Barnabas File

When Rita and I moved to Columbus, Georgia, in 1965, we visited Benning Hills Baptist Church where Sidney Waterhouse was pastor.     The following Sunday I was an usher and within a few weeks we were teaching a Sunday school class.     I certainly would like to think that this is because we were such apparently outstanding leaders (Rita is, I am not).     That was not the case, however. Benning Hills was located just outside the main gate of Fort Benning (now Fort Moore), and the post had recently sent several units to the Republic of Vietnam.     They had lost not only a number of military personnel but families who chose to relocate.   The church was experiencing what I refer to as “churn.”  This is a rather robust word.  As a noun,  It means “ a container in which cream is stirred or shaken to make butter ” (yes, I have seen one).  As a verb, it means “to stir or agitate violently .”  Benning Hi...

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.  (Ephesians 5:15-16, NIV) I came across this passage the other day and, as sometimes happens, it caught my attention for some reason.  Perhaps it was because of the various challenges that come from the permacrisis in which we now live—religious disillusion, factionalism, economic stresses, violent conflicts—you get the idea. In digging a bit deeper, I found this translation by Eugene Peterson from The Message: So, watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get. These are desperate times! (Ephesians 5:15-16, The Message)   Struck by the harsh implications of the word “desperate,” I looked up the definition.  This is what I found: “ feeling, showing, or involving a hopeless sense that a situation is so bad as to be impossible to deal with. ”   But in spite of the hopeless nature of life’s circum...

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...

Amidst the bills and circulars, good news sometimes comes to my snail mailbox.     This week I received a church newsletter of something unexpected and positive that has come of the COVID-19 crisis.     This church usually had 500 to 700 in multiple Sunday services prior to the pandemic.     They continued and upgraded their livestream service after the shutdown.     Although they have resumed one service with social distancing and other precautions and have 300 in the sanctuary every week, they also have over 5000 watching or listening through an online presence!     As a result, they have upgraded their production capability with additional cameras, improved lighting, and updated control systems.    They are investing for the future.   To put this in context, this is a church near a large military facility, so they have former members scattered across the nation and world, so they already had an audience prepared to conn...

Whatever your career--service, industry, farming, education, church--you are being challenged in this VUCA--volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous--moment. You have to reimagine the way you do business; that is, the way you operate.     THNK recently posted a blog suggesting how we can take advantage of this opportunity, and we can apply their insights to the church. First, take advantage of this time to do things differently.  As we think about the church, clergy and lay leaders have stepped and tried many new things during this time of pandemic, but a key learning is that the church is the people and not the building.  When worship and other gatherings cannot meet in a specific physical location, leaders have found different ways to connect people.  Perhaps we have learned some lessons here that we want to continue. For example, livestreaming services have offered the opportunity for those who are not able to attend physical worship to ...