Bible 101

I mentioned this in my e-mail Sunday preview this week. Here is all the information:

Bible 101

We base our faith and Christian life on the words of scripture. However, some of us are not as familiar with scripture as we would like. Sometimes the Bible can overwhelm us and we need help getting started in the discipline of Bible reading and study. Join Pastor Will Rice and the Bible 101 team for this four week class specially designed for people who have never engaged in an adult Bible study. It is even great for those who have never picked up a copy of the Bible. The fee for the course is $30 and covers the cost of one of the best study Bibles available, The New Interpreter’s Study Bible. During the four weeks you will get an overview of the Bible and you will be introduced to the skills and resources that will help you engage the Bible on your own. The class will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 for four Thursday nights beginning Thursday, May 1st. Because of the need to order materials, there will be a firm registration deadline of Monday, April 28^th and class size is limited.

Register by emailing me at pastorwillrice@gmail.com.

Reinforcing our Prejudices

You may notice that the blog avoids political issues and that tradition continues. So, when you follow the link to the article I am sending, and it begins with "If you’re a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night’s presidential debate." don't think you are reading a political article. It is about something much deeper. It is, instead, an article that uses the example of what is going on the democratic primaries to talk about how we process information in a way that tends to reinforce what we already believe. This is a really poignant issue for Christians. The Bible is our book, but how we read it can affect whether we will allow it to change our lives or if we will simply use it as a tool to feel better about how we already live. This is a really poignant issue for United Methodists, especially this week. As we head into General Conference, where we will be making decisions that will deeply affect the future of our denomination, will we actually listen to each other, or we will hold so firm to what we already believe that we will possibly miss where the Holy Spirit is leading us?

Give the article a read. I would love to read your feedback!

Divided They Fall

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 17, 2008

Even though the policy differences between the two Democratic candidates are minimal, each camp is becoming increasingly aggravated at the other.

peace,


will

Jury Duty

So I have to report for jury duty Monday. Some people are surprised that pastors have to go. We have to do all that stuff: report for jury duty, pay taxes, obey the speed limit. I dread going only from the point of view that I am really busy and this could keep me out of the office and away from my family even more. However, it is a servant thing to do. The Constitution gives us all the right to an impartial jury. That is a very important right, but it doesn't work if we won't be part of such a jury once in a while.

There will be less blogging if I am picked. I am pretty sure that blogging is not allowed in a jury box. (At least not on T.V.)

peace,

will

Catching up with the stuff on the right side of the blog

If you are a close follower of my reading list, it may look to you like I have given up on reading. Honestly, I really have been reading a lot less since finishing all my work related to covenant connection. That seems sort of illogical because covenant connection took up so much of my time I would have thought I wouldn't be reading. However, I think there were two things driving my pretty voracious reading habits during the process. One was that I was mentally overwhelmed to the point with the ordination process, the adoption process, etc., etc., that I needed to slip into some other storyline besides my own especially at bed time. The other thing, I realized was something about my own insecurity. Knowing that I was being evaluated and had a number of high-pressure interviews ahead, I had this overwhelming need to continually put new knowledge in my head hoping that it would help me better articulate my answers. All in all, this might not have been a bad plan. I wouldn't say that, in my time preparing for my ordination interviews, I really gained a lot of new knowledge but I did continue to enhance my contextual framework. As a pastor and amateur theologian, I think about nearly everything in theological terms. When I am processing new stuff, even stuff marginally related to what could be understood as theology, I am expanding and strengthening the bridges of my own understanding. So when faced with a particular question of faith, practice or thinking about God, my answer has a better chance of making some amount of sense to the questioner.

Anyway, this is a really long way of getting to moving another book from my "What Will is Reading Now" list to my "What Will Read Last" list.

I finished James Morrow's Towing Jehovah a while ago but just picked it up off my nightstand to blog about. I think I delayed so long because this book is fundamentally blasphemous. If you have any predilection to being offended especially regarding matters of faith, PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. If me writing that got you interested, this might be for you. The book is wildly irreverent, and brilliantly written. To test the level at which you are offended, the general premise of the book is that God has died and fallen into the sea and needs to be towed to his final resting place. It gets worse.

