I’m rather frantically attempting to get everything done I need to get done today and tomorrow before leaving for Dallas on Saturday, for a week of meetings that begin Sunday evening in Big Sandy, Texas.
I’ve been asked to do the worship for days we’ll be there, something that I greatly enjoy doing…mixing songs with prayer and relevant quotes. The theme for our time (well, for CAM really) is discipleship. I can’t think of a theme I’d rather talk about. Specifically I’ll be in a group that will seek to define what a ministry team (or whatever we end of calling it) looks like and how it will function. CAM is in the process of flattening out lines of authority and administrative structures…and we’re going to be talking about that.
Of course, the conference grounds where we’ll be happen to have a rather large lake full of bass…ah, distractions! Don’t expect to get any more sleep this coming week!
And there’s some pending Settlers and spades games to consider…
Quote of the Day:
Every time we open up a church door and take a careful, scrutinizing look inside we find them again—sinners. Also Christ. Christ in the preaching, Christ in the sacraments, but inconveniently and embarrassingly mixed into this congregation of sinners.
It is to be expected in these situations that with some frequency certain persons will come forward with designs to improve matters. They want to purify the church. They propose to make the church something that will advertise to the world the attractiveness of the kingdom. With few exceptions these people are, or soon become, heretics, taking on only as much as the gospel as they can manage and apply to the people around them, attempting to construct a version of church that is so well behaved and efficiently organized that there will be no need for God.
They abhor the scandal of both the cross and the church. But it is very nature of pastoral work to embrace this scandal, accept this humiliation, and daily work in it. Not despising the shame, and not denying it either.
Under the Unpredictable Plant, Eugene Peterson, pgs.24,25
