Padre Complex

We are potty training at our house!

My kingdom for a sticker…

Joel at Connexions shares some thoughts about jobs, performance evaluations and written letters from District Superintendents…

Over the years, many ideas have been forth for revitalizing the United Methodist Church. Several of them have to do with theology, others with organization. Among those I would place in the organization category are suggestions to eliminate the itineracy system, do away with minimum salary, give the laity more voting strength, streamline the local church structures, etc.

For what its worth, I have my own suggestion. In many Conferences, while clergy have annual consultations and themselves complete consultation forms (with Pastor Parish Staff Relations Committess submitting church profile forms), there is no written evaluation given by the District Superintendent to clergy. I think there should be, for the following reasons: (click here for those reasons)

In Texas our DS salaries are higher than Joel’s in Oklahoma — and they are responsible for more ministers. By the Book of Discipline we are required in the UMC to have an inventory meeting. This is interpreted by my DS as a 30 minute sit down where the minister can bring any issues we want for discussion. Often the agenda is about next appointments or current appointment frustrations. No written document is produced, and I imagine that that would be a large job considering the numbers (65 ministers I think for our DS).

The one place that might be different is that the cabinet requires an evaluation to be done by the clergy person and then one done by the PPRC of the church. Then the PPRC is required to share that evaluation with the clergy person. It is optional as to whether the clergy person shares his self-evaluation with the PPRC - but he gives a copy to the DS.

The evaluation is made based upon a definition of effectiveness established by the Annual Conference a few years back.

At the moment it seems thing are working well. But I can certainly see the value of having the inventory in writing - at least so that you can confirm that the DS got what you got out of the inventory.

The Museum of Hoaxes website has a list of the top 10 April fool’s pranks ever played. One of them was the ad campaign by Taco Bell relating that they had purchased the Liberty Bell.

On April Fool’s Day, 1996 the fast food chain Taco Bell took out a full page ad in the New York Times to announce their purchase of the Liberty Bell. The full text of the ad read as follows:

Taco Bell Buys The Liberty Bell
In an effort to help the national debt, Taco Bell is pleased to announce that we have agreed to purchase the Liberty Bell, one of our country’s most historic treasures. It will now be called the “Taco Liberty Bell” and will still be accessible to the American public for viewing. While some may find this controversial, we hope our move will prompt other corporations to take similar action to do their part to reduce the country’s debt.

In a related release, the company explained that people and corporations had been adopting highways for years, and that Taco Bell was simply “going one step further by purchasing one of the country’s greatest historic treasures.”

Reaction to this announcement was decidedly mixed. Thousands of people called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the Liberty Bell is housed to angrily protest the decision to sell the bell. However, most people seemed to realize that the advertisement was an April Fool’s Day joke. Taco Bell revealed the prank at noon on April 1st in a press release describing their earlier announcement as “The Best Joke of the Day.”

The White House even got in on the joke when Mike McCurry, the White House spokesperson, suggested that the federal government would also be “selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Co. and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial.”

The hoax paid off for Taco Bell. Their sales during the week of April 1st spiked upwards by over half a million dollars compared to the week before.

Nice story - maybe even an opener for a sermon on anger.

I am preaching on the John passage for tommorrow. I did the same a few years back. At that time I took the tack that anger was healthy — as long as we got angry about the things that God gets angry about. Of course this is a risky proposal… there certainly are enough loonies in the bin to make claiming God’s anger dangerous (think Crusades). But below was a list of things that were brainstormed and collected — sorry I don’t have sources…

Think about these things and see if any of them make you ‘whip cracking mad.’ They should.

Today:
40,000 people die each day from starvation.
Every 3.6 seconds some one dies from hunger, of those 75% are children.
Today 10% of children in developing countries die before the age of five. This is down from 28% fifty years ago.

Famine and wars cause just 10% of hunger deaths, although these tend to be the ones you hear about most often. The majority of hunger deaths are caused by chronic malnutrition. Families simply cannot get enough to eat. This in turn is caused by extreme poverty. Besides death, chronic malnutrition also causes impaired vision, listlessness, stunted growth, and greatly increased susceptibility to disease. Severely malnourished people are unable to function at even a basic level. It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.

