Life as an Introvert

Referring to myself as an introvert is relatively recent. The reason, I think, is because for many years I had no real idea how to distinguish the differences between an extrovert and an introvert. One person is outgoing, likes people and can talk in front of a large group while the other one doesn’t like being with people and can’t speak in front of any size group… right? Well, it wasn’t quite that bad, but I was in the neighborhood of that sort of thinking.

Since then I’ve learned a better way of understanding a significant difference between the two: What gives you energy versus what depletes your energy. That’s not a scholarly definition, but it sure helps me understand myself a little better. Reading and studying stimulates me. Two hours socializing at a party makes me want to crawl in my bed and sleep for eight hours. I can do both; I can enjoy both… but one pumps me up and the other wears me out. Knowing this about myself can help me strategize how I approach life, ministry, etc.

Now, it is true that, left to myself, I will probably choose to stay in my comfort zone and gravitate toward being alone or with a very small group of people. That’s why I’m so thankful I married a forceful extrovert who occasionally has to blast me out of that gravitational pull and get me out and about more. What a blessing she is to me in this respect!

Over the years I’ve been collecting articles on this subject that have been helpful to me in understanding how being an introvert can influence me as a husband, pastor, etc. I thought you might be interested in reading them as well.

Grace and Truth,
Dale

• How Introverted Pastors Love at Desiring God
• Help! I’m an Introvert… and a Pastor at Pastors.com
• Help! I Married an Introvert at Gospel Coalition
• Four Lies About Introverts at Gospel Coalition
• 7 Ways to Help an Introvert Engage at Meetings by Ron Edmondson
• True Confession: Life as an Introvert by Ron Edmondson
• How an Introvert Handles Awkward Situations by Ron Edmondson
• 7 False Assumptions about Introverts by Ron Edmondson (He’s got other posts on this subject as well, but I thought four was enough. You can check out his links for his other great posts.)
• Staying in Community When You are an Introvert at Building Church Leaders
• Leading as an Introvert at Building Church Leaders
• The Christian Introvert by Tim Challies at Crosswalk.com
• Introvert? No Apology Required by Adam McHugh at Crosswalk.com
• Introverts: You Can Evangelize by Whitney Hopler at Crosswalk.com

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John Piper on the Life and Ministry of Charles Spurgeon

One of the most encouraging messages I ever heard was from John Piper on the topic of the life and ministry of Charles Spurgeon, from Piper’s 1995 pastors conference. Click here to listen to or read the transcript from it. For that matter, Piper’s biographical messages that he gives annually at that conference are some of the most inspiring, convicting, and rewarding sermons I’ve ever heard. Whether you’re a pastor or a lay-person, you owe it to yourself to check these messages out. You can listen online or download them for later. Whichever you do, please listen to them. You’ll be glad you did. Click here to see the selection of messages.

Piper recently preached the following message on Spurgeon at Reformed Theological Seminary.
Enjoy,
Dale

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Men’s Easter Breakfast

Brothers,

I hope you already know about our 64th annual Men’s Easter Breakfast and are planning to attend. But just in case you haven’t yet decided, please let me formally invite and encourage you to join us this Saturday, at 8am, in the Family Life Center for a wonderful Southside tradition.

This is such a meaningful event for me. For almost 13 years I have enjoyed a great morning of food and fellowship with my father and my sons, as well as the other men of our church and community. Each year I see many generations of men gathering for this grand tradition. What a great legacy the men of our church left to us 64 years ago.

Please plan on coming and bring your son(s), father, grandfather, uncle, nephew, co-worker, neighbor, best friends, and anyone else who would enjoy this special time. In addition to the food and fellowship, we will also enjoy some singing (manly songs) as well as a great message by Rev. Mike Hudson of Ortega United Methodist Church.

So, to recap:

• This Saturday (March 30th)
• Southside UMC’s Family Life Center
• 8:00 – 10:00am

Please plan on coming as we prepare to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Stand Firm,
Dale

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Godly Men Believe God is Holy

Godly Men Believe that God is Holy

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. ² Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. ³ And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

⁴ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

⁵ “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

⁶ Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. ⁷ With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

In 1993, even though I was already a pastor, God revolutionized my faith by giving me a glimpse of his holiness. Any more than a glimpse and I’m not sure my heart could have taken it. I was studying R.C. Sproul’s book, The Holiness of God, and at the same time studying Paul’s understanding of grace in the Book of Romans. I still remember sitting in my house alone (this is before I was married), weeping over how good God’s grace really is. But I first had to understand how holy God truly is to appreciate his grace.

