MattGlover.com

I’ve been a fan of the Dilbert cartoon strip for years - especially when I was working for moronic ‘Dogbert’ type bosses in my previous ‘corporate’ life.

More recently I’ve been enjoying the blog by Dilbert creator, Scott Adams. The guy is funny, but perhaps his best post of recent times is when he tells the true story of an encounter with a fan of his on a plane trip.

Read it here. I promise it will make you smile!

The four year old son came into my study tonight and asked:

“What holds God up?”

“What do you mean?” I replied.

“If God doesn’t have any bones, then what holds his body up?”

Sheesh. This boy thinks too much.

So I go into the post office today to submit my forms for the ‘Working With Children’ check.

The woman takes one look at my photo and says, “We can’t use that. You look happy.”

Obviously the government only wants miserable people working with children. Anyway, that’s a side issue…

She takes a new photo then starts working her way through my pile of ID for the 100 points requirement.

She looks at my passport photo, then looks at me a bit strangely. It’s eight years old, but I don’t think i look that different,

Then she looks at my Driver’s licence which is only a year old. She looks at the photo then looks at me. With a smile she says:

“You look better with no hair.”

I’ve always thought I’m good looking, so it’s nice to have it confirmed.

Smart bum comments from anybody will be deleted.

I’m currently wagging one of the School of Ministry electives.

Not that the choices are bad this afternoon, but simply because my introvert scale is shot to pieces and if I have to talk to anybody else I’m likely to kill them.

SoM is an annual conference/networking thing put on by Whitley College in Melbourne for pastors and ministry leaders of Baptist Churches in Victoria. It’s usually pretty good in terms of catching up with some fellow travellers in ministry, hearing some good teaching, and then debating how what we’ve heard shakes down in the reality of life.

This year the guest speaker is Mike Frost. Being a former Forge intern, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard ‘Frosty’ speak now. But as usual, I’ved loved to watch a master communicator at work. His story telling ability is probably the best I’ve seen/heard and his passion for mission is undeniable.

In the past, I’ve argued against some of what he has said. I’ve heard him tear strips off the institutional church and any church that owns property. I’ve heard him say there is no point in continuing how we do church and we should simply give up and start again. I’ve heard him say that most pastors have issed the point entirely when it comes to the call of Jesus.

I disagree with all of those things in one way or another. Being one of the first ‘insitutional’ church pastors to be a Forge intern with a view to continuing being an ‘instituional’ church pastor, I found I had a few heated discussions with some of the other interns about al sorts of thing. I dn’t think many of them took me that serriously.

(For the record, I don’t think my church can be called insitutional. It’s part of the free church tradition that has held dear for centuries many of the things the emerging church movement is saying we should ‘rediscover’. But that’s a post for another day.)

Anyway, I was interested to hear what Mike Frost would have to say in a gathering of pastors and whether he would tone down his message at all.

I’m glad to say that he didn’t hold back at all, but delivered his message with his usual fire and passion…BUT…the content was quite different. This time I saw Mike Frost the pastor sharing some of his own story. He spoke of some of the fears we all must face in ministry if we are to be faithful to the call Jesus has placed before us. It was like Mike had the chance to reflect on numerous things since my time at Forge, and while not changing his message, he had come to realise that ‘reality’ sometimes means that being ‘radical’ must look ordinary at times.

Anyway, there’s still one session to go for the day, so I better come out from my hiding spot an re-engage.

I went to an old (and I mean that in every sense of the word) Uniting Church this morning for the baptism of a friends first child. As soon as I entered the building, the average age dropped by 50 years. We had a wide choice of places to sit as only 30 or so of the 300 seats were taken. And it was freezing!

The service will never attract anyone becasue of it’s slickness or music. Calling it boring is being polite! But when it came to the ‘passing of the peace’ something happened that I’ve never seen before. Every single person that was a regula attender of the church got up from their seat and came over to welcome me and my family. Nobody stayed in their seat, even the really old folk who could barely walk.

It was a nice welcome and made the place seem a whole lot warmer. The baptism itself was nice, even if I disagreed with the theology, and my boys were then welcomed into the Sunday School like they were old friends. Yes, this is a church for the elderly, with a small band of faithful younger folk, but it is church. It is the community of God’s people and is nurturing the faith of those that care to travel with them.

The reason that we were going to a baptism at this particular church was that it has a great outreach to country students coming to Melbourne to study. This is where my wife first lived when she came to town and were she met the mother of the boy being baptised. The links with the country are strong, and so there was saddness in the air as they grappled with how to respond to the events of this week.

The train crash in Kerang would be horrible for any community, but it is esecially hard for a small country town. Everybody knows somebody who was killed or injured. One labut lady I spoke to said they she knew once person killed on the train, but her friends knew more. They carried the burden with each other and set about the task of rebuilding life for the families directly involved.

The church I visited this morning is about 250km from Kerang, maybe more, but it was hurting because Kerang was hurting. Regardless of their theology, their age, and their style, this suburban church has got one thing very right - it knows what it means to be part of the body of Christ. When one part of the communinty hurts, all parts of it should feel some pain too.

Did your church say a prayer for the Kerang victims in it’s services today? Did you?

Many probably did, but if not, do it now.

On Sunday night I bacame an uncle for the seventh time! My little sister had her second child in Melbourne and all is well.

Welcome to the world Liam!

Another of our young people gave the sermon thing a try for the firt time last night. Kylie, one of the busiest people I know, somehow managed to study for and sit three exams as well as do her part time jobs and prepare a sermon. She’s nuts!