Often it takes just a few simple resources for impoverished people to be able to grow enough food to become self-sufficient. These resources include quality seeds, appropriate tools, and access to water. Small improvements in farming techniques and food storage methods are also helpful. Many hunger experts believe that ultimately the best way to reduce hunger is through education. Educated people are best able to break out of the cycle of poverty that causes hunger.

UNICEF also reports that the number of people living in poverty has grown to more than 1.2 billion, half of them children. Two hundred and fifty million children are forced to go to work due primarily to the Asian economic disaster.

Ft. Benning, Georgia. Some 12,000 US citizens gathered there at the gates to protest the continuance of the School of the Americas, an infamous training ground for Latin American military officers, as many as 2,000 per year, who are given comprehensive training in the latest military tactics and techniques. For many years it has been public knowledge that the graduates of the SOA have returned to their own countries and have perpetrated grievous harm on their own citizens, including torture, massacres, abduction and disappearances, rape, and murder. Thousands in Latin America have suffered and died at the hands of their own military troops. Who were educated right here in the good old south - at Fort Benning, GA.

An estimated 120,000 children under age 18 are currently participating in armed conflict in Africa, some as young as 7 years old.

You can’t raise a family on $5.15 an hour. A single mother with two children working at the current minimum wage earns just $ 10,700 a year - $2,900 below the poverty line. To have the purchasing power it had in 1968, the minimum wage would have to be raised to $7.33 an hour.

More than three thousand people now languish on the death rows of our nation. In the first six months of 1997, forty-one people were executed in the United States, the highest rate in modern history. Get-tough politicians increasingly use support of the death penalty — and the numbers of people they have executed — to gain votes. Only 13 states do not have the death penalty – that leaves 37 that do. Of those 37, Texas has the most executions at 195. Right now there are 458 death row inmates in Texas - 24 of which are Juveniles. For the year 2000 Texas is the state with the highest number of executions at 12 with the second highest going to Virginia at only three executions so far this year.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported that each day in 1999 approximately 2,100 children went missing.

More than half of all couples that get married this year will become divorced in their lifetime.

I’d say those are causes to get angry about… anybody got a cord for a whip?

What role should dialogue have in our lives as Christians? PM Pilgrim discusses the tensions that should be held together for the sake of community.

All of a sudden we find ourselves in slippery places of uncomfortable opinions and disconcerting feelings. Better to put up the walls, keep the defenses strong, and just be plain obnoxious. I guess what makes me “laid-back” is that I try (with some moments of success) to keep these things in perspective. I am willing to admit that I do not have all the answers and that I can learn great things from all kinds of people, even those with whom I have strong disagreements.

I learn from fundamentalists to keep the Bible central in my faith.
I learn from evangelicals to never forget that we are to live as witnesses to the Gospel.
I learn from mainline, moderates the value of roots and tradition and keeping balanced.
I learn from charismatics the joy of passionate involvement with the Holy Spirit.
I learn from liberals the challenge of living the faith in social justice and openness to people.
I learn from Roman Catholics that we are all branches of a very old, and richly watered tree of faith.
I learn from traditional worship the beauty of liturgy as a means of experiencing grace.
I learn from contemporary worship the need to speak in the language that people understand.
I learn from the emergent church that we must engage the culture.
I learn from my Orthodox brothers and sisters that “western” culture isn’t the only way and hasn’t ever been.
I learn from Christians in persecuted countries the true costs that following Jesus can bring.

If I lose sight of any of that, I will be poorer for it. I will lose connections with brothers and sisters who, while having new (or old) and different opinions from mine, are still brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. The church, The Church, is what we are. Jesus is who we are about. There is only one confession of faith:

Jesus is Lord!

All else is commentary.

Amen.

I am just geeky-enough about stuff to be dangerous.

Everytime the computer gets funky I get emboldened, and my wife fishes out the number for tech support. I wave her off with a macho “I know what’s wrong” and she starts dialing.

Into every life a little humility must come.

For much of the church in the west - the issue of ‘justice’ is a challenging thing to work out. We love the ‘Just me and Jesus’ faith that mega churches teach. and we prefer a little inidividualism in our faith experience. In the end faith becomes how I can get to heaven - oh yeah - and enjoy an iPod on the way.

