In all my years of interacting with pastors, teachers and leaders I have never met anyone who got into a pulpit on a regular basis and said “I think I am going to preach a one-sided gospel.”

In reality, none of us are preaching a fully holistic gospel, are we?

Obviously I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t have asked the question.

I believe this is one of the reasons we need to continually be in dialogue with the entire body of Christ, Christians from all walks of life.

We must know and learn from Christians from different racial, ethic and socio-economic backgrounds and even Christians from urban, suburban and rural contexts.

It is in these conversations and friendships where we can begin to see a more holistic view of the gospel.

So, here we go:

Two easy steps to preaching a more holistic gospel:

• 1) Admit that you don’t.
• 2) Stop only hanging out with people just like you.

See, told you it would be easy….

1. Try and find a second job that feeds your gifting  and passions in some way. I actually really enjoy web design. It taps into my creative side and gives me an outlet for that kind of thing. So, while it has its frustrations, I really can enjoy the work.  This has been very important as it doesn’t necessarily drain me as I engage the these responsibilities.
2. Try and have your second job be a career type job and not just a part-time placement where the only positive is that you make money. While I don’t want to have to depend on web design as much as I do, I know that I can make a career of it if I have to. This is something that too few of my pastor friends can say.  The best case scenario for your second job is one that can become a career if it has to be.  I assume since you are bi-vocational you are in a non-established, fringe type ministry context. You might just need to do your pastoral work for free someday.
3. Do whatever you have to while you search for that kind of second job. While you might want a job that brings you life and a job that can turn into a career, that might not come for a few years.  I slaved away at UPS and Starbucks for a combined 5 years before web design was even on my radar.  My skills in web design only came because God brought a few people into my life that were gracious enough to mentor me.
4. You better really be ready to sacrifice a lot. Living the bi-vocational life isn’t sexy.  It might sound like the cool thing to do and you might think you get to say “look at me, I’m a living the genuine missional life. I’m SO MISSIONAL!” but then when you get into it you realize that it’s really gritty, hard work.  Don’t get me wrong, I love it.  But, it is far from easy.
5. Be more committed to the Church than your career as a pastor. Honestly, I’d be a pastor at The Well for free if I had to. Granted, I wouldn’t be able to put the time in that I can now as a part-time salary supported staff member.  But I absolutely love the local church / global Church. I’ll always serve in some way or another even if I am not getting paid.  Being on staff at a church is a blessing in that it allows me to focus more energy there.  If you are in pastoral work for the career, bi-vocational isn’t for you because you have to realize you might never get there (I’d also argue that pastoral work isn’t for you in general, bi-vocational or not!).
6. If you aren’t prepared for it to be hard, it’s way too easy to become bitter and resentful. You have to guard your heart against this at all costs. If you choose this way of life and this way forward, you have to realize that you aren’t necessarily going to be living the American Dream and a lot of your ideals of what a pastor should do and be taken care of have to be revisited. If you aren’t ready for this, it’s far too easy to become bitter or resentful towards the church.
7. You better be willing to admit you can’t do it all. Why? because a) you weren’t made to.  This is why God made the body of Christ. Read Eph. 4 if you don’t know what I am talking about.  and  b) you don’t have time to.  The blessing of bi-vocational ministry is that you can’t take away the work that the people in your congregation should be doing because you just don’t have the time. So you have to be okay with saying no to things and admitting you aren’t the savior of the world (a harder task than most for many of us pastors than we’d like to admit!!). Honestly this is one of the best parts of being bi-vocational because we aren’t supposed to do it alone and we’re forced to live out Eph 4 by the nature of the way things are set up.  I like that.
8. Make sure your spouse is on board. I don’t know that this needs to be said but maybe it does.  If your spouse isn’t behind it, you won’t last, and I’m not just talking about your career.  Your marriage won’t last either.
9. Be ready to learn how to be self-disciplined. When you are bi-vocational you tend to not be “in an office” all the time and you tend to be able to schedule your life as you need/want to.  This is great freedom and it’s one of the best parts of being bi-vocational. At the same time, this is a great responsibility.  You absolutely must learn how to manage time and have discipline when you don’t have the “blessing” of someone looking over your shoulder all the time.
10. Being bi-vocational isn’t more spiritual or better than being a full-time pastor. Sometimes I feel like people get the idea that to be “really missional” (whatever that means) you can’t work full-time for a church.  I’ll be honest, I think that’s bull crap.  I don’t think that being bi-vocational is any better (or worse) than being/having full time paid staff.  I think it really all depends on the context.  There might come a day when The Well pays me full-time. and they might cut be back from 3/4 time to 1/4 time.  It really depends on how and where God is calling us as a community.  I get frustrated when I hear people imply that being bi-vocational is a more authentic expression of pastoral / church leadership because I see the value in both and I firmly believe that both are appropriate expressions of church leadership. We don’t have a policy of bi-vocational pastors at The Well.  It’s what I and we have chosen to do for this time as a community.
11. Being bi-vocational has both positive and a negative aspects to it. I know I said there were 10 suggestions but I just had a conversation today that made me want to add this one.  We were talking about all the positive things that come from being bi-vocational (shared leadership, not as much money spent on staff, the pastor isn’t sheltered from the world, etc).  Well, with each of these positives and strengths comes a weakness as well. I guess this is a continuance of the last point but there isn’t a right way to address this topic that is true for all time and all places.

