Daniel Darling's Blog, page 26

The Power of an Average Mentor

It was an inauspicious meeting, really. It took place in the corner booth at a Burger King. He, in his early 70s, a veteran pastor and church leader. Me, a young Bible college graduate and soon-to-be pastor. I was serving as a volunteer youth pastor at a struggling church in the Chicago suburbs and he was the interim, brought in to stabilize the congregation during a period of turmoil and decline.

I wasn’t really sure why I called Bill and asked for a meeting. I told my wife it was simply to “get on the same page” with the senior pastor of the church I was serving. But I had other motivations. I was contemplating a full-time call to the pastorate, but casting out for better leadership examples than what I had seen modeled in my previous ministry experience. I also knew that Bill had influence over the church’s search committee and … if a miracle occurred and he liked me, maybe he’d put my name in the hat.

I didn’t telegraph that intention in our conversations, but I did honestly share with him my doubts about pastoral work. Because I was never gifted with a sort of Type-A, rah-rah leadership style, I’d been told I wasn’t pastor material. In the paradigm I had grown up in, servant leadership was eschewed in favor of top-down, aggressive management. Not only did this kind of leadership make me cringe, I didn’t think I could pull it off.

But Bill … he was different. Refreshingly different. Kind in every way, a great conversationalist, a gentle, caring shepherd of a man. We hit it off right away and soon Bill urged me to apply for the senior pastor position. He not only championed me before the search committee, Bill coached and encouraged me. This was in the fall of 2007. By June of 2008, I was installed as the senior pastor of Gages Lake Bible Church.

Priceless Support

Bill became one of my best friends during my five years of pastoral ministry. On several occasions, early in my tenure, he saved me, literally. He showed me how to pursue change in a way that didn’t alienate members. He taught me how to deal with conflict in a graceful, humble way. More than anything, Bill showed me what it looks like to shepherd God’s people. “Make the ministry about God and about people, Dan, and you will do well,” he frequently said.

In my years of ministry I’ve had the privilege of meeting many church leaders. I’ve learned a lot from their years of experience. Some people collect baseball cards, artifacts, or books. But I collect mentors, downloading wisdom and grace for crucial life choices.

But none have impacted me like Bill. He never once said, “Want me to be your mentor?” He just stepped right in, meeting me for monthly breakfasts, lifting me up during trials, and serving me as a coach. Bill cried with me. Laughed with me. Grew with me. He opened up his life and shared his deepest frustrations and greatest triumphs. And even though he and I ministered in two different generations, the gap never hurt our friendship. It only enriched it.

Don’t Fear The Gray

There are many men like Bill in ministry: wise, humble, and ready to shape the next generation. But I wonder if my young peers are ready to listen and engage? At times it seems the evangelical world continually skews young. Our conferences seem to imply that only the beautiful and sexy need apply to make a meaningful impact.

This may be why we are so prone to burnout, missteps, and disqualifying sins. My mentors, particularly Bill, taught me to slow down, to move forward at a steady, faithful pace. To personalize my ministry, so that in my preaching and leading I saw actual faces of people, not numbers and programs.

I’m out of pastoral ministry now, serving in an executive position for a denominational agency. But I still carry Bill’s wisdom with me. And I urge young pastors everywhere to find a man like Bill, at whose feet you can sit and listen and learn.

Five Tips for Finding a Mentor

1 Identify someone within your sphere of influence whose ministry you’d like to emulate. My suggestion is to find someone local and someone not world famous. I doubt Matt Chandler or Rick Warren is accepting more mentees at this time. But you don’t need a rock star; you just need an experienced, godly leader.

2 Contact the person you’d like to engage. Make sure to start by keeping your expectations small. Don’t say, in your email, “Can you be my mentor?” Ask them to lunch or coffee. Tell them you’d like to pick their brain on ministry and leadership.

3 Schedule a first meeting. Don’t simply talk about “getting together one day” because you won’t. Open up your calendar and be willing to meet at a time that works for the leader you wish to meet. Bill loved early morning breakfast, so that’s what I did. Do what you have to do to put yourself in the presence of someone who can give you valuable life wisdom.

4 Give as much as you can. Offer to pay for meals or coffee. Use your car to drive if possible. The wisdom you gain from a mentor is far more valuable than a few more bucks on your expense account.