For those of us who need a little tech support in the justice area - I offer you Mike’s weblog - Liberation Tech Support. Mike spent a good amount of time writing on my old weblog - the now defunct ‘Gutless Pacifist Weblog.’ He comes from a Roman Catholic background, loves Star Trek and is excited to have his own place in the blogosphere. Just like the rest of us when we started out - Mike deserves a little clickage - to let him know that someone is watching. Take a trip on over.

A good beginning post for Mike is An athlete, a pacifist, and a villain. Enjoy.

A creed¹.

I believe in a Miracle that made stars dance and galaxies pirouette
I believe in a Desire that gave birth to wonder and cast it in a human form
I believe in a Relationship that radiates with life: full life, total life, eternal life
I believe in Creation
I believe in Love

I believe that destruction ends
That a broken creation rebirths
That harvests and land will be shared

I believe in a Promise that, with a baby’s cry, pushed himself into the world
I believe in a Truth that crushed sin and celebrates its freedom with new life
I believe in a Reality where love conquers untruth, injustice and death
I believe in Incarnation
I believe in Love

I believe that a man who was meant to die, refused
That a body that was still and broken, danced
That a voice that was silenced, laughed

I believe in a Vision that has noisy cafeterias in churches and children with muddy feet running through Parliament, turning white papers into tickertape parades, asylum bills into party invitations and bombs into flower bulbs
I believe in an Artist that paints the world in its true colours
I believe in a Mother that cannot help but respond to her child’s cry
I believe in Spirit
I believe in Love

I believe that wall’s that are permanent, fall
That racist systems, die
That terrorists in Northern Ireland, talk

I believe
And I believe
In Love

It is always good to know what you believe in…

1. Copyright: R Hamilton 1999 [back]

From some reading regarding ‘Paradox’ and Mark 8

John Cleese (best known as one of the comedians of the Monty Python team) once spoke publically about the attractiveness of Jesus. Cleese was being interviewed following some of the backlash from their film: “The Life of Brian.” Some felt that the film was ridiculing Jesus; and that perhaps the crucifixion scene was a cynical parody of Jesus’ crucifixion. In the interview, Cleese admitted that part of their original intention had been to send up some of the biblical stories about Jesus. However, he said that after having immersed themselves in the Gopsel material, they felt that it was too problematic. Jesus’ words and actions, on the whole were too difficult to satirise. “Blessed are the cheesemakers” was really about as far as they got. So they invented a life of Brian, set in the time of Jesus, instead. Cleese said that he personally found Jesus too human, too transparent, too real. Cleese said that fundamentally Python humour works by exposing human inhibition, double standards, hypocrisy and self-interest. He said that typically Python humour satirises the facades, masks and fronts that people put up to disguise their hang-ups and inhibitions. Cleese said he had never encountered such an uninhibited person as Jesus - someone not limited by class, gender, status or religion. Somehow, said Cleese, Jesus was free to act as a true human in any context.¹

1. A Fatal Attraction, by Kim Thoday [back]

An unlikely place to find a definition of success…

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a better place whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jesus said …

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”¹

Notice we think he meant … but he did say…

1. Consistent in worship attendance … Rather he preferred relationship (see woman at well)
2. Practice scripture memorization … Sure know scripture but not as an end – know it as a means to know God
3. Not afraid to pray in public … Don’t pray like the Hypocrites who stand in public (Mt 6:5-6)
4. Fast regularly publicly? … Sure - fast - but do it in secret (Mt 6:16-8)
5. Desire to stand against ungodliness … Don’t judge. (Mt 7:1-6)
6. Firm grasp of basic, foundational theology … It is not right thinking but faith (Mr 5:34); Or doubting Thomas’ are permitted (John 20:26-31)

The list is adapted from one that has made its way around the web. It is a summary of Pharisaical teachings and expectations. What is shocking about it is that our churches are geared towards making members — but not always geared towards making disciples. As an organization we feel the pressure to count noses and wallets — when instead we should be counting the transformations.

Don’t you think Jesus meant for us to be transformed - not institutionalized?

1. Mark 8:34-35 [back]