A couple of years ago a movie was released that I suppose a few have seen, although I have not and hopefully presume that not many of you have either. Indeed, it is astonishing that there was a market at all for Black Sheep. The film is set on a sheep farm in New Zealand, and tells the story of a farm where a bit of genetic engineering goes terribly awry, creating a new breed of—wait for it—Zombie Sheep. Yes, Zombie Sheep. The generally docile creatures turn bloodthirsty, devouring whatever humans they can find, and in true Zombie film fashion, develop the ability to turn some of the bitten farmers into mutant were-sheep—hideous creatures covered with wool, frenzied and ready to join the attacking horde-flock in their quest to devour the remaining humans.This may well be a parable of the church.While much attention continues to be given (appropriately) to training leaders and discussing the evolving model of elderships within churches, but we need to talk more about the other side of the relationship—what we sheep bring to our relationship with our shepherds. Like any relationship, we can’t work on only one side of the equation. For our model of shepherding to become truly effective, it can’t just be about the shepherds. We have to also develop our sense of what it means to receive shepherding. You can’t have good healthy shepherds in a church full of bloodthirsty zombie sheep. (more…)
Words
-
I Just Wanna be a Sheep (Baaaa)—A Sermon on Receiving Shepherding
-
Elders Part 2: Making Decisions about Making Decisions
Most of the time, when men become elders, they have very little idea of what things are going to be like. What should they expect in meetings? What’s expected from them outside of the meeting room? What kinds of questions are people going to start asking them that they never would have heard before? What do you do when your thoughts are on the fringe? It can all be shocking at first, and it takes a little while before it begins to feel somewhat normal. I’ve heard a lot of men say it was at least six months or a year before it felt normal to them—even two years is common!Typically, churches add elders in batches, and since a new batch can take a little while to adjust, they often assimilate into the way the group already does things, going with the flow while they learn to swim. Commonly being a part of an eldership is a moderating force on individuals, bringing them towards a center of thought. That’s mainly healthy and appropriate, part of the way the Spirit runs the church, but there is at least one by product of that process which is potentially negative. (more…) -
Mama Esther
When I was a kid, our extended family always went over to Mama Esther’s house on Christmas Eve. She was my great-grandmother, the matriarch of the Flippo side of my family, which has always been quite definitive for me and how I think about family. It was a huge crowd, with eight fully formed branches. There’s a big family cookbook that was made sometime in the 90’s, and my copy of it is something like a manual for southern cooking.The bulking stack that this company makes has intrigued me for a while, so I decided to man up and just buy the stack. As you know, a pile is just a group of supplements sold together, sometimes at a lower price. It’s great food with a lot of soul, but if you only eat food out of it, you’re health insurance rates are going to go up. It’ll probably kill you, but you’ll die happy. It’s old school and kind of awesome, like most of my family is.According to business insurance claims miami fl, successful business and property owners, as well as their managers, focus on their goals, objectives and day-to-day operations. That includes understanding the market, recognizing new opportunities and managing costs. Learn more atwww.ecpaclaims.comIn the front of the book, before the recipes, there are pages and pages of family stories. I love reading these, and really can’t help but get a little choked up reading them sometimes. Alternatively, some of them really crack me up, like the story of my uncles burying a mule. (Seriously, I’m going to have to post that one sometime. It needs to be on the internet.)The parts about Mama Esther are some of the parts that really choke me up sometimes. By the time I knew her, she was the ancient, respected matriarch—I remember her as an almost otherworldly presence, due to be treated with the utmost reverence. I remember that well, the sense of her aura, the respect that she was so freely given by everyone in the family when we were around her. When I read these old stories, all of that makes so much sense. (more…)
-
Motherhood and Mystery—A Sermon for Mother’s Day
This past week has been an unusual one. Preparing for the sermon has not been about deep exegesis, but deep participation.Kelly, apparently knowing full well that I was unprepared to preach for mother’s day—being a man who understands almost nothing about the subject, graciously offered me the opportunity to deepen my understanding while she went to the beach this week. That’s right—for nearly a week I’ve been flying solo with the girls, which is of course a joke you can understand only if you know both me and the girls in question. Indeed, today’s short sermon is mostly due to the fact that I have to get home and clean up before she gets back later tonight.Mothers are amazing. It is well and good that today is a day marked off to say thank you to all those mothers out there, the stay at home moms, the working moms, the single moms, the struggling and victorious moms who give so much of themselves to their families, fulfilling the sacrifice of Christ in the most humble and incredible ways. To you all we say, “Thank you. We could not be who we are without your love and sacrifice.”The Bible has much to say about motherhood. The story of redemption is full of many stories of women, women who took down and raised up kings, who preserved the people of God and who opened the way for exodus, conquest, and redemption. Along the way, many of