Daniel Darling's Blog, page 29

The Way Home: Jason Duesing on hope in an age of cynicism

Why hope in an age of deep cynicism and despair? Is hope naïveté or is it grounded in something real? Author and scholar, Jason Duesing joins the podcast to talk about the origins of Christian hope. He’s the provost at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of the new book, Mere Hope: Life in an Age of Cynicism[image error].

We are giving away three copies of this book–listen all the way to the end of the podcast to find out how you can win.

Show Notes

Twitter: @JGDuesing
Website: jgduesing.com
Book: Mere Hope: Life in an Age of Cynicism [image error]

The post The Way Home: Jason Duesing on hope in an age of cynicism appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

Funeral for a Stranger

I sat in my office late on a Thursday afternoon after a week of meetings, study, and a thousand other crises big and small. By that point in the week I was thinking about what I would do on Friday: lock myself in my office, take no phone calls, and crank out the final draft of my Sunday sermon.

Alas, the phone rang, and I took the call.

“This is the Warren Funeral Home. We have a family requesting an evangelical funeral, and we were told you could do this.”

Word had gotten out, apparently.

I told the caller that, yes, I would do a funeral for this person I’d never met. This was, after all, my calling as a pastor. Though I could think of a thousand other things to do with my day, though my sermon prep would now stretch into Saturday, this was one unique way I could serve our community. I was reminded in that moment that God holds my plans in his hand, and he has the right to change them.

While the lady filled out the details over the phone, the Holy Spirit brought to my mind an image of a grieving family, trying to figure out life without someone they loved. If I didn’t come alongside this family with compassion, who would?

I hung up with the funeral director and dialed the grieving husband to ask if he could meet with me that evening. In the coming days, I would have to assume multiple roles: friend, pastor, storyteller, and eulogizer.

Friend

The process of walking a family through the death of a loved one is multi-layered. At the first level, you approach the survivors as a simple friend. Before you do anything, you must be present.

I knocked on Jack’s door later that evening. I had arranged to visit with the family that night. I introduced myself and said, “Jack, I’m the pastor of Gages Lake Bible Church, but mostly I’m coming to you as a friend. I’m sorry for your loss. I want to serve you in any way I can during this time.”

Jack was married to his wife, Helen, for 33 years. Her death was not expected. His children, grown and spread around the country, now gathered to grieve and plan next steps. Jack was barely able to hold himself together. I tried, as a young pastor, to simply be there, to offer words of comfort. I did my best to avoid theological clichés and to provide a firm and tender strength for this man whose world was falling apart.

Pastor

There are many moments when being a pastor feels like a liability. I’ve had conversations in restaurants and barber shops and at family gatherings that grew silent when everyone found out what I did for a living.

But in moments of grief, when families are walking through a sudden loss, people long for a minister—someone called and trained to be present with them in their pain, to help them through their distress.

I find it vitally important, when ministering to someone I don’t know about losing someone I never met, to step fully and confidently into the role. Sometimes this means simple acts of comfort and mourning. Other times it is gathering the family together and reading some Scripture and praying.

The family needs to lean on you for the next few days. Details like scheduling the funeral or writing the obituary for the newspaper are often too painful to address. The pastor should offer gentle but steady leadership. Most family members are too drained from mourning their loved one to plan an order of service. In their minds, the pastor is the expert. You will need to guide them throughout the process, from the time you meet them until you say goodbye at the grave-side service.

When I spoke with Jack, I began by saying, “Jack, have you had time to think through how you might want this service to go?” I was prepared with a rough outline of a typical service. “This is what I’ve seen many families do,” I said, before asking some leading questions. “Do you have any music requests? Are there any passages of Scriptures or poems that are meaningful to your family? Would anyone in the family be interested in speaking to honor your wife?”

I reassured Jack several times in our conversation that my goal was to craft a service that would memorialize his wife in a way that would make the family proud.

