Toolbox For Faith

Like many other congregations, St. Michael orders palm crosses or branches each year for use on Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion. Certainly these worship supplies can be ordered from local florists or large supply houses, but you might consider ordering from ecopalms.org or African Palms USA. Ecopalms is an ecumenical partnership that focuses on providing palm branches in a way that is sustainable and helpful to the local economy. African Palms USA is a ministry sponsored by St. John’s Church, Olney, Maryland that produces palm crosses in Africa and then uses the proceeds for African ministries. I have ordered from African Palms USA several times and this year, after seeing a flyer from Lutheran World Relief, will be trying ecopalms.org for the first time.

It’s not uncommon for people to attribute a saying like “A penny saved is a penny earned” to the Bible. It sounds like good, solid, faithful, Biblical advice to many people. Since the Bible is a big book with lots of sayings, wisdom and advice and since most people haven’t memorized the Bible, it’s just easier to accept someone saying “Well, as the Bible says, a penny saved is a penny earned ” than it is to try and convince the speaker that those words were spoken by Ben Franklin, not Jesus, Moses or King David. A survey I read about this week, however, reminded me that sometimes the mis-identification of quotes goes the other way too.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/confused-americans-attribute-bible-quote-to-captain-america-54725/

I came across an interesting website this week called, Women in the Bible: http://www.womeninthebible.net/index.htm. The site was created by Elizabeth Fletcher, a professor at University of Sydney, Australia, as a way of making available the information published in her 1997 book, “Women in the Bible”. The book went out of print, so she published all the information online. It provides fairly complete background information, key events in the lives of the women profiled and a general overview of the conditions women face in ancient times. At the bottom of the page are links to several other sites she has created including: Bible People: http://www.bible-people.info/index.htm and All About the Bible: http://www.allaboutthebible.net/. Obviously, I haven’t read everything she has posted, but the majority of what I’ve seen so far looks helpful, well organized and fairly well researched.

At times Lutheran worship can be a little difficult to understand for people who come from a non-liturgical background. From robes to Lutheran aerobics (stand up, sit down, kneel, repeat) to the hymnals, a word of explanation can be helpful for new worshipers. My father put together an introduction to worship for the congregation he is currently serving to help a new group of worshipers. I liked the approach and adapted it for use at St. Michael. The modified version is currently posted on the “Worshiping at St. Michael” page on our website. Here is his original document and my modification to fit the practices at St. Michael. If you find the document to be helpful, please feel free to adapt it and use it in your congregation.

Understanding Worship at Mt Calvary

Understanding Worship at St. Michael

How many hours a week to you typically work - 40, 50, 60 or more? I am writing this on the 4th of July from my office, so I have to admit upfront that I typically work more than 40 hours per week, but an article I saw on Huffington Post this week got me thinking about why? Historically, I think most people would have said that pastors work long hours because the church is understaffed or because there are always emergencies happening or because the pastor wanted to be involved in everything. According to “Top-Level Professionals View 40-Hour Work Week As Part-Time” (accessed July 4, 2011), 40 hour plus work weeks for pastors may simply be a reflection of the world around us. The article discusses a report by The Center for American Progress which found that “many top-level professionals, lawyers and doctors view the traditional 40 hour work week as a “part-time” job . . . . Many feel, with some justification, that a 40-hour week would be career suicide. This schedule is seen as ‘part time’ in many professional-managerial jobs, and tends to spell a less-prestigious and less upwardly-mobile career path.” (quotation from the Huffington Post article).

Since I believe that most pastors reflect the culture around them, it makes sense that 50 or 60 hour weeks are become the acceptable norm, not an unhealthy habit that we were warned about in seminary. Let’s face it, if key leaders in your congregation are professionals who work long hours, then that’s what they will expect of their pastor. When I interned outside New York City, I wore a dress shirt and tie to the office Monday to Friday, but when I took my first call in Lowcountry South Carolina, the ties went in the closet and now only come out occasionally. Pastors often talk of “being in the world, but not of the world”, however I’m afraid we have become fully “of the world” when it comes to the number of hours pastors need to work or believe that they need to work per week to be faithful.

Since I don’t see that expectation changing anytime soon, the question becomes one of balance. How do you create a balance between work and home? For me, balance comes through flexibility. My internship supervisor, Pastor Roger Spencer, once told me that “some weeks you go home and the church owes you money, but some weeks you go home and you owe the church money. Hopefully over the course of the year, it all works out. The key to finding balance,” he said, “was to recognize the weeks when you could get back an hour or two and go home.” These days, seeking balance often revolves around time when I am in the office. I typically go into the office when I drop my kids off for school around 7:30 AM, but I also typically pick them up when school is over around 2:30 PM. Some days I am back in the office (and so are they) after I pick them up and some days, I am able to head home. Day to day, week to week it changes, but my kids and my congregation have learned my patterns and understand that this is one way that I balance family and church. I’m sure I’ll have to re-balance things as my kids get older, but for now it seems to work for us.

At Synod Assembly over the weekend, our keynote speaker, Dr. Jessicah Krey Duckworth, shared some wonderful ideas for nurturing faith in children and families. One of the resources she shared was the website: enterthebible.org from Luther Seminary. According to the introduction on the front page of the website, it contains a “wealth of resources to help you grow in your faith, add depth to your Bible studies and truly discover the people, places and events of the Bible. Think of Enter the Bible as your guide, a helpful reference tool to accompany you in your reading of the Bible.” For each book of the Bible, there is a tab with a summary of the book, an outline, background information, an introduction and theological themes. I have just started looking at the site, but so far it looks like a very useful tool.

I had the opportunity last week to hear two lectures focused on Islam and Christianity by Rev. Dr. Mark Swanson, the Harold S. Vogelaar Professor of Christian-Muslim Studies and Interfaith Relations at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, and Associate Director of Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice. In the next week or two, Dr. Swanson’s lectures should be posted on the website for the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary: http://www.ltss.edu/media_center/special_events/, but if you are looking for information or resources on the relationships between Christians and Muslims, check out the website for A Center for Christian-Muslim Engagement: http://centers.lstc.edu/ccme/ .

Like many congregations, St. Michael has a small lending library at the church. One of the librarians in the congregation introduced us to a website called, “Library Thing” which allows you to catalog your library and make the contents available online. The first 200 books are free and if you join as a lifetime member (we paid $40 for a lifetime membership), then you can enter an unlimited number of books. If you would like to see what St. Michael’s online library catalog looks like, you can find it here.

I came across a story this week about a church that ran a sermon series, service project series and advertising campaign around the theme, “Jesus is _______ .” While the scope of the project is a little beyond anything my congregation could pull off on its own, I am impressed by the interconnectedness of the campaign and the way in which it invites people from inside and outside the congregation to engage in a conversation about Jesus, to learn more about who Jesus is and to act on their beliefs. You can read an interview with the communication manager behind the project at:
http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/2011/03/jesus-is/
and you can visit the “Jesus is ______ .” website here:
http://jesus-is.org/.

A few weeks ago, I came across an excellent resource for Youth Group games on a website called “The Source for Youth Ministry.” I don’t know much about the other resources on the site, but the game section is amazing. The games are categorized and there is even a search feature that allows you to search by number of participants, prep time needed, etc. Here’s the link if you are interested: http://www.thesource4ym.com/games/.