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JoeBoysel
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Name: Joe
Country: United States
State: Ohio
Metro: Columbus
Birthday: 1/17/1969
Gender: Male
Interests: All things sports but especially football (American!), baseball and golf. I also enjoy academics, travel, reading, and good movies. Most of all I love my family and spend as much time with them as possible.
Expertise: I seek to be a good husband, father, professor, and pastor. I'm inconsistent at best but I am at least persistent!
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
8/3/2005
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I am writing a dissertation that argues that Sunday service of Word and Table (Preaching and Eucharist) is the weekly paradigm for shaping Christians into whole persons. In short, it argues that truncating the Sunday service by removing either preaching or the Lord's Supper from the program leaves the believer without an essential nutrient necessary for their spiritual development.
Now I do stipulate that God can make up for whatever we lack and, in fact, God often does provide grace in extraordinary ways when church leaders fail to provide that which they have been charged to oversee. However, that does not mean that the primary means of grace are superfluous. Nor does it mean that Christians are just as well without one (or both) of the means as they would be if it were provided.
If you would indulge me for a moment, then, by stipulating to the claims of my thesis without argument...just...well...for the sake of another argument, I wonder: What would it take for the church to change? I mean, what if I'm right and all Christians need a weekly diet of preaching and Communion? Could they get it in their present worshiping environments? Would or could the historic, sacramental churches begin to have a preaching piety that matches their Eucharistic praxis? And would or could Evangelicals ever start providing a weekly Communion service that is really a Lord's Supper for the entire community?
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Is Christianity as we know it threatened by the gospel itself? I mean
does it seem to you that if Jesus showed up just like Joan Osbourne
said, "A slob like one of us" that those who bear his name would much
recognize him? All through Advent we proclaimed the message of the
prophets, "the Messiah is coming!" and then we marveled at how humble
were the surroundings of the nativity - shepherds were witnesses! But
in church we were all business until we chuckled at the children in
their pageants that were so hokey! Where else does God show up and we
miss him?
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| A Long and Winding Road
Last January I went to Birmingham, AL for the Winter Meeting of the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA). When I left I was on "cloud nine" because I thought I finally found a people with whom I shared a heart for mission and ministry. I thought I found a home! As I left for the six-hour drive back to my home near Lexington, KY I was so happy and so full of excitment. In fact, I was so stoked that I actually turned on the wrong parkway...and I didn't even realize it for nearly an hour! Fortunately I was going the right direction so I checked the map, made a correction, and my mistake only cost me about half an hour or so. But as I was driving I had a sudden unsettled feeling: Could this be a metaphor, a message from the Lord? Could it be that I was on the "wrong road" vocationally and ecclesiastically? I comforted myself by saying, "No, you knucklehead, you just made a wrong turn, don't make it to be more than it is." But deep down I knew - I don't know how I knew, I just did - that that ride home, and taking the wrong parkway, was more than a simple navigational mistake, it had a meaning.
Lately my thoughts have gone back to last January and that ride home. It occured to me that I hadn't taken the "wrong road," I had taken the longer way. Today I am working as a college professor and attending an AMiA congregation (one of only two in Ohio!). I did not plant a church in my first year out of my doctoral program, like I thought. But perhaps it was the Lord's way of telling me that the time (and place) just wasn't right. It doesn't mean the sense of home I felt in the AMiA was way off. Rather it meant (or might have meant, if it meant anything!) that what was in my heart was right, but the specifics were not as I thought. What do you think?
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| Parishless Pastor
So here I am, waiting to start my first semester as a college prof - all stoked about classes and students. I'm trying to be realistic too: lots of students will be coasting through, only a handful will really want to learn. But I'm also hopeful...in a doggedly naive way. (Ignorance is bliss!) In fact, I really feel called to this.
And yet, there is an angst. I am a pastor. A pastor without a parish. There are no sermons to be written, no liturgies to plan - heck there aren't even any old ladies who want to roast my buns! ...And I miss it.
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| SWEET CONFUSION
Am I insane? Just days after the church vote in Tucson (which went very well) I had an interview with a small college in central Ohio. They too offered me a position! So here I was forced to decide between a GREAT church in AZ and a GREAT teaching job - something I've long sensed a call towards. How does one decide? I didn't want money to be the deal maker (that's just sleezy), but I didn't know how I could determine the will of the Lord.
Since they just wanted to interview me, my wife didn't drive the hour from our family's place to the school. Unfortunately, however, that also meant she could not have a "feel" for the place either. I prayed on the way down that the Lord would open a door so she could get a clear leading that I could compare to my own.
Well, it was great; in the conversation about me coming the president of the university asked what my wife did. I told him and he straightaway asked if she'd be willing to come in for an interview! To make a long story short they offered her a job she'll really love and I felt the Lord had answered our prayers for guidance.
Why is it, though, that these wonderful people in AZ had to go through the dashed hopes of setting their hearts on a pastor whom they lost before he even arrived? It seems so sad. And why is it that these decisions are never easy? | | |
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