Just Catching Up

It's the week before Christmas and all through the church, every staffer was busy...ok, so I don't have the creative time to finish the story. But we are 5 days before Christmas...and we have 4 Christmas Eve services looming large. We'll see about 1,000 people on Christmas Eve, which is so exciting to share the message to that many people.

Andrea and I celebrated our 5th anniversary this past Friday (Dec. 16th). We had a perfect celebration...we went out to Big Fish Grille and had a great dinner. I suprised with a diamond bracelet. It was great.

I am reading a good book right now. It is called Walk On, and it follows U2 through their birth and talks about the faith. I am only about a quarter of the way through the book, but it is really interesting (especially as a U2 fan, and a Pastor). I believe that church (especially the American church) has done who huge disfavor to future generations by not investing in arts, music, etc.

The western church also has in place huge contradictory standards. For instance...if you show up at church once a week, control your language, etc. you are a mature Christian. But if you take your faith outside the church, engage the culture to be the salt of the earth--then there is a different standard for that. Seems that U2 was told by their home church that they should break up back in the early 80's because of the evils of the rock and roll culture. Certainly there are evils..and I would be naive to think that U2 doesn't sometimes struggle with things that are not Godly (f-bomb on TV comes to mind), but shouldn't we as a church, as ministers of the gospel be taking it to the streets, the slums, the clubs, etc.? Why do we constantly expect that people are going to come into our doors and sit to hear a message?

I think I struggle with that as a pastor working in a church. I have enough work on most days that I could never step out of my office to go into the world where there are hurting people who need Jesus (just like I do).

I believe there will be more thoughts on this book coming in the days ahead. In the meantime..Merry Christmas!