Storyteller

As a minister of the gospel, I’ve always found it important to memorialize someone well at a funeral. For many who attend, this will be the only time they will step foot in a church and hear a pastor speak. The temptation, for many of us, is to use the funeral as a launching point for a gospel sermon, to almost pray the dead into glory. But if we do not carefully respect the deceased, we will not earn the right to be heard on gospel truths we hope to communicate at a time when family members may be most open to listening.

This task is much easier when preaching the funeral of someone we know well. I’ve led the funerals of good friends and long-time, faithful saints, and stories of their legacies and our time together came without much effort. But when presiding over the funeral of someone I never met, I do my homework by gathering some key facts from the family before putting the funeral homily together.

I typically do this when I visit with the family. After offering words of comfort and reassurance, and helping them put together an order of service, I invite the family to give me tidbits of information about their loved one.

With Jack, like with most who grieve, this was a therapeutic exercise. I asked him questions like, “How did you two meet? What kinds of activities did you enjoy doing together? What were her hobbies and pursuits? What are a few words you would use to describe her?”

I also asked the children similar questions: “What was your mother like? What were some of your favorite moments? What was she most passionate about?”

I take notes as they speak so I can weave them into my sermon. In this way, a good pastor is a journalist, gathering enough information to tell a story. After the funeral, the family thanked me: “You helped us remember her well.”

Eulogizer

Perhaps the most important thing you will bring to this funeral is what you will say during the eulogy. I start by weaving in the anecdotes and details I gathered from the family. I work hard to highlight one or two good character traits and, if appropriate, I share a funny anecdote. I’ve learned to avoid pretending I know someone I never met. Glib phrases like “My friend …” will come across as callous and cheap when everyone knows you never met their loved one. But you might say something like, “I never had the privilege of meeting her, but after spending time with those who loved her, I wish I had.”

With Jack’s wife, I had very little data on her spiritual condition. She seemed to be a faithful churchgoer, but I couldn’t speak with certainty about where she would spend eternity. Rather than dwell on that, I chose to pivot into a discussion about why death happens. “We live in a world,” I said, “where people we love are taken from us way too soon. It is natural for us to grieve.”

I spoke about Jesus’ bitter grief at the death of his friend, Lazarus. At funerals like these, I’m tempted to leap too quickly into a discussion about the blessings of Heaven for those who know Jesus. It’s important to allow proper space for grief. The Scriptures are full of rich lament. By dwelling on the pain of death and loss, you give permission to the family and those present to process their grief.

Ironically, I’ve found that a discussion of death becomes an onramp to hope. The Christian story tells us that death is not the final answer. Jesus defeated death, our last and terrible enemy. He offers to us the hope of eternal life with him, of a world that will no longer snatch away our loved ones. I usually end with an appeal for the people present to know the Good Shepherd, who bore our grief and sorrow and remains near to his people.

After I finished the funeral service for Jack’s wife, I made my way, with the family, to the funeral procession. As we drove, I reflected on the privilege of guiding people through the most difficult parts of their lives. This is the essence of shepherding. All the training and reading and preparing equips us to press the Good News into the brokenness of life in a fallen world.

This article was originally published here.

The post Funeral for a Stranger appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

The Way Home: Chelsea Patterson Sobolik on infertility

As an adopted child, she longed to be a mother. But in her teens, she received a medical diagnosis that she would never be able to bear children. How has her Christian faith helped Chelsea Patterson Sobolik help with the questions and doubt and what word does she have for others who similarly face infertility? Chelsea joins the podcast to talk about her life story, her journey through suffering, and how she encourages churches to help those who suffer from infertility.

Show Notes

Twitter: @chelspat
Website: chelseapattersonsobolik.com
Book: Longing for Motherhood: Holding On to Hope in the Midst of Childlessness [image error]

The post The Way Home: Chelsea Patterson Sobolik on infertility appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

Who Exactly Am I Preaching To?

