EL’s Dribble

>> changed the title from “where does the bible talk about senior pastors?”

I remember being in seminary and a friend of mine came to me with a “huge” discovery. He said – I don’t see any where in the Bible that talks about churches needing a senior pastor. He pointed out that the early church communities functioned from a plurality of non-educated, regular Christian leaders and that we need to rethink how the church does leadership.

When he said that, I was flabbergasted. How dare he challenge the church. I couldn’t believe it – some young punk coming in and speaking against what generations of Christians have accepted. I remember a friend and I started throwing back rebuttals to his argument; of which none were biblical. We just couldn’t imagine a church without a singular pastoral head. In the end, I thought he was a loony. He can take his “infantile” ideas of church and start his own little commune.

Little did I know, I’d be taking my own advice. I’d even run with his premise and take it way further. Why was I so resistant? Here are a few reasons why:

• Threat – It threatened what I had believed in for so long and had never challenged. Because if he’s right, then I may be wrong [at least partially].
• Pride – I didn’t want to admit that he was on to something. If I gave credence to his question, I’d need to travel down the same road of questioning. And you never know where that’s going to lead.
• Fear – What’s going to happen to my master plan? My plan of getting lots of degrees and being a big shot? What if all I was trying to achieve is a waste of time? What do I tell the people who were paying my way?

I had to fight back. I had to… or else, I’d lose it all.

And in fact I did lose it all. God found a way to drive that nail of skepticism into my brain. I had to ask the questions I didn’t want to ask. I had to confront why I didn’t like asking them. I had to defend why I came to certain conclusions. And I realize that it was God’s way of helping me lose. Helping me lose it all… so that in turn I can gain something better. That seems to be a theme somewhere.

And now when I ask the hard questions to others and feel the push-back, I know the feeling. And when it’s coming from leaders who are supposedly more experienced and more knowledgeable than me… I don’t quite know how to respond. I can empathize… because they have way more to “lose” than I ever did. I’m 35… I don’t have 30 years of ministry life to reckon with.

But at the same time – I find myself assuming the elder brother role in the prodigal son narrative – and I judge. I judge the heck out of people. I wonder why they can’t see things the way the Bible so plainly states. I wonder why they are so defensive and inadvertently say things to put me down. I wonder why they are so obtuse – resistant to just asking the simple, unavoidable questions… just questions!

And then I remember myself… and how I shot down my friend and judged him for being so bold as to challenge the “church.” I want to judge some more and be angry… but I have not far to look but within myself to find the same crap that I’m so outraged by.

Lord, help me to forge ahead and yet have mercy on my friends/father-figures who may not quite see it yet.

It’s funny [or disturbing] how much gets revealed when you spend bulk time with your family. I’m in Taiwan spending a week with my dad – taking care of family business, helping him sort through my grandparents things. Basically spending some father and son time. There have been few moments of “I’ll remember this for a lifetime”… but it’s been more of a journey in seeing the baggage my family carries around with them… and most certainly my own baggage that I still deal with.

I’ve been reading Henri Nouwen again. That guy reads me like a book [ironically as I’m reading his]. This time it’s The Return of the Prodigal Son which is his exposition of the Luke 15 passage and a personal journal of his encounter with Rembrandt’s painting of which he titled the book after.

I’m not even half way done and the thing is killing me; and I’m only up to where he talks about the rebellious younger son. He uses the analogy of the younger son “leaving home” as a parallel of when we doubt that God’s love is unconditional or that in him we are fully alive and secure. And when we doubt and begin looking in other places as if we don’t already have a home… that’s leaving home.

It can manifest in being at the mercy of people’s opinions, posturing for attention or respect, being paralyzed by fear… when we leave to find what we already have in God… we’re leaving home.

Here’s some Nouwen:

“…when I forget that voice of the first unconditional love, then these innocent suggestions can easily start dominating my life and pull me into the ‘distant country.’ It is not very hard for me to know when this is happening… a little criticism makes me angry and a little rejection makes me depressed. A little praise raises my spirits, and a little success excites me. It’s takes very little to raise me up or thrust me down… I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.”

I notice when I’m around my family for a substantial period of time – this time my dad and my uncle – I see their insecurities, their posturing, their paralysis, their judgmentalism… and then I realize that it’s all in me. That’s frightening. Really frightening.

I see my own insecurities: I see how I try to say things that shade towards my competence, I see how I get scared to say the wrong things so I retreat into silence, I see how I throw back the judgment I think I’m getting with more judgment.

It’s born from thoughts in my mind that end with “…is not good enough.” My Chinese is not good enough, my career is not good enough, my “required public behavior” is not good enough, etc. When I allow these thoughts to stay too long, I’m forced to act out out on them [as if they were true]… and I realize that I’ve ventured into that “distant country”… looking for something that can never be found there.