5 Thank the people who invest their time and resources in you. Don’t ever forget their sacrifice, don’t ever get “too big” for them. Call and visit even after your church is being profiled on the Today Show—or if you simply enjoy an “ordinary” ministry marked by fruitfulness and fulfillment.

This article was originally published here. 

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The Way Home: Craig Groeschel on believing God is good when life is not

Craig Groeschel shares how his faith has been tested during his life and his family’s life. He is the founder and senior pastor of Life.Church.

Show Notes

Website: craiggroeschel.com
Twitter: @craiggroeschel
Book: Hope in the Dark: Believing God Is Good When Life Is Not [image error]

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Abortion Meets a New Generation

As evangelicals who came of age during the culture wars, we’re part of a generation ready to move past the pitched left-right debates. The critiques of Christian political activism have held some merit: A hyper-focus on elections, voter guides, and strategy has often buried the gospel story. Sometimes following Christ has strangely looked like following an elephant or a donkey.

We need the hope, optimism, and willingness of a new generation of evangelicals to get dirty serving the poor, fighting for justice, and eschewing party labels. Their wide-eyed engagement has awakened new interest in bipartisan horrors such as human trafficking, environmental degradation, the orphan crisis, and child poverty in underdeveloped nations.

And yet, in our rush to justice, we cannot forget the prophet Micah’s haunting words:

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8, ESV)

These words motivate our desire as God’s kingdom people to pursue justice where we can and pray for it where we cannot. But what about causes that push against the culture? Surely God’s intention for his church didn’t simply include only a portfolio of chic causes.

And that leads us to the pro-life movement, dating back to the 1970s. Being pro-life was missional, incarnational, and radical way before those terms became evangelical buzzwords. And yet, caring for and advocating on behalf of the unborn remains controversial.

Thankfully, its controversial status may be a thing of the past if trend lines continue. Younger generations are markedly more pro-life than their parents. We’re observing a rising generation of pro-life Americans, many of whom (though not all) identify as Christian.

But sadly, among progressive evangelicals, there’s a reflexive hesitancy to tout or raise the banner of human life as a preeminent justice issue. You’ll hear individuals in this camp dance around the sanctity of life—writing it off as “political” or “complicated.”

One of us had a conversation with a leading Christian ethicist, who denied a consensus around the personhood of the unborn, muddying the moral clarity of the abortion discussion. This same scholar rightly chafes against the industrialization of abortion, but then focuses their energies toward mitigating the social factors that lead to abortion. It’s a noble effort, but it lacks the moral force needed to give justice its proper due.

That’s where a lot of progressive evangelicals are. They’re against the circumstances of teenage poverty that lead to abortion. They’re against sexual abuse. They’re against a libertine sexual ethic (though many of them also ridicule sex education that upholds abstinence as the best model). But when questioned about whether the value of changing laws matters in reducing abortion, you’ll often hear a harrumph, brought on by the awkwardness of extending Christian ethics and justice to its proper conclusion.

We’re not asking Christians to be engaged solely on the legislative level, but we’re asking progressive evangelicals who desire justice to remove the log from their eye.

We’ve heard well-meaning, but cautious lovers of the gospel say that the cause of the unborn is too political, that it casts a harmful pall over the church, damaging gospel witness. To be sure, politics has not always brought out the best of God’s people. A renewed embrace of the grace-truth tension is needed. And yet, can we really claim to be social justice warriors if we ignore the millions of unborn children silenced and snuffed out in America at the altar of convenience? Can we overlook the corporatist worldview of Planned Parenthood that has industrialized abortion? No, we cannot.

And so today, we see a two-pronged front in the struggle advance a humane ethic of life: Ministries and activists give support to those considering abortion. In these places of refuge, you won’t find a donkey or an elephant, but ordinary Christians serving as the hands and feet of Jesus. They offer hope and healing for women who find themselves on the margins of society. They offer a cup of cold water in Christ’s name, meeting physical and spiritual needs, and offering a better choice than the cold and dispassionate choice offered by abortionists.

Meanwhile, we’re also seeing real, but incremental steps taken in our state legislatures to peel back the abortifacient mindset.

Work on both fronts should continue. Evangelicals are taking a long view of this struggle, and our concern isn’t that we’ll just “win,” but in league with the historical Christian social witness, that we’ll be judged a faithful witness to God, the giver of life. This isn’t politics; this is the church’s social witness that necessarily entails political implication.