But let me tell you how I, as a pastor, found enjoyment in this book. First of all, it is pretty funny at times. Second of all, books that sort of tromp on the fringes of my belief system are really healthy for me. When I read something that offends me, I have to think about why. When I think about why, I think about what I believe. When I think about it those terms, I am usually left standing in a stronger place about my beliefs. If am not, I have to question why a silly book would raise such a doubt.

That is all I am going to write about that. If you read the book and enjoy it, let me know. If you read it and get horribly offended, please remember I warned you!

peace,

will

Where are the sermons?

I have had a few questions lately about the absence of my sermons both online and in printed form at the church. Well, what started as me being a little behind led me to reevaluate a bit. First, let me say, I love the idea of making my sermons available. I know people who read them when they miss church, read them to clarify something they heard in a sermon, I even have some readers online from far away. Second, let me say that publishing a sermon takes a little bit of work. I tend to print and post my sermons without them being perfect. However it still takes some time to take what I write and put it in publishable form. I don't mind a typo or two but sometimes what I am working from on Sunday morning is a pretty rough form of what I actually say. So, it takes me some time to look back at the notes and create a finished manuscript. Really what happened for me is that the time for this got squeezed out.

In making the decision as to whether or not to reprioritize my time to keep printing and posting, I started looking over how my time as allocated and why I don't have time for this thing I used to have time for. I made a mental list of all the things we are doing at Grace that I am heavily involved in that we were not doing when I got here three years ago. I don't offer this list as a chance to say: "look what I have done." The point isn't that I personally do all this stuff. We have a really dedicated core of lay people who do a ton of praying and planning and working to pull this all off. We also have a dedicated staff that is involved in administering these things. However, as a pastoral leader, these sorts of things take a lot of my time. Since coming to Grace, I heavily focused on programming while John focused on leadership and administration. We have come a long way in programming. While it is still in its infancy, we have developed a discipleship program to help people take their first steps into the life of Christianity: Bible 101, Prayer 101, and Methodism 101 have taken a huge number of hours to launch and nurture. Worship 101 launched last week led by Pastor John. The Why Grace intro session has been polished and expanded to be more informative and welcoming to new people. We have added local mission experiences like Kairos Cookie night to connect new people with missions. We have added an orientation event for new members to challenge them to get involved in the life of the church. The teams I work with have become systematic in their planning and visioning to create even bigger plans for the future.

Outside of discipleship, John and I have led a movement to make worship excellent here at Grace. That has involved extra planning and training of lay ministers. It has also taken a lot of weekly preparation for worship. We have added a lot of multi-media to all three services including sermons slides and video. The lyrics at 9:45 are finally on the big screen! I love all that stuff and I think it is worth it, but it all takes time to plan and to implement.

Multi-media and a desire to be excellent in all we do carries beyond worship. If you have taken any of the 101 classes of Why Grace, you have probably noticed that we use multi-media and multi-sensory learning to make these classes the best that they can be.

Over the last two years, Grace has also been involved in the Church Transformation Process with Don Nations from DNA coaching. Don has challenged us to evaluate all we do and do all we can to be in the business of making disciples. This has involved a huge investment of time both in training, evaluating and implementing.

I hope it doesn't sound like I am complaining about all I have to do. I love this stuff! It just so happens though that there is a physical limit to my time. Most of the time, as a pastor, I am aware of the boundaries I need to keep. When I work too long and too hard without family time and R&R, my ability to do my job and be a pastor is severely hampered. With a physical limit of time, when I add enough additional projects without an increase in support staff, something has to go. In this case sermons.

The reason we have been able to add so much to the church in the last three years is that lay people have stepped up to carry the weight. Our 101 classes would not even happen without lay leadership. In fact, Prayer 101 is completely led by lay people. Most of the work of our Church Transformation Process has been done by lay people and they attend as much training as John or I.