“Um, so, did someone tell you about Dave’s job?” an anxious member told me, as she shook my hand on the way out of the auditorium one Sunday morning. “Because it seemed like you were talking to us.”

I told her this was the first I had heard of their fragile employment situation. The sermon was on fear, and we were in uncertain economic times. I had offered, in passing, an example of someone who might be nervous about his or her job. But I wasn’t specifically targeting this family.

It’s difficult to know how to take this kind of comment. One the one hand, I never want people to think I am using the pulpit to preach at one specific person. On the other hand, I want to preach messages that the people in attendance can experience in a personal way. I think about this conversation and several like it often as I reflect on what we do when we preach.

When we stand in the pulpit and open the Word of God, we are doing two things. We are declaring, first of all, what God has already said. Pastors, therefore, have to get the text right. They have to know the text so well that they can get out of the way and let the Holy Spirit speak to the people of God.

But we’re also doing something else. We are preaching to a people. Our weekly declarations are contextualized to an audience in a place and time in the history of the world. Preaching, then, is also taking what God has already said and directing it toward those he has called us to faithfully serve.

In my experience as a pastor, the first part of my mission in preaching seemed to come naturally. I enjoyed studying and praying and reading. But in the second aspect I often struggled. There are dangerous temptations in crafting applications. I’d like to address a few of those temptations and offer some lessons on what I’ve learned.

Preaching to the Podcast

I love to listen to sermons from other pastors around the country who are far better at this than me. Today there are thousands of resources available, online, on our phone, at conferences. This is a gift of grace in this era of history, but if we are not careful, we can pick up the habits of our favorite expositors and preach to their congregations instead of our own.

Early in my ministry, I regularly listened to a handful of well-known pastors. I’m so grateful for the way these men shaped my preaching in those early days and gave me confidence that, like them, I too could feed my people from the Word. But I found myself, at times, preaching messages aimed beyond the men and women sitting in the pews at Gages Lake Bible Church and toward the churches served by my preaching heroes.

I once had a breakfast conversation with a longtime elder in my church. This was a man whom I deeply respected, who had a great love for the church and for Jesus. A few minutes in, he gently said, “I didn’t quite understand what you were saying on Sunday.” He identified a particular theological phrase I had used.

This came as a shock to me. All the preachers I listened to used this phrase. The journals I read and the books I studies used it as well. I assumed the people in my church knew what it meant.

But they didn’t. Not even close. I had been preaching to the podcast, so all the smart evangelical leaders I respected would download my sermon and think I was smart. I wasn’t preaching to the people I was called to serve.

First Peter 5:2 reminds us to be shepherds of our flocks that are among us. We aren’t called to pastor the podcast listeners or the folks on Twitter. We’re not called to engage the latest conversations on Facebook—though some of those conversations might inform our understanding of our people. We are called to shepherd and apply the Scripture to our actual community.

Some pastors I know do this well. One gathers an informal focus group of members to see if his application of the biblical text is connecting. Another has lunch with a regular group of members and has them read his message draft. A third pastor has stopped listening to sermon podcasts for a season to get his head out of other people’s congregations and into his own. I also know preachers who use social media—Facebook especially—to get a sense of what the people in their congregations are wrestling with. The key is to make sure we are preaching messages aimed less at the Twitterati or the podcast listener and more toward the people we serve in our faith communities.

Preaching to the Amen Chorus

Every year the calendar in January presents two opportunities for cultural reflection: Sanctity of Human Life Sunday and the observation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. For most of my life growing up in church, we observed the first one. As a conservative, white, evangelical church, we lamented the sad legacy of Roe v. Wade and recommitted ourselves to speaking up for justice for the unborn. But I don’t remember ever commemorating the birthday of MLK. We never used that opportunity to challenge ourselves to think about race or helping to reconcile a divided country.

