the church geek

It’s that time of the year again. It’s time for our congregation to produce its report for the upcoming annual meeting. The following is an excerpt from something I posted last year about a few changes we were making to our Annual Report:

1.) Since we have a mission statement, I suggested that instead of organizing our annual report around our committee activities, maybe we should frame it around our mission statement. So, as a session we are working together to prepare a summary report of activities for the previous year and dreams for the coming year that we hope is reflective of the mission of our congregation.

2.) We are summarizing our various budget/financial reports, so that people will get a broad brush strokes overview of the financial activity of the church. I honestly don’t think folks need to know how much the church spends on office paper or on janitorial supplies, so why report it?

My hope in making these changes was to get us closer to producing an annual report that takes the stewardship of our resources seriously by not generating useless stacks of paper and not spending anymore time on the project than it is worth. I also hoped that the report would better reflect the mission and ministry of our congregation.

Too some extent I think we succeeded on both fronts. I really felt like organizing the activities of the congregation around our mission statement was a great way to report our activities for the year. Also, we also reduced the amount of paperwork we generated, and people seemed appreciative of the new format.

Still, I think something is missing. After all the annual congregational report at its heart is focused on the institution and its particular activities. So, we report membership gains and losses. We report things that we accomplished. We report financial and budget information.

All of that is great. But the deeper question needs to be asked: Are those things really Christ’s purpose for our congregation? Are we really just about the ABCs of maintaining an institution: (A)ttendance, (B)uilding, & (C)ash?

I think the Annual Report, in its current form, communicates that the primary focus of our congregation is on maintaining the institution. And so, I am left to wonder what would have to change structurally so that our annual report focused instead on discipleship and mission? What would such a church look like, and what would its annual report look like?

Here are three briefs of movies I have seen over the last month or so:

1.) Joyeux Noel

This is an instant Christmas classic, and a testament to the power of the spirit of Christmas to unite troops from three warring countries together during the Great War to celebrate and remember, even for a fleeting moment, the things in life that really matter.

I rate this 8 out of 10 stars.

2.) Changeling

The true life events of this story based in the 1920s and 30s are truly frightening….a mother loses her boy and the police try to convince her that another boy is her own.

This movie has a lot to say about the work of the church, from a justice perspective, as the Presbyterian minister that John Malkovich portrays, is unafraid to challenge the corruptness of the powers that be. I was left to question, what sorts of justice issues I would be willing to stand up against in the pulpit.

While it’s an inspiring story, it was a little too long and overdone in spots, so it merits a rating of 7 out of 10 stars.

3.) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This is the strange story of a baby born as an old man who grows younger as he progresses in life and then dies as a baby.

Both Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt pull off excellent performances in this movie, but the movie itself suffers from being far too long and not well drawn together. It meanders way too much to effectively make its point.

I rate it 6 out of 10 stars.

Happy New Year! I had hoped to pull off a few of those ‘year-in-review” type posts, but I haven’t had time, and tomorrow we’ll be heading off to the land of cheese to visit with my parents for the holidays.

Over the holidays, I haven’t done as great a job as usual keeping up with blog feeds, so this installment is shorter than usual:

1.) This coming year is Calvin’s 500th Birthday!! All Presbyterians say “whoo hoo!” In honor of this momentous birthday, Drew invites you to read Calvin Institutes this year. I’m not sure I’m that committed, but if you are, then I say more power to you!

2.) Adam offers a thought provoking quote on the process of changing one’s mind.

3.) One of my favorite photobloggers has produced another wonderful photo, this one reveals the subtle beauty of winter.

‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!’



A Prayer from Tim Loder from his book Guerrillas of Grace:

Lord God, in the deepest night there rises the star of morning, of birth, the herald of a new day you are making, a day of great joy dawning in yet faint shafts of light and love.

