It is a strange morning. Unlike any Sunday morning in my life. This is the first Sunday of our COVID-19 closure. I am at church expecting no one to come. No classrooms will be filled, the sanctuary will remain silent. I am missing the happy greetings of friends arriving at church together, the purposeful scurry of leaders doing the jobs they have committed to accomplish, and my anticipation that soon I will be preaching to a people who have graciously come to listen.
I know there are many pastors who are having the same experience today. Like me, they have spent the week carefully listening to government proclamations, contacting health agencies, finding the best medical advice, talking to other clergy and church leaders, considering options, and most of all, praying in order to make the difficult decision to suspend services.
It is not an easy decision to ask the church not to gather as the Body of Christ on our chosen day to study, worship, pray, and share the love we have for God and for each other. Coming together is so central to being the church that we cannot imagine not spending the first day of each week with fellow believers. So why take such a dramatic action?
I understand the epidemiological and medical reasons for the large-scale cancellations we are seeing. We are at a critical juncture when this virus becomes a community-spread germ instead of an infection traceable to specific encounters. Public health agencies are asking for social distancing at this point to prevent an explosion of cases severely impacting medical facilities as seen elsewhere in our world.
But there is another layer of consideration that is more significant to our core values as a community of faith. We are cancelling services as an act of love. First, it is a loving act for our fellow believers in our community of faith. We can say, “Don’t come if you feel ill, are over 65, are in a high-risk group, or have been around sick people.” But the desire to see friends, fulfill obligations, a sense it can’t happen to me, or just plain good habits often overrule thoughtful decision making. Sometimes collective wisdom in more important that individual choice. We are loving one another by not exposing vulnerable individuals to the possibility of infection. Our care for sisters and brothers in Christ necessitates that we sacrifice in this significant way.
Secondly, canceling services is an act of love for our world. “Love your neighbor,” we are commanded by Jesus. As governments and medical institutions struggle to deal with the threat of this pandemic virus it is our ministry of loving our neighbors that leads us to step forward and set an example. We are making necessary sacrifices to follow government agency guidelines in slowing the spread of COVID-19 because we love our neighbors, our community, our world.
I don’t know how many Sunday mornings I will spend alone at church, I don’t know the impact this pandemic will have on our community. I don’t know when “normal” will become normal again. But I do know this. There is no greater force at work in our world than the love of God. And we, at First Baptist Church, are going to do everything we can to be a part of expressing that love in our church and to our world.
Category Archives: God
A Strange Morning
Filed under Church, God, Grace, Love, Making a Difference, Morrow, Pastor, The Future
Home Is Where the Espresso Machine Is
Well the official day has arrived for our move to Morrow, Georgia, to pastor First Baptist Church of Morrow. While one truck is already delivered and we will be back in Madison a few more nights to deal with Realtors, this is the moment that I deem to signify the move. Why? Because I just packed up my espresso machine.
When I was a teenager we built a house in Birmingham and moved out of the church’s parsonage. Before construction was finished we started having someone of the family spend the night at the new house for security reasons. We also started a moving process that took a couple of months as rooms were finished and furniture was brought over a pickup truck load at a time. We soon were referring to one place as “home” and the other as “the house” as in,”Are you going to the house before you come home?” As more and more stuff was moved, and more of us were spending the nights at the new house, the terminology shifted to the new house being the “home” and the parsonage being the “house” as in “Are you going by the house to pack the dishes and bring them “home.” The official moment when the shift was made was clearly determined. It was when we moved the TV. (No one had more than one back in the dark ages!) Yes, for us it was, “Home is where the TV is.”
So you may have a glimpse into my soul when I say for this move, “Home is where the espresso machine is.” I take a great deal of pleasure making and drinking very good coffee. Want a Cafe Americano with an extra shot of Tanzanian Peaberry? I’m the guy to see. Espresso Macchiato, latte, cappuccino, can do. So for me home is were the Nuova Simonelli Oscar Professional Espresso Machine is.
