Take And Read

Historical Context Sometimes called the “Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed,” this expression of the Christian faith is the product of a century of heated debate around the person and nature of Christ and consequently, the nature of God. At the end of three hundred years of oppression and widespread persecution, a great turn came when the Roman Emperor Constantine declared the Christian faith legal for the first time by the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. As Roman Emperors had done in the past with conquered peoples, he convened a council of representatives from every major city in the empire to settle internecine disputes. In 325 AD, the council was convened in Nicaea, just outside of Constantinople. The Emperor himself presided, deferring to bishops and theologians from across the known world to deliberate the questions at hand. At issue was the teaching of Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria. In an effort to defend Christianity as a monotheistic religion, Arius presented the Trini

A friend recommended the book Failure of Nerve  by Edwin H. Friedman  especially for the pastoral ministry. I've not been one to focus on family systems theory, but this books, as it pertains to leadership, has really given wonderful, and in my view, undeniable, nuggets of wisdom. The subtitle says it all for me: "Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix." I present here some quotes from the introduction and a few helpful charts.

The following is from Edwin Friedman's Book The Failure of Nerve. It is an expanded look at Chapter Two - A Society in Regression. All of the below are excerpts with page numbers listed. A Society in Regression My thesis here is that the climate of contemporary America has become so chronically anxious that our society has gone into an emotional regression that is toxic to well-defined leadership. Five characteristics of chronically anxious [families and societies]: Reacitivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather t

Make a list of all the texts in the whole world which are four hundred years old or more and are still widely read today. The first five are easy: the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Pali Canon of Buddhism, and the analects of Confucious. Then, in rapid sucession, nearly everyone agrees to include: Plato's Republic Aristotle's Politics the plays of Shakespeare the plays of Sophocles Dante's Divine Comedy Homer's Illiad and Odyssey Montaigne's Essays Cervantes's Don Quixote Machiavelli's The Prince. After that, consensus becoes more difficult to achieve. . .The point is not whether the list contains twelve or twenty-four or even fifty entries; rather, the point is that the list is extremely short. Think of it: of all the hundreds of thousands of books, essays, poems, letters, plays and histories that were composed four hundred years ago or more, only a dozen or two are still widely read today. . .these supertexts

If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even when there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty, and little faith - and if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so miserable and so insignificiant and does not at all live up to our expectations-then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.That also applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from pastors and zealous parishioners about their congregations. Pastors should not complain about their congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. Congregations have not been entrusted to them in order that they should become accusers of their congregations before God and their fellow human beings. When pastors lose faith in a Christian community in which they have been placed and begin to make accusations aga

You have heard, brethren, as well in your private examination, as in the exhortation which was now made to you, and in the holy Lessons taken out of the Gospel and the writings of the Apostles, of what dignity and of how great importance this office is, whereunto ye are called. And now again we exhort you, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you have in remembrance, into how high a dignity, and to how weighty an office and charge ye are called: that is to say, to be messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord; to teach and to premonish, to feed and provide for the Lord’s family; to seek for Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for his children who are in the midst of this naughty world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever. Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to you charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom yo

American Pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn't the remotest connection with what the church's pastors have done for most of twenty centuries. A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted. Most of my colleagues who defined ministry for me, examined, ordained, and then installed me as a pastor in a congregation, a short while later walked off and left me, having, they said, more urgent things to do. The people I thought I would be working with disappeared when the work started. Being a pastor is difficult work; we want the companionship and couns