What is interesting in retrospect, is that with all the amazing expansion in programming in the last three years, the staff has remained the same size. I look at the main role of the staff of the church as a vehicle to empower the lay ministers of the church. That goes for the pastors as well though the pastors have some additional function (some call these the priestly role, but that is for another post.) Even with the huge expansion in ministry and the large number of additional people involved in ministry, the staff size has remained mostly constant. There have been some changes and some filled vacancies and we did add a very part-time sound tech at 9:45 but otherwise we are the same. The staff here has been amazing in their ability to continue to accept more and more work, but they, like me have physical limits.

It is interesting how a thing like published sermons, or a lack of, can raise the question, "Are we staffing our church in a way that will allow us to continue to grow or in a way that will cause us to shed useful ministries as others grow?" For that, I don't have and answer and I have to get back to work.

peace,

will

The Monumental Journey Towards Ordination - Volume 4

When we last left our caped crusader, he was precariously perched on the precipice of pandemonium. Well, not really...

I was working with my lay guide through a book called Ministry Inquiry Process. Before I move on to the next step I want to fill some more details of what was going on during this process. The process took several months. During these months, I experienced what was probably some of the most intense spiritual growth of my life. This all happened in the midst of some pretty intense activity in my life. I apologize in advance if I mess up some of these details. As the presidential primary has reminded us, sometimes we remember things as being a little different than they actually were.

So there I was, flying into Bosnia under heavy fire from artillery. Wait...

So there I was working through this book with my guide Sue, meeting about once a month. My spiritual hunger brought about by this experience and by my call in general caused me to exhaust most of the resources at the church I was baptized, so I went looking for another one. Not to replace the first one, but to supplement it.

I was searching around on the web (this was back in the day that not many churches had websites) and found that First United Methodist Church in downtown Austin had a Saturday night alternative service. They had their very own website with pictures and it looked really cool. So I went. And as God would have it, I met one of the most significant people in my spiritual journey: my friend Tina. If you don't know her, you will see her if you come to my ordination service. She will be one of the one's laying hands on me as the Bishop ordains me. She was interning at First UMC at the time and launching this new service.

We made an immediate connection, which may be less telling for her since she is all about connections, but it was something for me. I am getting chills as I am writing this because I have never really thought back to the enormous things that happened in God leading me to that Saturday evening worship service. Tina was there as I made my decisions about seminary. Tina was there as I decided to get married. Tina drove me to the hospital when I found out I was deadly allergic to ant bites. Tina performed the marriage ceremony for my wife Alisha and I. She sat next to me during Alisha's brain surgery. She helped me decide to transfer to seminary in Austin. Well, let me not bore you with every major event she was part of. (There are a lot more.) And don't let it seem like she was the only person who had an enormous impact of my journey. I could write whole books about Jen, Barbara, John, Mary Beth, Sandy, Alisha, Grant, Sharon, and on and on and on (sorry if I left you out, but there are more posts to come). The reason that I write about Tina at this point is that it was a fairly "random" decision that sent me to worship at her church. But for me, it was clearly a decision that affected my decision and ability to follow my call to ministry.

Calls to ministry, just like the other aspects of what God does in our lives are clearly built on relationship, intertwining interactions of God's people who are called together to be the church.

More soon!

peace,

will

Trash

I find it fascinating that one of the most poignant weblog posts I have read in a while is about garbage:

trash - Ryan Barnett's u|preacher

peace,

will

The Monumental Journey Towards Ordination - Volume 3

When we last left our hero, he was tragically stuck at the first roadblock of his journey toward ordination! Paragraph 311 of The United Methodist Book of Discipline, section 1 reads:

Those seeking to begin candidacy for licensed or ordained ministry: a)shall have been a professing member in good standing of The United Methodist Church for at least two years immediately preceding the application for candidacy; including a year of service in some form of congregational leadership, either in the local church or one agreed to by the district committee on ordained ministry, provided that in the case of an affiliate member, there has been a consultation with and approval by the charge conference of the home church.

