Sheep Respond to Nurture
For Reflection Roundup each week, we gather news stories, notable pieces, and other important items for Christian leaders today. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but may not concur. Here are 10 things worth sharing this week.
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This week I saw a sheep with an adopted master, following close because it knew familiarity and care. It had everything it needed and responded simply in acceptance.
1. Early Christians were not necessarily noticed for their worship services or preaching, but for their peaceful, faith-filled, reliant lifestyle. Christians were recognized by their habits, their character, their barrier-breaking community. In “Getting Our Questions in the Right Order” for Mosaic, Carson Reed reflects on the questions the early Christians continually asked as they noticed the movement of the Spirit – starting with, “What does this mean?” In Acts, God’s actions through the Spirit, coupled with the apostles’ words, caused folk to stir and consider further, “What do we do?” Reed reflects contemporarily and admonishes us toward the hope embedded in times when God allows God’s Spirit to shake our people and our places.
2. Speaking of really good questions, David Odom asks, “What if we are all burned out?” for Faith & Leadership. He expounds on the fact that decisions made in the interest of health and safety often perpetuate fear or incite anger. It takes more mental energy to complete the cycles of daily life, and everyone’s threshold is lower because of it. Odom refreshingly poses, “As a pastor, what if I viewed my entire congregation as burned out?” His exploration of how we can notice, affirm, and listen to one another is worth the read.
3. Pastor Melissa Florer-Bixler’s “My Church is a Beautiful Waste of Money” made Faith & Leadership’s list of Top Ten Stories from 2021. Florer-Bixler describes the work of her Mennonite church in Raleigh as having a different way of looking at the distribution of their resources. “We’re a worshiping community, people who have been drawn together in following Jesus and creating a particular form of life.” This group has agreed to quell the lurking addiction to productivity and do what may look like wasting time together with Jesus. Though they acknowledge and support the place that programs have, they don’t feel their church needs to prioritize them. Florer-Bixler describes the church as “carving out space to rest our lives in the care of the living God.” This sounds to me like a reframe many of us might like to explore.
4. “If the voices we attribute to God are strangling rather than nurturing our souls, we need to question them,” writes Jean Neely in “Healing Our Image of God” for Faith & Leadership. Neely boldly calls out our aversion to trusting God’s compassionate nature, maybe because we know the shallowness of our own graces toward ourselves. Neely invites us to think in metaphors of care and to place ourselves in the center. God challenges us because God cares, but ultimately God has and continues to work to sustain an environment of spiritual nurture for us, both personally and communally, if we can but permit ourselves the grace to settle into it. Reaching out from this place, we possess the freedom and fullness the world needs to know exists.
5. Writing “Here’s Who Stopped Going to Church During the Pandemic” for Christianity Today, researchers Wendy Wang and Alysse Elhage share research connections forged over the past year of church attendance in response to the pandemic and likely other social and political factors. There’s a lot of good data here that can help us come to an honest understanding of where we are in our churches. While it’s difficult to broadly measure online engagement with worship services, the benefits of people gathering in hopeful spaces is undeniable and motivating as we seek to shepherd our people through the throes of this liminal period.
6. Popular articles with lots of photography don’t usually draw my eye, but the opening scenario in this one gripped me. Even if your babies have all flown the nest, the fatigue and the partnership aspects of trying to do life together will resonate, I believe. Ann Voskamp shares what she calls the “front porch” of her blog with Courtney Ellis, who writes “The Sabbath Road to Happiness.” Ellis says that “joy begins in acquiescing to our limits and accepting the invitation to let God restore our souls.” Acquiescing to our limits. Who wants to do that? “Let God restore our souls,” she says. This is divine work we cannot do ourselves.
7. “Part of the problem with being wrong is that it rarely feels like we’re wrong, more often, being wrong feels like being right. And we love being right.” Daniel Harrell writes this confession of one of his elders in “Our Currently Polarized World.” This piece is the first in a new series called “Seeking Shalom in the Midst of Polarization,” a collaboration between The Colossian Forum and The Banner magazine. Harrell posits four ways the U.S. Christianity divides itself, each often struggling to value the perspectives of the other as strengths of the church as a whole. As a Christian symbol, the cross represents loving sacrifice, and we often forget that this sacrifice is ongoing and embodied in and through our own lives. So let me steal a question from my colleague David Sessions: “How much of my own comfort am I willing to give up for yours or that of another?”
8. Mary Taylor shares “The Unexpected Beauty of Brokenness” for Alabaster, reminding us of the simple yet important things, first things, as creation is. When all seems overwhelming and chaotic, Taylor invites us to look to the natural world for reminders that everything has a season, all very different. God has built a rhythm into the physical world that reminds us of God’s own consistency, God’s heartbeat that we can access in activities as simple as observing nightfall and first light.
9. Do you ever feel your own efficiency wearing you out? Erin Straza interviews practical theologian Kelly M. Kapic for Christianity Today in “Learning to Love Your Limits,” in which the two discuss healthy dependence as a laboratory for growing love. They ask good questions of efficiency, exploring what it conveys about our highest values as people. Why do we crave it so much if we view our resources (including our time) as gifts to which we are not actually entitled? After vocalizing sensitivities (like aging!) they land their conversation in the compassionate, quiet space of prayer.
10. Finally, I dare you to challenge this truth. In other words, if we must make it a hermeneutical matter, we can always find what we’re looking for.