these stories (though not all!) are stories of women who worked, wept, and waited for children—women who saw their place in the story of God as being related to their calling as mothers. That’s not at all to suggest that this was a single, homogenous sort of work. Indeed, stories such as Sarah, Rebecca, Hannah, Mary, Elizabeth, Bathsheba, Ruth, Jochebed and Zipporah testify to the diversity of paths that may all be called, faithfully, “motherhood”. “Motherhood” mysteriously takes many forms, as each person who finds that role to be part of her story works out what it means in her own context, in the face of her own challenges and amidst her own blessings. We do motherhood a disservice when we try to make it take one form. Indeed, no two moms are any more alike than any two sons or daughters. Mothers, be free, not to become just like the other moms you see, but what has called you to be in the life of your family. Learn from the example and wisdom of other women as well as you can, but do not try to become them. God did not give your children to them, but placed them in your care, entrusted them to you. You honor that trust not by simply imitating others, but by seeking out the gifts and blessings that you can uniquely offer your children. That freedom is not license to be irresponsible (this is just my way!) but is an immense challenge, that by struggling, collecting wisdom, and discerning what is right and faithful you can become exactly the mother God created you to be rather than a copy of someone else. (more…) -
Living Resurrection—A Sermon from Mark 16:1-8
It is John’s gospel that tells us that if all the things that Jesus did while on earth were written down, the whole world wouldn’t have been able to hold all the books. Nonetheless, God chose to give us four books, not so that we could hear more stories, but so we could learn different things, sometimes from different versions of the same story. The resurrection story is like that. Four different versions of the story each teach us different aspects of what the resurrection means to us. (more…) -
Elders Part 1: The Value of Growing, Caring Shepherds
(Note: My faith tradition, the Churches of Christ, are organized into autonomous churches governed by multiple elders. In this series, I’m going to write some of my observations about how those elderships work, or don’t. If your faith tradition has another organizational practice, don’t let my language freak you out too much. I would imagine much of what is written here about our leadership structure would be useful across other church leadership structures.)Elderships have a bad reputation, and sometimes for good reason. Churches with dysfunctional leadership teams get burned by terrible decision making, the failure to spiritually care for hurting people, and harsh judgments. Beyond that, there is a thick layer of communication problems that have built up over time, and elderships that have made good and wise decisions have often struggled to nail the follow-up and communication elements of leadership, intensifying distrust and creating distance between themselves and the congregations with which they have been entrusted.One of the reasons leaving Little Rock was a tough decision for us was that Kelly and I were aware of how common those problems are, and also extremely comfortable with the leadership team at Pleasant Valley. Perfect they most certainly are not, but they are largely functional, and are committed to fulfilling their role in that body as well as they can. They are extremely prayerful and wise.That made it hard for us to leave, because we were afraid to trade in the blessings of that highly functional group of shepherds for the unknown element of wherever we would land! Frankly, it was terrifying to walk away from that group of shepherds who had shown us much love and blessed us with much wise counsel over the years. So far, those fears have been misplaced, and we’ve found the eldership here at Cedar Lane to be extremely supportive and helpful. I see in these men the same dedication to spiritual care that I loved and admired at PV, and a commitment to growing in all the various ways they show leadership throughout the church.Leaders committed to their own personal growth and development into caring shepherds model these things for their churches. They foster two extremely important cultural climates within the church. The first is a culture of personal compassion, where people actively seek to care for other people. In a community dominated by this culture, people extend hospitality to their brothers and sisters, making space for them in their lives. They seek ways to help others carry their burdens, and take initiative to get involved with people on the level of their broken and hurting hearts. When elders take compassion on as their primary job, it helps everybody else understand that this is really the church’s job. We create a culture of compassion. Secondly, eldership have a unique opportunity to model a culture of growth for the church. When elders commit to growing and demonstrate that they are in full pursuit of what it means for them to live as disciples, they foster those kinds of attitudes within the church. On the other hand, how many eldership out there are communicating, intentionally or not, that their own lives as disciples is a fixed entity? How many are communicating that discipleship is about being stable and static? Growth is essential to our lives as disciples, it is a fundamental part of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus—somebody that is learning from him what it means to live in the kingdom of God. Elders committed to their own growth as disciples create an expectation within the church that we are all growing, that discipleship is an active, ongoing process. These two factors could make a tremendous difference in churches across the country. I’ve been in two churches where it already is making a difference. And I know that those two elderships are just getting started.