Of course all this is a tongue-in-cheek corruption of the proverb, “Home is where the heart is.” That proverb, of course, is as true now as it has ever been. For two an a half decades home was Madison, Alabama, as Melody and I raised our family, and I poured my heart into ministering at First Baptist Church of Madison. Now our nest is empty and we are ready for a new opportunity of investing our lives and ministry. First Baptist Church of Morrow, Georgia, is now home for that if where my heart is. I am thankful to God for the calling that FBC Morrow has expended and am excited that the official day has arrived for my move to Morrow.
And by the way, I now have to disconnect and pack this computer. So, home is where my computer is as well!
New Opportunities
Last Sunday I had the very great privilege to receive a call from the First Baptist Church of Morrow, Georgia, to become their pastor. It is an opportunity that I have been eagerly anticipating. It is a marvelous thing to have confidence in having discovered and be following God’s will in moving to Morrow and beginning this new relationship.
Let me share some things that have impressed me about First Baptist, Morrow. One is a solid commitment to be an agent of change in its neighborhood though sharing the love of God in a variety of ways. This clear vision of God’s calling for the congregation, already articulated through ministries, will continue to be a guiding commitment in the future.
Another is First Baptist, Morrow’s recognition that we are all, both women and men, gifted and called into the ministry of the church. Having ordained ministers and deacons of both genders is an essential aspect of the church’s relevancy to the world in which we live, reliance on a careful reading of God’s word, and respect for the transformational grace of God express in all who believe.
I am also impressed with the church’s ongoing commitment to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship movement while maintaining historic connections with Southern Baptist life. The respectful way that Morrow deals with each members preferences for supporting cooperative relationships with other Baptists reflects a solid understanding the priesthood of the believer and the value Baptist have always found in their diversity.
I could hardly list reasons I am excited about new opportunities at First Baptist, Morrow, without mentioning the great ministerial staff already there. I know that one of my greatest sources of joy will be building new collegiate relationships with each of them as we partner together in leadership at First Baptist.
Filed under Blessing, God, Missional, Morrow, Pastor, The Future, Transformation
Palm Sunday Morning 2011
The world is perfectly still, waiting the day. The water of the lake mirrors the shore where the tallest trees are crowned with the glow of a new sun. The fog resting on the water is moved only by the silent beat of the heron’s wings and the leaves only by the timid ventures of a squirrel. Then a sound – a mockingbird praises the creator.
“Be still and know that I am God …” – Psalm 46:10
Five Words That Made a Difference
In 1968 I was 14 years old, and living in a suburb outside of Birmingham, Alabama, known as Rocky Ridge. That year five words changed my life.
Books have always been a source of great enjoyment for me and my parents wisely nurtured that interest in many ways. One was to allow me to order just about anything I wanted from the Scholastic Book Club flier that was given to us regularly at school. I ordered books on every subject under the sun and took pride in having the biggest stack of new books every time the teacher distributed our orders in class.
In the eighth grade one of those stacks included a book I ordered only because it had “Birmingham” in the title. It was not until the teacher distributed our books and I began examining my new acquisitions that I found out it was a book about the civil rights movement in Birmingham. In it were pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, and others, leading civil rights marches in downtown Birmingham. Also pictured were the dogs, water hoses, and clubs the Birmingham police turned on protesters.
At this point a classmate spoke to me from over my shoulder, “What you want that book about those (n-word) for?” Some other comments followed from my classmate and others nearby that parroted the racism of their parents. I had not learned such attitudes from my parents. While they had isolated me from the turmoil of the civil rights movement and talked little about the issue, they non-the-less modeled loving acceptance of all and had taught me to respect all people equally. I was confused and did not know what to make of the hatred my classmates’ comments conveyed. Sadly though, bowing to the power of peer pressure, I was quickly agreeing and echoing their prejudices.
That evening I showed the book to my dad and began repeating some that comments of my peers. “Look at this terrible book. It says awful things about Birmingham in it.” Then Dad made his only comment about the book, five words that would stop me dead in my tracks and have a profound impact on me from that moment forward.
“Have you read it yet?”
In that moment I knew that I had just been confronted with the intellectual dishonesty of prejudice. I knew that examining an issue and taking a stand of my own instead of uncritically accepting the judgment of others was a matter of integrity. I also knew that as surely as that was what Dad expected of me, it was what God expected of me as well.
