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My dream for the church: Missions and Mars

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    We asked our bloggers to share their biggest dreams for the church. Here’s what they imagine.  We can put a man on the moon, but the church still has a food pantry. I recently watched the first season of "Mars" from the National Geographic channel. (No season 2 spoilers please!) It follows a hypothetical mission to Mars in the 2030s while sneaking in some documentary education from actual space exploration up through 2016, and for a sci-fi fan like me, it's a very bingeworthy show now that it's on Netflix. What most impacted me from watching the show is the passion and imaginative energy that go into the human effort to reach and colonize Mars. It's captivating: the fictional crew are willing to give their lives to live on an inhospitable planet millions of miles from Earth. Their supporters back home do everything in their power to keep the program going despite seemingly overwhelming challenges. As a Christian, though, seeing the passion and energy that … [Read more...]

Tagged With: church dreams

Taking time off

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  I noticed early on that when pastors get together, one of two things tends to happen. Either everybody gets into a contest about how “my church is better than yours” – or, somehow, everyone gets into a contest about how “my job is worse than yours!” It boggles my mind, but I’ve seen it happen over and over again – and even succumbed to the temptation myself. Isn’t it strange how we get into arguments over who has it worse? I don’t want to win the contest of “who has the worst luck” or “who has the worst job,” but every once in a while I find myself stuck arguing those exact points. There are a lot of people who think that pastors have one of the toughest jobs in existence. Pastors are always on call, are rarely recognized for the intangible work they do, work for relatively little pay despite (at least in our denomination) high education requirements. I knew these things before I began my first call. I had experienced some of the difficulties of pastoral ministry … [Read more...]

Tagged With: sabbath • self-care

The art of getting lost

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We just moved to a new city, and even with Google Maps and Waze I'm finding myself lost pretty regularly. As a pastor, I realize that there are some great spiritual components to getting lost. Think about all the stories in the Bible of people who neededto lose their way: the Israelites had to get lost in the wilderness before they were able to enter the promised land, Jonah had to get lost in the belly of a fish before he could follow God's commands and Jesus had to go get lost in the wilderness before he began his ministry (not to mention the stories about God's tendency to pick people up and whisk them off to unknown locations — Elijah, Ezekiel, Philip and John of Patmos for example). I'm not saying that God is miraculously sabotaging GPS satellites to stop me from getting where I'm going, but getting lost has, in fact, been a reminder to me that not everything in life is about getting from point A to point B. And in a new place, that's good news. On a very practical level, it … [Read more...]

Tagged With: New year

An ordinary ordination

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This week we asked our bloggers to reflect on their ordinations.  Here are their blogs. I’ve wanted to be a pastor since I was a kid. That’s not true for a large number of people who become ordained as Ministers of Word and Sacrament, but I knew about my calling when I was taking those career exams they made us take in high school and middle school. I remember the test it spitting back out a number of different career choices, most of which didn’t appeal to me. And, to be honest, I don’t remember at this point if it even listed “pastor” as one of the options, but the exam definitely got me thinking. I spent the next eight years exploring and educating myself and making sure of things, but as soon as I got out of college I entered seminary. Getting ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament (or, as they did it “back in my day” in 2012, as a teaching elder) defines the course of your life. It’s true that it sets you apart to a special kind of service, but I know that for a lot of … [Read more...]

Tagged With: ordination reflections

What can 1870 teach a 2018 minister?

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This month we asked our bloggers about how they view the role of pastor, how they understand their pastoral identity, or to share what a pastor really does all week.  Here's how they responded.   When I daydream, it’s almost always about the future – flying cars, spacecraft, jetpacks and the little pieces of gum that make you feel like you ate a three-course meal from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” Sometimes, though, I get swept in the other direction – especially when it comes to the history of the local church. The church I currently serve, Langcliffe Presbyterian Church in Avoca, Pennsylvania, was established in 1870, which is the same year its presbytery (Presbytery of Lackawanna) started. It’s a young church by many standards, including the standards of the First Presbyterian Church of Wilkes-Barre down the road, which was established in 1772 (as a Congregationalist church), and the other Congregationalist, Baptist, Roman Catholic and still other … [Read more...]

Tagged With: Role of pastor

On being a young leader

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“There is something ludicrous about a callow young fool like myself standing up to preach a sermon to these good folks.” Thus begins Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic,” with his first journal entry from 1915. After one sermon on bearing crosses, a woman asked him whether he had “borne many crosses” in his young life. He relates that many just couldn’t understand how someone that young could be a pastor — they expected a little more wisdom from the role. I completely understand where Niebuhr is coming from in this entry. I began ministry straight out of seminary, serving a church where I had preached during my senior year. It might not sound like a second year grad student is very young to be a pastor if you’re coming from some other denominations, but we’re not used to 24-year-old pastors in the Presbyterian Church. What does a 24-year-old pastor have to offer to a church full of people two or three times their age? Certainly not experience or wisdom, … [Read more...]

Tagged With: leadership

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