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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| Not A Lot To Say Lately |
Sorry about my posting lately. I have been busy in the real world, and blogging is always the first casualty when that happens. I had a bit of a break over the holiday season, and I have used it to do very little other than enjoy my family.
Like last year, I took our family, and joined some other families we know, to stay for a couple of days at a local Holiday Inn. They have an indoor play structure there that is two stories high, and plenty of fun for the kids, and the obligatory indoor pool, hot tub, sauna, and weight room. Our children have more than enough toys as it is, and we would rather make our family time special than simply spend money on more toys and goodies. It is a wonderful treat for the whole family.
There were some hitches this year though. Normally we get a queen sized bed, but this year we got a double for some reason. Also there was a problem with the thermostat in the room - and so for the first night the room temperature was in the high twenties Celsius - (that is the low eighties Fahrenheit), which for me was uncomfortable, and just barely tolerable. On our second day, some person pooped in the pool, and the hotel was less than pro-active in dealing with it. I respect that there is a chain of command and all, but really, you shouldn't need the hotel manager's written permission to close the pool and clean it when something like that happens. At one point the lock on our door simply stopped working, and my daughter and I sat in the hall way for about forty minutes as first one man tried his pass key to no avail, who called another more important man, who likewise tries his pass key to no avail, who in turned called a more significant man, who likewise tried and failed to get in with his pass key - who called the hotel manager to come and open the door. then when it was opened, they spent a half an hour fixing it.
What struck me only afterwards as significant about both the door and the pool incident, is that the hotel staff wasn't concerned so much about the people who were put out by these things, as they were in just fixing the problem. That is, they didn't see the inconveniences imposed upon their paying customers as the problem, but rather they saw the pool and the door as the problems, and so that is where their attention was focused.
Now to be sure, one should not expect too much from the maintenance staff; and I don't. Their jobs are technical and specific, and as I was a janitor for a few years, I wouldn't demand from them any more than they gave. That is, it isn't the job of the maintenance person to smooth over a bad situation, that sort of human relations problem should fall to the management, and the failure on the part of the management to address this stood out.
Now, to be perfectly fair, it is the holiday season, and I expect that many of the regular managers were at home with their families during all this, and that the hotel was being looked after by a (relatively) inexperienced skeleton crew, so I am not overly offended that the service was under par this time. To be sure, the staff knew their jobs and did them proficiently without supervision. The problem wasn't that the staff was lazy, or unskilled - it was that the managment was stretched so thin that everyone was more or less on autopilot. When incidents arose that required a coordinated effort, their was no one to coordinate the effort, the end result, even though the staff was working just as hard as they were any other day, was a pronounced slackness, and rather poor service.
I see in this some instruction for us in the church.
This is what a poorly shepherded flock looks like. Gifted individuals minister in the strength of their gifts as they have always done, but there is a disconnect. Each individual is ministering, but there is no bigger picture, and so long as nothing significant happens, everything is fine, but the moment something out of the ordinary happens, there is no direction, no leadership, and ultimately, just as in the hotel, the end result is that however productive the individual ministries may be, the church overall is slack and rather poorly ministering to their community.
There is much more to pastoring a church than preaching on Sunday. The pastoral staff must not only feed the church, but unite it. The church, or so it seems to me, properly shepherded, is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Let us therefore, who are members support the leadership in our church.Labels: leadership, pastoring |
posted by Daniel @
7:37 AM
 
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| 4 Comments: |
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to you and yours as well JD!
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I admire how you work through matters with your theological opponents. I shall endeavor to follow your example.
Happy New Year to you and yours.
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So, who gets to clean out the baptismal when it becomes the abysmal.
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Thomas, that's a deacon's job if ever there was one. ;-)
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to you and yours as well JD!