Category: Newsletter

It has always felt a little surreal growing older.

My memories of my childhood are a blur of endless summer days playing outside with the neighborhood kids, riding to grade school on my bike, going to Sunday School in my parents’ Chevrolet, staying all night at Grandma’s house, Christmases, birthdays, reading comic books, and listening to Monkees records.

Somewhere around 12 or 13 years of age I slowly became aware that, even though I still felt like a little kid inside, I was getting bigger on the outside. I was awkward and clumsy as I grew into my new size. To add to my embarrassment, pimples started breaking out on my face—especially on the tip of my nose—and my voice started to change, getting lower but unexpectedly squeaking up an octave at the worst moments—like whenever I tried to talk to a girl. At some point during that time, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t a little kid anymore.

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There’s a short poem about money I heard a long time ago that I’ve never forgotten. Here it is:

Money talks; that’s no lie.
I heard it once; it said “Goodbye!”

But let me reword it a bit, like this:

Time flies; that’s no lie.
I heard it once; it said “Goodbye!”

Actually, I don’t think time says “Goodbye” at all. It just rushes by without so much as a “See you later!” It really is astonishing how fast it goes.

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Let me point to what I believe should be the future for our church. And please note: when I say “our church,” I mean in the sense that we belong to it, not that the church belongs to us. Our church belongs to God. It’s His. He paid for it with the blood of His Son (Acts 20:28).

We have revised our church constitution twice in the last 28 years. Both times it was a lengthy, challenging process, even with the aid of computers. Both times we looked at our church constitution- which, like so many others, borrowed heavily from the business world of the mid-20^th century- streamlined it, and brought it more into line with how we actually do things.

But we have also had an ongoing problem of diminishing interest and participation in the running of our church.

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The nature of a thing impacts how you interact with it. When we remember what the Bible says about the church, it will change the way we interact with it- especially our main Sunday morning gathering. Let me tell you about three different scenarios.

Scenario A. You go to Walmart. You need to get some bread and milk. You walk in through the sliding doors, grab a cart, and make a beeline to the back of the store. You maneuver around a few people who stopped in the middle of the aisle. You grab the milk. Heading for the bread, you have to take the long way because someone spilled something. Finally, you get the bread and head to the checkout. With some frustration, because the machine didn’t like how you swiped your credit card the first time, you completed your trip. Despite some inconveniences, you got what you came to get.

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About 1982 my family and I moved to Coal City, Indiana and I reconnected with a friend of mine I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. His name was Richard, and he was a musician, too. I was playing strictly acoustic guitar in those days, and he loaned me one of his amplifiers and an electronic effects unit for guitar. (For you guitar geeks out there, it was an Ibanez rackmount unit with compressor, overdrive, chorus, flanger and phaser.) All of this opened up a whole new world of wonderful sounds to explore.

Even more significantly, he loaned me an album of contemporary Christian music. It was an LP (I know, I’m an old guy) recorded by Dion, of “Dion and the Belmonts” fame. Dion had some top-40 hits in the sixties and seventies with songs like “Runaround Sue” and “Abraham, Martin and John.” But later Dion became a Christian and began to record Christian music. His music was a revelation to me. He sang the Gospel, clear and true, but in his own style, with guitar, bass, drums, and a Hammond B-3 organ. It was fantastic.

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I turned on the radio in my truck, listened a moment, and my heart sank. I thought: “Not again!”

I’d only listened for a moment before I realized that the announcer was describing yet another senseless, horrific shooting. Children in a Catholic school in Minneapolis had gathered in the connected church for a service, when someone fired indiscriminately though the stained-glass windows. Seventeen were wounded and two were killed. And first reports say that all the victims were children. The two who died were 8 and 10 years old.

That hits hard hit hard when you have children or grandchildren that same age. And it didn’t happen in a bar, late at night, in a rowdy crowd of grownups who were in a drunken rage. It happened at a church, in broad daylight, to a group of children who’d gathered in a church for a back-to-school service for their parochial school. This was unthinkable and unheard of not so very long ago. Now, when I hear news like this, my immediate reaction is: “Not again!”

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When our son Josh was just a tyke, one day he announced to us with great conviction: “Oh, I can’t stand change!” My wife and I both laughed and told him he was going to have to get over that.

Turns out, sometimes that’s easier said than done.

Over the last nearly two decades our family has gone through major changes. These changes began with the birth of our first grandchild in 2008. (Grandkids are more fun; I recommend having them first.) Our first grandson’s birth was followed less than three months later by my mother’s death. My mother-in-law died in 2014. In 2016 my father-in-law remarried, and later that year our second grandson was born. Then came the whole COVID shutdown in 2020. In 2021, my father-in-law passed. There are some other things: a heart attack, a couple of hip surgeries, and so on. But the ones I mentioned are the most powerfully personal ones.

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John Maxwell was and is a Wesleyan minister who has pastored several churches in Indiana, Ohio, California and Florida. He has written many books on the subject of leadership, and held conferences on leadership all over the country. He has written and said many good and helpful things on leadership, but as far as I’m concerned, the best and most helpful thing he ever said was in an interview with Dr. James Dobson back in the mid-nineties.

Dr. Dobson’s organization, Focus On The Family, had begun issuing a series of cassette tapes specifically aimed at pastors. Each tape contained an interview with various people on some aspects of ministry. During the course of the interview with John Maxwell, Maxwell said this: “Leadership is influence.” That’s a direct quote,and it was an epiphany to me. I have long since given away that cassette tape to another minister…and if I still had it, I’m not sure I have a working tape machine to play it on anymore. But what he said on that tape has stuck with me.

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