I must admit that for my first couple of years as a pastor I hesitated to talk about MLK. As a pro-life church, the sanctity of life issue was an easy message to preach. My audience largely agreed with me that abortion is a moral outrage, and they were eager to partner with our local pregnancy resource center to help counsel women who had abortions and to pray for a day when the unborn would be protected by law.

I grew deeply convicted, however, of my failure to address the issue of race, to apply the Scriptures to the vexing problem of racial unrest in the country. But the issue was risky. If thinking and preaching on race uncovered sinful attitudes in my own heart, I knew it would provoke the same wrestling in the hearts of my people. I would be stepping on toes.

So I decided to preach on both the sanctity of unborn life and on race in the same message, grounding it in a high view of human dignity based on Genesis 1:26. I was surprised by the reaction. Many of my people told me later that they were not thrilled to hear a message on race, but that my words helped them recognize that perhaps they had been blind to the hurts and pains of those in minority communities. Others said they were wary of a “political message” on abortion and came away with a freshly awakened conscience on human dignity.

The calendar provided an opportunity for this discussion, but we can do more than simply mark out one time a year to talk about difficult issues. We should contextualize our application to make sure we are not simply preaching about issues our congregations already agree on, but are hitting pathologies and attitudes with which they struggle.

For instance, in my nearly four decades of church life, I’ve heard hundreds of messages on the Great Commission text in Matthew 28, but very rarely have I heard pastors explain how the gospel brings together disparate ethnicities. For the Jewish audience, the idea that the gospel should go to “all nations” came as a shock. It meant that Jesus was not simply for the Jewish people of God, but for the world.

As I’m preaching that passage, if I do not challenge my people about their own temptation toward prejudice, I will not be delivering to them the full weight of Jesus’ words. The gospel is for all nations. When the nations come to our doorstep, into our neighborhoods, and into our workplaces, if we are not loving and listening to them, we will not be ready in that moment when God directs us to share the gospel with them.

In fact, you can hardly go through the New Testament without seeing, over and over again, the imperative that gospel work is reconciliation work, that in Christ we are “one new man” (Eph. 2:15) or that the kingdom of God is made up of every nation, tribe, and tongue (Rev. 5, 7).

This is just one issue in which, if we are only preaching to the biases of our people, we’ll miss opportunities for the Spirit to use us in revival and repentance in our congregations. We are tempted to preach against the evils “out there” in the world, to never challenge our people toward sanctification in areas where they really struggle.

Preaching to Our People

I’ve learned to contextualize my applications in several ways. First, I ask myself with every message, “In what specific ways does this text address this community and these people?”

Second, I endeavor to live in and among my people in such a way that I hear their conversations, listen to their pain, and understand their struggles. I cannot simply preach from the ivory pulpit; I must seed my preaching with the blood, sweat, and tears of those whom I serve.

Third, I try to model for them what it looks like to live out the Scriptures in my own life. It is tempting to avoid difficult issues, but it is just as tempting to shame people from the pulpit rather than provide them with on-ramps to help them understand what God is trying to do in them. Preachers must personalize the Scriptures, showing ways in which the gospel is working its way through our own hearts. We should be transparent about ways in which we have failed and sinned and sought forgiveness. We should talk about areas where God has helped us grow.

I’m not sure I’ve seen these principles embodied better than in the pastor of the church I now attend. As an associate pastor, I have the opportunity to step into the shoes of someone in the congregation, to listen and learn and hear preaching. I’ve realized the value of patient, faithful shepherding. Daryl, who leads our congregation, does this with a firm gentleness that I’ve rarely seen elsewhere, both speaking from the Scriptures prophetically and with compassion.

I’ve even found myself in the same position as the lady from my previous congregation, shaking hands at the door, saying to my pastor those words I heard said to me: “Did you know about my situation? Your sermon seemed directed at me.”

Those words, I’ve come to understand, just might be the best compliment a preacher can receive.

This article was originally published here. 