Okay. Anything else to add?

With that being said, I want to highly recommend the little book by Henri Nouwen called, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership. This book is fantastic and it’s a good complement to our efforts in understanding good leadership technique. In the book, he talks through three movements we must make as leaders of the future (actually, today since he wrote this a while ago).

The three movements:

• From Relevance to Prayer.
• From Popularity to Ministry.
• From Leading to being Led.

In the first section he writes about our need to stop seeking relevance. His experience of working with the mentally handicapped played a huge role in him learning this.  He went from being a sought after speaker, author and professor at Yale, Notre Dame and Harvard where everyone was impressed with him to working with the mentally handicapped who could have cared less about his books and all he had accomplished.  He writes,

“Not being able to use any of the skills that had proved so practical in the past was a real source of anxiety. I was suddently faced with my naked self.”

From there, he was forced to discover his true identity  and concluded that,

“the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own valuable self.

My friend and former co-pastor Gary Alloway says all the time, “Remember your own irrelevance.”  This is wonderful advice (and I realize now he stole it from Nouwen!) because it reminds us that the message that we carry is that God loves and uses us as his servants, not because of what we have accomplished or how gifted we are, but because of his saving and unconditional grace.

The quesiton he asks in response to this call to irrlevancy is from Jesus himself, “Do you love me?”  That’s the question that we need to allow Jesus to ask us, “Peter, do you love me?”  Nouwen writes,

The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? But: Are you in love with Jesus?”

I’ll be honest, I know from experience it’s way too easy to be a pastor without being in love with Jesus.  Nouwen writes some more,

“Knowing God’s heart means consistantly, radically, and very concretely to annnounce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that eery time fear, isolation, or despair begins to invade the human soul, this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without conditions or limits.“

So, moving from focusing on our successes to others to focusing on our love for Jesus, he submits that the practice of contemplative prayer is essential. He writes,

“If there is any focus that the Christian leader of the future will need, it is the discipline of dwelling in the presence of the One who keeps asking “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” This is the discipline of contemplative prayer.”

and later he writes,

the future of Christian leadership it is of vital importance to reclaim the mystical aspect of theology so that every word spoken, every word of advice given, and every strategy developed can come from a heart that knows God intimately.

As Christian leaders, I pray that we are not seeking approval and acceptance from the “great” things that we have done but rather we are understanding ourselves as vessels of grace.  I pray that we would be serving out of a heart that is connected to Jesus through the practice of prayer and contemplation.

LIke I said, leadership technique is good, I’m a big fan of it and I will continue to explore it to help me grow as a person and as a leader, but I am reminded again by Nouwen that all of it is a big, giant waste of time if I am not connecting to the heart of God in prayer and remembering that all I accomplish is as a result of God’s grace in my life.

May we all remember our own irrelevance.

Also, Jason Coker is going to be starting a series on whether missional church leaders should be paid.  I absolutely love the way Jason thinks so this should be a good, challenging series of posts.

Part of the deal is that I get to head over to preach to his community.  I’m tremendously excited about this as I love being given the opportunity to speak into other communities of faith.  I’ll be preaching on the topic of personal / corporate vocation which will fit quite well with my place in life these days. 

One of the values we have at The Well is that of “unity” with the wider body of Christ and I am excited to see us expressing it in this simple way.  If you have never done this kind of thing in your church, suggest it or if you are the pastor, just make it happen.  I think its a great way to say “we are all one body on mission together.”  

Also, its always helpful for communities to hear the scriptures spoken from someone who lives in the midst of a different environment.  While there is some overlap for sure,  there is no question that the lives that Pastor Greg’s people are living have somewhat different narratives and questions than the people at The Well.  I’m excited to be able to speak into their community from my experience and he into ours. 