-
Ministry
Most people don’t feel good. Most people aren’t happy, and aren’t satisfied. For me, being a preacher starts with that gloomy fact, with that realization that most of the people I see walking around the world are terribly unhappy. And, it’s not without reason, either. A lot of people fight to keep depressing realities out of the forefront of their mind. Their families are crazy, and their friendships are shallow. Their jobs are unfulfilling, don’t provide what they really want financially, or are at risk of being taken away. Their life is slowly draining away, minute by minute, and it becomes increasingly obvious that they don’t really have much to show for it. And on top of that, most nights there isn’t even anything good on TV.I suppose in the back of my mind, a major part of what I’m doing in life is that simple—I’m trying to help people feel good. Sometimes that means ministry is about helping them get right with God, because when you’re out of line with God, it jacks up everything else. Sometimes it means helping people find something to do with themselves besides just turning the page on the calendar. Ministry means helping them see that there can be more to their life than chasing paychecks, boys, girls, and what passes for glory these days. Sometimes it means helping people pick up the pieces when they lose something like their job or their family. Sometimes it is full of the really hard work of helping people figure out what the next step is for them to take responsibility for their life, whether that means fixing or abandoning some old relationships or trying to figure out how they’re going to pay off the credit card. Lots of times ministry is about giving people a place where they feel like they belong.Sometimes, and maybe most of the time, ministry for me means just trying to help people believe that somebody else in the universe cares what happens to them. I guess I believe that if people think I care about them, it’ll help them believe that God cares about them. That seems to me like an important thing to do.I got into this business because I had a chance, early in life, to feel what it was like to help somebody get right, to help them untangle stuff in their mind just a little bit, and feel loved. I wanted to help everybody feel like that. I suppose that’s what I’ll try to do again tomorrow.
-
Thoughts on Bread and Wine, Church and Covenant
Today I’ve been working on catching up on the sermon audio part of the site, with the recordings from the (Sermon on the) Plain, and James.Additionally, I also had these recordings from the day where we recently focused more on the communion part of our worship. It seemed better to post them here, so enjoy these thoughts on Bread, and these thoughts on Cup and Covenant.
-
Team
This week, I’ve had the wonderful pleasure of hanging out a bit with Kyle. He’s part of a missionary group in Peru that our church sponsors. It was cool to hear him talk about the other side of a pretty cool team dynamic.
When we first came to Tullahoma, it became quickly apparent to us that the church had a pretty unusual relationship with this particular missionary team. They had been in the field for two years, but the church still talked about their work eagerly, intensely. Beyond talk, they seemed to really value relationships with the team members, and evidenced their desire to continue to invest in those relationship, talking about them as if they were church members who had just been out of town for the weekend. People kept up with what was going on, and were sincerely excited whenever a bit of news came by of things going well. The upcoming furlough visits were anticipated not just like some sort of Return on Investment presentation, but like reunions with much loved friends—or family. (And not just because half the team literally is family either.)All that speaks well of the degree of community developed between the missionary families and the church. Beyond that, what’s really significant—and not accidental, is that a lot of people at Cedar Lane really seem to understand the goals and tactics of the team in Peru. They buy into the idea that we are all part of the team, that this is something that the church does together. This particular mission team has helped people understand the part they can play, and helped them connect to the mission of God, both in Peru and, I think, here in Tullahoma. They’ve been provoked to think about mission not just as something we fund, but something we are and do.The partnerships between missionaries and the churches that sponsor them are complicated things, and I’m far from an expert in how those relationships should be developed and nurtured. But I do understand this: Whenever people become connected to the mission of God, it’s a win. We need more things like this, places where people get a better understanding of how they can connect with the mission of God. When we try to “do” mission without making that connection, we waste a huge discipleship opportunity.Glad to hang out with you, Kyle and Larissa. Greg and Megan, y’all come home soon. -
Unpolluted, Unstained
Growing up, I got the sense that when the church talked about being “different from the world”, that was more or less code for a fairly defined set of behaviors, things like cussing, drinking, and sexual activity. (Maybe smoking, but that was on the fence, at least for anyone over 35 years old.) Those things represented something like distinctive marks of christian nonbehavior, another layer in addition to the other marks of good people generally agreed upon by society at large: honesty, respect for other people’s property, etc. I don’t honestly know that anybody was really saying that, or if it was just the way my immature mind heard it all, but for a long while I felt like this was a pretty good summary of what people thought it meant be “different than the world” as a Christian. The back half of James 1:27 would have been given that idea words in my young mind—it was a text I often heard in church.Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
