the simplicity of it makes the point.

Not long ago, I was sitting in one of our armchairs reading the newspaper, my son having gone down for an unexpected nap. I was partly through a gripping article when God told me to get up and go outside. I felt silly because I had no idea what I was supposed to do when I got outside. Standing there in my driveway, trying to find some purpose in being there, I decided to check our mailbox at the end of the long, hidden driveway that leads up to our house. I crossed over the road to the mailbox in time to see a car coming up the little hill that crests at the mailbox.

The car never made it to the top; it conked out thirty feet from where I was standing. I walked down to see what was going on. An obviously less well-off woman with two young children was trying to start her beaten-up truck—no luck. A quick check revealed she was out of gas.

Now I have no real need for gas here. Most of my farm equipment is diesel. I keep a single 2.5 gallon gas can for the lawnmower and weedwhacker, but I use them so infrequently that the whole container lasts a year and half. Just a few days before, I had drained that tank. Without any need to have it filled right away, I nevertheless had topped it off the day before all this. My house and driveway are impossible to see from where her truck died. None of the three neighbors near me were home.

Living off an unmarked county road, the speed limit is 55. I cautiously filled the tank since I was right on the yellow line and people can't see over the hill. No cars had come by the entire time this was going on—not unusual. Still the situation wasn't great because any car coming up behind her truck would be stupid to pass and would have to sit. We didn't have a whole lot of time to chat.

But I did have the opportunity to tell her this story, telling her that I was a Christian and had heard God ask me to help her even before her truck died. I made sure she knew that God loved her very much to look out for her and her children that way. Just as I was about to get even deeper, those cars that had held off for the entire time all showed up at once. I had to let her go on her way. She was very thankful.

I don't know Gary Friesen. I wonder, though, if he has a way to explain that encounter. I wonder if he were sitting in that armchair reading the newspaper if he would have gone outside on account of God telling him to.

Are we limiting God? Even more, are we missing out on wondrous blessings if we don't believe that God works this way in guiding people? Some would argue that the encounter was guidance I wasn't actively seeking, but I'm not sure if Ananias or Abraham were expecting God's knocking on their heart's door, either. Sometimes we seek God and sometimes He comes to us.

Anyone who puts God in a box is going to live a small life. He gives us as much as we are willing to believe.

I don't know about you, but a small life doesn't interest me in the slightest.

Update: For more on this issue as it applies to prayer, please see "Hearing God: The Prayer Example."

Tags: Guidance, God's Will, , Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 4

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Today brings four more issues confronting the Church in the West, America in particular. Please keep commenting, too. We all need to be talking about these things.

8. Rethink how we use our time
We live in an age of distraction and entertainment. We exist in an era when people are increasingly torn in myriad directions, their days measured in a succession of frantic activities that drain away one successive hour after the next.Some people would say that those two are incompatible, but if we’re the kind of people who are assaulted all day by a parade of activity, it’s easy to understand how an hour of mindless television or a couple chapters of some potboiler novel becomes all we can manage before we trudge off to bed. Every year sees our average work week increase. Every year sees our commutes get longer. And so it goes, day after day after day….Into the blender of daily living comes the Church. And what does the American Church ask for? Even more of our time. Volunteer for this ministry, lead that group, homeschool your kids, date your spouse, have a meaningful devotional life, and…and…and….

But nothing gives. We’re just having more tossed onto the pile of “To-Do’s” that we already fail to manage. Is it any wonder that we feel isolated from each other, disconnected from life, and enslaved by the clock?

Sadly, the idealistic model held out to most Evangelical Christians is based upon 18th century ideals of home and family. Ministry after ministry wants to take us back to those golden days when America was first founded, when everything was noble, pure, and good.

The problem is that the entire world changed. Every aspect of 18th century life was annihilated by the Industrial Revolution and social Darwinism. The result is that today’s Church is demoralizing people by asking us to live like Founding Fathers without addressing the radically altered nature of work and family life that has become our 21st century regimen.

I’ve probably blogged about this issue more than any other (see my entire Business series and posts here, here, here, and here.) Unless we begin developing a Christian mindset that rethinks how we work, play, and live together, nothing will improve on the time front and we will only grow progressively more frenzied.

I continue to be frustrated by a clergy that never speaks to this issue. Nor are wise Christians with a public forum offering means by which we can live in a manner wholly countercultural that redeems time and allows Christians to truly live for Christ rather than for broken, worldly systems.

Let’s get talking more how we Christians can fight the forces that seek to entrap our time. Let’s break out of the box we’ve been put in so we can better serve each other and the lost around us.