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The Way Home: Pete Scazzero on healthy spiritual leadership

What does healthy spiritual leadership look like? Why is it that Christian leaders often neglect their inner lives? Pete Scazzero, drawing from his own experiences and from Scripture, trains pastors and leaders to lead well and lead healthy.

Show Notes

Twitter: @petescazzero
Website: emotionallyhealthy.org

The post The Way Home: Pete Scazzero on healthy spiritual leadership appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

Boring Church Services Changed My Life

I’ve never really had a moment in my life—39 years—when I wasn’t going to church. My parents got engaged and married in the church. I was born into, raised in, and baptized in church.

My parents, first-generation Christians, were devout church-goers. We went every time the doors were open—and many times when they weren’t. My father, a plumber, volunteered thousands of man-hours helping build church buildings. My mother volunteered, worked as a secretary, and later served as a preschool teacher.

Since the age of five, I sat in church services: Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday night prayer meetings. I wasn’t allowed to draw. I was required to sit up straight—no fidgeting. And I wasn’t allowed to fall asleep.

Up through my teenage years, I thought of church as a bit boring. Sure, there were some life-changing, soul-stirring messages at summer camp or a special service. But for most of my life, including my years as a pastor, I did pretty much the same thing every week: singing familiar hymns or choruses, standing up and reading Scripture, listening to a sermon.

Ironically, one of the axioms of my childhood evangelical faith was this: Church is more than the service or a building; it is the called-out people of God, living on mission every day. Church, I was told, will not get you to heaven. Only a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ will do that.

I still believe this, more strongly now than ever, but I also believe that in some ways church does—or did—save me. It didn’t save me in the ways you might expect: a spectacular Sunday service, a homerun sermon, or a gripping worship set. God’s primary tool to transform my heart was not the conference speaker or the travelling revivalist or the worship concert. Those events were important, but now I realize that, more often, God changed my life using routine worship services in which I sang hymns I didn’t quite understand and heard messages I didn’t quite grasp.

In dark and stormy seasons, what comes into my head first? The lines of hymns I learned as child in church. The verses I memorized on Wednesday nights in my Awana class. The passages of Scripture we stood and read aloud.

During times of fear and anxiety, I drift back to the words of hope from Martin Luther’s epic hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”:

And though this world, with devils filled,

Should threaten to undo us,

We will not fear, for God hath willed

His truth to triumph through us:

The Prince of Darkness grim,

We tremble not for him;

His rage we can endure,

For lo! his doom is sure,

One little word shall fell him.

When I feel insecure, I recall the lines of the Methodist hymn, “I Stand Amazed in the Presence”:

I stand amazed in the presence

Of Jesus the Nazarene,

And wonder how he could love me,

A sinner, condemned, unclean.

The hymns of the blind poet, Fanny Crosby. The majestic lines from Isaac Watts. The simple melodies of Bill Gaither. These are just a few of the hundreds of hymns that were cemented in my heart from week after week of “boring” church services. As a young child enduring the routines of our Baptist church, I didn’t realize what was happening to me.

In his book, You Are What You Love, James K. A. Smith talks about the way our hearts are formed:

There is no formation without repetition. Virtue formation takes practice, and there is no practice that isn’t repetitive. We willingly embrace repetition as a good in all kinds of other sectors of our life— to hone our golf swing, our piano prowess, and our mathematical abilities, for example. If the sovereign Lord has created us as creatures of habit, why should we think repetition is inimical to our spiritual growth?

This repetition built in my heart a deep reservoir of theology. And now, as a husband and father and pastor, whenever I stand and sing these hymns, I can barely contain myself. At times I cannot sing; I can only weep. Some choruses evoke memories: My father serves communion while “Jesus Keep Me near the Cross” plays faintly in the background. Dad fights back tears as we sing “Jesus Paid It All.”

