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Sundays and the Sabbath

I'm a fan of Sheldon Sorge, and I affirm his article on ways that congregations can support their pastors in keeping their callings vital. However, I've been forced to conclude, after too many years of study, that there is little evidence from New Testament and pre-Constantinian historical sources to justify a Gentile Sabbath ethic. Sheldon says of himself (and all us pastors) and of members, "I needed not just an equivalent of their Saturday, a day to mow the yard, change the oil, fix the bicycle, etc. -- but also of their Sunday."

Many American Presbyterians remember blue laws and other external constraints on Sunday activity. Those constraints are gone, and "their Sunday" enjoys no practical consensus. Are Sundays for naps? NFL football? Movies and museums? Golf? Shopping? Youth sports? The whole day in acts of corporate and/or personal worship? Lacking a consensus, many pastors and authors are treating Sabbath as a personal spiritual practice, loosely defining it as "rest." Such an approach requires a good bit of work to justify itself as sufficiently grounded in Scripture, confessions, and theological reflection.

Paying attention to Sheldon's situation (and every minister's) can help. 

A tale of two Congregations

Standing on the corner of Santa Ana Blvd. and Main Street, in downtown Santa Ana, Calif., you experience the sights, sounds, and faces of a microcosm of the American urban story. 

On one side of Main Street sits First Church of Santa Ana, a downtown church celebrating this year its 125th anniversary. Considering it is in California, it is actually quite old. Once overflowing with members, more recently it is struggling to adapt to the city's changing demographics. Across Main Street, not a half block away, is the building that formerly housed Trinity United Church, the first United Presbyterian Church west of the Mississippi when it was founded in 1876. 

In 1958, Trinity Church, like many downtown Presbyterian churches, left the city to move out of downtown, now in the midst of a sprawling suburbia. First Church remained.

Now, some 50 years later, the two churches are coming together in a partnership that may give hope to other struggling urban churches, and inspiration to their often resource-rich suburban counterparts.

What is the public witness role of the assembly’s stated clerk?

Most of our church members know that the stated clerk is not just a guy with an eyeshade reviewing reports, though that part of the job was and is important. What makes the position so important is its leadership role, and that relates to the way the Clerk embodies and implements the Church's public witness. So we must look first at a definition of public witness, and then look at what current and past stated clerks have been doing.

By definition, public witness is a larger category than social witness and includes at least four main categories:

1.      Influencing public opinion by presenting persuasive, credible, ethically-grounded stances;

2.      Appealing to the faith and values of individuals, particularly in their church life;

3.      Effecting specific policies, involving informed constituencies;

4.      Exemplifying viable alternative visions grounded in the Gospel that contrast with the models of secular society, business, and government.

The Office of the General Assembly, focused in the elective office of the stated clerk, represents the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) internally and externally through a range of official and personal roles. Thus it relates to all four of the categories above. By virtue of its "church-wide," or General Assembly-based, election, the Clerk may be legitimately considered the highest elected continuing representative of the Church, carrying administrative duties well beyond those of Moderator, whose role is almost entirely symbolic.

The clock is ticking …

"The clock is running out very, very quickly. I am more pessimistic on the question of time running out than I've ever been."

-- U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt,), while on a visit to Jerusalem with Rep. Peter Welch (D.-Vt.)

I agree with the assessment of our Congressional leaders and applaud them for going to Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank. Reflecting on my three-week visit to the West Bank in May, I too discerned a sense of despairing hopelessness and apathy. Regretfully the delegation could not meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in person. But we saw the visible devastation caused by the Wall as it snakes its way mostly on Palestinian lands, cutting Palestinians off from Palestinians, creating apartheid-like Bantustans. As Shulamit Aloni, former member of Israel's Knesset, said recently, "Forty years of occupation has turned every Palestinian village into a detention camp. We are exercising apartheid." 

Forty years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories was recently marked. In 36 of those years I have witnessed what occupation is, having conducted annual alternative pilgrimage tours, done fellowship study, and been involved in humanitarian projects in hospitals, clinics, and schools. I have seen the strangulation of Palestinian cultural, political, economic, religious and social life, and educational opportunity. Each year it gets worse. Remember, Palestinians are the occupied, not the occupiers; yet they are being punished. Their land is being confiscated for Israeli settlements and an intricate system of roads for settlers only (all contrary to Geneva Conventions).

Personal needs require personal response

Of all institutions, the church has both the opening and the obligation to make a personal response to people's needs. People endure anonymous and mechanical responses from other institutions. They expect more from a faith community. 

With some exceptions, most church members will grant their church access to their lives. They will respond to personal visits, telephone calls, e-mail, and letters. In a need situation, they probably won't respond to a broadside invitation, such as, "If anyone needs a personal visit, call the church office."

Clergy need to develop the habit of making pastoral calls other than hospital emergencies.

Presbyterians using blogs, Web sites, podcasts to reach out

So what happens when John Stuart posts his daily devotions on his blog, "Heaven's Highway"?

People write to him from India, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Folks from his congregation say things like, "That's not what I believe," or "I never thought about that," and conversations begin.

And, as an added bonus, a teacher from a local high school is having students download his sermon podcasts. The students are preparing for an upcoming production of the musical "Brigadoon," and their teacher wants them to get it right.

"They're copying my accent," Stuart, pastor of Erin Church in Knoxville and a native of Scotland, said with pleasure.

