I just watched We Are Marshall, and I don’t think a movie has threatened to take a second tear from me since Mystic River.  It tugged, and yanked, and torque-wrenched at my heart strings…very effectively.  The crowning moment: when the student body gathers outside the Board of Governors meeting and chants “We are — Marshall!”. Yeah, the one in all the previews and commercials.  The one that I knew was coming long before it happened.  I tried to stop it…but it was no use.  The second tear fell.

And on a positive note, I was born on the 11th anniversary of the Marshall plane crash.  Knowing that will make this year’s celebration a doozy, I’m sure.

We got back today from our first international trip as a family, up to Ontario, Canada. We were visiting a local Church of Christ to see if God is calling us to serve there. Everything went smoothly, and we had a great time.

My wife and, obviously, my son, have never been to Canada. I am the lone continental traveler in the family, having visited the Canadian side of Niagara Falls as a 5-year-old. It’s just like I remember it…only from a higher perspective. But this was my first trip beyond the border. (continue reading…)

Guest Post by Jason Miller, Discovering the Hope

At this point in my life I do not have a full-time ministry job. I work too many hours a week as a manager in a blue-collar business to pay the bills, but now that I am ordained and am working on my master’s thesis, I am hopeful that the Lord would allow me a return to full-time ministry. During a conversation recently with a customer at my job, we were talking about my background as a full-time pastor and my desire to return to that arrangement. Then he went and did it: he let loose with a “real world” bomb. “Well,” he said, “at least this job has given you some real world experience to help you when you talk to people as a priest.”

This conception that there is somehow a “real world” and, I guess, a “church world,” is so widespread that it is virtually taken for granted. We nod approvingly when pastors tell of their work in some other profession and how it relates to something they are trying to teach us. In fact, in the Anglican tradition, more and more of our priests are second-career individuals.

Yet this benumbed obeisance to a shibboleth of our culture may be cast differently when examined from another perspective: name one other career where we say that those in that field ought to learn another field in order to do well in their chosen field. Do we ask CPA’s or construction workers or business owners or CEO’s or lawyers or electricians to take employment in positions completely out of their field of expertise, in order to make them better at what they really want to do? (continue reading…)

After reading Is the D.Min a “fluff degree? at Pomomusings, I started to rethink my grad school choices a little. I want to have my options open for a Th.D, if I decide to go that route, but I don’t want to “waste” my time (I use quotes because study is never wasted time) on a degree that won’t make me a better minister.

My friend Jason is finishing his M.Div and I know he’s been challenged and has had to work hard on his theological understanding. But he says that his classmates aren’t necessarily following suit. And the school isn’t encouraging them to. Neither of us can understand why.

The majority of the study is on pastoral care issues, church growth, and program trends. But praxis changes. That whole portion of study could be useless in two or three years. But theology is timeless.

Sure, our understandings change from time to time, and we have to be able to articulate and apply our theology in rapidly changing contexts. But Christ doesn’t change. God doesn’t change. Our church leaders need to be grounded in the constant, unchanging things…houses built on the rock. (continue reading…)

A friend of mine was interviewing for an associate ministry spot at a church in Ohio and asked the pastor, “What kinds of books do you like to read? What drives and inspires and challenges you theologically?” The pastor’s response:

“I’m not much of a reader…I’m more of a writer.”

That was the end of the interview.

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