Church, Culture, Book Reviews
John Beeson
The Long Journey of Self-Knowledge in a Culture ...

“We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in US history. It is greater than the First and Second Great Awakening and every revival in our country combined...but in the opposite direction.” This is the conclusion of the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching in America by sociologists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe. In The Great DeChurching, pastors Jim Davis and Michael Graham unpack why and how over the past twenty-five years, forty million of those who formerly attended church no longer do so.

The Long Journey of Self-Knowledge in a Culture of Confusion
Christian Living, Prayer
John Beeson
The Air Raid Siren

Jerusalem, Israel

3:15 am, April 13

 

I sat up in bed to a wailing sound I had never heard before, but knew immediately: an air raid siren. Our building rattled to the booms of interceptors from Israel’s missile defense system hitting their inbound targets. I pulled back the curtains and watched as sprays of light streaked the sky.

 Iran launched 170 drones, 20 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s purported attack on an Iranian embassy in Syria.

The Air Raid Siren
Christian Living, Nature
John Beeson
The Ground Where Saguaros Thrive

Nothing is more iconic to the Tucson landscape than the saguaro. The emblematic cactus is to the Sonoran Desert what the palm tree is to Miami: hard to imagine without it. Saguaros typically live between one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy-five years, not sprouting its trademark arms until around thirty to seventy years of its life and growing to around fifty feet tall.

For those Sonoran Desert natives, we intuitively know where saguaros thrive. They love the rocky (both granite and volcanic) soil at the foothills of the five beautiful mountain ranges that surround Tucson.

The Ground Where Saguaros Thrive
Leadership, Wisdom, Vocation
John Beeson
Anger, Retaliation, and My Scion xB

I drove a little manual 2005 Scion xB for about eight years. It finally gave out after 230,000 miles. I loved that little car. It was fuel-efficient and required minimal maintenance. But it is undeniably close to the least powerful car on the road. I’m pretty sure that on its specs, next to 0-60mph, it says, “Eventually!”

Unless I was lined up against someone from a nearby retirement community, I was the last car to reach the speed limit coming off a stoplight. Unsurprisingly, more aggressive drivers with more powerful vehicles tended to treat my little Scion like a safety cone on the road, more like an obstacle than a fellow traveler.

Anger, Retaliation, and My Scion xB
Family, Leadership, Parenting, Marriage
John Beeson
The Top Ten Ways to Lead in Your Home (and ...

In the past post we considered the biblical priority of leading in our homes before stepping into leadership callings outside of our home.

When I was asked to speak to our Mom’s Matter group on leading well in the home I was a bit intimidated. I felt far from equipped to speak as a man to women on the topic of leadership. And so, I did the only thing I could think of: I asked wise, godly women who were also great leaders. Starting with my wife, I began to listen to the advice my female friends offered on leadership in the home and beyond.

The Top Ten Ways to Lead in Your Home (and Organization, Too!)

Leadership

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Choosing Our Values

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Choosing Our Values

Like individuals, every organization has a unique beauty. But like individuals, no organization is without warts. The sooner you can look your organization in the mirror and make an honest appraisal of your beauty and your warts, the better. It’s a dead end to either become obsessed by your warts or to become infatuated by your beauty.

By God’s grace, New Life’s staff culture is more beautiful than when I arrived two years ago. There are lots of reasons for that, but none more significant than the process we went through a year ago to create a staff culture document and then to begin to invest time and energy toward making strides toward our staff culture document.

The process of choosing those values was messy, but the mess was important. Ultimately the process took just less than three months. I share our process not because I think we navigated the process perfectly or that we’ve arrived or that I would recommend the same exact process for another organization, but because there were important points of learning along the way for us that I hope can benefit you.