And I rejoice to nourish it in myself, in other people, in the world for the sake of him in whom it was born and shines forever, even Jesus the Christ. Amen


Further information about each of the images found in this picture can be found here. The picture comes by way of Matt Stone.

Living in the midwest, a couple of times every winter we run into a difficult decision regarding bad weather and the cancellation of worship services. It’s especially difficult when there seems to be no clear or right call to be made.

Some churches make it a policy to hold their worship service no matter what the weather is like. This is an especially easy policy to maintain if the pastor, like my friend Howard at FPC Marion, lives somewhat close to the church and can always just walk over to the church building if need be.

It becomes more difficult to hold to that sort of policy if you live further from walking distance to the church, or if you don’t have the right sort of vehicle that allows you to get to where you need to go. We personally live in a neighborhood that is one of the last to be plowed, so we have been asking ourselves if we need to own at least one 4 wheel drive vehicle, especially for my wife who now lives 30 minutes from her church.

Yesterday we had some bitterly cold and potentially dangerous weather, but as far as I know only one of our sister Presbyterian churches in our city canceled their services. The pastor of that one congregation was quoted in the newspaper this morning as saying he didn’t want to place any of his parishioners into a dangerous situation if a car failed to work and they ended up stranded in the bitter cold.

I don’t know if that was the right decision, but I do know that each church needs to make its own decision about what is best for its members, volunteers, and staff.

While I think we might want to error on the side of believing that congregation members can make their own decisions about whether they should venture out and brave the weather, I also know that if you hold the worship service some folks will feel compelled to come all the while muttering under their breath that the service should have been canceled (believe me, I got an earful onetime from someone upset about an uncanceled service at a church where I served as a student pastor.)

At the same time I don’t think braving the weather to get to church makes anyone more holy or that God will somehow be upset if we make a decision to not hold a worship service. God is big enough to handle missing our worship and at some point it is not worth asking people to risk their lives to hold one. This is especially true if a decision to hold a service places key volunteers and staff in harm’s way to get to church.

These things are never an easy call. Sometimes we get them right and other times we get them wrong. It’s a tricky thing to judge and people within the same congregation will have different ideas about whether the decision made was right or not. My hope is that everyone would display some sort of grace about the matter.

I’d appreciate, and I’m sure others would to, hearing your thoughts on this matter.

A few years ago, I became aware of a church where Santa Claus would make an appearance during the fellowship hour on one of the Sundays before Christmas. The first time I heard about this, I must say I was a bit shocked that a congregation would intentionally choose to bring Santa Claus into the mix during the advent season.

Personally, I think children have a hard enough time separating Santa Claus, commercialism, and the story of the Christ child that I think it ought to be the church’s job to work as hard as it can to separate itself from Santa.

I of course am under no illusion that others agree with me on this point, so please take this brief poll and offer a comment or two.

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year, until you have to sit down and write that Christmas letter or lick the envelops on 75 Christmas cards. I’m curious as to your Christmas Card/Letter sending habits, so I have created a new poll. Feel free to select more than one answer. As always comments are welcome.

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1.) Blogger and seminary student, Adam Copeland, enters the world of twitter. Quite thoughtfully I might add.

2.) Jenell offers a dead-on perspective on the whole issue of Santa that I never thought of before.

3.) A couple of days ago, I tweeted a question about sending Christmas cards and discovered that this is an issue on all sorts of people’s minds. It is on Jody’s mind as well.

4.) Dory, a favorite local blogger, offers a post called Ain’t no such thing as a homeless playah.

5.) Each week I like to feature a favorite photograph I discovered during the last week. This week’s photo is from local photographer Todd Adamson. It is a stunning capture of Ashton Kutcher’s wife, who is more commonly known as Demi Moore.

I’ve had my blog for close to three years now, and recently I decided to try an experiment with monetizing my blog. When it comes down to it I don’t really need the money, which is why I never had them on my blog in the first place. Recently however I began to think if I could at least recoup the rather minimal expenses for its upkeep that would be nice.