It highlights even more the need to stay close to home [Jesus that is... not San Jose, haha]… where I don’t need to validate my worth, daydream of proving everyone wrong, wait for moments to highlight my brilliance. Home is where I’m received with nothing to prove and no explanation needed. It’s only here that I’m actually free to express myself without shading, say things without fear of getting it wrong and return judgment with mercy and humility.

It’s being out of my regular environment and around the people that push my buttons that I see the full breadth of my flawed-ness, the ball of anger, fear, pride, restlessness, sensitivity that I am [at times]. But it underscores my need to stay close to home. Rest my head on the chest of my Father, receive his embrace and enjoy being his son.

So my time here is not all “hyper-emo”… have had good dumplings, spending quality time with pops and will get to see some friends. Hopefully some more reflection on Nouwen soon…

The longer I’m here and the more I get to know myself and our generation, the more I realize that our biggest obstacle is fear. We’re crippled by it in ways that are deeply rooted. And it’s disheartening in so many ways.

And I think it is exasperated by the fact that so many of us [and I have to speak primarily as a child of a middle class home] had it easy growing up. Things came to us easy, we didn’t need to work [hard] for our education, we didn’t need to wait too long to satiate our selfish/material hunger attacks. I wish I could exclude myself from this, but that would be disingenuous.

It’s the stuff that our parents would tell us all along – “You’ve got it easy.” or “You don’t know what hardship is.” or “You don’t know what it means to work hard.” And the truth is that they’re right. Sure we work hard if we have to wait in line for an X-BOX or an iPhone. But when things come fairly easy, what does it really matter?

I think the issue is multifaceted – in that we are also children of broken homes, dysfunctional relationships and workaholic parents. And there is a bit of that in play… why work so hard at the expense of our families and a happy life?

But I feel like the most negative by-product of all this is that we’re a generation crippled by fear. We always feel like we have something to lose – and if we take any risks, our biggest fear is whether we’ll lose what we have. We end up making choices that perpetuate the fear. Choosing careers for money, choosing relationships that are easy. Never facing up to issues in our lives because we’re afraid of the horrible truth that we might not have it all together. That we might not have what it takes.

I think our generation of men are chickens. And I say that because I wrestle with the big chicken in myself. Wanting the easy route, always wanting to escape… maybe that’s why our generation is so enslaved by porn. Or so attention deficit or so commitment phobic or never really following through on things. I think that’s why our generation has so many people who are in their 30’s and 40’s who act like their 20. And 20 year old’s who act like their 14. It seems like a mass deterioration of maturity.

We’re afraid of wearing clothes that are uncoordinated. We’re afraid of saying how we really feel [we say what we think people want to hear]. We’re afraid of letting anyone get too close because what if they see who we really are? We’re afraid of giving our best effort… because if we do we’d have no excuse if we failed.

And I think if I were to pinpoint one specific fear… it would be the fear of failure. Failure in whatever endeavor [career, relationships, family, spiritual, etc.] means rejection. Sort of like sailing in for a beautiful layup to quickly find Dikembe Mutombo airmailing your shot 10 rows up into the stands. Rejection means that you had to eat your dreams. Rejection means that you might need to deal with the fact that you’re not invincible. Rejection also means rejection from the people that we long to impress. And we can’t take the rejection… we can’t.

And in the end we’re handcuffed. We have our toys, we eat well… but very few of us are men. We live crippled lives of fear and never really live free.

This is not necessarily a rant but an observation. And I think that’s why the Gospel still makes sense in this generation. It’s why the Gospel still makes sense to me, if not more so now. That’s it for this one… I’m now afraid that I’ve written too much.

I have a friend who asked me about developing small groups. And she said that there’s this tension with developing community and reaching out. Meaning you want to keep the same group so that you can develop trust and then nurture transparency. And we all know that transparency is where the action happens.

But if you reach out and invite new people you take a few steps back on the trust index. And then we’re no closer to transparency nirvana. So she asked me what we do about that.

To be honest I haven’t thought about that for a while. We’re always telling our people to integrate their faith with their life and to then integrate their life with the lives of others. So that there are very few seams in the fabric of our lives. Jesus is spilling over everything.

And it made me think that even the paradigm of community building vs. mission is contrary to the Gospel. If the Gospel is God initiating love for his people… meaning he loved when he knew we didn’t love him back… and we’re to model that love for others, transparency should come before trust. Not trust before transparency. The Gospel always turns stuff upside down.