So, since I was baptized in January of 2000, I had to wait until January of 2002 before I could start, which seemed like an insanely long time. As I was thinking through this timeline, I realized that I didn't really wait two years and suddenly worried that I must have cheated. It turns out, my District Superintendent at the time clarified that I could do one part of the process without waiting. So I became an inquiring candidate. To do this, I had to write a letter to the district superintendent and request a lay guide. I was assigned a wonderful guide, Sue, and we worked together through a book called, Ministry Inquiry Process. It is know affectionately as "The Purple Book" by those who have been through it. I have to say in reflection that this was one of the most rewarding processes I have ever been through. I took it pretty seriously and spent a lot of time with the guidebook, a lot of time praying and a lot of time reading the books that it suggested.

In thinking back about this, I have to wonder how I would react to someone so new to the church expressing a call to ministry. I would hope that I would embrace their call because I do believe that God calls people in a lot of different ways. But I hope I could encourage that person to take the process at least as seriously as I did. Although I felt certain of my call early on, I did not allow myself to breeze through the process as something to "get done." The months during which I completed this first phase were some of the most spiritually intense months of my life. I remember a bunch of late nights drinking coffee at Mozart's on the lake in Austin reading scripture and praying and trying to discern what God was doing with me.

More soon!

peace,

will

Some sort of non-drinking related hang over

Some Mondays I find myself having trouble doing much more than staring at my monitor hoping my computer might do something on its own. Sunday, especially good ones, can really leave me without a whole lot of anything left to offer. If I have an especially busy Monday with lots of structured stuff and meetings, sometimes I can be really productive but then Tuesday ends up fairly useless.

Fortunately today, I had a good long talk with a member of the church about spiritual matters. I always have energy for that. But since returning to my office, I am not sure I have accomplished anything except moving papers from one side to the other.

This is also an odd time in general. I have a lot of non-church stuff going on. We are trying to buy a house two hours a way and that swallows up an insane amount of time. The church work is a little strange as well. A large part of my work includes thinking about what will be happening in six months. I won't be here in six months so that puts me in a odd spot. I am trying to shift my focus to me more on the present and getting outstanding projects finished.

Lots of change. Lots of uncertainly. The Holy Spirit works pretty well in that sort of stuff.

peace,

will

Forwarded Emails

If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.
-James 1:26

With his mouth the godless destroys his neighbor,
but through knowledge the righteous escape.
-Proverbs 11:9

But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken.
-Matthew 12:36

I don't get as many forwarded emails as I used to. The reason is that I tend to respond. If someone forwards me an email that I fear may be false, or slanderous, I tend to check it out and then respond to everyone who received the email with a rebuttal. I notice that after I do that, I am removed from the forwarding list of the person who sent it. I usually find out later that the person is still forwarding similar emails, but just not to me.

Even in my inbox which is a bit cleaner due to my behavior, to pace of these emails is picking up as we get closer to the Presidential election. I hear again and again of Barack Obama's plans to be sworn in on the Quran. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican, an Obama supporter or a Clinton supporter, it wouldn't take much research to know that this is simply not true. None of these emails talk about policy differences or voting records, they just make stuff up.

I just want to say for the record that there is a certain sinfulness is forwarding slanderous emails. If you receive an email that attacks another human being, even if that is a public figure and you forward it without verifying the truthfulness of that information, scripture is very clear that you are transgressing and you should repent.

If you are the sender or receiver if this sort of forwarded email, you owe it to yourself and your email companions to read this article on factcheck.org, a website run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Here is the article:

That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously.

By the way. I actually love to see the most preposterous of the chain emails. Feel free to forward me the ones that you find especially slanderous. I don't mind getting them when they are sent from people who know they aren't true.

peace,

will

Whew!

Sometimes I don't blog because I have too much to blog about and I don't know where to start! Holy week and Easter was extraordinary! As always, under Pastor John's direction, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday were a true blessing in our preparation for Easter. If you don't make a habit of attending the services of Holy Week, you should commit right now to be in church next year for the Thursday and Friday before Easter.

Easter Sunday was amazing and exhausting. We had over 700 people in four worship services. Don't worry, I realize that it is not about numbers, but each number represents someone who was here to worship and hear the Easter Gospel. In many cases, churches have physical or mental blocks in their growth. Once they surpass them, they become able to maintain a higher level of attendance. I think that Easter broke through one of those barrier for Grace.