These rituals train our hearts. We sing to ourselves songs, hymns, and spiritual songs. We hear the same gospel preached to us, over and over again. We lift the cup to our lips and the bread to our tongues remembering, again, our place at the King’s table. Through these practices, God takes our hearts and seals them for his courts above, to paraphrase another hymn writer, Robert Robinson.

Don’t get me wrong. We shouldn’t eschew creativity in the church or stick with only one era of church history to form our Sunday liturgies. We are, after all, “new creation” people, and our churches should find fresh and innovative ways to communicate that old, old story.

But that’s just it. Our creativity should not seek to tell a new story. It should be designed to communicate to our hearts that same, old, wonderful story of salvation.

When I think back on the simple routines—the liturgies—that changed my life, I’m encouraged in my own pastoral role. I’m reminded afresh that the work of ministry is not so much about finding new, tantalizing ways to make people excited about Jesus, but about the timeless rituals that shape their hearts.

Because somewhere in your congregation are children singing words they don’t know, listening to Scripture they don’t understand, and fighting sleep during a sermon that doesn’t hold their interest. They don’t realize it yet, but the Spirit of God is pressing the gospel message, through yet another “boring” church service, deep within their hearts.

This article was originally published here.

The post Boring Church Services Changed My Life appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

The Way Home: Jason Thacker on the gospel and technology

How should Christians think about technology? Should we be afraid of it? Should we wholeheartedly embrace it? What are the deeper questions we should ask? Today my colleague Jason Thacker joins me for a discussion on the gospel and technology. Jason is the creative director at ERLC and the author of several important articles asking questions about our life in this digital age. We also discuss the latest issue of Light Magazine.

Show Notes

Articles by Jason
Subscribe to Light Magazine and use coupon code WAYHOME for 50 percent off.

The post The Way Home: Jason Thacker on the gospel and technology appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

The Way Home: John Stonestreet on what it means to live on mission for God

How should Christians think and live in an increasingly secularized culture? Should we be shocked by ways in which historic Christian beliefs conflict with other completing worldviews? Should we long for, with nostalgia, a time when things seemed to be different? John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, stops by to discuss what it means to live on mission for God in this world.

Show Notes

Twitter: @JBStonestreet
Website: breakpoint.org and colsoncenter.org

The post The Way Home: John Stonestreet on what it means to live on mission for God appeared first on Daniel Darling, author, pastor, speaker.

The Dad I Want To Be

I wrote a piece on the vulnerability of fathering for In Touch:

It’s 7:30 at night, and I’m staring at my iPhone for no apparent reason. There is no crisis in the world that requires me. No organizational issue that demands a response, and no critical communication I must conduct on behalf of my family or friends.

I’m just scrolling through Twitter, aimlessly. This is probably a justifiable use of time during leisure activity or when waiting in the doctor’s office, but not at 7:30 on a weekday when the kids need my attention. And yet here I am, escaping the messy reality of being present as a parent, for the cheap comfort of the passive and useless acquisition of knowledge.

The shame hits me, not in the moment when I’m chuckling over a funny tweet, but later when I kiss my youngest daughter on the forehead before putting her to bed. Will she know me as a good and godly dad who pointed her to the heavenly Father? Or will she know me as that adult male in her home who gave only small bursts of attention while his phone was charging? I’d like to think I’m the former, but there too many nights when I’m the latter.

There is the father I should be and there is the father I really am. The gap between those two is wide. I live in that chasm every day.

Read the rest of the piece here

photo credit: Ed Yourdon

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The Way Home: Sam Allberry on engaging a secular culture

A lot of Christians are asking themselves if gathering on Sundays, in church, still matters. Sam Allberry, pastor, author, and apologist says it does. Sam is the author of several books, including his latest, Why bother with church?[image error] He also reflects on what it means to engage an increasingly secular culture with the gospel and why the church needs a better theology of the body.

Show Notes

Book:  Why bother with church? [image error]
Twitter: @SamAllberry
Website: livingout.org

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