There is no blueprint to Web 2.0, but the simple truth is this. Presbyterians --  like lots of other folks -- are using Web-based technology more and more. They find it freeing, a doorway to discipleship, a way to creatively meld words and music and images and ideas.

Your own personal Gutenberg

In the beginning, there was Gutenberg. Those privileged few who owned the printing presses printed the text, while everyone else merely read it. To be sure, copies of a text might be circulated among friends, discussed around the dinner table, or used to prop up a short table leg, but the text itself remained static. Any underlined passages or notes in the margin remained isolated from the general public, existing solely in that copy of the text.

The beginning of the Internet (what we'll call "Web 1.0") was much the same. A limited few who had the technical or financial resources to do so created Web sites. The World Wide Web quickly developed into a great source of information, but not really a means of self-expression or conversation for the masses.

Cold Turkey Days

For those who can deny the malls,

and flying footballs on the screen,

there lies, tucked in between the feasting

and those first December days,

a blessed intermission, several hours,

at least, when nothing must be done,

Blogging as spiritual discipline and pastoral practice

My name is Bruce and I am a blogger! 

Group response: "Hi, Bruce!"

There I said it, I am an unapologetic blogger. And not just any blogger, but I am a blogger that also happens to be a quickly aging Presbyterian pastor who is probably not as cool or hip as I once thought I was ;-)  Please don't hold any of this against me.  

As one of those folks whose age allows me to bridge the gap between knowing a time without the Internet -- gasp! - and experiencing online social networking as a natural part of my life, I feel like I not only have lived the great technological transition of the world, but have been transformed in the midst of it all. THANK YOU, JESUS!

Ministry in the online world of social networking

Staying on top of the technological curve in ministry can eventually drive one crazy, but it is also one of the most effective tools in communicating with and connecting those in your congregation. With this in mind, one of the very first tasks that I set about in the summer of 2002 when I became the college director at Bel Air Church in Los Angeles, Calif., was to hire a professional Web designer to create a very attractive and interactive Web site. I was expecting this new Web site to bridge the gap for us in communication and connection within our community. We created pages for them to upload their artwork and photography, and we created a forums section where various issues could be raised and discussed for anyone who desired to enter the conversation.  Since both my students and I were controlling this content, users weren't returning to the same static site that they had grown used to in the past. But having an attractive and interactive Web site in hopes to communicate and connect people was just not enough, and it is certainly not enough today.

Blogging 101

I was driving home on Interstate 84 just outside of Wendell, Idaho, where I was serving as a director of youth ministries. I was talking with a friend on my cell phone and he told me I needed to get a blog. "A what?" I asked. "A blog -- you know, a Weblog?" Although I was very computer-savvy at the time, I hadn't gotten involved in blogging. My friend eventually convinced me that I needed to get one, and so I went home and started my first blog and called it Pomomusings ("Pomo," at the time, was the trendy version of "postmodern," so it was going to be my musings about issues of church, culture, and postmodernism).

A blog, or Weblog, is basically a Web site that has constantly changing content. The Oxford American Dictionary defines a blog as "a Web site on which an individual or group of users produce on ongoing narrative." Instead of the more traditional, static Web sites we are used to (where the content remains the same), people constantly add new posts to their blogs and often update them daily -- producing an ongoing story or narrative of their lives or thoughts. On most blogs, not only can you go and read the posts, but you can also leave comments and get involved in conversations on the blog.

The one-year blogiversary of a RevGalBlogPal

I used to think blogging was stupid. Who would want to read some random person's thoughts? Why would I want to read what is essentially an online journal? 

This was my opinion about blogging until I created a blog for our church's "Theology on Tap" group and wrote my first post. Last October, I returned home to see the sun setting on the row houses behind our own. The trees and the rooftops looked as if they were on fire. I was so struck by the beauty that I grabbed my camera and found myself writing about the experience on the newly created blog. I wrote about a moment that stopped me short and pulled me out of my busy life. I wrote what I was thinking and feeling and pushed "publish." From that moment on, I was hooked on this crazy thing called blogging. I soon created a personal blog and celebrated my first blogiversary on October 26. 

What brought about this change of heart? For me, blogging is about two things. It is about community and the discipline of taking notice.

The case for Facebook and other social networks

Do we really meet people where they are, even if it is on Facebook?

Seems that over the past months I have heard a couple of interesting comments from some pastor-type colleagues in regards to the www.facebook.com hysteria:

"What's Facebook?"

"Are People REALLY using Facebook?"

"I had no idea how cool Facebook is."

So, is Facebook just the latest Internet fad? Could be. Does it really matter in the whole scheme of the cause of Christ? Probably not. Should all pastor-types at least look at it? Probably.

Hospitality Counts

The days of families meeting at church -- the husband coming from work, the wife coming from home and bearing a casserole -- shaped church hospitality for many years. Those days have ended.

One thing is ongoing -- the need for hospitality. Jesus ate with people. Table fellowship was a primary venue for his teaching and touching.

How, then, does a congregation provide hospitality?

For those few congregations that have cooking staffs and ample budgets, the answer is easy; for everyone else, not so easy. Some order food to be delivered -- portable food such as pizza or salads. Some heat up large lasagnas purchased in bulk. Some tell people to bring a sandwich with them. For an upcoming class on a Wednesday night, I plan to put out bread, peanut butter and jelly, and to say clearly, "This isn't fine dining, it's taking off the edge of hunger so we can learn together." Some shift their gatherings to restaurants.