It was wonderful to worship in the fellowship hall after all the hard work that went into transforming the room. The sound was 1000 times better and the atmosphere was such an improvement with the paint and the different configuration. I felt much more comfortable preaching and leading worship.

On a personal note, after Easter is usually a bit of a down time for pastors to recoup from all the extra physical, spiritual and emotional work that goes into Easter. I did take Monday off, but have been living with the good stress of buying a home in San Antonio. Alisha and I had an offer accepted yesterday on a wonderful home. Now we just have to figure out how to pay for it!

peace,

will

Learning something new every day

I really want to get back to my posting about my call to ministry but my current life keeps getting in the way. I mentioned we are house hunting. Oh my goodness this is hard. During the couple of recent trips I have taken to San Antonio we have looked at more houses than I can remember. We made our first offer on a house today, which was flat out rejected. They didn't even counter which makes me pretty confident we didn't bid too high! We are going to keep looking. I won't make another offer on that one because we don't really want to pay any more than our original offer for that particular house.

This isn't something I necessarily wanted to learn about but I am having some fun learning about mortgages and closing costs and inspections and offers and the like. I like learning, I just hope I don't have to learn too much!

peace,

will

I am glad things have slowed down

Wow! The current pace of life is really fast! After the final interview for my ordination and after the finalization of Josh's adoption, I thought life would slow down. I was wrong. I got my new appointment, which required a couple of trips to San Antonio which led me right into the busiest week of the church year, Holy Week, which is made even busier by the fact that it coincides with the permanent movement of one of our services into the fellowship hall. Oh, and if that were not enough, because we are moving to San Antonio, we are house hunting.

It is all good. It is just a lot all at once!

peace,

will

My Column

This appeared in this week's edition of The Good News our newsletter at Grace. If you get the newsletter and read it, you can skip this post...

To my brothers and sisters in Christ at Grace,

It is hard to believe that it was about three years ago that Alisha and I learned that we would be moving to Corpus Christi and beginning a new chapter of ministry at Grace. I still remember the series of events and decisions that led us here. I had been an associate pastor at Oak Hill UMC in Austin, serving with Rev. Barbara Ruth and Rev. John Wright. Barbara was selected to become District Superintendent of the Corpus Christi District. A couple of months later, I learned that John had been appointed as Senior Pastor of Grace. Because I had finished seminary and was to be commissioned that year at Annual Conference, I informed my District Superintendent that I was ready to leave Oak Hill and accept an appointment as a solo pastor of a small congregation. Somewhere along the way, I learned that there might be an associate pastor opening at Grace as well. Having worked with Pastor John for a number of years, I was excited about the possibility of continuing my working relationship with him and taking our experience together into a new context. After much thought and prayer, I informed the cabinet that I would be open to the idea of taking another appointment as an associate. I was eventually appointed to Grace.

Some of my colleagues expressed disappointment that I did not take “my own church.” There is an underlying assumption among clergy and laity that the ultimate goal of someone called to be an Elder in the church is to become the pastor in charge. However, I believe that the ultimate goal of an Elder or any baptized Christian is to be obedient and faithful to God, wherever that may be.

During my time here at Grace, people have continued to ask and speculate about me taking “my own church.” Knowing that I am to be ordained in June, some people assumed that the cabinet would reassign me in June as a solo pastor. Some may be startled to hear that, while I will be moving, it will not be to an appointment as a solo pastor, but rather to another associate pastor position.

During my three years at Grace, while Pastor John handled the administrative and big-picture aspects of the church, I was able to focus my energy on one basic question: how is it that we “make” fully committed disciples of Jesus Christ? Those of you who have worked with me closely on programming teams at the church have been on the front lines of my research and testing of ideas and strategies for helping people move from membership to discipleship. Through the incredibly hard work of the lay leadership of Grace, the thinking, praying and planning has born much fruit with the addition of a number of programs designed to help people grow in faith, knowledge and fellowship.

