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Why I Share the Pulpit
I’ve been the teaching pastor at Sunrise since January of 2013. I believe for the first 7 years, I was preaching 50-51 Sundays a year. I loved it and still do, but truthfully, I don’t know if it’s best to keep that pace forever. This has been a conversation with our elders for a little while now, and we’ve settled on me aiming to preach 42-45 Sundays a year. I’m grateful to our leaders who are looking out for me. I’m also thankful for other men who are willing and able to preach. Here are some benefits to sharing the pulpit.
Sharing the pulpit also helps to communicate that the ministry of the local church isn’t all about one person.
Pastors, if you are able, I’d encourage you to look for opportunities to share the pulpit duties as you can. Are you ever going to stop moving? There is no way you need to go to the potty AGAIN! Chairs are for sitting, not wallowing. Can you please stop looking behind you? Don't poke your sister! No, you cannot have another peppermint. It will be over when it's over, stop asking. Sit still!
Have you ever whispered any of the above to a little one that you are desperately trying to keep subdued during church? I have. Having children in church is a wonderful if not sometimes challenging privilege. The idealism of a family all sitting in church quietly lined up like little angels is not usually reality for most of us. Some weeks you feel more like you are trying to wrangle a lab puppy, or two. As another Sunday approaches and more families are back from the pandemic hiatus, here are a few helpful hints for navigating Big Church.
But remember what we are doing at church. Is there anything more important than gathering with God’s people consistently to worship the living and redeeming God? Our kids will grow up and leave home one day. What do you want them to remember about how your family valued corporate worship? As an afterthought? No, let’s prioritize this! Here are a few ways we can prepare well through the week: - TALK: Take some time each week on a few occasions to talk about worshipping on Sundays. Remind your kids of what they learned and remind them that Sunday’s coming. Worship is a privilege not a drudgery. Communicate that to your kids. - PRAY: Often times when we are at the dinner table as I pray before our meal, I will thank the Lord for our church. I think it’s important for our kids know we are thankful for fellowship believers. Pray for missionaries, pray for your elders, pray for special events coming up and those who are hurting in the church. Let your kids hear you pray specifically for the local body. I'm so encouraged when families tell me they are praying for me and our church leaders! - PLAN: This is where a little bit of forethought goes a long ways. My wife is really good about having something for our kids to do during the service. We do not expect them to take copious notes. [Note: When I first wrote this, my kids were 8, 6 & 6]. Be realistic. Many times, we will take a sheet of paper and make 3-4 columns on the page. We have the kids listen for key words. Usually a couple of simple ones like God or Jesus, and then something more sermon specific. If you know the text to be preached, you can look ahead and use a word like resurrection or grace. We have them make a tally mark each time they hear that word. Our kids responded well to this. We try to bring one maybe two things for kids to do to occupy their hands. But don’t give many options (they just go back and forth ad infinitum). Many times just a pen and paper are fine. Occupied hands often times means a quieter mouth.
I’ve tried a lot of different methods through the years to do the Bible in a year. Like many of you, I’ve found myself bogged down and many years I’ve given up the journey way too early. I just finished a plan that I wanted to share with you. It worked for me and maybe will be helpful for others.
I used The Bible Project reading plan through their Read Scripture App. This year I decided to listen instead of read. Of course both listening and reading have their benefits. Here’s how it works for me: I’m the first one up in our house, so when I get up and am making a cup of coffee, I put in my headphones and then use Youversion App to listen to the reading for the day. I open the Read Scripture app first, look at the reading for the day, then listen using Youversion. I then scroll through the reading on Read Scripture and click the check mark so it marks it complete. Repeat until you are done. This year I listened to the CSB version and I plan to do that again next year. I typically use the ESV, so it’s a nice change of pace. Anybody have other plans they have found to be useful? I know you don't want to think about death. Neither do I, it's Saturday morning, the sun is shining here in NE Florida, I'm about to go coach my son's flag football game, then we'll fire up the grill, and enjoy some college football later this evening before I hibernate to finalize sermon prep for tomorrow. But death is still coming.
I originally titled my sermon from Ecclesiastes 2:12-17, "The Longer You've Lived: the less you'll live." The Preacher in Ecclesiastes has some pointed thoughts for on death and like a persistent drippy faucet, he just keeps reminding us of death over and over and over again. The topic comes up more than 20 times in the 12 chapters. What should we make of this? Rather than sending us into a spiral of depression or into hopeless nihilism, I think there's something we can pull from the reality of the relentless march of time: seize the day because you don't know how many you have. An item's value is most often determined by it's scarcity. This is why gold is valuable. If everyone could dig up pounds of it in their backyard, it wouldn't be worth much. Think of your time as a precious and scarce commodity. I think that's the heart of Moses' Psalm: "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." (Psa 90:12). Enjoy the day. All of it. Life is a gift from God. Recently we passed 75 years since the first and only usage of atomic weapons in world history — a fact for which we are grateful and honestly a little surprising to me. The use of “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and “Fat Man” on Nagasaki unleashed a new era in weaponry. The development and use of these weapons remains highly controversial.