7. Strive toward true community
Hand in hand with the idea of rethinking how we live as Christians at even the most basic levels comes the need for true community.I’m sure most of us have seen at least one war movie. The staple of those movies is the character that watches guys’ backs as they move from one position to another. He’s got the gun ready to take down anyone who makes a move against his buddies. He’ll look out for them no matter what—or die trying. We all know his line: “I’ve got ya covered.”Too many Christians have no one no one to say, “I’ve got you covered.” Most are left to their own devices. And when they get picked off by the world’s or the Enemy’s snipers, no one’s there with the medic.

If we haven’t noticed, Christians are divorcing at the same rate as the godless. Christian young people are no better than their Christ-denying friends when it comes to biblical knowledge and sexual purity. And when people are in desperate financial straits through no fault of their own, their church says to them, “That’s too bad. We can’t help you.“

But that’s not being the Church. The anti-church, perhaps, but not the communion of saints. The truth of Christ shines in a dark placeWe Christians in America must abandon the Rugged Individualism that has permeated all of American culture and start living like our brother or sister in Christ is as much our concern as our own families. We’ve got to start asking if there are better ways to live in community than the fatally flawed half-dead thing we call community today.

Because of the strength of community in the 1st century Church, no one wanted for anything—at least according to what Acts 2:44-45 says. Or do we not believe that passage? The way we live today certainly proves that we don’t believe it. What really gets me is how ardently some Christians will argue against that passage while their neighbor goes bankrupt.

It goes beyond money, too. In our churches we may complain about so-and-so’s punk kid, but that punk kid is also our responsibility, not only because his parents are our brother and sister in Christ, but because the kid just may be, too. We may wag our tongues when some young girl in our church gets pregnant out of wedlock, but when was the last time we heard an entire congregation say that her failure was a result of their (that church’s) failure? That kind of group responsibility in other cultures is powerful, especially when practiced by Christians. But here in America it’s always somebody else’s problem.

That’s not community. There’s a million ways we can do better. Let’s start trying at least a handful.

6. Develop a holistic Christian worldview
Believe like a Christian; think like a pragmatist. Jesus fish on the car; Darwinism on the brain.The 2005 Gold Medallion Book Award for best book on Christian living went to Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. (You’ll notice that book listed under my Godly Read tab at the top of this page.) Pearcey’s book has made this The Year of the Christian Worldview. Many have talked about how important it is to have a holistic Faith in Christ that impinges on every aspect of our lives. Such a worldview provides the godly glasses through we interpret the world before we speak it back indwelt with the grace and truth of our Lord

When we roll out of bed in the mornings, we’re almost instantly assaulted by worldviews that set themselves up against God. We may not even realize it’s a fully-realized worldview we’re encountering, and this is to our own detriment. The businessman who proclaims Christ and sits on the board of the local Christian college is just as likely to be channeling a pragmatic worldview in his business and college dealings as he is the truth of Jesus Christ. Our child comes home dressed like a goth/vampire despite the fact that she’s the Awana Bible memorization regional champion, and we just shrug our shoulders, not understanding that a competing worldview has overtaken all her Bible verses, one that runs contrary to what all those verses mean.

How many Christians are hardcore evolutionists? How many Christians think it’s okay to hurt people far away as long as it accomplishes a nearby noble goal? How many Christians live by “If it feels good, do it” rather than “You are not your own, you’ve been bought with a price”? How many Christians think its okay to slash and burn the forests and meadows because it’s all going to burn in the end anyway?

The answer? Far too many. And we have non-Christian worldviews at operation in those people to explain their behavior.

Because we no longer teach a comprehensive view of the Bible that encompasses the entire spectrum of Creation, Fall, and Redemption (the crux of a Christian worldview), we have more Christians in America operating out of contrary worldviews than a Christian one. Sadly, too much of the Church doesn’t understand that Christianity works within the realms of philosophy, chemistry, economics, art, and whatever creative and rational thought we can imagine with the brains God gave us. Too often we default into various “-isms” that are the spawn of hell, yet we coat them with a thin veneer of Bible verses to give them mass Christian appeal. In our technological age, we’ve become convinced that Christianity can’t explain reality, yet nothing explains reality better than the truth of Christ.

If you haven’t read Pearcey’s book, do it. There’s nothing new in the book, but rarely has one book brought the pieces all together in one place so convincingly.

Now let’s start drilling a Christian worldview into our kids from the day they’re born and see if they can do better than we have.