After reading this blog post over at Adam’s blog, I tried Text Link Ads. This actually held the most promise for generating quite a bit of revenue. In fact in just a two week period I had made about $6.00 from the placement of 2 ads.

I probably would have kept them on the blog, but I ran into a technical problem with the code they provided that appeared when people submitted comments to the blog. I was unable to resolve the issue and the help I got from support basically said “no one else has this problem,” so I pulled them off the blog.

Since the beginning of December, I have been using Google Ad Sense, and the earnings have been pitiful to say the least. In a half of a month I have generated 21 cents of revenue. This period of time has coincided with the biggest increase in blog traffic since I began this blog, so I’m thinking this is not going to be a good revenue stream for me!

Now I realize that a big part of the problem in terms of revenue generation is that the subject matter of this blog hits a very small niche market. I simply do not generate the type of traffic that makes placing ads something advertisers will drool over. Plus I don’t have the time, energy, nor desire to turn this thing into something more high profile.

Still, if I could generate 20 or 30 bucks a month from ads, it would be a nice source of income to cover the costs of keeping it up and the price of a cup of coffee or two a week at my favorite coffee shop. But at this point, I’m not sure what to try next or if I should just give up on the idea.

A number of months ago and long before the stock market began to turn south, I was having a conversation with a member of my congregation about the impending economic crisis. We were talking about whether or not churches in general were equipped to survive and have a vital ministry in times when the economy went sour.

One issue of concern we talked about was the ‘pastor’s salary.’ The question we asked was whether or not churches would continue to be able to afford to employ full-time professional ministers. We didn’t really come up with an answer to that question, but we both agreed that if they could not, then it would be up to the congregation to pick up some of the slack.

This is not necessarily a bad thing (unless of course you are a pastor counting on a paycheck…) In fact, I suspect that hard economic times may actually force churches to either close or to restore a much better and more appropriate balance between the work of the people and the work of the paid professional pastor. Less money means it will be harder to think of the pastor as the person who gets paid to do the work of ministry that every baptized Christian has in reality been called by God to do.

Kim, a friend and fellow Presbyterian colleague, wrote an excellent reflection last week about her particular struggle with a related attitude that often prevails in the church - that of just wanting to ‘get it done.’ What I hear in her explanation is that many folks often see the Pastor as the one who gets paid to say the magic words - at the wedding, funeral, or baptism - and once that’s been done then they can get on with their lives.

What I think is at issue in her post and what we will face head on in an economic downturn is that people think of their faith as something peripheral to their everyday life. They have not integrated it into the core of their very being, so they don’t see how their faith is supposed to inform their daily life. They haven’t heard Christ’s call to be disciples who love and serve God AND who love and serve others. And finally, being an active and vital part of the mission of the church is not integral to who they are.

While I don’t invite it, I do think a bit of economic turmoil will force us all to look at the ways our economic prosperity has failed to help our faith be an integral part of the lives we lead and the ways the mission of Christ has been compromised by how our churches have been structured.

For further reflection on this topic I would point you to an excellent article called “Mission and Recession” (HT: smart pastor)

This sermon was preached on the 2nd Sunday of Advent, December 7th, 2008. The sermon text was Mark 1:1-8.

On November 4th of this year, the United States of America did something rather extraordinary….Our country elected its first ever African-American president.

One of the more poignant images was of Jesse Jackson waiting in Hyde Park for Obama to give his acceptance speech, with tears just streaming down his face. That picture is important because without a doubt Barak Obama would not be preparing an inauguration speech for next month if it had not been for the work of folks like Jesse Jackson and countless others who had gone before him.

On the day of the election, on her blog, my friend Carol Howard Merritt relayed a story from another blogger in Washington DC, who went to stand in line to vote. He arrived at the polling place around 6:30 that morning only to discover a line down one side of the block and halfway up another.

