Sunday Lunch

As to some new ideas to stop the bleeding, first of all I would like to recommend family devotions. From the earliest times in the lives of your children, awaken your whole family around 4:30 am, and put together an hour long presentation of scripture, sharing, prayer requests, and prayer. Everyone should share, and sleeping is absolutely forbidden…

Okay, not really.

Look, I don’t want to diss anyone. Seriously, if family devotions were a part of your upbringing and it was meaningful and life-altering, I honor you and especially your parents for what they were able to do. Unfortunately, as well-intentioned as they might be, it is not the experience of most people, including parents and their children that devotions accomplished what was intended. More often than not they were forced, dreaded by everyone, too long (no matter how short), ineffective, and generally… uh…hated.

The intentions of family devotions are so good. But is there a way to engage your family in meaningful conversations about your faith and about the things that count? And can we find a way to make that happen naturally and spontaneously?

An idea came to me as I walked through my own home one afternoon. I was picking up papers, crafts, worksheets, coloring pages, loose cotton balls, and some multicolored pipe-cleaners that were all over the house that day. And it occurred to me that this represented just one week in the church life of my daughter. This pile was a collection of work that she had been given beginning with Sunday School on Sunday morning, Children’s Church after that, Sunday night worksheets, Wednesday night choir, and followed by her age-appropriate missions program. Wow!

Talk about drinking from a fire hose! She had at least five different lessons from five different teachers about five different subjects with five different scripture verses to memorize. But then, she would be doing that all over again starting the next Sunday morning. Five more of everything. I started looking through the pile and realized that none of what she had heard that week matched any of the three sermons I had heard in the same time frame.

Then a thought hit me. If the church wanted to help facilitate my being the point man in my daughter’s spiritual formation, why couldn’t they plan it out to where all the pastors were using their creativity to coordinate lesson plans? Wait, hear me out. It would have really helped if my daughter and I were learning the same things, you, know, at our own levels, but the same concepts, maybe even the same scriptures at the same time. That might actually spark some authentic and unforced conversation between us.

Then I thought about Sunday lunch. The Sunday afternoon meal after church has always been a family thing for us. How cool would it be if the conversation around the table at lunch time on Sunday afternoon was to eventually come around to the subject matter of the day? What would it do for our kids if they were to become involved in, included in the deep issues discussed at table on Sunday afternoon? Not compulsory, not strained, but naturally included, encouraged. What if their opinions actually mattered? (I’ll go here next.)

This is something with which we have experimented, and we can see real potential for the future as we grow into having just such a creative planning team. Some object lessons work for all ages. Videos, movie clips, and larger metaphors can bridge or can be made age-appropriate. Whatever tools we have at our disposal. Shouldn’t we be the most creative people on earth?

Just my first idea. What do you think?

At the End of the Day

I don’t know what you do when you have a major decision to make, but I do some pretty dramatic stuff if the choice is particularly difficult. When everything is on the line, I don’t want to be casual about it. Deciding whether or not to start a church was arguably the most important decision of my life up to this point. So it was time for some drama.
I learned while studying and teaching the Old Testament that the “fleecing” that God allowed Gideon to do was not appropriate for me. You know the: Okay, God, if you want me to do this then let this other thing happen kind-of-thing. So, for example if I were to say, “God, if you want me to start a church, then let someone who doesn’t know we’re even considering it come and tell me we’re supposed to do it.” Or maybe, “If we’re supposed to do this, then let someone give an anonymous donation of several million dollars for the cause.” See, that would be inappropriate for me to ask for. So that was out.
The next thing I do—short of lightning or an audible voice—is to make a “pro / con” list. That’s where you draw a line down the center of a yellow legal pad and write “pro” on the left side and “con” on the right side. Okay, yeah, let’s do that. So I listed all the reasons for (pro) starting a church versus all the reasons not to (con). This turned out to be a rather futile exercise, because I was leaving a job for which I had years of education and experience. I had a great salary and benefits and a certain reputation in a rather controlled sampling of my peers. Plus security, retirement, and stability are not something to ignore at my age. And all of these things were on my “con” side. I would be leaving these things behind.
However, on the “pro” side were things like adventure, creativity, and challenge. None of those give me any hope of retirement before the age of 80. So that approach was a bust.
Now what?
I do believe in wise counsel. I’m certainly aware that I’m not the first guy to come up against a hard decision. So I sought the input of several whose opinion I value. One of those stood out. In fact, his words to us became the theme song of our step of faith.
Jeff Lucas is an internationally known speaker and author. Although England is his land of origin, America has also fallen in love with him. He now shares almost equal time between the two. And Carbondale has been a frequent stop for him over the last several years.
While we were in the throws of decision-making, Jeff paid us a visit. He gave us some really good input and insight into new ways of doing and thinking about church. But the best advice we received in the weeks during our dilemma were these. Jeff said, “Here’s the only question you have to answer: At the end of the day, has God called you to do this?”
That may seem so simple—kind of a “duh!” But those straightforward words became our answer. When we looked at it from that perspective, we knew the answer.
“Yes.”