Upcoming Events…
I am really excited about being able to go speak to the students and young people at Augusta Road United Methodist Church! I will be there on the 18th of this month in their 5:00 service…so if you are a youth, feel free to come join us! If you are the average age of my readers…over 18, please be in prayer for me as I speak to this group of young people! Their pastor is a student of mine, and she seems to really have a passion to see these kids grow in the Lord and help them bring their friends to Christ! I am praying that God will give me the words that HE wants me to speak to this bunch and that someone will come who doesn’t know the Lord so that we can see new life born! Baby Christians are messy, but awesome! They bring life to a church just like a new baby brings new life to a family! Thanks for your prayers!
Burl
“Crazy ‘Bout Ya Baby” by the Crew Cuts!
In the 1960′s song “Crazy ‘Bout Ya Baby” by the Crew Cuts, the not so sophisticated chorus goes:
Crazy bout you baby, crazy bout you baby
Crazy bout you baby want you all to myself
Crazy bout you baby,
Man I’m crazy bout you
Crazy bout you baby,
Don’t know what I’m gonna do
Crazy bout you baby
I’m just bubbling with joy
Crazy bout you baby
want you all to myself
Crazy, crazy
Crazy bout you baby
want you all to myself
While the singer was referring to the woman he wanted to take as his wife, it got me thinking about how God feels about us! He is so crazy about us, that HE sent HIS son to die on the cross so that we would be able to spend eternity with HIM! He truly is “Crazy ‘Bout Ya Baby”!
Picking a Pastor
A young man just stopped by my office to talk about hiring a new pastor. The previous pastor left after a year, and he finds himself leading the church in looking for a new pastor. His question was, “What questions do I ask?”. I am sharing the advice I gave him here on my blog because I know some of you out there are pastors or church leaders who have hired pastors…so I would love your input!
1. Decide who currently has the power in the church and if they are willing to share it/give it up.
2. Decide what the vision of the church is. If there is no vision in place, then you can’t find a pastor who will help the church move forward in that vision.
3. Once you have answers to the first two issues, then you can look for a pastor whose vision and passions line up with where the church sees God taking the local congregation.
Any thoughts? Comments? Criticisms? Ideas?
Lead on!…Starting with Temptation and Rejection!
This morning, I was reading Luke chapter 4 and something quite obvious hit me. Jesus’ temptation came BEFORE all the incredible miracles in this chapter! He cast out demons and healed people in the end of the chapter. Before he did the “cool stuff” he lived through the temptation of Satan and being rejected by his own home town. If you are a pastor or leader going through a time of rejection or temptation, remember that coming out the other side of that season with your integrity in tact could be setting you up for God to use you in doing those really cool things! Too often, we fail at the temptation stage, so it seems we end up in an eternal cycle of trying to deal with that, and never get beyond it. Or we get through that, but then crumble at the rejection part. Jesus is our example of how God can use us if we hold on to HIM through the temptation and the rejection. Let us LEAD ON….Starting with ourselves.
What to do with those college students!
One of the great things about working with college students is that they are so very full of energy and great ideas! I sometimes feel like I could give them a class project to “change the world” and they would figure out a way to do it. If you are a pastor or church leader, remember this group. They don’t often give much monetarily, but they have very much to give to the church! You might find your church busting wide open with creativity and energy if you can harness their creative powers and help them find how GOD wants them used! And remember that most of the great revivals began when students got on fire for GOD! I am constantly inspired in my own walk with the Lord by the college students in my life.
If you are one of those students, thanks for all you guys do to make this world a better place and for everything you do to make Jesus famous!
Things that surprise me!
Just a list of things that surprise me…not exhaustive, but feel free to add to it with your comments.
- God can use our biggest failures to HIS glory!
- I really can’t outgive God!
- Seeing people come to Christ NEVER gets old!
- Re-reading the Bible still is fascinating! (Most books get old if I read them twice!)
- Atheists aren’t put off by a Christian’s passion for God. They are turned off by a lack of passion from those who claim to be a Christian.
- That there are so many different ways to worship one God!
- Prayer really works, though I still don’t understand exactly how.
- Confession breaks Satan’s bonds on people, and like prayer, I don’t know how it works, it just does.
Have an awesome day!