I truly believe that a systematic (or methodical) approach to helping people grow in grace and discipleship is at the heart of what is needed for a true renewal to begin within the United Methodist Church. It is no coincidence that the Methodist Movement was born out of an effort to help people take a structured approach to their own spiritual development.

During my work at Grace, I learned that the new Directing Pastor of University United Methodist Church in San Antonio, Charles Anderson, was implementing a church-wide map of discipleship. I asked Charles to help me on a project entitled, “Growing in Grace – Wesleyan Sanctification and Discipleship Systems.” I learned during our time working on that project that Charles and I share a common vision about how the church can truly be in the business of following the Great Commission, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” When I learned the University had an opening for a Discipleship Pastor, a position designed to focus on discipleship systems, I expressed to my District Superintendent, Barbara Ruth, that I would like the cabinet to consider appointing me there. The details were worked out and the Bishop has announced his intention to appoint me as an associate pastor to University UMC in San Antonio this June. I am extremely excited about his appointment. I will part of a team of six full-time pastors, (not counting retired pastors and other clergy staff members) part of an exciting group of focused, ministry specific leaders at a church of 5700 people. While bigger is not necessarily better, the sheer scale of the ministries at University will give me the tools and resources to continue my work of creating discipleship systems. I pray that my time there will be fruitful not only for University but for the United Methodist Connection as a whole.

I often hear talk at United Methodist Churches of the Bishop and the Cabinet, “snatching away” pastors from churches. This is not the case here. As much as I have loved my time here at Grace and as much as I have learned from Pastor John and all the people I have worked with here, I believe it is time to take what I have learned here and put it to work in a new place.

Change can be hard. Alisha and I will soon be packing and leaving behind the friends we have made here. This will be the first time in my ministry that I will not be working with John or Barbara. But Alisha and I both firmly believe that change can be powerfully good. It forces us to grow and to face new possibilities. It is my prayer that change will be powerfully good at Grace as well. You will get a new associate with new energy, new ideas and another perspective. It is my prayer that you will embrace your new associate and use this opportunity to continue the amazing steps forward that the church has already taken. God is doing amazing things and Grace and I believe God will continue to bless this congregation as it reaches out to spread the Gospel to this community.

And don’t forget, I will still be here until June. We still have lots of work to do together!

peace,

will

The Monumental Journey Towards Ordination - Volume 2

Where was I? Oh yes, now I sort of remember...

Pastor John ordered me a copy of Christian as Minister. When it came in, I took it home and read it. I think one of the main purposes of the book is to make the point that all Christians are called to ministry and therefore feeling a calling doesn't necessarily mean one is called to full-time Christian vocation. However, after much thought and prayer, I decided I was indeed being called to full-time Christian vocation.

As a side, all this time I was following another piece of advice John have me which was to get more involved in the life of the church and see if I really found it interesting. So, I became a Sunday School Superintendent. (I took attendance, counted the offering and kept the kids out of the hall.) I also signed up for Disciple Bible Study. I was also in the choir and somewhere along the way, I was asked to be a Lay Leader.

I finally went back to John and expressed that I still felt called and I ran into my first official roadblock. It turns out one needs to be a United Methodist for at least two years before one can become what is called a Inquiring Candidate. So I waited...

More soon.

peace,

will

A Blog Free Vacation

Alisha, Josh and I were in Florida last week. I usually do some posting on vacation, but that becomes more difficult with a two year old.

Life has been pretty non-stop for the last few weeks. If you haven't heard already, check back next week (or read your newsletter if you get it) to hear what is keeping us hopping now.

peace,

will

Greetings from Mount Wesley

I really am going to get back to the story of my journey toward ordination. I am counting on things slowing down a little soon. Today, I am at Mount Wesley in Kerrville for the annual Bishop's Convocation. The clergy of the Southwest Texas Conference gather every year to learn and worship and just spend some time together. With the sheer size of our conference, sometimes this is the one time of year I see some of my colleagues.

I will be out of the office until next week, but I may still be on the blog.

peace,

will

My Column

Here is my column from this week's newsletter at Grace for those of you who don't get it and for those of you wait.