The world operates on that paradigm. You don’t give anyone your money, time or heart without first determining whether they are trustworthy. They’ve got to earn it. And when they do, then you can leak out a bit of yourself while still maintaining some safeguards. Earning always comes first.

So going back to the small group thing – what if we followed the paradigm of the Gospel and were transparent regardless of trust. I think it would accomplish 2 things:

1. It would reinforce that we believe the Gospel… the Gospel that says that our worth is completely based on what Jesus has done for us and never on what we’ve done. If we believe that Jesus determines our worth, we don’t need to be enslaved by what others say. We’re wholly accepted and loved by God. Isn’t the reason why we’re not tranparent is that we’re afraid of rejection? It becomes a faith exercise and a way of deepening the Gospel within us [isn't that Philippians 2:12?].
2. New people will automatically feel embraced… they’d be pleasantly surprised that people would be willing to share their life without even knowing them. The first time I went to this one group, I heard everyone’s junk… they shared openly and vulnerably, acknowledging their need for God. I automatically felt like I was one of them – they didn’t need to welcome me.

When we live out the Gospel paradigm, community is built and we’re on mission… automatically, without needing to reconcile the two. And I realize that it’s the Gospel’s business to reconcile things that just don’t make any sense, that seem in opposition. Whether it’s people, social systems or ministry methods.

I’m finding that I need to be very aware of whether our medium is also communicating the Gospel. I realize that having such a segmented paradigm contradicts the message of the Gospel. IE. having a small group for community and a small group for evangelism. Don’t get me wrong… I don’t think I’m trying to be militant about the integration of everything into one homogenous medium. That’s not right either. I can’t imagine our toddlers and soccer players meshing well [though I'm sure there might be a way that could work]. But I’m finding that I need to ask whether the medium… the means by which we are communicating the Gospel… contradicts the message. If so, we’re in big trouble.

I think one of the purest joys for me in doing what I do is “passing the rock” and watching others “score”. I’m sure that analogy can be taken in infinite ways. My only other dream profession is being in the NBA and I’d love to play the point. In the mold of the traditionalists – John Stockton, Steve Nash, Magic Johnson… setting up his guys to score.

I was discussing Good Friday with Warren and Serg and had told them before that this time they were going to lead more and I was going to lead less. And as we were discussing, getting excited about what we were going to do, Serg asked me what part I wanted to lead. And Warren said… we don’t need him, we can do it! And I was really proud of my guys. They saw the joy of helping people see Jesus and they stepped up to the challenge. They weren’t afraid… of messing it up or doing something wrong.

I’m so tired of people who are paralyzed by a fear of failure. Don’t get me wrong… I’m afraid of failing too. I’m like everyone else… I don’t like falling on my face. But by and large there is so much fear. Fear of making a mistake, being looked down upon, losing what you have, finding out the truth. It’s slavery. It enslaves regardless of age, ethnic or socio-economic background. When I’m being judgmental… I think it’s pathetic. When I’m more humble about it [and realize it in myself too], it really makes me sad.

So I’m excited to see guys who say that fear is not an option. And to see it in a few of my guys… that they were willing to not be owned by fear for the sake of the Gospel. That makes me really proud. And the truth is that I see very few who make that deal, step up to that challenge… and not be owned… by fear.

I think I’m relearning the breaking process again. I wish it didn’t cycle back so quickly. And yet I know… I know it’s God’s way of pruning those he loves. No father withholds discipline from the son that he loves.

As a man, pride and fear still course through my veins. There’s some enormous thing in me that still wants to conquer the world and have everyone shower their praises over me. Delight in my brilliance. Rejoice in the gift that is me. And the moment that I find the coat of grandeur fitting so well, it gets ripped off and I find that I’m not wearing much underneath.

Nothing necessarily terrible has happened. But I just feel like I’ve been running head-first into the wall of failure and impotence over and over again. Feeling like a failure and feeling powerless – those are the worst feelings. But it’s said that there’s good brokenness and bad brokenness. Good brokenness is when the element that needs to be broken gets replaced with something life giving. Bad brokenness happens when the element gets broken but is never replaced. It just becomes the wound that we carry and thrust on others through life. We never grow from it, never gets replaced, we continue dying the slow death, never rediscover fresh and new life from the brokenness.

When Jesus says that dying comes before life. I think I’m rediscovering that truth once again. Those parts of me, the pride, the fear, the dreams of my own immortality… must die. And die completely. When he says apart from me you can do nothing, I always want to bend the rule. How about a little something? How about being able to do a little… and then take it to the corner of my house, crouch down and revel in my false brilliance. But no… he says nothing. Apart from Him, I can do nothing. And the nothing is what I’m finding all the more apparent.

Thanks? OK… thanks.