by Tim | Nov 19, 2009 | God, Our Culture, The Church World |
Let me start this post by warning you–I’m sure this will be much longer than a typical blog post. I would like to flesh out a series of thoughts I’ve had recently. I would appreciate anyone’s feedback to what you read. These thoughts have originated because of two separate events in my life recently. One deals with a friend who has an eating disorder. Another deals with some people I know who live within the homosexual lifestyle. For awhile, I’ve been considering the the idea that we all have some issue of depravity within us. For some, it’s very noticeable and apparent, such as an eating disorder or addictive tendencies, and so those people often go through intervention for their issues. For others, the depravity is much more secretive, and oftentimes even more destructive. For example, if someone has a serious problem with gossiping, that destructive behavior can destroy an entire church and cause many people to never know Christ. Whereas the homosexual may only destroy their own life and the lives of his/her partners. My passive/agressive behavior or my bitterness may destroy everyone I come in contact with…so I must come to recognize the depravity in me and must assume that everyone else has severe depravity in some area(s) too. We must realize that our depravity, even if it is not so noticeable, is probably even more deadly than the ones we typically label as depravity (i.e. homosexuality, drug use, sex outside of marriage, murder, etc.). I would like to probe this a little further as well and compare the depravitous behavior in both homosexuality and your typical...
by Tim | Nov 14, 2009 | Our Culture, The Church World, Youth Ministry |
I would like to be the first (even though I may not be the first) to say “Congrats, Marko!” on your recent firing/release from President of Youth Specialties by their parent company, Zondervan. While many others are offering their condolences, I can’t help but want to throw a party for the latest person in ministry who has had to struggle with the complexities of serving in a corporate-America environment. While Zondervan is indeed a publicly-traded company, many of us serve in churches who try their best to act like they are, too! Those of us who do so recognize that as much as we’d like to make ourselves to be the holy righteous minister in the evil, corporate church world, it simply isn’t that simple. We know deep down inside that our churches are trying to carry out God’s mission. We understand that we can’t caricaturize them that way, even though our differences were so severe that it resulted in our firing, our resigning, or our perpetual suffering as we continue to serve in that environment. Case in point: When we leave, we feel torn away from the work we felt God had us do–the only work we knew how to do. We walked away from deep relationships, and we discovered a deep loneliness/lostness–we weren’t in the trenches, doing what we’ve always done. As much as we want to demonize the institution, we are constantly reminded of the redeeming qualities we found there. And now what to do? Go to another church and start it all over again? Or work in the “secular world”? It all feels second-best. Either...
