Monday, August 31, 2009

Now, I'm not feeling sorry for myself when I say this. Really, I'm not. But I became aware again how quickly we become irrelevant to each other. This probably makes little difference to most people, but to preachers and pastors, who trade on relevance, quick perception about culture and speaking into the culture, getting irrelevant is scary.

I viewed pictures on Facebook of a woman who used to be in our church. How very Central we pastors imagine our churches to be. But then the people move on, develop great lives, experience happiness and many new things all without our participation. Perhaps viewing FB pix of people who have moved on isn't a good idea. But it stimulated thinking about how relevance is relative! Today I may be profoundly relevant to someone; tomorrow I will likely become a memory, and then...irrelevant. Now this is a grief if I maintain an insistence on always remaining relevant with everyone I meet. Yes, Yes, no one can do that. But we imagine we can... And truly, we cannot. So I suppose the solution is to accept passing relevance, and try to always be creating NEW relevance with new people around me. Praying faithfully and intelligently for various people, keeps me relevant too, a little bit.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

So often I see people entranced with someone's "niceness" that they make theological decisions about their correctness based on liking that person. This is preposterous. I am all for being nice. And friendly. And a good listener. And funny, even. But theological rightness or wrongness has little to do with nicencess. We need to develop a filter for gullibility. The apostles warned against the tactics of "niceness."

Sunday, August 16, 2009

I think theological issues--true ones--come up fairly infrequently these days on the local church scene. At least, they do not come up so often around the church where I am part. Theology of baptism, the Lord's Table, salvation, sanctification, polity are pretty set in place. Conflagrations about election, glossalalia, what millenialism?, head-coverings or clergy-Or-not, just do not occur these days. I wonder what theological matters await us in the future? The next generation knows very little theology, I fear.