I read the book. I learned about noble men and women making a difference by taking a stand against hatred and injustice. And, by the way, I wrote a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. on the cover of my school notebook for all my classmates to see.
I wonder, “Have I said five words that made a difference lately?” Have you?
The Resurrection of the Dead vs The Immortality of the Soul
On Wednesday evenings I am leading a Bible study of Paul’s Corinthian letters. Recently we have been in I Corinthians chapter 15 and have been discussing the resurrection of the dead, the subject of the entire chapter. It is tempting to pull a few hopeful verses from this chapter for use in funeral services and move on just taking resurrection as a given in the Christian faith. But the Corinthians’ struggle to understand the meaning of resurrection as something very different from the immortality of the soul is very much a problem for us today.
The idea of the immortality of the soul was a very familiar idea to the Corinthians. It came to them as a basic part of Greek understanding of the world which taught that the soul and the body were separate things. The soul was good and immortal while the body was temporary and inadequate. On death the the soul was freed from the weak and temporal body to continue it’s immortal journey in the realm of the spirits. Understood correctly, it was best to accept death as a welcomed deliverance of the soul from its mortal prison. The Corinthians equated the immortality of the soul with the Gospel’s promise of the resurrection of the dead. All this sounds quite familiar to us as western society is heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Greeks.
There were, and are, however, serious incompatibilities between the Gospel and Greek philosophy that are particularly stark when it comes to the difference between immortality and resurrection. In Christian understanding death is not a part of God’s plan but has been imposed into our experience as a result of sin. Death is an enemy to be defeated. God’s plan is to deliver us from the influence of sin and its ultimate expression, death. When Jesus died His soul was not freed from an unimportant body. Rather he was experiencing in an act of love and sacrifice all the terrible destruction that our sins have imposed upon God’s plan. The resurrection of Jesus inaugerated the power of God’s plan in defeating death.
Another area that needs to be informed by the concept of the resurrection of the dead is respect for the body. While an immortal soul is delivered from bodily imprisonment in Greek thinking, the Biblical revelation teaches us that we are wonderfully made and that every part of us is loved by God and should be loved by us. We are not a soul trapped in a worthless body. We are a treasured creation that God has made, “a little lower than the angels … crowned with glory.” God’s redemptive plan includes all that we are, body, mind, soul, emotions, everything. The resurrection of the dead teaches what while our physical bodies are temporal and will “return to dust,” what lies beyond is a perfected extension of what God has already started, the redemption of our whole selves including the embodiment of all that we are.
Paul taught the Corinthians that the resurrection of the dead was a divine plan that expresses important aspects of God’s loving redemption revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. I think we need to pay attention, too.
Filed under Body and Soul, Corinthian Epistles, Death, God, Immortality, Jesus, Paul, Resurrection
“You need to lead now. You know where we are going.”
This week has been a great mass of emotions all clustered around one significant event. Last Sunday Wesley, my middle child, and I left for Waco, Texas to get him moved and ready to begin his seminary education at the Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University. Every parent knows the mixture of emotions such an event evokes; sadness, joy, grief, pride, loneliness, and others. All these feelings are a part of the process of letting go of our children as they make their own way into an adult world.
One moment was particularly poignant for me, however, and unique, as Wesley not only goes off to graduate school, but takes an important step in following his calling into the ministry. We left for our long trip with two carloads of Wesley’s worldly possessions. Since Wesley had never driven to Texas, having flown in for his campus visits, I was in the lead with Wesley following behind as we made our way from Madison through Memphis, Little Rock, Texarkana, Dallas, and on to Waco. But I had never been to Baylor’s campus. So as we neared our destination I telephoned Wesley and said, “You need to lead now. You know where we are going.”
Almost immediately I began reflecting on my words not as a practical tactic for taking the right exit off the interstate but as a statement of faith. I believe that God calls new leaders for the church from each generation of believers and enables those leaders to envision new directions as we minister to an ever-changing world. “You need to lead now,” is my blessing that I give to Wesley and all other young men and women that God is calling to be the leaders of the church in a dynamic future. “You know where we are going,” is my pledge to always listen carefully to the ideas of young ministers who understand the future better than I do.
God bless you, Wesley, and God bless all your colleagues. You need to lead now. You know where we are going.
Quiet Faith 