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Planning for life after retirement

We all know that it's important to care for our health and finances as part of retirement planning. However, we often neglect more obvious, but no less significant, issues, such as where we will live and what we will do with our time. As one Board of Pensions seminar asks, "If you are what you do, who are you when you don't?"

Entering this new stage of life can be a challenge, especially if you don't start thinking about it until you're already retired. Consider this example from Jeri Sedlar and Rick Miners' book Don't Retire, REWIRE!

[Bill] had come to realize that a traditional retirement like his father's was not for him. He wanted to do something productive -- but he didn't know what. He just knew that he didn't want anything as demanding as the 24/7 existence he had been living for the past three years (xi).1

Retirement Resources

The Board of Pensions of

the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.):

www.pensions.org

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.):

www.pcusa.org

Presbyterian Association of Homes

and Services for the Aging:

www.pahsa.org

Calvin’s Jubilee

Presbyterians across the church have had July 2009 marked on their calendars for years, in eager anticipation of the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. Or perhaps not.

Lutherans adore Martin Luther. Methodist hearts are strangely warmed by John Wesley. Anglicans even have a sardonic fondness for Henry VIII. But Presbyterians are uncertain at best about John Calvin and his legacy. Calvin is not a Reformed idol.

Our reluctance to venerate John Calvin would have pleased him. Calvin did not want the reverence of future generations. Among other safeguards against idolization, he specified that he be buried in Geneva's common cemetery in an unmarked grave. Although there is a Rue Calvin in Geneva today, his house no longer stands, and no one knows quite where it was. 

Presbyterian church ecumenical relations since its 1983 reunion

Introduction

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) experienced a reunion in 1983 of what are commonly referred to as the Northern and Southern Presbyterian churches. This article gives a brief account of what has happened in ecumenical relations in the PC(USA) since its reunion in Atlanta, Ga., June 1983.

The common designation of the previous churches as "southern" and "northern" is an inaccuracy. The northern Church, UPCUSA, was a national church with congregations and presbyteries spanning the USA territory. One can surmise that this designation began at the time of the separation of these churches in the 1860's over issues relating to the holding of Negro slaves, a subject of great interest, though this article is not intending to address it.

Christian sign language

In my current days of age, I have come to believe that there is another aspect of learning, and worshipping. 

It is the presence of motion, and the use of the body in praise. I call this Christian sign language. Oh, you say, "This fellow is off on a Pentecostal kick!" Perhaps there is a suspicion brewing that I have sold out to ecclesiastical "rock and roll". 

Effectiveness, not smallness

Many Protestant congregations have gotten trapped in a "culture of smallness."

They don't value growth, they resist change, and they look askance at megachurches. True virtue, they want to believe, lies in the small, in face-to-face intimacy, in the pastor who knows every story well. Some of this attitude is defensive, of course. Their churches aren't growing, so they develop an ideology of non-growth.

Children of divorce?

In 2003, Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten edited a little book entitled, In One Body Through the Cross, challenging churches in North America to discover their unity in Christ. In that book, Jenson and Braaten note that congregational life in the United States "often proceeds with little sense of contradiction between division from others and life as a realization of one church of Christ."1  We are no longer offended by denominational differences and indeed regard such variations as normal, i.e., as "the natural expression of a Christian marketplace with churches representing different options for a variety of spiritual tastes."

“What’s happening here?”

As one fascinated by the future and its possibilities, I find scenario planning -- creating stories of possible futures, and watching for signs as to how the future is unfolding -- to be a stimulating framework for observation. Peter Schwartz, in The Art of the Long View, and his consulting firm, GBN Global Business Network, popularized this planning technique that is used in for-profit as well as non-profit and governmental organizations. I like to think that my passion for scenario planning both honors and invokes the tradition of the Bible's visionaries and dreamers, whose own scenarios of what God's future would hold were awakened by the touch of the Spirit in their respective contexts and cultures.

Designating Greeters

If ministers have the fortitude to greet arriving and departing worshipers on Sunday, they will find themselves whipsawed between conflicting needs.

Longtime members want the pastor's attention and believe, quite justifiably, that they deserve it. Visitors, new members and those not yet incorporated into church life need the pastor's attention, too.

On a recent Sunday, I talked with a needy member at the front door and watched helplessly as a dozen newcomers left church without any connection. We didn't get their names or e-mail addresses, or say a word of welcome, or convey a desire to embrace.

If I had focused on the newcomers, of course, it would have been the member who left feeling ignored.

Use “purpose-driven” to become a missional and emergent church!

As an advocate for overcoming disciple-making mediocrity by adapting the purpose-driven approach to ministry, I recognize that some leaders question whether this innovative strategy can indeed reflect non-negotiable Presbyterian beliefs and values. And some leaders wonder whether the Missional and Emerging Church movements have supplanted the purpose-driven approach as the best way to re-tool a congregation for life-changing ministry.

To some observers, the phrase "purpose-driven Presbyterian" is simply an oxymoron, since the concept was developed by Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Community Church, a Southern Baptist congregation! Yet the six Great Ends of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) i.e. (G-1.0200) mirror Warren's premise that Christ's church exists in order to cultivate worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and mission. (Two of the six "Great Ends" concern "mission," expressing our Reformed conviction that salvation is holistic, involving both the "proclamation of the Gospel" and the "promotion of social righteousness.")