At the heart of all temptations, as we see here [in the temptations of Jesus], is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary; if not actually superfluous and annoying in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside s an illusion – that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms.

Pope Benedict XVI,  Jesus of Nazarath

“Ultimately, each church will be evaluated by only one thing. It’s disciples. Your church is only as good as its disciples. It does not matter how good your praise, preaching, programs or property are: If you’re disciples are passive, needy, consumerist, and not moving in the direction of radical obedience, your church is not good.”

- Neil Cole (not sure what book this is from)

Lord, our efforts at faithfulness are fraught with failure more often than we care to admit. Thank you that your love for us is never wasted. Keep us rooted in your word, eating at your table, and praying by your Spirit, so that we may remember when we fail that we are part of your family not because we deserve to be but because you want us. Amen.

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you : wherever he may send you; may he guide you through the wilderness : protect you through the storm; may he bring you home rejoicing : at the wonders he has shown you; may he bring you home rejoicing : once again into our doors.

As a pastor however, I know its the one thing that I need the most. It is the one thing that fights against most pastor’s greatest temptation: Pride. It is a strange thing that pastors and leaders struggle so much with pride. We are supposed to be the ones who are most grounded in the scriptures, grace and truth. I think therein lies the problem. Pastors get lifted up as something that is impossible to live out. Really, pastors get lifted up as idols. Pastors become something to attain to and, dare I say, even worship. Somehow, we are supposed to have a greater access to truth and God than others. Sounds like a recipe for pride for me.

The truth is, all of us who are pastors know the truth. We struggle just like everyone else. We wrestle with our beliefs, our calling, our kids, our marriages, and even our faith. But we aren’t supposed to let all the people in our churches know that. So, we somehow fool ourselves that we are not really human. That we are not really like everyone else. We secretly wish that the rest of our congregation was more like us – after all, isn’t that what they basically tell us – that they aren’t like us?

I think Thomas a Kempis writes specifically to people who struggle with the things that pastors do when he writes,

How many perish through empty learning in this world, who care little for serving God. And because they love to be great more than to be humble, therefore they “have become vain in their imaginations. He only is truly great, who hath great charity. He is truly great who deemeth himself small, and counteth all height of honour as nothing. He is the truly wise man, who counteth all earthly things as dung that he may win Christ. And he is the truly learned man, who doeth the will of God, and forsaketh his own will.

The answer? The remedy to pride in pastors? I think the answer is simple, but complicated: submission. Thomas a Kempis writes later, “It is verily a great thing to live in obedience, to be under authority, and not be at our own disposal. Far safer it is to live in subjection than in a place of authority.”

Even pastors need to be under authority. Date I say, it is especially pastors who need to be submitting to others on a regular basis. As a pastor, I have found that one of the most important practices I have ever undertaken is that of mutual submission with those I am in leadership with and those I am in community with.

“Mark campaigns against balcony-type Christians who are too high for mission and discipleship that in Mark’s terms necessarily involves cross-bearing and self-sacrifice.”

One of the things I am getting as I read Mark so far is that the disciples themselves didn’t understand what they were getting themselves into. Sure, they showed great faith by dropping their nets and leaving their lives and family behind to follow Jesus. But, they didn’t count the cost as we see them constantly misunderstanding what they were getting themselves into throughout the rest of the book.

Ladd continues,

“Mark’s account tells us that Jesus’ disciples found this a hard lesson to learn. Indeed, their whole understanding of Jesus’ mission was at best superficial, if not dangerously misleading. There is a recurrent empehesis on their failure to understand.”

Leads us to the ask ourselves the question, have we flippantly decided to follow Jesus without truly counting the cost? I think what we get when we do that, is balcony-type christianity that quickly follows Jesus when its exciting (or emotional) but tends to abandon Him when things stop making sense or we are called to sacrifice in ways that we aren’t prepared for.

Update: one more quote too good not to share:

Discipleship, therefore, must necessarily be an uncomfortable process of reorientation and of abandonment of the self-centered values of human society in favor of the divine economy, in which, “Many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

Read this whole quote, it’s worth it…

If you look around at most organizations and communities, people are still being kept in boxes. They are not invited to contribute, to create, or to care about each other. Instead, it’s assumed that people must be policed into good behavior. Endless policies and laws attempt to make us behave properly. Yet very few people tolerate this disrespect and constraint on their personal freedom. We become rebellious, hostile, cynical-or we shut down and look as if we died on the job. Whole cultures and generations of people become deadened by coercion, but underneath, the apathy and withdrawal still live human spirits that aspire to live lives of their own choosing.

It is time to become passionate about what’s best in us and to create organizations that welcome in our creativity, contribution, and compassion. We do this by using processes that bring us together to talk to one another, listen to one another’s stories, reflect together on what we’re learning as we do our work. We do this by developing relationships of trust, where we do what we say, where we speak truthfully, where we refuse to act from petty self-interest. These processes and relationships have already been developed by many courageous companies, leaders, and facilitators. Many pioneers have created processes and organizations that depend on human capacity and know how to evoke our very best.

…

As leaders, as neighbors, as colleagues, it is time to turn to one another, to engage in the intentional search for human goodness. In our meetings and deliberations, we can reach out and invite in those we have excluded. We can recognize that no one person or leader has the answer, that we need every-body’s creativity to find our way through this strange new world. We can act from the certainty that most people want to care about others and invite them to step forward with their compassion. We can realize that “you can’t hate someone whose story you know.” We are our only hope for creating a future worth working for. We can’t go it alone, we can’t get there without each other, and we can’t create it without relying anew on our fundamental and precious human goodness.