Joining a church
In every church I have been a part of since babyhood, I have been an active participant. I don’t just mean that I went to service; I remember as a kid being on one end of folding tables and carrying them into the fellowship hall. Honestly, it probably would have been easier for the man to have carried the table himself, but I was helping. Now I am an adult and recently found myself in the position of looking for a new church. My wife and I had visited a few, and then when we found the church we decided to join, there was one statistic about the church that really stood out to me. That was the HUGE percentage of people who volunteer! The old rule of 20% of the people doing all of the work just doesn’t apply. I wondered how this was accomplished…the church isn’t more spiritual, it doesn’t have more programs…but people volunteer. When I went to the class for membership, it became apparent. While one is welcome to attend and not serve, if you are a member, part of maintaining membership is that you serve in an area of ministry and only one area. This helps solve the burnout problem, because you only serve in one area at a time. It also means that there are no “members” who haven’t done anything but show up for years. In case you are wondering if they get anyone to join, there were about 50 people in the membership class…I think most of them joined. This means that there are smiling faces directing parking, greeting people as they walk in, handing out bulletins, counseling…etc. This system might not be good for every church, but I liked it. In case you are wondering, we joined the church.
I Have to Admit Being an Accomplice to Murder
Not a happy post today, on the way to work, it sunk in that I am an accomplice to murder. I didn’t pull the trigger or wield the knife, but I still contributed to the death of an innocent, actually, many innocents.
I live in the state of South Carolina. Here are some stats about our state that I am not so proud of. I don’t have the numbers for 2005-2007.
- Last year (2008-2009) 6 murders by abortion were funded by my state.
- FY 2003 – 2004: 4 surgical abortions were reimbursed by the SC State
Health Plan - FY 2002 – 2003: 5 surgical abortions were reimbursed by the SC State
Health Plan - FY 2001 – 2002: 10 surgical abortions were reimbursed by the SC State
Health Plan - FY 2000 – 2001: 25 surgical abortions were reimbursed by the SC State
Health Plan - FY 1999 – 2000: 37 surgical abortions were reimbursed by the SC State
Health Plan - FY 1998 – 1999: 41 surgical abortions were reimbursed by the SC State
Health Plan
This means that I, and every tax paying person in South Carolina have been forced by our state legislature to be accomplices to murder! Many of you who read this aren’t from SC, but you might be surprised to find in the fine print of your own state that the state health plans are paying for babies to be slaughtered.
Great Moments!
Today in my Spanish III class, one of my students asked, “Mr. Walker, is there anything we can pray for you about?”. I was humbled and impressed! Every day, I take prayer requests from students. This student was asking me if he could pray for me! It is moments like that that make teaching an incredible profession! It reminded me how easy it is to make someone’s day! All it took was a simple question from one student to make me more intrigued about this particular young man’s life. I want to be more like him. Even in the roles we play where at the moment, he is the student, and I am the teacher, he, along with many other students over the years has inspired me! He inspires me to be more like Jesus and that is an example we ALL can follow!
Is Change Good…a rant?
Most people don’t like change. Those who propose change are seen as heretics, revolutionaries, or presidential candidates. In the church world, most of us have a church culture that we are comfortable with. It isn’t more holy, it isn’t more scripturally accurate, it is just cultural. Things like Hymns vs. Contemporary Music. When is the last time someone stood up railing against those modern Hymns wanting us to go back to Gregorian Chant? You may laugh, but it makes my point, music is cultural. Pews vs. Chairs…I don’t see anyone clamoring to bring rocks back into the service to sit on like the early church along the sea of Galilee. There are those things that we can not, and must not change. The Apostle’s Creed sums those up pretty well, so I won’t list them here. The rest is changeable. We shouldn’t divide Christianity based on those changeables. If someone challenges the virgin birth of Jesus, that is worth a church split. However, the color of the carpet isn’t, neither is a guitar or lack thereof, piano vs. organ or that piano being moved to the other side of the platform. We need to quit fighting over things like if a pastor uses video clips in his sermon or not. If he preaches from the King James 1611 or the New King James or the NIV or even a paraphrased translation like The Message, as long as he is presenting the gospel of Jesus Christ to people and those people are coming to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior then we should be supporting him, not tearing him down.
Sorry for the rant. A pastor friend of mine was told last week that his whole church was going to hell because people in his church don’t “dress properly”. GQ and Vogue can’t teach us much, but they can definitely show us that style changes rapidly. The picture (if you can’t see it, click on this link) shows us the style of early Judah. I haven’t been to any churches here in the USA in which I saw people dressed like that. Dress, is changeable. The Bible is clear on some things. Women shouldn’t dress like men and neither should men dress like women…what constitutes “like men” or “like women” is changeable. Let us not fight over the changeables and instead fight for those things that are not changeable. Let us show people the love of Jesus Christ each day in a way that is so compelling that they have no choice but to want to be like us or at very least figure out what is different about us.
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