5. Restore the importance of the Scriptures
There’s been far too much hellish mishandling of the Scriptures in our churches today. There’s been far too little meat of the Bible fed to people who are dying to hear God’s word. We have pastors who can’t preach the word of God, and people who can’t tell they’re not getting what they need. George Barna reports that pastors have never thought higher of their ability to get the Scriptures out there to their people, yet never since polling began have so many supposed Christians demonstrated more ignorance of the Book.I could beat this point to death, but I suspect that most readers here can go to more sources than I can to prove that we simply aren’t the people of the Book that we once were. For that reason what follows isn’t academic, but personal.It pains me to say this, but I was once a far better handler of the Bible than I am today. I memorized huge chunks of it, spent a couple hours every day in the study of it, knew where to find just about anything anybody wanted to know from it, and had a good answer based on it always at the ready. Unfortunately, I spent too much time with folks who thought there were more important things to the Christian Faith than storing up the word in one’s heart. In fact, I felt there were times that I was the oddball because I did have that “Bible advantage” going on. I let people convince me that I was haughty and made other people feel bad because I could quote verses from memory and could find any passage people wanted to locate. And though it didn’t feel right, I believed them.

I was a fool.

Now I didn’t give up the Bible, but I didn’t let it absorb me like it once did. I didn’t study it for hours on end anymore. Sometimes I didn’t even read it at all. And sure enough, over time I became exactly like all the people around me who couldn’t find things, couldn’t remember passages, and just didn’t handle the word of God well at all. I went from a workman approved to an apprentice’s apprentice. The wretched part of this is that many of the people I know who once deftly wielded the sword of the Lord have also grow slothful. We once burned brightly in this regard, but have dimmed today.

The cares of life? Yes. More trials than we anticipated? Sure. Marriage? Yep. All have contributed to that decline in the knowledge of the word. The weeds grew up and choked us.

But grace is sufficient and we can all get back to where we were (and beyond) if we realize that knowing the Bible inside and out can save us from countless defeats. It renews the mind and the soul. I pray that for all of us, we put the Scriptures in their rightful place in our lives.

We should not let a famine for the word of the Lord be self-created. To whom else shall we go? Only Jesus Christ has the words of eternal life.

Part 5 examines  the four issues I believe we Christians need to examine more than any other. Any ideas what they might be?

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21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 3

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New light in an old churchFour more issues we need to address in this series of “21 Steps to a 21st Century Church.” (Previous installments: #1 and #2.) If you start to see a trend here, well…it’s intentional.

12. Be a church for all kinds of people
It bothers me as a Caucasian to look around on a Sunday morning and see no faces that look different than mine. While it’s true that our churches draw from surrounding neighborhoods, I know that while my neighborhood is predominantly white, it’s not exclusively so.It bothers me that at most churches the second a family hits the lobby they scatter. Mom goes to her MOPS class, Dad goes to his men’s class, while each child is sent to a separate classroom. Poof! They’re vapor. We talk about unity of the Body, but the designs of our churches and their programs tell a different story.

The singles are herded into a corral with other equally sexually frustrated people and we expect them to behave. Nor do we really want to know what they’re up to so long as they don’t whine about it.

Same goes for the elderly, because God knows that once you’re old you no longer have any viable purpose. (No wait, perhaps I’m confusing the Church in America for the movie Logan’s Run.)

Yet a body cannot function compartmentalized. Cut the heart off from the rest of the body and we know what happens. Remove something as small as the pancreas and see how long the body lasts.

Why we think it’s healthy to compartmentalize people in our churches is a real head-scratcher.

Somehow we’ve gotten it all backwards, thinking that our little nuclear families are the ne plus ultra of God’s design. Jesus turned that idea upside-down, though, when He said that the Christian family does not consist of those who share a biological relationship, but of those who do His will.

A healthy family is available to all its members. It doesn’t shunt its elderly off to a home to die. It doesn’t let its singles twist alone in the wind. It doesn’t believe that the five-year old can’t contribute. The foreigner and the alien are welcome and given a place of honor. Angels are entertained without our knowing.

Why are our church programs segregated by age and various other distinctions? Why do we have separate educational materials for each age group rather than a unified curriculum around a set area of study that is taught age-appropriately to all people in our church? Why do we set up parents to fail with their kids because they never know what the kids learned in Sunday School?

I believe we need to start asking questions why our churches look all white, all black, all middle class, all young, or all old. If the Church on Earth is a representation of the Church in Heaven, then why aren’t we preparing now to look like that Church at the End of All Things? I wonder if God is asking the same question.

I’m not filled with answers on this one, mostly questions. Still, I think that all of us need a gut check on this issue because it causes the Body of Christ to suffer needlessly in the long run. I’ve written a few smatterings on this topic before, so I won’t needlessly rehash old posts. Let’s just agree that this is an area of growth we should be pursuing in order to make our churches all they can be, not only for the Lord, but for all His people.

11. Conduct a proper self-examination
Ever encounter a truly humble person? I haven’t met many, but one characteristic stands out in the few I have met: they live in peace with all men. Why? I think the major reason is that they’ve truly believed that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.This past year, the garrulous tone that the Godblogosphere took on disheartened me because it was a rush to self-justification. Each side in whatever battle was picked launched into the other with fingers wagging and hearts pounding. Jumping into some of my favorite blogs lost its allure. After awhile I was just sad.