Now, here is the thing.  For those of you trained in theology you probably wince at the phrase “human goodness.”  Many of us have a theology that says, “you are depraved and are sinful.”  Now, I am not arguing against that. I believe all of us are in desperate need of a Savior and that Savior is none other than Jesus Christ.

But, I believe that sometimes when we focus so deeply on our brokenness we forget that we were made in God’s image.  We need to let this truth be an assumption we also lead with.

Far too often we only lead with the assumption that people are sinful, screw-ups.  I believe we also need to lead with the assumption that people are first and foremost made in the image of God.

If you are leading a community, stop forcing people into boxes and assuming the worst about them. Instead, invite them to live into the person that God has made them.  Allow them to flourish in their God-given creativity and gifts. Don’t put policies in place that will keep them from screwing up. Instead, give them freedom to flourish (and yes, this sometimes means they are going to screw up!).

Stop assuming the worse about the people you lead and they will surprise you.  Of course, don’t be naive, they won’t be perfect. But that’s okay because neither are you.

Trying to be an effective leader in this machine story is especially exhausting. He or she is leading a group of lifeless, empty automatons who are just waiting to be filled with vision and direction and intelligence. The leader is responsible for providing everything: the organizational mission and values, the organizational structure, the plans, the supervision. The leader must also figure out, through clever use of incentives or coercives, how to pump energy into this lifeless mass. Once the pump is primed, he must then rush hither and yon to make sure that everyone is clanking along in the same direction, at the established speed, with no diversions. It is the role of the leader to provide the organizing energy for a system that is believed to have no internal capacities for self-creation, self-organization, or self-correction.

and…

We fail to acknowledge these unstoppable forces of life whenever we, as leaders, try to direct and control those in our organization. Life always pushes back against our demands. But instead of learning about life, we tend to see their “difficult” behaviors as justification for a more controlling style of leadership. Many of the failures and discontents in today’s organizations can be understood as the result of this denial of life’s forces and how life pushes back against a story that excludes it.

A lot of this comes down to trust and leading in a new way,

Leaders who live in the new story help us understand ourselves differently by the way they lead. They trust our humanness; they welcome the surprises we bring to them; they are curious about our differences; they delight in our inventiveness; they nurture us; they connect us. They trust that we can create wisely and well, that we seek the best interests of our organization and our community, that we want to bring more good into the world.

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”

From Mere Christianity in Book IV – Beyond Personality: Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity

1. The church cannot be viewed as the ground of mission, it cannot be considered the goal of mission either – certainly not the only goal. The church should continually be aware of its provisional character.
2. The church is not the kingdom of God. The church is “on earth the seed and the beginning of that kingdom” and “the sign and instrument of the reign of God that is to come. The church can be a credible sacrament of salvation for the world only with it displays to humanity a glimmer of God’s imminent reign – a kingdom of reconciliation, peace and new life. In the here and now, that reign comes whensoever Christ overcomes the power of evil.  This happens most visibly in the church but also happens in society, since Christ is Lord of the whole world as well.
3. The church’s missionary involvement suggest more than calling individuals into the church as a waiting room for the hereafter…there is a convergence between liberating individuals and peoples in history and proclaiming the final coming of God’s reign.  In this perspective, the church is the “people of God in world occurrence” (Barth) and the community for the world.
4. The church is to be viewed as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, as a movement of the Spirit towards the world en route to the future. When we view the church as a community of the Holy Spirit we identify it preeminently as missionary community, since the Spirit is the go-between God.
5. If the church attempts to sever itself from involvement in the world and if its structures are such that they thwart any possibility of rendering a relevant service to the world, such structures have to be recognized as heretical. The church’s offices, orders, and institutions should be organized in such a manner that they serve society and do not separate the believer from the historical.  Its life and work are intimately bound up with God’s cosmic-historical plan for the salvation of the world.  We are called, therefore, to be “kingdom people” and not “church people.” Because of its integral relatedness to the world, the church may never function as a fearful border guard, but always as one who brings good tidings.

I think this stuff #5 on the church and its connection to history is extremely important.  Karl Barth in volume 4.3.2 in his Church Dogmatics spends a lot of time talking about the “gospel in world occurrence” and its really, really good stuff.  Heady, but good.  I think we tend to separate world history from the church and that’s a grave mistake.  We talk about salvation history, often in opposition to, world history.  I believe the scriptures are talking about salvation history as world history.  God is working in and through history to bring it to completion and it’s through Christ that God is accomplishing this.  I think far too often we accidental forget that God is not working alongside or in opposition to history, but in history.

“Church is the appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end.  Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation. Death by electric chair, injection and hanging. The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and partciate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word. Jesus Life…”

He goes on the point out that the church is far from the utopian dream that many of us have when it comes to church and says,

“Romantic crusader and consumer representations of the church get in the way of recognizing the church for what it actually is.  If we permit – or worse  promote – dreamy or deceptive distortions of teh Holy Spirit creation, we interfere with participation in the real thing.  The church we want becomes the enemy of the church we have.”

Eugene has an incredible and important prophetic voice for the church today.  Simply out, this book is worth getting and reading.