Anyway, she had lots of great things to say, but the one thing that stuck in my mind was how much our impression of the ‘outside’ affects how we treat a person’s crisis. That is, would we treat a prositute who walked into our gathering sobbing but dressed for work any differently to one of our youth group leaders who was also crying?

We probably would. Well, I probably would. And that difference would be based soley on what I saw before me and the stereo types I have built up in my head.

Kylie reminded us that God see’s the heart. God sees the beauty of the inside and doesn’t base his love on any external appearance. God loves the prostitute, the nurse, the teacher, the accountant (well, maybe not the accountant…joking!) - anybody because God sees them all as children who he wants to return home.

Home is the body of Christ. The nurturing, healing community of God’s people. Later that night I was talking to one of our other young people about how it seems that God uses our brokeness to minister to others, thus if we are all open about our broken state and our need for restoration, God uses all of us as agents of healing for each other. We travel the journey of life together and it doesn’t really matter who we are or what we’ve done. All that matters is who we’re following and we’re we are headed.

The community around us is in crisis. Everybody has, is or will very soon, face some sort of life rattling event that will leave them dazed and struggling to cope. Relationships will crumble, homes will be taken away, death will visit, health will deteriorate, debt will overwhelm - it could be anything. These are the times when the church can be it’s best. Welcoming and supporting with no questions asked.

Kylie finished her message with a reflection on Matt 25 the passage that speaks of showing acts of kindness to the sick, broken, lost, imprisoned etc and doing the same for God. It was a powerful finish to a powerful message and a good reminder to me at least, that I’m nothing with out God and his church.

Thomas: Mummy, does God have a telephone?

Mummy: No, you just talk to God normally.

Thomas: Then why doesn’t he talk back?

Ouch. How do you answer a four year old who asks such things?!

Despite not too much happening on the blog of late, plenty of stuff has been happening in the real world. Sometimes there’s been too much, and my health has taken a battering again. But in the midst of all that there has been some significant times of wrestling with God.

Philip Yancey’s book called ‘Prayer’ has been a place of refuge in the busy-ness and a timely reminder that neglecting a life of prayer is one of the surest roads to disconnection from God. But at the same time, that feeling of isolation is one that forces us to our knees with more urgency than before. In some ways, that has been my story over the last six months - but that’s a post for another time.

In the dark spaces, God’s word becomes life giving in a new way. It seems that it is the only link to something far greater, the only strand of hope to hold on to, the only point of light in the darkness. And so preparing messages for our Sunday gatherings has been a spiritual discipline for me and supported me in a way that others couldn’t.

A few weeks ago I spoke on Romans 12:1-8, the well known passage about living a life as a living sacrifice. But while it may be well known, there is a lot of confusion to what it might mean in the reality of the everyday. How do you live your life as a sacrifice to God?

Some of this confusion comes from a misunderstanding of what a sacrifice actually is. I always used to think of a sacrifice as something I give up and don’t have anymore. I sacrifice some time for my neighbours sick child. I sacrifice some money for church. I sacrifice some sleep for comforting my son we he has a nightmare.

But a sacrifice is not so much about what is given up. Nor is it about what is given. It is about the giving.

To be a living sacrifice for God means we are not simply given to God but are in a constant stae of being given. Granted, this is a subtle disctinction, but still important, becasue if I see myself as having been given to God, it becomes a one off event and too easily becomes less significant/relevant with time. But if I am constantly being given, then I am faced witht he prosepct of a life that God owns, everyday.

Paul encourages us to be transformed, by renewing our minds. There’s lots of strategies around to try and do this, but very few of them seem to be very effective in the long term. The boundaries that we put in place to protect our thoughts are good at stopping us from doing things (sometimes) but don’t necessarily help us with DOING the right things.

Immediately following this statement about renewing the mind, Paul talks about serving others. He encourages leaders to lead, teachers to teach, givers to give and so on. It’s almost as if using our gifts somehow contributes to the transformation of our minds and helps us to discern the will of God. And to top it off, it is an act of worship.

Being actively involved in the faith community contributes to our spiritual growth and worships God. That’s cool.

I encouraged those in our church that are already involved in stuff to keep at it, and to view what they do as an act of worship in which they are constantly being given over to God. For those that weren’t involved, I encouraged them to get involved - offering before they were asked.

But there was another category of people that I thought needed addressing. Those that were already involved but were considering pulling out. Not pulling out to do something else (I firmly believe there are different seasons that we go through that call for different involvement), but those that just wanted to pull out because it all seemed to hard. Those who thought sitting back and doing nothing seemed like the most attractive option.

I was discussing the same question with a group of youth pastors the week before. We wondered what you did as a pastor when you felt tired, exhausted and struggled to see what God was doing. Your enthusiasm was gone and there was little motivation for ‘the call’. The conclusion of the group was this: When you don’t feel like doing ministry, you keep doing it anyway.

1 Peter 5:8 describes the devil as prowling, wanting to devour any that wander too far. And what pleases him more than anything else is when God’s people stop doing God’s work. That makes life nice and easy for him…

At the end of the night, I simply encouraged people to see themselves as being given over to God always, and to let that be expressed by serving the faith community using whatever gifts they had. In doing so, minds are renewed, lives are transformed and God is worshipped.

The subversive love notes are next! Missions month is giving me a chance to catch up!!

I still haven’t decided to buy one yet, but thought I’d do a bit of research before I do.

What should I be looking out for? Any brands you recommend? Any to avoid?

And do you want to pay for it for me…;)