Two rather major events occurred in my life within the last two weeks. On Tuesday, February 12, at Mount Wesley in Kerrville, I sat for my interview with the full Board of Ordained Ministry and was recommended unanimously for ordination at Annual Conference on June 7. This was my final interview in a process that has taken about seven years and has included three years of schooling, countless interviews, and hundreds of pages of writing.

Then, on Friday, February 22, at the Bexar County Courthouse, Alisha and I stood up together as the judge announced that our adoption of Joshua Steven Rice had been granted. This was the final step in a process that has taken close to a year and a half and has included nearly as much paperwork as my ordination process.

A couple of people have asked, “Aren’t you glad to be finished?” And I am, but finished is probably not the right word. These two milestones in my life are very similar in that they were and are both things that were already done and not yet completed. I believe that God called me into Christian ministry on my baptism. My ordination will mark the end of a process but not the beginning and certainly not the end of my ministry. It is really just another step on the path that I have allowed my heart to follow. Our adoption of Joshua is the end of a legal process but we became Joshua’s parents and he became our son the day he was carried through our front door and we still have a long journey ahead as a family.

It is important to mark milestones in our lives. It is good to stop and mark major events and accomplishments and give thanks to God for where we have been and how far we have come; but we always need to do so in the context of the continuing journey of growth and change that God has in store for us.

The Apostle Paul, with so many accomplishments already behind him writes in his letter to the Philippians about his own spiritual journey, “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is speaking of sanctification, the idea that, while there is a major milestone in our lives when we accept the grace that God offers us, when we are justified, there is also so much more. There is the prevenient grace of God that loved us before we even knew it and the sanctifying grace of God that continues to mold us and change us and recreate us more in God’s image. I was called to be a pastor before I knew it, I will be becoming a pastor for the rest of my life. Joshua and Alisha and I were a family long before the court decided so and we will be becoming a family as long as we live.

During the season of Lent, as we prepare our hearts for Easter, I invite you to consider where you are on the journey. Where are you on the continual journey of transformation and re-creation that God has undertaken in you?

peace,

will

More after this...

Another break from the story of my epic journey to share with you a piece from yesterday's New York Times on a new poll released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. There is a ton of stuff in this article and more in the study it is referring to that could inform our church's or any church's evangelism effort.

The line that really jumped out at me was this:

“Those losing out are offering impersonal religion,” he said, “and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”

Give the article a read. I would love to hear your comments.

Poll Finds a Fluid Religious Life in U.S.

By NEELA BANERJEE

Published: February 26, 2008

More than a quarter of adult Americans have left their childhood faith for another religion or no religion.

peace,

will

The Monumental Journey Towards Ordination - Volume 1

So I have decided to reflect on the all the things that have brought me to the eve or my ordination in June. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I will count on any of my colleagues who read the blog to chime in with corrections or experiences that were different than mine. Here goes:

The very first thing someone is to do when they feel a call to ministry is go and talk to their pastor. Which raises the question, "How do you know if you are being called into ministry?" Good question. Everyone's experience seems to be different. I have friends who always knew they were supposed to be in full-time ministry. Others describe a pretty dramatic moment of revelation. For me, it was more similar to having some nagging discomfort that someone finally convinces you to go to the doctor about.

My first step was schedule a meeting with Pastor John. For me, it took a while to schedule this meeting. It is a little unnerving to go and tell someone you think God is calling you into full-time ministry. What if the person says, "No, I talked to God and you heard wrong."

This is especially an issue if the person feeling the call is fairly new to the Christian faith as I was. There tends to be a initial suspicion about people who are young in the faith that perhaps there call to ministry is just a strong feeling of the call that all baptized Christians are called to ministry of one sort or another.

Anyway, Pastor John did as he was supposed to and ordered me a copy of A Christian as Minister. Those who initial feel the call to ministry are to read this to learn a little bit about Christian vocation and all the different option that were available. Pastor John also spent a little time explaining what actually goes into the process of ordination. It sounded impossible and like it would take forever. It didn't take quite that long.

More next time.

peace,

will