Christians and non-Christians can and should partner together around such initiatives as clean water and poverty relief, but if man is indeed God’s unique creation, if the blood of the innocents cry out to him from the ground, then surely abortion is as much a moral evil as anything else that motivates our generation to activism.

In fact, the denial of human life is arguably what triggers all other forms of activism. If we don’t get our witness right on life, how can our witness on any other issue seem anything other than pyrrhic? A Christian approach to social engagement cannot be calculated through the grid of popular appeal or mass approval.

Misguided opponents on the other side of this issue would have the public believe that being pro-life is a right-wing political cause drawn up by Machiavellian political strategists to elect Republicans or worse—a conspiratorial effort motivated by patriarchy and a repressive conservative agenda to roll back the rights of women.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Being pro-life is about justice. And justice is blind—blind to color, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status. Justice is standing up for what is true, good, and beautiful; and on the issue of life, we insist that every child is a uniquely good and beautiful creation of God, and therefore deserving of life.

So we’re calling all Americans and our fellow evangelicals who wince when the “A word” is mentioned. We call them to bear witness to the God of life. We call them to envision an America that no longer violates the sacred proposition on which it was founded—that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, first among them life.

Andrew T. Walker contributed to this article. Andrew T. Walker is the Director of Research and Senior Fellow in Christian Ethics at the ERLC. You can connect with him on Twitter: @andrewtwalk.

This article was originally published here.

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The Way Home: Alan Noble on speaking truth in a distracted age

Alan Noble joins the podcast to talk about his new book Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age[image error]. The book “casts a new vision for the evangelical imagination, calling us away from abstraction and cliché to a more faithful embodiment of the gospel for our day.”

Dr. Noble is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture, and author of numerous articles.

Show Notes

Website: oalannoble.com
Twitter: @TheAlanNoble
Book: Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age [image error]

The post The Way Home: Alan Noble on speaking truth in a distracted age appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

The Church That Saved Me

When a church looks for a pastor, in most cases, it is looking for a leader who can revive its witness and vitality in the community. So I supposed Gages Lake Bible Church, a small, struggling church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, was looking for a human savior. And while we had some successes in the five years I pastored there—increased attendance, major structural changes, renewed vision, and leadership health—it wasn’t me who saved the church. It was the church that saved me.

Of course I should begin with the usual Christian caveats. Yes, I realize churches don’t save pastors, and pastors don’t save churches. Jesus does the saving, both from eternal damnation but also from a self-serving life on earth. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

But God’s instruments for renewal come most often in human form. For my wife Angela and me and our four children, Gages Lake was such a place.

When we arrived at Gages Lake, we had just spent a good season of our lives in leadership in an unhealthy church environment, the church I grew up in, so it was complicated. I was (and still am) grateful for the spiritual heritage sown in my heart at this church, for the faithfulness of my father to lead our family to church every Sunday, and for the rich hymnody and gospel witness embedded in my soul. And yet by the time we moved on to Gages Lake, we’d been disturbed and shaken by some poor leadership models.

Truthfully, though we were called to lead Gages Lake, Angela and I were looking for renewal and a fresh vision of church life. This tiny church, struggling to keep open its doors, gave us just that.

Greeted with Open Arms

First, the people of Gages Lake opened their hearts and lives to us. When I assumed the senior pastorate, I was 29 years old. I was armed only with a bachelor’s degree in pastoral ministry and a lot of opinions about church life, most of which were raw, untested, and probably wrong. But the good people of this small church, many of whom were veterans of church life and leadership, didn’t immediately dismiss my ideas nor did they look for ways to “show this young kid a few lessons.”

Instead, they patiently endured my many trial-and-error attempts at leadership. I remember with fondness one wise elder who, in meeting after meeting, worked to help shape the way I led. I remember another elder, who is now one of my best friends. We had many long conversations about the gospel, church life, and leadership. This man became a father-figure, a mentor, and a steady guide.

My wife remembers fondly the sweet saint, a faithful lady who had served many years in the church. When it became known I was candidating for the position, she ran up to her and gave her a big hug. “I’m supporting you guys all the way.” And when she said that, we learned later, she really meant it. Support for her meant monthly encouraging notes to me, notes that often made me weep with joy during times of great distress. It also meant meals, gifts, and generous financial gifts. This was not a wealthy lady, and yet her generosity of spirit and resources were a huge investment in our lives.

