mayo-moyle

Category: Clergy Health

  • this week’s round-up (august 15)

       Dancers protest church – seems like it should be a story from the Onion, sadly it’s not. Todd Rhoades has some great thoughts, and pretty much puts into words what I’d been thinking since I first heard about the story. To summarize the story: for the past few years a congregation in Ohio has been staging protests every weekend in front of a local strip club, which included taking photos of the license plates of the club’s patrons and posting the info on the web. This past weekend the strip club fought back by having some of the dancers plant themselves in front of the church, grilling burgers and holding signs like “Matthew 7:15: Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing.”
       There are big issues surrounding the sex industry in this country, so I’m sympathetic to a congregation that is trying to do something about it, but at the same time, I can’t help but be amused at the dancer’s creative response.
       As I’ve been thinking about “what would I do if I found strippers on the front lawn on a Sunday morning”? I’d like to think that in my very best moments (after my initial panic) I’d announce that we’ll be having worship outside this morning with these ladies who have joined us, gotten some more hotdogs and hamburgers and turned the whole thing into a party. As I noted on facebook, “Somewhere along the line we’ve become allied with the Pharisees, instead of spending time with (as opposed to protesting) the people Jesus hung out with, AND we’ve forgotten that one of the key images Jesus uses again and again for the kingdom is that of a party! Sometimes we need to take a moral stand on issues, but maybe instead of a protest, we should offer a better party.”
       (Or you could try this).

    At EmergingUMC, Matt Kelly takes a slight tangent off the recent article about clergy health, and asks the question, who is responsible for fostering an environment of unhealthy expectations around church. Eugene Cho also offers his take on “Death By Ministry.” (In another tangent, one way to help foster personal happiness is to use your “extra” income towards memorial experiences rather than more stuff).

    Fred Clark looks to sewers and storm drains as a possible answer to the current economic problems.

    Seth Godin on “The Incredible Power of Slow Change.”

    Lifehacker suggests a list of foods that are cheaper to grow than buy. (I especially found the comments to be fascinating as one commentators suggest things like kiwi and shrimp (raised in a kiddie pool in the basement!?!) might also fall into this category).

    The Most Beautiful Churches in America

    Double-rainbow action in this week’s Fox Trot.

  • this week’s round-up (august 8)

    Playing catch-up from the past couple weeks, but here’s a few things that have caught my eye:

    This video is well worth your time – “A Thousand Questions” (via Jeremy Smith)

    From Cornel West:

    “We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for non-market values and non-market activity so that love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that’s being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.

    You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit. You see it in our television culture that’s obsessed with superficial spectacle. You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It’s a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.

    It’s a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what’s right and what’s good. It’s just stuck, and they can’t get it out because there’s too much greed. There’s too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.

    And when I talk about love, I’m talking about something that’s great, though, brother. I’m talking about something that will sustain you. It’s like an Aretha Franklin song, brother, or a Coltrane solo or Beethoven symphony, something that grabs you to the gut and gives you a sense of what it is to be human.

    That’s what we’re more and more lacking, and it’s very sad. It’s a sign of a decline of an empire, my brother.” (via Mike Todd)

    I love that line “It’s a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation” – don’t know how I’d ever work it into a sermon (or a poem), but it’s certainly an image that gets the point across. That quote also intersects with part of what I’ve been reading in Seth Godin’s latest book which talks about how that “market” undermines “art” and “community” – rather than delve into it right now, I’ll try to pick up more on that theme later. (Actually I have this idea of doing a Linchpin for pastors/churches series of blog posts that aim to apply the lessons of his book to the context of ministry; I don’t know if it will see the light of day, but it might).

    7 Reasons Leaders Quit Your Organization

    Scot McKnight points to an article on the erosion of the middle class. Also via McKnight’s blog this entertaining little cartoon on Twitter disciples.

    Among my circle of friends and colleagues the NY Times article on clergy burnout has been receiving (needed) attention this week. NPR’s Talk of the Nation also provides a discussion of it as well:

    Insightful, short article in Leading Ideas – The Promise and Peril of Conflict by David Brubaker.

    Fred Clark on why every AG in the country should be suing the credit rating agencies. Also check out this post which is a letter written by a former slave to his former slave owner; as Fred says, “The letter provides a valuable glimpse into the atrocious reality of our history, but it should also be studied and relished as one of the all time great examples of the cheerful and elaborately polite ‘Screw you.’“

    Donald Miller put this song by Andrew Peterson up on his blog a couple weeks ago; its a lovely little song about life and marriage:

    That does it for this week. I think I will probably be moving to a Sunday posting schedule, for the handful for people who actually follow this little thing.