Among the many losses of Covid, our congregation lost the opportunity to properly say goodbye to the church’s pastor, Johnny Lewis. But that loss will be rectified this Sunday, when Johnny and his family will join us for worship at 10:00 am. There will be a cake and cookie reception following the worship service.
Please bring a note or card that expresses your appreciation for his ministry.
While there are many signs of renewal in our church (worship attendance, number of kids in the children program, ongoing youth programs), we are not yet out of the Covid woods. Like many, if not most, churches, SCCC is facing financial challenges. We are running operating deficits each month, currently averaging about $5,000/month.
Thankfully, we have operational reserves from savings and our two PPP loans that allow us to meet our monthly expenses, but those reserves will only last about eleven months, assuming both income and expenses remain the same.
The Search Committee hopes to bring a recommendation for a new pastor soon. But we don’t want our new pastor to have to deal with a financial crisis early in their ministry. It is best for the new pastor and for the church if the new pastor is able to focus on ministry not money.
That is why in August the church will be embarking on an Over and Above Financial Campaign. Members will be asked to invest in the church’s future by giving over and above their usual commitment to the church’s budget.
The theme for the campaign is Where Love Grows…investing in our church’s future. The goal is $125,000 given over a two-year period. You will be asked to invest in the future of this church we all love by making a promise of financial support that is over and above your regular support for the church.
Look for more information in the days ahead. And plan to attend a Town Hall Meeting following worship on August 8. The Town Hall will be live streamed as well as for those attending in person. This Town Hall will allow everyone to ask questions about the campaign.
The Campaign Team is Dave Roeder (Chair), Darrell and Sharon Cantrell, Mark Phillips, and Sandy Allen, Rick and René Jensen.
Three years ago, I was doing an interim in a small town in northern Oregon where the chief gathering place in the community and that part of the county was the school gymnasium for basketball games. If you wanted to catch a taste of the local culture, this was the place to be.
One game I found myself sitting by a lumberjack who worked in the forests a good way south of town and east of the Cascade Mountains. It had to be a dangerous job with lots of alone time scrambling up trees and making sure when he cut a tree down it fell where he wasn’t. We struck up a conversation. I soon learned he was paid well when he remarked that he had more money than I would see in a lifetime. I had no reason not to believe him.
But this wasn’t the end of his conceit. After bantering back and forth about a myriad of topics, including politics, he says quite earnestly, “You know, I know exactly what God thinks.”
Tongue in cheek, I congratulated him on his boast and then quickly added my 2 cents. As we were about to leave the gym, I replied, “I believe the truth is half of what I hear and half of what I think.” I also informed him that I was the interim pastor at the local Disciples church and that no one I knew knows the mind of God precisely, including me.
His eyes grew wide as he quickly hustled out of the gymnasium, not quite sure what to make of me at that point. I saw him the next night at another game, but he avoided me altogether. He had clearly had enough of me the night before. However, I felt I’d also overplayed my hand and was sorry that we couldn’t have parted company more amicably.
Though I did find his statement, “I know exactly what God thinks” more than a stretch but an incredible thing to say. And yet, one thing this lumberjack and I had in common that evening was an absence of any spirit of penitence or much of an admission that either of us could be wrong.
This is a disease of our time—impenitence and a failure much of the time to admit we might be wrong. Truth is: Admitting we are wrong is in short supply these days. This lack of humility breeds a world of trouble in our marriages, in our families, in the workplace, on the ballfield and in our politics, all because we can’t say, “I’m sorry!” or “Me Bad!”
We can see evidence of this unbridled pride, whenever we feel we have to have the last word or refuse to stand beside ourselves in a kind of self-transcendence and ask the question, “Is what I just said really true?” Do we sometimes show the attitude that we have a corner on the truth? Lots of people hold this attitude these days whatever their faith or political party.
I’ve even told couples coming to be married to be careful if each of them finds themselves arguing all the time because each insists on having the last word, even if they’re unaware of it! Soon couples find themselves in a zero-sum game to win the argument or lord it over the other person. We see this same kind of pridefulness in our politics today when either political party insists that they have to have all the power, or in churches where pastors take it upon themselves to declare who is bound for heaven and who is bound for hell. This is nasty stuff.