These are just some of the many stories I could tell. What we learned from Gages Lake Bible Church was how to love, how church members wrap themselves around your family and will not let go. It was here we learned what genuine gospel community looks like.

Permission to Grow

Second, Gages Lake allowed me to grow in my leadership. Most organizations are looking for proven leaders to help get them to the next level. This is wise, but a special grace goes to those who are willing to take a chance on unproven talent. It was at Gages Lake that I worked out my ideas of leadership. Besides generously paying for conferences and giving me wide latitude to seek out mentors, they also gave me some margin to make mistakes. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t accountability—there was—and I’m grateful for the many decisions we didn’t make because of wise counsel from the leadership.

Yet it wasn’t so tight that I couldn’t grow and learn. The very first initiative I tried, early on, was a soccer camp for the community. Our facilities didn’t allow us to do some sports ministry like other churches, but we did have a wide-open field. This was a big endeavor for our small church and required the involvement of almost the entire congregation. That first year required some major financial investment. It could have been a flop.

And yet instead of saying, “We’ve never done this before,” they said, “What a great opportunity” and rolled up their sleeves and made it a successful effort we repeated year after year.

Pastoring this church formed me as a leader in ways that will last for a lifetime. They gave me the confidence I needed to pursue larger endeavors. My wife has even remarked that my time at this church has made me a better leader at home.

A Grounded Gospel

Third, and most important, Gages Lake showed me what the gospel looks like in everyday terms. Before I was a pastor, I had a lot of esoteric theories about how people should live the Christian life. I could weigh in from the ivory tower about difficult subjects like sin, sanctification, and grace. But when you are dealing regularly with actual people, you come to understand the messiness of human life.

It made my sermons a bit more real. There’s a tendency for pastors to preach theologically airtight directives, but until you’ve sat by the bedside of a parishioner dying with cancer, until you’ve wrestled with someone struggling with same-sex attraction, until you’ve cried with someone losing their home in bankruptcy, you can’t really understand how the gospel invades the human experience.

Pastoring gave me more empathy and clarity; it also provided me with a window into my own fallen heart. God’s people, I had to learn, are not a mass to be herded somewhere you want to go. The body of Christ is made up of individual parts, people with human faces and their own callings. With pains and sorrows, joys and victories, relationships and struggles. It’s tempting to care more about principles than people, but pastoring grinds that out of you so quickly.

There’s something palpably Christian about pastoring a small, struggling church. It’s an up-close and intimate encounter with God and grace. And for all of my life, I will thank my?heavenly Father for the church that saved me.

This article was originally published here.

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The Way Home: Justin Giboney on being pro-life and pro-justice

This episode is the last part of a special series of podcasts in conjunction with the release of The Dignity Revolution: Reclaiming God’s Rich Vision for Humanity. In this series, Dan is bringing together leaders and thinkers whose work helps Christians think well about what it means to be human.

What does it mean to be pro-life and pro-justice? Justin Giboney joins the podcast to discuss both of these important topics. Justin is the co-founder and president of The And Campaign (&). He is also an attorney and political strategist in Atlanta, Ga.

You can pre-order The Dignity Revolution today and receive a free one-year subscription to Light Magazine.

Show Notes

Website: theandcampaign.com
Twitter: @justinegiboney

The post The Way Home: Justin Giboney on being pro-life and pro-justice appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

Joni Eareckson Tada on dignity and advocating for people with disabilities

This episode is part of a special series of podcasts in conjunction with the release of The Dignity Revolution: Reclaiming God’s Rich Vision for Humanity. In this series, Dan is bringing together leaders and thinkers whose work helps Christians think well about what it means to be human.

What does it mean to be a God reflector? How do we act out of humility rather than pride? Joni Eareckson Tada joins me to discuss this and more.

Joni is the Founder and CEO of Joni and Friends International Disability Center and is an international advocate for people with disabilities. A diving accident in 1967 left Joni, then 17, a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, without the use of her hands.

You can pre-order The Dignity Revolution today and receive a free one-year subscription to Light Magazine.

Show Notes

Website: joniandfriends.org
Twitter: @joniandfriends

The post Joni Eareckson Tada on dignity and advocating for people with disabilities appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

How Did Jesus View the Bible?

When I pastored my small, theologically conservative church, I could safely assume the people sitting in the pews on Sunday morning to hear me preach believed that the Bible they held in their hands was God’s Word. But what exactly does that mean?

