A Charbroil Upgrade

My ten year old griller has been upgraded, anyone want the old one? The new infrared technology worked great last night on a rib eye, and I plan to do alot more veggie grilling on this one. The shiny new guy has a smaller footprint and those side tables fold down to less conspicuous when not in use. Grill cover is in the mail from Amazon but missed a bit of monsoon dust and rain that coated the stainless steel and led to a cleaning.

Had breakfast with friends headed to Kauai and we shared some sightseeing ideas and wished we were on the plane with them. They are going to see Pearl Harbor for the first time, a must do if you get a chance, reminds you why we cherish the nation.

Getting back into leading worship service tomorrow, like bike riding you never forget, but you are a bit rusty.

End Times Expert

We encountered a new huge SUV type vehicle that had an unfamiliar name and new design in California last month.

I have been listening to a set of DVDs by a popular end times expert. He has so many points and proofs that it is hard to slow down long enough to see if he is explaining scripture or twisting it.

He predicts the absolute certainty of WWIII and a death toll of 2 billion people. He predicts that anyone who takes the mark of the Beast to do business will go to Hell, so, my choice is to be lost in the nuclear war. That being the case, there is not much to do in being Christlike and compassionate in this current day.

If, this man is sincerely wrong in assigning future literal meanings to the mystery texts in Revelation then we have a very confusing and contradictory division in the church, and people so convinced there is nothing we can do to prevent a religious war that they become willing to foment its certainty. I really resent it when these experts say "The Bible Says" and then insert some fact or idea that they have connected and interpreted to be the same thing.  Ex. The wound that was healed in Revelation is the reuniting of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall????? And he knows this How?????

Events that changed me

I loved the dumping bucket at kids area at Knotts Water Park.

Having begun my 46th year of faith I am reminded that while I am still loving the head of the Church, there are many events and experiences in life that change us for good or ill. Here are a few.

Encountering Churchianity- a ho hum culturally bound religion which is just going through the motions of church life for social and cultural reasons.

Rediscovering Vocation- I tried to run from Churchianity and discovered struggle that convinced me that I had to keep working within the existing structure to help things change.

Ministry outside the walls of the church- in which I learn to love people in my community and church as they are.

Courage to try to escape the Bible Belt- following a call to the desert west.

Discovering the great difficulty of change within church leadership- great time of dissapointment.

Discovering God was with me- rescues from dissapointments.

Helping a church grow- a time when things were working.

Watching a church implode- a time when disunity destroyed something that was working.

Realizing its all bigger than me- when health challenges change us and we change with them.

All the above are statements that represent parts of my experience in vocational ministry, they are part of my story and I am comfortable in revisiting them, in learning from them, in not being totally defined by them, and in learning in the messiness of history, we still have great pleasure in following Christ.

The Nine Year interesting occurrence

Window shopping in Palm Springs.

One of the reasons I like to celebrate the beginning of my personal faith, which does not by the way coincide with church attendance which I did off and one up until my conversion experience, is because two other dates of memory brought that date into my mind and helped me to mark some major changes in my life.

After that evening when I began to think about a call to ministry I of course set my sights on college, and then seminary, and then openess to my first place of service as a pastor.  All that occurred and we set a service of ordination to mark the official beginning of my ministry. Turned out to be June 27th, 1976, and I realized that from the night of my conversion to the night of my beginning of ministry was exactly nine calendar years.

Of course the next week, my first message as an ordained pastor, with on July 4th, 1976, our nations 200th Birthday which had all that celebratory hoopla to make the week very special.

I wish I could say the church was as healthy and America was as well off as we were back then, but that's another story, I am just glad to still be in the game, living every day for the joy of the Lord.

June 27, 1967

Tomorrow is my spiritual anniversary. 45 years of being called to follow the Lord. No regrets, lots of blessing and living, lots of change and lack of change forgiven. Friends, travel, good experiences, a share of frustrations, some confusions and misteps, lots of thinking, meditation, prayer, and the books that helped me on my journey.

Nothing matches the big thought, that I have a good Shepherd leading me into paths of righteousness for His names sake.


I am not that young man who cautiously placed his faith in a God he could not see late one evening.....wait, yes I am, and His mercies are fresh every morning.

Wineskins and Wine

During seminary I read a seminal book by Howard Synder? that discussed the gospel and how we deliver the gospel. When you attend worship no matter how you slice it there is singing and praying and teaching, but the structures that surround those elements need to change with time and changing needs.

Yesterday I attended a church that had grown from 600 to over 6000 in five years, the kind with police and parking attendants to get people in and out of the parking lot. I was living here when it started and know it was built to 600 on the Bill Hybels seeker sensitive model and for years met in my kids high school.

Five years ago the new pastor came on the condition that the church would adopt a different and more purposeful missional model which was styled on Micah 6:8. live justly, love mercy, act humbly. In other words instead of worrying about how to get butts in the seats they want to get butts out into the world to help and serve. The bells and whistle of the wineskins were not the attracting....look at our coffee shop, see our cute themes, are'nt we cool christians? Let us help you have a better family, a sexier sex life, ect. ad nauseum.

This church had all the new bells, comfortable theater seating, darkness and mood lighting for the singing, but here something was different, here the new wine was served. It was about Jesus and the gospel and families giving themselves for others. The baptism service was moving and the testimonies tell of people who had fleeting or poor church experiences and how this fellowship had helped them sort through the false and find the real.

These people have the bells and whistles that caused so many of us problems as we dealt with people resisting change with appeals to tradition and threats of leaving or fighting, or anguished appeals to "we've always done it this way".  The people at this service came along after all those struggles, and they are benifitting from getting wine from new wine skins that fit this culture. I was impressed, and a bit envious.

God talk

A Candle in the Wind, now a statue in the park.

12 years ago now, I began a personal quest. Like most quests, most books, most major life changes it began with some painful experiences of disunity. People who loved me suddenly hated me, supporters became detractors. The struggle was about religious views, things I had been taught all my life that flowed through me with ease and made life understandable were causing others who had different life views to be alienated. Sadly, all those people whom I loved and cared for are no longer in my life, but God, as He often does, provided a way forward, a rescue of sorts, and a place to reflect upon my little crisis.

The issues were parsed to simplicity, two simple but enormous questions emerged that have settled into my mind and heart as the rudders for the remainder of my life. What is the nature of God like, and what is this Good News that He announced to the world in the New Covenant? With those two surgical instruments I was able to go back through my spiritual, emotional, relational life to cut and to heal, knowing that my conflict were being experienced in many similar ways in this world of evangelical thinking.

Now that I have some new answers and have left some old ways of thinking behind, strangely I do not have much inclination to fight for my new ways of thinking, nor do I have much desire to try to create healthier patterns in what I now believe are dying ways of life. I am, however, still called to share and comfort people raised in that same world, many of whom have never questioned the boxes that provide the limits of their views. I cannot really tell the old, old story, when I have some new, new exciting ways of telling that story.

Bridge building is my necessary task, and I am back at it tomorrow.