What makes this whole issue of power more complicated is that none of us wants to be a Casper Milquetoast and appear vulnerable or weak. But this fixation on always being right can lead us into adopting dogmatic positions about every opinion we hold or about everything we believe. It also can lead us into anxiety in a world where ambiguity and uncertainty are everywhere. We’re tempted to reach for solid ground wherever we think we might find it.
But the obvious alternative to holding nothing but “fixed” positions is to hold “fluid” positions, which may make us seem wishy-washy and indecisive. This is especially true for us men, who have been taught to stand our ground, even if it’s on quicksand. And yet, second guessing ourselves doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
You see, there is a third position between “fixed” and “fluid.” It’s the position of learning how to hold our opinions and judgments provisionally for later denial, amendment, or confirmation. We can discover we don’t have to have the last word about everything but can still express our convictions openly.
We’re all familiar with the word “ultimate.” It can mean many things: like best or final. Theologian Paul Tillich spoke of faith in God as our “ultimate concern,” meaning the top concern and quest in our life. Loving God as our top priority reflects Jesus’ 1st commandment, as does loving our neighbor, Jesus’ second commandment, he says is equal to the 1st!
Curiously, the name of the last syllable in a word just happens to be called “the ultima!” with the same root as “ultimate,” or topmost and best.
But there is also a name for the next-to-the-last syllable in a word hardly anyone has ever heard of. It’s called the “penult.” It sounds like “peanut” but with the letter “l” in it. We get the word “penultimate” from combining penult and ultimate. Penultimate means not the highest, but the next highest; not the best but next best!
We’ve all been around heated arguments when someone shouts, “Back off!” or “Chill!” Police and soldiers will intervene in an incendiary situation by yelling “Stand Down!” It’s an attempt to disarm adversaries and make peace.
When we put ourselves into a fixed opinion about anything, including our faith, we are inadvertently taking the position of the ultima or ultimate for ourselves and in so many words saying, “My word is the last word. My word is the final word. My words are the best words.” There is no backing off by admitting we might be wrong. It’s like we’re always stuck on that final syllable as if our every word is also God’s word. No sign of humility, only hubris, pride.
But when we permit ourselves the latitude of being wrong, we take a cooler, penultimate, provisional position, on the chance that the truth really is half of what we hear and half of what we think! Yes, we can still speak with conviction. But there is also a little voice in our brain that whispers to us the news that we might be wrong, even terribly wrong! This is a more fluid position, but not like jello melting in the sun and running all over the place. There is still a mold of truth against which we can test the validity of our passioned position and appeal.
Imagine marriage and family arguments where a couple or all parties held in reserve the right and freedom to be wrong. Everyone then would have the capacity to say “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong” without losing their heads. It’s only when we utter our opinion as if we’re speaking “ex cathedra,” from the throne of God, when we get into trouble & alienate the very people we love.
Maybe this is what Jesus meant when he taught us to “turn the other cheek” and “love our enemies.”
More food for thought and spiritual reflection,
Rick
Among the many losses of COVID, our congregation lost the opportunity to properly say goodbye to the church’s pastor, Johnny Lewis. But that loss will be rectified on Sunday, August 1, when Johnny and his family will join us for worship at the usual time of 10:00 am. There will be a cake and cookie reception following the worship service.
Circle the date on your calendar and plan to be present in worship that Sunday. Please bring a note or card that expresses your appreciation for his ministry.
Join Disciple women around the Kansas City region for a weekend retreat at Tall Oaks. The theme of the weekend is “Faith That Overflows” featuring keynote speaker Kirby Gould.
On April 13, 2014, Kirby’s cousin, Bill Coporon and his grandson, Reat Underwood, were murdered at the Jewish Community Center, along with Terri Lamanno at Village Shalom in Overland Park. Kirby will be sharing her personal story of how the extended Corporon family reacted and responded to the shootings. She will explore how faith influences our lives and how we can make a difference in our lives with our families, our churches and our communities.
Learn more about the weekend!
Sandy Allen is the chairperson for the Fall Retreat. If you have any questions, please contact her at skballen67@gmail.com.