1.       We committed to a process

Not everyone was thrilled that we were taking a significant amount of time to walk through developing a document that, to some, either didn’t seem to offer much hope for change, or was so obvious it didn't seem to need to be stated with a document. But everyone agreed that for it to truly be our staff's document, we all needed to take ownership. Furthermore, we agreed with the simple ground rules that our staff culture values would be those which represented “who we are at our best.” That spoke to the pessimists in the room, who might be tempted in such a document to focus on the warts.  And it spoke to the optimists in the room, who might be tempted to include values that are great, but aren’t reflective of who we are.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       Three Predictors of Porn Use: Jay Stringer explains, "Perhaps you’ve found yourself not able to turn off your allure to porn. If so, a far more beneficial approach to recovery than combating lust is to focus on the themes that drive and necessitate your use of pornography. Until these themes are transformed, you will find yourself in the same, pernicious cycle of pornography use."

2.       How to Heal the Damage Caused by Family Conflict: Mark Gregston wisely reflects, " Not following up on hurtful actions of confrontations to either correct the mistakes you’ve made or affirm the relationship is what allows conflict to cause damage to your relationship with your child.   Remember that you’re not only resolving issues that you have with your child, but, more importantly you are setting the example of conflict resolution and teaching your child how to admit fault, assume a position of humility, and ask for forgiveness for any wrongdoing; all characteristics in a person’s life that are more caught than taught."

3.       5 Honest Struggles Church Leaders Don't Want to Admit: Carey Nieuwhof with a good reminder of the lies leaders can easily get entrapped by, "Greater faithfulness should result in greater impact in ministry. Pursue God, and pursue a great mission. Both are critical. But God doesn’t reward the most faithful with the best results."

4.       The Best Preacher in the World: David Murray says, " Every church needs two preachers. We need a human preacher, one who is visible, audible, tangible. But we also need a divine preacher, one that is invisible, inaudible, and intangible. I’m speaking of the Holy Spirit, without whom the work of the human preacher is in vain."

5.       Girl Scout Marketing Meeting: Jon Crist will have you laughing at the silliness of the Girl Scout's marketing plan.

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Breakfast is Served

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Breakfast is Served

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Just about a year ago we went through an exercise as a staff that has proved one of the most important things I’ve done on staff at any organization. It was messy and it took way longer than we thought it would take (about two months), and the end result wasn’t shocking or ground-breaking, but despite all of that, the exercise was a fulcrum point for us as a staff and as an organization.

What did we do? We created a staff culture document, which named our values as a staff. In the third post, I will share the full document, but in this post, I will share the values we chose and why I am convinced staff values are so important. In the next post I will share what the process looked like.

Our values are:

  1. Humble
  2. Loving
  3. Prayerful
  4. Hard Working
  5. Fun
  6. Collaborative
  7. Trustworthy

We are far from the first organization to create a staff culture document and our values are not unique. In fact, there may be organizations out there who might share our exact seven values. But the process of putting the document together was invaluable for us as a staff. And the values themselves have become anchoring points for who we are and who we aspire to be.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       Are you Addicted to Your Phone? Research finds that 40% of cellphone usage is compulsive. I'm guilty as charged: "Finding that the average user unlocked their phone more than 10,000 times a year — or about 28 times a day — the researchers identified about 4,000 phone interactions a year as being “compulsive” (i.e., the owner had no particular act in mind when engaging). Equally eye-opening was the finding that the highest decile of smartphone enthusiasts — or the top ten percent of users — opened their device 60-plus times every 24 hours."

2.       The Dangers of Success: Paul Alexander captures some of the most significant dangers of success succinctly. One of those are our motives: " It’s easy to hide our motivation and heart in the apparent external success of the churches we’re building. I’m not saying every church leader has poor motives, far from it! But it’s easy to ignore motive when you’re experiencing success."

3.       Leadership Comes Back to the Home: Rich Holdeman on the significance that the office of elder is reserved for those who manage their household well, "Good managers know the people that they manage.  They know their strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, fears and aspirations.  Simply put, good managers put the people under them in positions where those people can grow and succeed.  Really good managers do this in such a way that when things go well, the people under them get all the credit.  Conversely, when things do not go well, good managers take the heat.  Because good managers have the well-being of those they manage in mind, people love to work for them."

4.       In Defense (Somewhat) of Self-Help: Samuel James with a fair critique for those of us who consider ourselves above the self-help genre, "For all my Christian culture’s scorn of self-help, couldn’t we at least have talked about actually living life in a non-theoretical, non-gospelly cliche way? One of the things I am having to slowly unlearn is the idea that having good theology is the most important thing in life. I cringe even as I write that sentence, because for years to even think a sentence like that indicated, I believed, a willingness to embrace bad theology."