He got in line and noticed in front of him was an 80 or so year old African-American woman. She was dressed to the nines and proudly refusing all offers to move up in line or to sit down in someone’s folding chair.

Around the same time, a twenty-something young man showed up. He looked at the line and and complained out loud: “How long ago did this line start, anyway?!” That elder woman responded to the young whiner saying, “Honey….this line began a looooong time ago … way, way, way before even your mama was born!”

Since I stopped taking photos on a regular basis, I haven’t had any photos to post for “Photo Friday.” I do hope to eventually get back to my photography and am even looking for a possible project for the coming year, but until then I think I need another feature for Friday on my blog.

So, I’m going to try out something and call it “Friday is for Fun.” I’m not sure what this all will entail. We’ll just have to see how it evolves.

Recently I got a new MP3 player for my birthday. So today I feature two great music discovery websites out there to help you expand your musical horizons. These websites help you find new music that you might like based on what you already listen to. They are:

1.) Pandora. This service is great because you can set up a music ’station’ with an artist or song that you really like. Pandora then plays a series of songs and artists with similar musical styles. Sometimes we have hooked up the laptop to the home stereo and via wi-fi have let Pandora play all evening. If you want to see and even listen to the stations I have currently set up you can check out my pandora profile page.

2.) Last.fm is very similar. After you download a simple program to your computer, last.fm will upload (”scrobble” is what they call it) a list of your recently played songs and will continue to monitor and update what you play. The website offers you a a recommended list of music that you can play. It has better social networking capability than Pandora and offers a greater variety of music because it works off of your entire musical collection, but I still prefer Pandora. Here is my Last.fm profile.

Next week, I’ll try to feature some of the new music that I’ve discovered and have been enjoying.

This post is a reprint from last year in which I offered up some of my essential albums for Advent and Christmas:

This album (actually 5 set CD collection) by Sufjan Stevens has sky-rocketed to the top of my list of favorite Christmas albums. Sufjan works his musical magic with a collection of fresh, creative renditions of classic sacred carols combined with a number of his own original offerings. Christmas albums can be sappy and schmaltzy, but this album never is. Instead it evokes the feeling of warmth and love that one feels when family and friends gather around the piano and fireplace to sing together the songs of the season.

I’m not normally a big flute fan, but James Galway’s album, Christmas Carol, has found its way into my heart. I’ve had this album for about ten years, and it never fails to move me into the wonder and celebration that Christmas truly is. This album was the first to introduce me to what has become perhaps my favorite Christmas carol, “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.”

As far as sacred Christmas music goes, my all time favorite is Sing We Christmas from the a capella choir Chanticleer. The vocals of this twelve man group are crisp and clear. They grab you right from the beginning with a glorious rendition of another of my favorite carols, Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming) and they keep you spell bound through the course of this wonderful album. For many years, this and Galway’s album were about all I had in my Christmas collection and to be honest I didn’t feel as if I needed much more than that!

The Vince Guaraldi Jazz Trio is simply brilliant in this original score from A Charlie Brown Christmas. If you love good jazz and you love Christmas then this is the one album you must absolutely own, but then if you love those two things I’m sure I didn’t have to tell you that!

1.) Good, free, Christian music; is that possible? Yes it is. Go download “Hope for a Tree Cut Down.” I was sold from the opening chime.

2.) Speaking of free…stop sending your money to Miscrosoft!! A number of months ago, I switched over to Open Office…then I began to think do I really need to run MS Windows? The answer is no…check out Ubuntu. I’m running it on my laptop and I don’t think I’ll be looking back.

3.) Do you have a young fundamentalist in your family that you have difficulty shopping for? The Internet Monk offers an excellent shopping list.

4.) Here is today’s photo for your enjoyment.

I know it’s still the season of advent, but I thought we all could use some Christmas cheer anyway. And what better way to celebrate than with “Angels We Have Heard on High” played on a broccoli flute?