Join us on Sunday at 10:00 am as we continue our sermon series, “What Ministers Wish Church Members Knew.”
The sermon series is aimed at helping prepare the church for its new pastor. Loosely based on a book of the same name by Disciple pastor Jan Linn, the series will suggest some of the things that are important for lay members to know so that they can support your new pastor in his or her ministry.
July 18 First Pastors and Congregations Get Married And Then They Fall in Love
July 25 The Care and Feeding of Your Pastor
A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Clark Williamson, a good friend and former member of a church René and I served in Indianapolis passed away. Both René and I had him for classes at Christian Theological Seminary in our respective M.Div. and D.Min. programs. René also worked as his teaching assistant her last two years in seminary.
Clark’s credentials were impressive. He received his Ph.D. in theology at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. There he served as teaching assistant to Paul Tillich, regarded as one of the top five theologians in the world in the 20th century.
In the classroom Clark was an intimidating figure. He was like the formidable Harvard Law Professor Kingsfield in the movie “Paper Chase.” Yet despite Dr. Williamson’s tough demeanor, he was a dedicated Christian and church member in the congregation we served.
It didn’t take long for me to realize in my first class that Clark was brilliant and off-putting in his demeanor. While I aced all his classes, I only realized many years later that if he bled red on all your papers, he did so out of respect for your work, even publishing one of my papers in CTS’s journal. I learned this straight from the horse’s mouth. He was one of those demanding teachers we all come to admire after we survived their class.
Yet, it wasn’t just the material he taught that inspired me. One day he opened his personal life to us by telling our class how he and his wife lost their 10-year-old son to cancer. He said, “You know, we never get over the death of a loved one, but we do get through it.” He added, quoting philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “Nothing beautiful is lost to God.”
I would draw on these pearls of wisdom a few years later when René’s sister and nieces were killed in an accident caused by a drunk driver and for all the years since when pastoring to families going through grief. It was after our family’s tragedy and Clark’s wisdom that I realized the great difference our theology makes. Whether we know it or not, we all have a theology and enjoy or suffer the consequences if we have a good theology or a bad theology. A good theology meets the criteria of being logical, consistent, coherent, and true to life. A bad theology fails to meet these criteria.
Clark also became renowned for his expertise in Jewish-Christian relations. He served on the founding Board of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., before it was even built. He also often underscored the importance of the rabbinic (teaching) role of ministry. He faulted seminaries, clergy, families, and congregations for failing in the educational ministry of the church and often groaned at the biblical illiteracy of so many active Christians.
But his fight against anti-Judaism in the church was particularly poignant. He wrote a book titled “Has God Rejected His People?”, assuring his readers that in fact, God has not. His argument against anti-Judaism remains timely with the rapid rise of anti-Jewish violence in America today. In the book Dr. Williamson shows that much of the anti-Judaism evidenced in the New Testament reflected an intra-family argument between Jews and Christians and not an attempt to reject Jewish religion altogether. Jesus, after all, was a Jew, and often quoted the Hebrew scriptures (the OT), to communicate clearly to his heavily Jewish audience.
Yet, the violence Christians have done in Christ’s name against Jews is reprehensible: from calling them “Chris Killers,” to the pogroms of the self-righteous Christian Medieval Crusades to Hitler’s use of bad Christian theology in formulating the Final Solution and the Holocaust, to the demonstrations at Charlottesville with white supremacists wearing t-shirts with the Nazi phrases “blood and soil,” and “durm and strang” (storm and stress) emblazoned on them. These were not and are not “fine people” as Americans were led to believe.
What Dr. Williamson understood and would have us understand is that all faiths, Jewish, Christian, Moslem, et.al., can be radicalized with bad theology to whitewash evil in the form of unconscionable actions. Jesus was most thoroughly Jewish, but he pulled no punches in critiquing piety that appears to be righteous but is in fact complicit with evil. The gospel writers understood this and reported this in colluding with the Romans in Jesus’ death.
BUT even the Jewish leaders could not exert the death penalty. Caesar and his henchmen, like Pilate (who really was a bad person, despite John’s Gospel’s portrayal of him as a victim of circumstances), were jealous of their power. Crucifixion was a Roman death penalty Jewish leaders could not exercise.