5.       Pano Photography Awards: Spend some time with this jaw-dropping collection of photographs. What a world God has created!

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       Netflix Thinks You're Bored and Lonely: Trevin Wax pushes back on the way our culture thinks about boredom, "The entertainment industry expects us to see boredom as bad, which is why advertisers, sponsors, filmmakers, and game-makers collaborate to create shows, movies, and games that will capture our attention and keep us preoccupied. There’s money to be made in eliminating boredom. But is boredom always a problem, or could it be a possibility? Talk to people whose job it is to make things with their hands or create things in their head, and they’ll tell you that great things happen when your mind runs free."

2.       Ruth Graham Didn’t Waste Her Life: Dave Boehi reflects on the lessons we can learn from the beautiful marriage of Ruth and Billy Graham. He reflects on Ruth’s sacrifice, “One writer for The Washington Post wrote, ‘What a sign of those times, one might say. Or, how sad. The world will never know what else Ruth Graham … could have accomplished …’ What the world often fails to understand is that God often calls people to set aside their own plans in order to follow Him … and then He uses them in greater ways as a result.”

3.       Evidence of Evangelical Political Pragmatism: A discouraging survey I recently came across. Self-described evangelicals' position on how important a politician's morality is has shifted dramatically since the 1990s. And not in a good way.

4.       High-Stakes Leadership: This Read to Lead podcast with Constance Derickx is loaded with good stuff. Derickx definition of courageous impatience and patience particularly struck me.

5.       Why (almost) No One Wants to Host the Olympics Anymore: The 2004 games garnered 12 bids from around the world. Zeeshan Aleem reports that the next two summer and winter Olympics received a total of two bids each. Why? Former cities who hosted the Olympics are littered with unsightly abandoned facilities and a huge price tag for the honor: "Pyeongchang, South Korea, built a brand new Olympic stadium to host the Winter Games this year. The 35,000-seat stadium cost $109 million to build. And it will be used just four times before it’s demolished."

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       13 Things a Pastor Should Never Tell a Congregation: I've heard at least half of these. And Amen the critique of each one. The first three on Joe McKeever's list: "1. 'I’m thinking of quitting. I haven’t decided. Pray for me.'; 2. 'I’m no theologian.'; 3. 'God told me to tell you … '"

2.       How to Re-Shape Your Conscience: Michael Taylor with sage advice for a reality we all face, " For most of us, the normalization and celebration of sin has become so pervasive in the entertainment we grew up enjoying that it can be difficult for us to discern whether or not God is pleased with our lifestyle. There is often a cognitive dissonance between what we believe about God and his law and how we live. So, how are Christians meant to navigate this complicated issue?"

3.       What is Reformed Theology?: Benjamin Vrbicek answers this question by focusing both on the historic and theological components: "When we seek God through Scripture and church dogma, we can be made right with God only through Christ, his mother, priests, and saints, by trusting in God’s grace and the sacraments, as long as we do enough good works alongside our faith.”

4.       A Visual Representation of Just How Split Our Politics Have Become: There truly is no middle ground any longer. And both parties have reduced their platforms to a particular set of issues. " The data viz designer Mike Cisneros has mapped out the political positions of every member of Congress ever, starting with the first Congress in 1789 up until the 115th Congress that’s currently filling the news cycle with so much anguish. The central visualization is a giant scatterplot, where positions are mapped based on how conservative or liberal each Congress member is economically and socially."

5.       Carnival Scam Science: This really fun video tells you the science behind what you already know: carnival games are rigged against you.

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Celebrating One Year

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Celebrating One Year

Today we celebrate our first year at The Bee Hive. 55 weekly posts, 52 recommendation posts, and 14 book reviews are in the books. I offer two thank you’s and two reflections:

1)      Thank you, dear reader. When I was a freshman in college and really caught the writing bug, I brought home my favorite papers and had my parents read them. Twenty years later, I recognize what a gift it is to have had parents who offered the gift of their time and focus to care about something I cared about. There were undoubtedly more than a few of the 121 posts over this past year that weren’t as compelling for you, kind reader, as they were in my head. Thank you for persisting with me. Thank you for your time. Thank you especially for those who subscribed, for those who shared, and for those who commented. You don’t know what a blessing that is to me.