Like many folks born and raised in mainline Protestantism, I grew up hearing lots and lots about God’s love. And thank God for it! However, I think I came to understand God’s love as an entitlement which was due me. I mean, God is love after all… he owes me love. In reality, God’s love didn’t mean that much to me. Yet, as I began seeing God’s holiness through a biblical lens, I couldn’t help but be humbled…and all the more as I saw my fallen and sinful state as God did. Newton’s “Amazing Grace” started really making sense to me.

A.W. Tozer writes about this “aha” moment that I, like the prophet Isaiah, had. He says…

The sudden realization of his personal depravity came like a stroke from heaven upon the trembling heart of Isaiah at the moment when he had his revolutionary vision of the holiness of God. …[Isaiah] expresses the feeling of every man who has discovered himself under his disguises and has been confronted with an inward sight of the holy whiteness that is God.

Until we have seen ourselves as God sees us, we are not likely to be much disturbed over conditions around us as long as they do not get so far out of hand as to threaten our comfortable way of life. We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.

Godly men believe that God is holy, first of all, because that is what God has revealed to us about himself. He wants us to know he is a holy God. Second, I believe we must understand that God is holy because it truly impresses upon us how precious God’s love and grace really are and compels us to desire and appreciate God’s love and grace that much more. God forbid we should ever come to a place in our thinking where we believe love and grace are our due.

The third reason we must see God as holy is because God commands us to be holy because God is holy. God wants us to imitate him.  But we’re sinful and fallen, so how in the world can we ever obtain the holiness which is required of us? Tozer answers this question well…

We must hide our unholiness in the wounds  of Christ as Moses hid himself in the cleft of the rock while the glory of God passed by. We must take refuge from God in God.

This holiness God can and does impart to his children. He shares it with them by imputation and by impartation, and because he has made it available to them through the blood of the Lamb.

We must hide ourselves in Christ and put on his righteousness by grace through faith. Only then can we be holy.

Brothers, on this Lord’s Day, I encourage you to draw close to the One who was put to death for your transgressions and raised on the third day for your salvation… to make you like himself… to make you holy.

Have a great Lord’s Day today. I look forward to seeing you all this week.

Your Brother in Christ, Dale

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What is Pastoral Theology?

In September, 1989, I began my first year of seminary at Candler School of Theology. Like the rest of the incoming M.Div. students, I had to take an introduction to pastoral ministry course (I can’t recall the actual title of the course). I’m sure it was a fine class, but I was a clueless freshman and remember next to nothing about it.

However, in God’s kind providence, I did hold on to the text-book that we used. It has been an incredible blessing to me over the years as I have read it time and time again. It’s entitled, Pastoral Theology: Essentials of Ministry by Thomas Oden. Here’s the blurb about it from Christianbook.com…

This much-needed book fully integrates principles of pastoral care, leadership, and theology to restore ministers a clearly defined pastoral identity.  Moving from a critique of inadequate models for ministry–from community organizer to T.V. evangelist–Oden develops a more classical model, rich in its references to the past and compatible both with the Christian faith and theology through the ages and with current needs.

Further, Oden discusses the call to ministry; the meaning of ordination; pastoral self-understanding, role, and functions; biblical mandates for ministry; the issue of women in holy orders; Jesus as pastoral model; the pastoral office through out Christian tradition; and the five main areas of ministry: preaching, teaching, leading worship, administration, and pastoral care, with a special section on crisis ministry.  And with his hybrid of classical tradition and practice, Oden’s PASTORAL THEOLOGY will be a standard resource and reference in the filed for years to come.

The book really is quite good. And I believe, as the paragraph above indicates, because Oden so saturates the book in Scripture as well as the great Christian tradition, that this book is in many ways, timeless.

Here are a few quotes from the introduction…

Pastoral theology is that branch of Christian theology that deals with the office and functions of the pastor. It is theology because it treats of the consequences of God’s self-disclosure in history. It is pastoral because it deals with those consequences as they pertain to the roles, tasks, duties, and work of the pastor.

Pastoral theology is a special form of practical theology because it focuses on the practice of ministry, with particular attention to the systematic definition of the pastoral office and its function.