I read two books on this recently and found both fascinating. Chris Wallace’s Countdown to 1945 tells the story of the development of the nuclear program in Los Alamos, NM, known as Project Y or the Manhattan Project. Wallace tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer and other scientist who worked to make these bombs. It’s told in a “countdown” style marking the months, weeks, days, then hours up to the first bombing. I enjoyed this one. It’s readable and thought the science is mind boggling complex, Wallace writes in a way that’s easy to follow. The second book was equally fascinating as it told the story of The Girls of Atomic City. In the little town of Oak Ridge, TN there was a sprawling military reserve set up for the purpose of creating material for bombs. With many of the men off to war, so many young women were recruited to work the development site. It was so secretive that the vast majority of the people who worked there had no idea what they were working on. These girls were trained to turn dials and monitor readings without even knowing what they were working with. It wasn’t until after the first bomb was dropped that they became aware of what they had helped to create. This book follows the lives of these ladies and takes a look at the ethical struggles many have once they realize what they helped create. One final resource, I appreciated Dr. Mohler’s take on this episode of The Briefing on the ethical implications of the use of the bomb. This book should be required reading for parents and educators. The authors take on 3 big misconceptions that are popular today and demonstrate how these bad ideas are wreaking terrible consequences. The bad ideas are: 1) What doesn't kill you makes you weaker; 2) Always trust your feelings; and 3) Life is a battle between good people and evil people. This book isn’t written from a strictly Christian perspective but Christian parents can learn much from this work and how to prepare our kids for the world and particularly the college campus. You can read the article that prompted the book here. I love the Exodus story. Our church spent a series of months, make that years, working through the book of Exodus. As often happens when I finish preaching a sermon or series, I come across a resources that I wish I had earlier! For the book of Exodus, this is one of those resources. Carmen Joy Imes does a great job of showing “why Sinai still matters.” Many of us probably grew up thinking that the command to “not take the Lord’s name in vain” was little more than using God’s name in a curse. Dr. Imes demonstrates that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Bearing God’s name is a central theme in the Old and New Testaments. Believers are called to carry God’s name everywhere we go, in everything we do.
When you study theology, you can study it in one of two basic ways. You can study “systematic theology” which is a method of study that asks what the Bible says about a given topic (e.g. Salvation, End Times, the person of Christ, etc) or you can do “biblical theology” which considers how doctrines develop through the progressive story of the Bible. Biblical Theololgy has seen a major uptick in writings in the past few years and this trend is encouraging. This book is well researched and immensely readable. You don’t have to know Hebrew or get a Bible degree. Pick it up, read it, let me know what you think! A couple of weeks ago as our church, like many, was dipping our toe in the livestream waters (somewhat to my chagrin, but that's for another post). We got a notification from Facebook that Big Brother caught a song being played for which we didn't own the copyright. Turns out, it was our preservice music, and we actually did have a license to play it, but I digress. For me, it was another reminder that AI isn't just the future, it's here and it's watching, listening, learning, and predicting. It's fascinating what AI can do now, and it's somewhat horrifying what it could do when the tech turns predictive. The ethics get murky. Sometimes it doesn't seem quite as improbable that we could move towards a "precrime" type of intervention like Marvel's S.H.I.E.L.D. Tech is here to stay so it's time for Christians to catch up and think about these issues from a Biblical Worldview. Below is a primer to get us started on how to think about AI and the Christian. I appreciated this article just released from the ERLC. I particularly like the emphasis on the Imago Dei (Image of God). This is worth consideration. Jason Thacker, of the ERLC, wrote a book that was just released this year (2020) entitled, The Age of AI. This was a fascinating book written in a conversational style. Thacker does a nice job of explaining the challenges of even defining AI and shows how that differs from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The chapter on AI and war will give you all kinds of ethical heartburn. John Lennox is a great writer. In my humble opinion, he's one of the most well versed apologist around today. In his book, 2084, Lennox jumps into the AI and Imago Dei discussion. The title is a tip of the cap to Orwell's classic, 1984. Lennox book is less about AI than Thackers and more focussed on building a robust Anthropology (doctrine of man). I'm a little more reformed leanings than Lennox, so some of his later chapters take on an emphasis that I wouldn't completely embrace, but the book is more than worthwhile. Franklin Foer wrote the book, World Without Mind. Foer is a journalist with The Atlantic. He's not necessarily writing from a theological or biblical perspective. This book will cause you to rethink your relationship with digital tech! He profiles the big 4 in the Big Tech world (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google). They own us, let me demonstrate. If you are reading this, there's a strong chance you found the article on Facebook and likely an Apple device. If this book strikes your interest, you'll google it to learn more. If it seems interesting, you will buy it on Amazon. These 4 compete in some arenas (iPhone and Android) but there is plenty of turf for each giant to to their thing in controlling the masses. Sometimes you read a book that reminds you how much you have left to learn. This book did that for me. We often speak of the intentions of the founding fathers and the original colonies as if they were a monolithic unit that were all in agreement on policy, cultural norms, and religion. This book challenges that notion and demonstrates that the “United States” weren’t so united in the early days. What’s fascinating is you can draw a line from the ethnoregional backgrounds to current day political leanings. Why is there such a similarity between the Northeast and the Left Coast? Why does the Midwest tend to vote similarly to the Deep South? This is a fascinating read. I do think Woodard was a bit harsh on his critique of evangelicals. The book skips too quickly through Reconstruction but overall, this one is fascinating. Though not the goal of the book, it helps explain why a two party system feels so unsatisfactory to many of us. |