Enter Pastor Kevin DeYoung. His book, Taking God at His Word: Why the Bible Is Knowable, Necessary, and Enough, and What That Means for You and Me (Crossway, 2014) doesn’t break any new ground in the debates over inerrancy. Coming in at just under 140 pages, this is a quick and easy read. But that’s just the point. DeYoung synthesizes the best scholarly arguments for the reliability, trustworthiness, and inspiration of Scriptures and presents them in a way that my deacons could digest and understand.

What is helpful about DeYoung is his willingness to address contemporary questions about Scripture and our perennial desire to mold Scripture to our current context. Perhaps the most valuable chapter in Taking God at His Word is chapter seven, “Christ’s Unbreakable Bible” where he pushes back on the notion of a “red-letter” Jesus. “I’m not asking how Jesus interpreted the Bible or fulfilled the Bible, or what he taught from the Bible,” DeYoung writes. “I’m addressing only the simple, absolutely crucial question: what did Jesus believe about his Bible?” Then DeYoung systematically describes Jesus’ strong doctrine and high view of Scripture.

This is an especially important argument today when many evangelicals are placing a high premium on the words of Jesus, but questioning whether they are compatible with the rest of God’s revelation. Unhelpful dichotomies such as “Jesus came to abolish the law” or Jesus came to “do away with religion” confuse believers and lead them away from a holistic understanding of the entire span of salvation history.

Taking God at His Word also makes Sola Scriptura accessible to a new generation. The Bible occupies the magisterial role, and the Church is its minister. You’ll find a fuller treatment in works such as Timothy Ward’s Words of Life, but DeYoung gives a terrific and clear-eyed view of the important arguments.

Last, DeYoung forcefully urges Christians to consider the Bible to be “clear” and “sufficient” for faith and practice. To evangelicals for whom certainty is a four-letter word, DeYoung’s apologetic will go down hard, but he offers an important reminder of the danger of shading God’s revealed truth in gray hues.

DeYoung may not convince those already determined to press their cultural preferences upon Scripture, but he’ll likely influence those curious about the relationship between Jesus and the law. What’s more, this little book will sharpen those who agree, philosophically, with the argument that “the Bible is the Word of God” but are unsure of how to explain it. Its compact format has the potential to stimulate good thinking from lay believers otherwise unengaged in the important apologetic arguments surrounding the Scripture they trust to be breathed by God.

Pastors and church leaders will find this a handy resource to hand out to new believers and mature saints who never personally grappled with the doctrine of Scripture. In making esoteric arguments accessible to the average Christian, DeYoung has succeeded. If he equips a new generation with a confidence in God’s revealed Word, this is something worth applauding.

This article was originally published here.

The post How Did Jesus View the Bible? appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

The Way Home: Rick Smith on human dignity and Down syndrome

This episode is part of a special series of podcasts in conjunction with the release of The Dignity Revolution: Reclaiming God’s Rich Vision for Humanity. In this series, Dan is bringing together leaders and thinkers whose work helps Christians think well about what it means to be human.

How can Christians help lead the conversation of Down syndrome? Rick Smith, founder of Hope Story, joins me to talk about being a dad to a child with Down syndrome. He shares how he and his wife started a ministry to educate people about Down syndrome.

You can pre-order The Dignity Revolution today and receive a free one-year subscription to Light Magazine.

Show Notes

Website: noahsdad.com and hopestory.org
Twitter: @RickSmith and @hopestory_org

The post The Way Home: Rick Smith on human dignity and Down syndrome appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

The Way Home: John Kilner on the image of God and why people matter

This episode is part of a special series of podcasts in conjunction with the release of The Dignity Revolution: Reclaiming God’s Rich Vision for Humanity. In this series, Dan is bringing together leaders and thinkers whose work helps Christians think well about what it means to be human.

What does it mean to be created in the image of God? Dr. John Kilner joins me to talk about bioethics, the Imago Dei, and why people matter.

Dr. Kilner served for more than eleven years as president of The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity on the Trinity campus, where he continues as senior fellow. He is currently co-chair of the bioethics section of the Evangelical Theological Society.

You can pre-order The Dignity Revolution today and receive a free one-year subscription to Light Magazine.

Show Notes

Website: divinity.tiu.edu
Book: Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God [image error] and Why People Matter: A Christian Engagement with Rival Views of Human Significance [image error]

The post The Way Home: John Kilner on the image of God and why people matter appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.