Of course, since the baby has come I haven’t preached in about 7 weeks so I’ve got to figure out how to do this again…

Dear Church Family,

During our worship gathering on Sunday we took a break from our regular sermon series in order to look back at the early dreams and passions of The Well and to celebrate how God is making these dreams a reality. (You can listen to the audio on the church website here: http://church.thewellpa.com/podcast/the-history-next-steps-for-the-well/)

The Well has four foundational values:

• Discipleship (we are a community of people becoming more and more like Jesus)
• Justice/Evangelism (we reach out and share the love of Jesus with others, especially those on the fringes of society)
• Locality (we are locally embedded in our neighborhood, especially through the use of our building)
• Unity (we are connected to the historical and global Church)

On Sunday we focused on three of these four values, and how God continues to bless our desire to serve in these areas. Below is a quick overview:

Discipleship: God has been actively working in the lives of the people in our congregation. It’s clear that his Spirit is present and active among us. We believe that it is now time for us to become even more intentional about allowing God to form all of our lives into the image of Christ. We seek to enrich our environment in a way that will help people discover practices and relationships that foster Christ-likeness. This summer we will begin a very intentional time of searching and seeking in order to more fully understand the next steps before us. If being part of this process interests you, please e-mail Shanna (splatt20@hotmail.com).

Justice/Outreach: Over the last few years God has given us wonderful opportunities to serve our local community in things such as the missions trip to Lower Bucks County, meeting specific local needs, and partnering with local community services organizations. As we continue serving in those ways we are making intentional steps to reach outside ourselves. God has planted a desire among many in The Well to serve our neighboring community of Bristol. From June 7 to August 23, we will meet in Bristol for informal Sunday night worship gatherings. We will meet at Brian and Dorie Morgan’s house (922 Spring St, Bristol, PA) at 6 pm for a potluck dinner, followed by music and discussion from 7 to 8. Once a month, we will also do a service project in the community of Bristol. We pray this will be an awesome opportunity to worship God in an intimate setting, grow close with friends and neighbors, and serve in the most depressed part of Bucks County. For now, this is a summertime program, but we will pray as to how God is leading us in the future. For anyone interested in serving the people of Bristol, there will be a meeting after church on May 24. If you have any questions, please contact Gary Alloway (garya@thewellpa.com).

Locality: Our prayer is that our building would serve as an important means of blessing and partnering with our local community. We have certainly seen God honor our prayers, as he has allowed us to use our building to minister in exciting ways. We now see the need to hire a Building Ministry Coordinator to continue our faithful use of this resource by finding new opportunities for our community to serve others through use of our space. Our goal is to have the Coordinator in place by August in order to prepare for fall programming. We will also be undergoing some renovations to our bathrooms and coffee bar as well as adding another classroom. We are currently in the midst of estimating costs and exploring grants to fund this position and the renovations. If you are interested in helping with the planning process, writing grants, or doing renovations please contact Todd Hiestand (toddh@thewellpa.com).

Our journey the last twelve years has been much like a hike. Our dream was to walk this journey in step with the Spirit. There have been some peaks, some valleys, and some great stories of God working in, among, and through us. For the last year or so we have sensed that God has brought us (organizationally speaking) to a peaceful clearing on the trail. This clearing has been a place of much needed stability and rest. We’ve been able to catch our breath, roast a few marshmallows on the fire, and throw the frisbee around a bit. As nice as it is, we do not desire to stay in the clearing for too long. It’s time to continue on our journey. So we walk forward in faith, believing that God will continue the good work he started in us twelve years ago.

As always, we invite conversation and discussion about these decisions. We also ask you to join in prayer with us as we ask God to lead and direct these goals. As each of these areas proceeds there will be opportunities to participate with your time, ideas and finances. If you have questions, concerns, ideas or just want to hear more, please do not hesitate to ask.

The Ministry Leadership Team at The Well,

Gary Alloway, Shanna Cummings, Todd Hiestand, Patti Pearson, Anna Pelger, Phil Wood

Seth Godin says it in his book Tribes better than I did and clearer than Edwin Friedman did. He writes,

If you hear my idea but don’t believe it, that’s not your fault; its mine.

If you see my new product but don’t buy it, that’s my fault, not yours.

If you attend my presentation and you’re bored, that’s my fault too.

If I fail to persuade you to implement a policy that supports my tribe, that’s due to my lack of passion or skill, not your shortsightedness.