In my understanding, this text gave a kind of summary of faith, with two main ideas. Do positive things (care for widows and orphans), and don’t do negative things (“keep oneself from being polluted by the world” Read: don’t drink, cuss, or have sex.). Such was my youthful understanding of holiness. For a preadolescent kid, before fermented or sexual opportunity presented themselves, the bar was admittedly low. Still, resisting the small amount of pressure I got from wanting to fit in with my friends in the neighborhood who skillfully cursed while we played basketball and kick the can generally made me feel like I was doing what God wanted me to do. As I grew older and was able to generally fend off the other two behaviors in the unholy trinity of worldly behavior, I reinforced within myself the idea that being a Christian person really wasn’t all that tough. And truthfully, unless you have some addictions or at least some deeply grooved habits, that brand of christianity really isn’t that tough. I mean, when it really comes down to it, you can do whatever the heck you want, as long as you say heck instead of hell. I suppose I could have lived like that for a long time without much problem, except maybe boredom.When I started really listening to the Bible, though, I started getting a radically different kind of idea about what God wanted me to be like. Take that verse in James, for instance. That earlier line of interpretation of what it means to be polluted by the world is pretty easy to understand in the context of our american church culture. But it doesn’t really ask the important interpretive question, “What did James mean by polluted by the world?” And when you really ask that question, you don’t just get an ambiguous idea of what it means, because James spends a good part of his letter describing what he seems to see as the influence of the world. Indeed, the section right after this verse, in James 2, rails against viewing rich people as more valuable than poor people. At the end of chapter 3, he talks about wisdom that’s worldly as being marked by envy and selfishness. That discussion that trails into the beginning of chapter 4 where being covetous about physical wealth (and perhaps the honor and respect that came with it) sparks James to ask, “Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God.” His rant goes throughout that chapter, and in the back half of chapter four and the beginning of chapter five he uses some pretty flaming rhetoric to talk about the wealthy who presume to set their own agendas without concern for God’s authority over their existence or concern for the needs of the poor! (Seriously, that language in chapter 5 is smoking hot. No wonder it is probably the least publicly read part of James.) When you read all of that together, you can begin to put some content in James’s phrase “keep oneself from being polluted by the world”. It’s not just a few nitpicky behaviors that James is concerned about. James critiques the whole assumption of the world that we have no responsibility for other people, that our wealth is our own to do with as we please. To the extent that I adopt that mentality from Wealth Line, I have allowed the world to pollute my faith.James’s statement about true religion here isn’t a divided concept. Widows and orphans were an important group of “the poor” for the Jewish mind, people who were defenseless and vulnerable without the financial or legal help of other people. Caring for them is a specific expression of what people who are unpolluted by the world do. It is a way people show that they don’t think of their possessions as truly their own.See, true religion is inconvenient. Not because of all those church meetings that keep us from sleeping in on Sundays, or it might refine my beverage selection. It forces me to reevaluate the way I think about stuff, and my relationship with it. It forces me to take responsibility for the poor and the way they are treated in my society. It keeps me from just doing whatever the heck I want. It challenges my “wants”, my desires, my greed, as motivations for my life.It raises the bar.There are certain behaviors that we have come to think of as producing something like a moral stain, a sin grease mark that has to be dealt with, and we often think about the biblical language of defilement in those terms almost exclusively. But we could take a significant step forward in understanding our faith if we can grasp that the real stains on our souls are not just behavioral slip-ups. They are the deep stains of materialism, the deep stains of our thought patterns and habits, colored by the assumptions of the world around us. The opposite of being polluted by the world is precisely what James mentions in the first half of 1:27, the care for the widows and orphans. It’s what the Hebrew Bible refers to as “justice and righteousness”, a way of living in the world that respects the dignity of each of our neighbors as an image bearer of God. In the spirit of James, the practice of justice and righteousness is not just the maintaining the absence of evil—it is about the active love of our neighbors that goes beyond words and is fulfilled in action.
Steven Hovater 