The Importance of Relationship

I am at the annual meeting of the United Methodist Church in North Central New York, and have been making some observations. The most significant right now is the inability, or unwillingness to build relationships with each other. I am sad to say that I see this most in my clergy colleagues. Sure there are those whom we share the highest affinity with, but we are in connection with all those who are clergy persons. We should be building relationships with people who we view life differently than, especially those people. Why is it that what we were designed and created for, what we long for, we are so poor at doing?

The Best Teacher

It is said that experience is the best teacher, in some regards this is true, but by another it is not true. Think about the best teacher you ever interacted with. One of the reasons you learned from that person was because you choose to learn. Experience can only be the best teacher if we choose to let it be our teacher. We need to take each opportunity to allow God to teach us through what we are experiencing.

By the way, who was the best teacher you ever had?

Who Are We To Be?

Life gets busy and things fall to the wayside, things like blogs, but I am back. I wanted to go back to the first entry about the biggest issue facing the church. There is no such thing as one issue facing the church in America today, the multiplicity of issues facing the church is truly staggering. At the core of all these issues however I thing one thing rises above all else. There are many ways to say it, are we more concerned with doing church and not being the church, or are we so concerned with being the church that we lose sight of being Christ-Followers? In the world of the church, which I traffic a majority of my time in, we are all too often caught up in the trappings of what we think church should be, and therefore confuse our image of the church with the Image of God. I don't think God has particular interest in many of the things that we as the church fret about. I do think that God has great concern about the things we wave a passing thought to. In the end, when all is said and done, what matters most is living the life that God gave us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and now empowers through the Holy Spirit. At its best our lives should be a grace-filled, love-oozing life patterned after the life of Christ. At minimum I think we all need to be able to say we don't know, and acknowledge that none of us has it all together, and we all do things that are in line with the verbal claims we make about out life.