If I learned one thing in 2005 it’s that all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Sure, I’d memorized that verse a long time ago from my Navigators Topical Memory System days, but the deeper meaning behind it had gone undiscovered. What I learned this year is that most people don’t get up in the morning plotting evil. Usually evil comes as they try to go about their day using whatever flawed coping mechanisms they’ve acquired in time. The result is shattered lives and bondage to sin.

This is not an attempt to diminish sin, only an acknowledgment that none of us are perfected yet.

Before we launch into a tirade about homosexual activists, our snooty neighbor, or the promiscuous girl in the youth group, perhaps we should put ourselves in their shoes first. Maybe then we can better examine ourselves to see how far we’ve fallen and carefully note the chinks in our own armor. That homosexual activist may be a slave of sin, but he’s there at the bedside of every friend who has ever died of AIDS. The snooty neighbor who needs to know Christ gave a third of her income to help destitute children in Africa, never saying anything about doing so. The promiscuous girl who is fornicating her life away tutors dyslexic kids every day at her school.

Where are we? And just how big is the log sticking out of our eye?

We need better self-examination, folks. If we’re not putting ourselves in front of the Holy Spirit daily to allow His Light to root out our darkness, then we need to be doing a whole lot less finger-pointing. Ironically, when we do put ourselves under the Spirit’s illumination we do a whole lot less finger-pointing anyway.

There but for the grace of God go I. The humble man realizes this because he’s been there. He knows the depth of his own failure, so he’s less likely to grouse about someone else’s. I pray that our churches would be filled with that kind of humility.

10. Fire the youth pastor…then rehire him for his true purpose
Okay, now I’ve ticked off the multitudes of youth pastors out there, but hear me out. Trust me on this one.If you’re familiar with the
Business series I wrote this last summer, then you know that youth ministry started as a reaction to industrialization in England in the early 19th century. Young people were leaving farms to come to the big city to work in factories. Alarmed by the loss of parental support and the tendency of youth to turn idle hands into the devil’s toolkit, well-meaning Christians attacked the problem by creating a new kind of ministry.

The only problem is that no one thought to ask was if there was a better way. In truth, for centuries there had been a better way: parents taught their children at home about the Lord.

In taking the role of teaching one’s children about Jesus and placing it in the hands of supposed experts, the Church in industrialized nations created a monster. Teens today don’t work in sweaty factories or live in factory-sponsored dormitories, but the model used to meet that need is still paraded as the best way to reach young people.

Yet by every measurable standard, today’s youth ministry is a devastating failure. Every poll shows that Christian youth are indistinguishable from their pagan counterparts. Same amount of sexual sin, same pathetic understanding of Scriptural truth, and on and on. The model is not working, yet we continue to believe it is.

Why not take what was usurped and turn it back over to the people who once did it right? In other words, why are we using youth ministers to instruct our children in the faith rather than using their parents? It’s the parents’ responsibility anyway, isn’t it? Aren’t we simply undermining that responsibility?

Fire the youth pastor. Then rehire him for his true purpose: teaching parents of youth how to teach their own kids about the Faith.

Today’s parents were never shown an example of how to raise their children for Christ. Most don’t have a clue. I find it hard to believe that this was the case with Christian families two hundred years ago. The failed reality remains, though. We have to do something about it.

Already in a tailspin from its heyday in the 1950s, the early 1990s saw the wholesale shuttering of Christian Education departments within churches. Time was that every church had a paid person on staff responsible for overseeing the education of people within the church, but this has long since gone the way of the dodo. In many cases, the Christian Ed department was there for the very purpose of helping adults instruct their kids in a holistic Christian worldview. Now it’s gone.

But a youth ministry 180 degrees from the typical youth ministry model of youth pastor and clan of kids can counter that loss. A youth pastor dedicated to teaching parents how to instruct their kids in the faith puts the pieces back in their rightful place. It betters families, improves parent/teen communication, and also saves the youth pastor from the typical two-year burnout and rampant divorce patterns that have plagued youth ministers for the last thirty years.

This doesn’t mean that a youth group must go away, only that it be better incorporated into the full functioning life of the entire church. The elderly are involved, entire families are involved, and parents get to take back what they let slip away.

It’s time we moved to this model. (If you didn’t get enough here, I may write on this again in the future.)

9. Be hospitable
In the latter half of last year I wrote series called “The Little Things.” One of those little things that has gone unnoticed is our lack of hospitality in our churches and our homes. This lack of hospitality manifests itself as an unspoken message of division and exclusivity. Rather than reinvent the wheel here, I’ll point you to “The Little Things” post on hospitality and hope it speaks as well now as it did then.

Follow the link below to part 4…

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