Love: It’s Time to Get to Work
For Reflection Roundup each week, we gather news stories, notable pieces, and other important items for Christian leaders today. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but may not concur. Here are 10 things worth sharing this week.
—
Reflecting on years of teaching young students, I am reminded of exercises captioned “Listen and do.” Might this be a simple, yet awfully mature, set of ancient instructions?
1. David Brooks writes a compelling piece for the New York Times, “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself.” Brooks quotes lyrics from a familiar Christian campfire song that proclaims the truth of the gospel: “For they know we are Christians by our love.” At the same time Russell Moore, former Southern Baptist leader, said this after stepping down last summer: “We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe that the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.” In the populist movement that evangelicalism represents, power and its corruption come into play. The unwillingness of the powerful to address racial injustices or tolerate socio-cultural differences undermines the love by which Christians are to be known. Brooks directs the reader’s mind toward sources for renewal even among demographics previously viewed as divisive. Walter Kim of the National Association of Evangelicals suggests churches look within, at their ethnically diverse congregations, learning from how they relate to one another and to society. Kim suggests workshops in discourse, in learning how to talk and listen to those with different experiences and opinions than ourselves. This is a difficult, truth-filled article written from a challenging, hopeful perspective. According to Brooks, it’s definitely time to get to work.
2. “How do we bring people along on this journey and really help them see what it means to love your city and your geographic neighborhood?” asks Aaron Villarreal, community development director of “a mission-minded team that calls itself ‘a design lab for good.’ ” Sunset Ridge Church of Christ in San Antonio is working with The Impact Guild to reinvest in their neighborhood. In “A faith-based design lab teaches churches how to help their communities flourish,” Emily Starbuck Gerson writes for Duke Divinity’s Faith & Leadership about how the church, along with consultants from the Siburt Institute, intends to revitalize the neighborhood with the church as a central point for activity and renewal.
3. In “Leaving Church: So Many Baptist Resignations,” Pam Durso and Carol McEntyre begin a series of articles, published on Baptist News Global, that emerges from their research. Between the summers of 2020 and 2021, these two midwest pastors’ friendly conversations took a turn toward asking, “What’s going on here?” Together they began to investigate, resulting in an October 2021 survey that reveals what 100 Baptist-affiliated ministers said were their reasons for leaving ministry.
4. Continuing their series, Durso and McEntyre share what their respondents reported to be the number one reason for leaving vocational ministry in “Leaving church, part 3: ‘Opposition to leadership.’ ” A growing number of matters – racial justice, COVID-related polarization, partisanship, women in ministry, and LGBTQ conversations – create anxiety within congregational systems. “The extreme discord and congregational unhealth experienced by some pastors led them to characterize their congregations as toxic, aggressive or adversarial,” they report. Durso and McEntyre invite congregations into conversation and consideration of this topic.
5. Interested in the health of your church? The Siburt Institute for Church Ministry has a tool specifically designed to benefit Churches of Christ. The Church Health Assessment gathers numerical ratings and open-ended responses on nine key elements of congregational health. User-friendly and inexpensive to administer, this tool was born out of feedback from a focus group of church consultants on key health indicators, then developed into a survey by experts in organizational communication and sociology at Abilene Christian University. Several Mosaic articles explain and testify to the assessment’s helpfulness.
6. Ministering to Ministers offers “Pastor Skip Irby: The Power of Listening in Times of Upheaval” on the Friends for the Journey podcast. Speaking with host Kathrin Gabriel-Jones about ways he’s seen the church be effective (and not) when getting people and churches together to talk about hurts, Irby settles on listening in opportune times in order to build relationships. He talks about pushing back defensiveness when we do listen and hear things we might not like, in order to take a healthier view. Understanding family systems and sharpening our emotional intelligence enables us to mitigate emotions in what is a peak time in an anxiety-driven world.
7. In a piece worth revisiting, Carlus Gupton offers “Paul’s Spirituality of Non-Anxious Leadership” for Ministering to Ministers. Here, Gupton briefly explores material on family systems theory from Pete Steinke’s book, How Your Church Family Works. Gupton defines what non-anxious, self-differentiated leadership looks like while noting situations in which Paul models these qualities. Anxiety in churches is not new. Gupton highlights where Paul “demonstrates a calm spiritual center rooted in God’s presence and power” that today’s leaders can seek to emulate.
8. Last week, the On Being podcast replayed this most beloved conversation: “John O’Donohue: The Inner Landscape of Beauty.” Host Krista Tippett interviewed O’Donohue in 2008 shortly before his death. The two explore a variety of reflective topics that may change the lens through which we view present circumstances. O’Donohue says, “Time is the parent of presence,” and other poetic bits of wisdom designed to draw listeners back into a quality of living content with “being.” Simply listening to the melody of their voices while O’Donohue and Tippette converse exemplifies the “being” of which they speak.
8. Writing for Fuller Youth Institute, Kara Powell shares, “Worried about your teenager’s mental health?” Though likely aware of growing concerns toward the mental health of our youth, we may not realize the intensity to which the pandemic has exacerbated this crisis point. This article references a Surgeon General’s report that states rates of anxiety and depression have doubled in the last year, with suicide rising to be the second leading cause of death for young people. Powell shares how to talk to our kids or, more importantly, how to make ourselves available in ways they perceive. We are not here to fix the situations they must traverse, but to empathize and commiserate. Much of what they are dealing with is completely different than “when we were their age,” a reality we need to acknowledge as much as we need to differentiate our own fears from theirs.
9. “When You Feel Small, Look to the Cosmos and the Cross,” and be affirmed, writes Philip Yancey for Christianity Today. Yancey unpacks astonishing facts about the universe as revealed by the Hubble Telescope and later the James Webb Space Telescope, newly launched on Christmas Day. Read the article, click through the pictures, and meditate for a few moments on Yancey’s reminders of Christ’s cosmic sacrifice in coming to live as a human. Then maybe revisit God’s conversation with Job about any adjustments God might (not) need Job to make in situating the constellations. How can feeling so small be comforting? The very Spirit of the one in charge indwells us.
10. Take a minute for this! So much to be happy about; so much good.