John’s and the other gospel writers, demonstrating the High Priest Caiaphas’s and the Sanhedrin’s complicity with the Roman authorities, were practically shouting to their faithful readers, BEWARE whom you buddy up to. There will always be politicians who exploit their office by leading you to compromise your faith & co-opt your religion to do their bidding!
Ge
Over the past few years René and I had the opportunity to break bread with Clark several times. Dr. Williamson was deeply distressed at the complicity he found from so many churches & Christians in supporting values & policies that aren’t just unamerican but unchristian. He was scandalized by the upsurge in violent anti-Judaism across our country, along with racism, sexism and other anti-social attitudes and behaviors.
Our task as Christians is to name evil when we see it. NOT do Namecalling, as politicians running for office often do. That’s a whole different matter, but to name evil and injustice wherever they exist.
This can be tricky. Naming evil can appear to make us look like trying to make ourselves the hero. It’s like the daughter of Teddy Roosevelt said of her father. “He wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.”
Trouble erupts when people try to speak ex cathedra, as if from the throne of God or assume our will must be God’s will! Humility and modesty are always in order. But we all know how intolerable people who never admit being wrong can be. Yes, sometimes I’m one of them.
On the other hand, it does little good to so censor ourselves when we know “There is a time to speak” as there is a time to be silent. Silence is often unintended complicity with outcomes we abhor. We not only need to throw bouquets wherever good occurs but also name evil when it occurs. We may be entering a time in America when we all will have to choose to speak up against injustice or remain silent and unintentionally contribute to evil.
This is one reason I respected Dr. Williamson. It wasn’t just his brilliance in teaching church history & theology. It was because I always knew where he stood. Yes, he could call a spade a shovel. But he was a man of Christian integrity, who didn’t need to be liked and wwho never compromised his faith in order to win an audience.
He knew, as we must, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Rom. 3:23). Clark knew, that even if we aren’t formally trained theologians, we all have theologies, beliefs that make a difference in the way we act and think about our world and our lives.
The questions then become: Do we know God? Do we know what we believe and why we believe as we do? And do we know how our beliefs affect other people, our church, our nation, and our world? Because as Clark liked to say, “Beliefs have consequences.” He was right. They do! They always have! And they always will!
Thank you, Clark!
Rick
Among the many losses of Covid, our congregation lost the opportunity to properly say goodbye to the church’s pastor, Johnny Lewis. But that loss will be rectified on Sunday, August 1, when Johnny and his family will join us for worship at the usual time of 10:00 am. There will be a cake and cookie reception following the worship service.
Circle the date on your calendar and plan to be present in worship that Sunday. Please bring a note or card that expresses your appreciation for his ministry.
Over the last six weeks, the Shawnee Community Senior Pastor Search Committee has been receiving profiles from interested candidates and has been working on scheduling initial interviews with them. As of this week, we will have met with four candidates. While all of the candidates whose profiles we’ve received seem to have potential to be excellent leaders of a congregation, we are looking for a candidate who can meet the specific needs that SCCC has at this time. So far, two of them have received unanimous support from our committee as being top-notch choices. While we are continuing to review prospective profiles as they come in, we are also moving to further discussions with the two top candidates we’ve interviewed so far. We think that Shawnee Community would be very blessed to have either of these Pastors leading our congregation, and we are prayerfully considering the pros and cons of both, as well as giving them a chance to get to know us a little better. Please continue to support us with your prayers, and continue to have hope in the future of Shawnee Community Christian Church.
Blessings,
Andy Petrowsky
Chair – Senior Pastor Search Committee
Interim Pastors Rick and René Jensen begin a short sermon series on July 11. The series entitled “What Ministers Wish Church Members Knew” is aimed at helping prepare the church for its new pastor. Loosely based on a book of the same name by Disciple pastor Jan Linn, the series will suggest some of the things that are important for lay members to know so that they can support your new pastor in his or her ministry.
July 11 Failure Is Not an Option—It’s a Necessity
July 18 First Pastors and Congregations Get Married And Then They Fall in Love
July 25 The Care and Feeding of Your Pastor
