Barnabas File

During a recent webinar, my colleague Mark Tidsworth observed, “Every congregation is in redevelopment or transition.”    I agree, but my question is, “Do they realize it yet?”   In his classic work The Frog in the Kettle published in 1990, George Barna shared the metaphor of the frog residing a kettle where the temperature was steadily rising.  Barna suggested that the frog would not be aware of the rising heat until it was be too late to escape the boiling water. His take-away was that churches were in a similar situation. Things were slowly changing, churches were ignoring those changes, and they needed to respond before it was too late.   Societal and cultural changes in recent days have turned the heat up drastically and the change would be hard to ignore.  Even so, some of us are doing our best to try to get back to a “normal” that no longer exists.  The pandemic has accelerated cultural and societal changes that were already pres...

The man who came to my office was a retired moderate Baptist pastor who had moved to Tennessee recently.  He came to talk to me about ministry opportunities in the immediate area.  I expressed appreciation for his interest, asked him some questions about himself, told him a little bit about the nature of progressive Baptist life, promised to share his resume as opportunity presented itself, and suggested that he might want to expand his search to some other denominations in middle Tennessee.  He finally said to me, “I come in here asking for your help and all you can tell me is that I might have to seek a place in another denomination?  That’s not very helpful!” Helpful or not, I had defined reality from my experience.  He had the choice to accept it or not. In this case, he did not.  The late Max DePree wrote, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.  The last is to say thank you.” When we go to someone asking for insig...

I was listening to a podcast recently that featured a computer systems engineer who had worked with six different tech firms over the last 20 years.   He had some interesting stories, but what struck me most about his presentation were some of the words he used—words like “mission,” “values,”   “making a difference,” and “calling.” These are all terms that I am accustomed to hearing in a religious context.  In the church we affirm that we have a mission—the missio Dei (or “mission of God”), we help believers recognize and act on their values, we encourage congregants to “make a difference” in the world, and we facilitate each person discovering his or her calling. How did this connection or transference originate?  For a number of years, various types of companies have emphasized the need for a clear vision and a mission statement.  These terms could very well have come from other sources such as the military.  The use of more values-laden terms...