2)      Thank you, beloved editors. Behind the scenes are four faithful editors

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Why I Need You to Help Me Do What I’m Supposed to Do as a Pastor

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Why I Need You to Help Me Do What I’m Supposed to Do as a Pastor

Moses was crushing it. The people loved him. He had lines out the doors for those who were hoping to hear a word from God or a word of wisdom from Moses.[i] Then his father-in-law, Jethro, showed up and told him he was leading poorly, not well.

Moses had every reason to not listen to Jethro’s advice. There were no real indicators Moses’s leadership style wasn’t working. And yet Moses heard Jethro’s advice, and humbly heeded it.

In Ephesians, Paul makes it clear that this is no mere stylistic choice for a godly leader. Healthy leadership is characterized by “equip[ing] the saints for the work of the ministry.”[ii] Did you catch that, healthy leadership isn’t characterized by doing “the work of the ministry” but rather by equipping the congregation to do the work of the ministry.

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Mark Zuckerberg, Meet Jethro

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Mark Zuckerberg, Meet Jethro

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, recently claimed that as church attendance declines, Facebook will become the new church for people, offering a sense of community and meaning.[i] But Facebook can’t be the church, and not just because it isn’t built on a true foundation of hope in the good news of Jesus Christ. But it also can’t be the church because it can’t effectively form a community of a people on mission, serving God and one another together for God’s transformative purpose. In other words, Facebook neither has the content nor the form that can replace the church.

My hunch is that most Christians get the content part of what makes Zuckerberg’s claim faulty. We get that we need the gospel for the church. But I think that fewer might understand the gap on the form front. In other words, what am I really missing out on if I listen to worship music throughout the week, watch clips of my favorite preachers on YouTube and then share about my faith on social media?

One thing you’re missing out on is God’s purpose for you in serving a gathered community, the church.

One of my favorite passages in the Bible is the unlikely encounter between Moses and his father-in-law, Jethro, in Exodus 18.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       Always Looking, Never Wanting to Find: Mark Loughridge considers a reality for us in our cultural moment, "It’s cool to search for God, but uncool to find him. People talk about wanting to find spiritual reality and deeper meaning, about wanting to get in touch with God. The idea of looking for him sounds good—the search, the journey—but the reality of actually finding him is too much."

2.       Ordinary Beauty: Melissa Edgington shares an ordinary story of God's grace, "At the cash register stood a young girl with a nose ring. Her hair was pulled back, but long blonde ringlets framed her face. There is no telling how many hours she had been on her feet in that store, but still she smiled and asked how my night was going. And then, while I fished in my gigantic black hole of a purse for my wallet, she told me that I look pretty tonight. Just like that. She handed me that grace. That generous gift to a tired mama who almost certainly doesn’t look pretty tonight. And I was surprised by how shocked I was."

3.       Accept Your Leadership: Tim Challies with a call to men, "Your family needs to be led. Your wife and children need you to be the leader God calls you to be. He calls you to lead in love, to study the life and character of Jesus Christ, and to imitate him. Do that and God will be pleased. Do that and your family will be blessed. Run to win by accepting and embracing your leadership."

4.    When Should a Church Address a Current Event: In light of the recent outbreak of racist events, Trevin Wax processes whether or not a church ought to publicly address a given issue. He begins by sharing the online response from a certain quarter regarding the Charlottesville protest, "On social media, multiple people counseled churches on how to respond the next morning. Some called for condemning white supremacy and Neo-Nazis by name. Others offered prayer for pastors who were revising their sermons or penning statements to read before the church. This sentiment popped up a few times: If your church doesn't address this tomorrow, find another congregation. The social media fever implied that failing to speak on the issue indicated you were taking the side of white supremacists."

5.       Is that Hate Speech? I encourage you to take this New York Times baffling quiz on what and what does not qualify as hate speech on Facebook.

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