If you are a student in my class and you don’t learn what I’m teaching, I’ve let you down.

It’s really easy to insist that people read the manual. It’s really easy to blame the user/student/prospect/customer for not trying hard, for being too stupid to get it, or for not caring enough to pay attention. It might even be tempting to blame those in your tribe who aren’t working as hard at following as you are at leading. But none of this is helpful.

To that I say, amen.

Now, let me try and translate this to church / pastor / leader world:

If you hear my idea sermon but don’t believe it, that’s not your fault; its mine.

If you see my new product ministry but don’t buy participate in it, that’s my fault, not yours.

If you attend my presentation worship service and you’re bored, that’s my fault too. (no, I am not saying that worship services should be flashy to feed our consumer needs!)

If I fail to persuade you to implement a policy invest financially in a way that supports my tribe, that’s due to my lack of passion or skill, not your shortsightedness.

If you are a student in my discipleship class and you don’t learn what I’m teaching, I’ve let you down.

It’s really easy to insist that people read the manual our church rule book. It’s really easy to blame the user/student/prospect/customer congregation for not trying hard, for being too stupid lazy to get it, or for not caring stepping up enough to pay attention. It might even be tempting to blame those in your tribe church who aren’t working at hard as following as you are at leading. But none of this is helpful.

Pastor, stop blaming your congregation for your church not living its mission well. Take some responsibility.

While we’re at it…

Congregation, stop blaming your pastor for your church not living its mission well. Take some responsibility.

The reality is, its probably everyone’s fault.  

But you can’t control everyone’s behavior, thoughts and actions.

You can control yours.

Blaming helps no one.  

Taking responsibility and doing something about it helps everyone.

In preparation for this gathering, I’ve been doing some reading on the subject and picked up the late Stanley Grenz’s book on prayer called “Prayer: A Cry for the Kingdom.”  It’s really a great book and here is a collection of short excerpts from the introduction. 

The greatest challenge facing the church of Jesus Christ today, and therefore every local congregation, is moving the people of God to engage in sincere, honest, fervent prayer….

If we look closely at the contemporary situation, we would likely find ourselves readily admitting that ours is the epitome of a prayer-less church….

Prayer is a relatively insignificant aspect of the structured life of the people of God…

Not only does prayer find little place in the structuring of church life, but meager attention is devoted to fostering a praying congregation…

When it comes to prayer, denominations and churches are simply reflecting what is true of most individual Christians. For many believers, prayer is a lost art.  Many do not know how to pray and do not pray.  For many the mere mention of the word results in an immediate recognition of our personal failure to pray as we should. 

Good words and a good challenge.  I am looking forward to our meeting on November 16th as we discuss some practical ways to have our community actually shaped by prayer. 

I am beginning to realize that to be a strong leader/person, you have to be willing to take the responsibility when things go wrong.  Too long have we been too quick to “displace blame.”  While its really convenient, its not helpful and no growth and is really, well, honestly, its cowardly.  

Friedman calls it a failure of nerve. Here’s a little blurb from his book where he ties this into our political situation:

Perhaps the most outstanding example of blame displacement in chronically anxious America is what has come to be called anti-incumbency, the tendency of voters to reject whoever is in office almost irrespective of their political party affiliation.  This flailing at the political winds amounts to a collective irresponsibility on the part of voters seeking magical, quick-fix answers to a complex range of problems of existence.  Instead of focusing on their own response to the challenges of change, these voters find fault in their political stars.  And this is not just a political phenomenon; it is occurring with regard to coaches, educators, CEOs, and clergy, not to mention marriage partners and parents. 

But for some reason, my mind is going to the idea that pastors need to be doing their own personal reading (call it devotions if you want) outside of the text they are preaching for the week.

I get the concept behind that.

But now I’m wondering, is this because we’re trained to approach the text that we are preaching in a way that doesn’t effect or transform our lives?

We encourage those who are part of The Well to sit with this text during the week and let it be part of their regular reading. But, as the pastor, that’s not good enough? I need to read beyond that?

When I study a text for a week that I am preaching I am doing background work and (some) language work. But, I am also sitting with the text all week long, keeping it in on the front of my brain all week long and letting it become infused in my daily life. Sounds pretty devotional to me.

The question for me is, am I doing this with the text when I am not preaching?

That’s another story altogether.

I guess my point is, as pastors, we better be taking in the text we are preaching in a way that it can transform our own lives, or we’re probably better off not preaching it at all.

And when we’re not preaching, we’d better be doing it too…

Now I am preaching at myself…