As theology, pastoral theology is attentive to the knowledge of God witnessed to in Scripture, mediated through tradition, reflected upon by systematic reasoning, and embodied in personal and social experience.

Yet it is not merely a theoretical statement or objective description of what occurs in ministry. It is also a practical discipline, for its is concerned with implementing concrete pastoral tasks rather than merely defining them. Its proximate goal is an improved theory of ministry. Its longer ranged goal is the improved practice of ministry.

It is not that practice cannot be taught. Practice must be practiced. Yet the practice of ministry can better be engendered by solid reflection in its theological and biblical grounding. More strongly put: It is dangerous to the health of the church for ministry to be practiced without good foundation in Scripture and tradition, reason and experience.

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The Significance of Your 9 – 5 Job

by Brian Brenberg at byFaith Magazine

On Labor Day, we should honor those who serve the Lord 9 to 5. But if you think I’m talking only about pastors and preachers, then you need to meet a man named Stephen.

Acts 6 opens with the Greeks complaining that their widows aren’t getting enough to eat in the daily distribution. The apostles, meanwhile, are working so hard to feed the widows that they can’t find time to preach. And as the church grows, the problem gets worse. So, like good economists, the apostles propose a division of labor: They’ll stick to preaching and let the disciples find somebody else to serve tables.

When we talk about “full-time” ministry today, it’s the apostles we usually have in mind—people whose daily work is devoted to preaching and teaching. The problem is that most of us aren’t preachers, and probably shouldn’t be. Most of us are much better at jobs that fall into the “non-preaching” category. To put it in the language of Acts 6, most of us are table servers. And most of us have no idea if this work matters to God.

So does it?

Learn the answer as you read the rest of this article by clicking here.

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Three Principles of My Ministry

I have been thinking and rethinking the purpose and trajectory of my ministry lately. It’s good to fine-tune your purpose/mission statements, etc., from time to time and that’s what I’ve been doing. In my case I’ve had to make sure that I’m grounding my own ministry in the sure foundation of clear biblical truths. Here’s what I’ve been chewing on during this latest brainstorming (or, light drizzle, as the case may be)…

The goal of my blog is to provide an online version of my ministry, which is…

To help men (but not only men) become all that God has created, redeemed, and called them to be in every sphere of their lives.

This purpose or ministry statement is built on my belief that there are implications to the fact that God has done just that… created us, redeemed us, and called (and continues to call) us. However, the truth is, we often don’t know what those implications are or what they should look like in our lives. My own calling from God is to help others discover what that threefold work of God means in their lives.

1.) God has created us. Therefore…

• We are created in God’s image.
• Though sinful, fallen, and broken, we have dignity.
• We have an ultimate purpose in the here and now (to glorify the God who created us).
• We have meaning and significance because we aren’t the results of some random accident of the universe.

2.) God has redeemed us. Therefore…

• We can know that we are loved by God (however, we must respond in trusting dependence to God’s loving initiative in Christ).
• We are new creatures in Christ, redeemed to know God as well as to grow in the grace and knowledge of God.
• We are commanded to become more like Christ by loving, trusting, following, and obeying him.
• We have the universal purpose of all who follow Christ to bear witness to Christ in this world through evangelism of those who don’t know Christ, edification of those who do know and follow Christ, and engagement with the world on behalf of God’s Kingdom.
• We can have confidence that our identity is in the Word (made flesh and revealed in and through holy Scripture) and not the world around us.
• We have a new family with whom we can grow, love, minister and worship.

3.) God has called us. Therefore…

• We can know that we have a unique purpose to which God has called us and are thus encouraged to pursue it with humility, focus, confidence and passion.
• Our work matters to God.
• Our relationships matter to God.
• It matters, if we are called to be married, how we think, speak, and live as husbands and wives.
• It matters, if we are called to be parents, how we think, speak, and live as mothers and fathers.
• We have particular gifts for ministry to discover, cultivate, and use in service to God and others.

I realize I have only touched the tip of the iceberg with these remarks. As I learn and grow I will certainly edit what I have written. But, for now, these thoughts help me with my own calling as a follower of Christ as well as what my ministry might focus on in service to those God has entrusted to my care. I pray that I will never cease to learn and grow with either one.

Grace and Truth,
Dale

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