Memorizing the Dessert Cart

One of my favorite moments from the Valentine's Dinner involved two students talking together about their area of service - the parade of sugary wonders known as the Dessert Cart.  If you didn't make it to the dinner this year, you missed out on more than a few wonderful things - including the delicious desserts hand-made by folks from our community and offered in abundance to guests at the Valentine's Dinner.  If you consider yourself a dessert person, the cart made you feel like you were in heaven.

Behind-the-scenes at the dinner, two students were working together to present the dessert tray to our guests.  The elder student, a tall, athletic young lady with a kind heart, and the younger student, an energetic middle school guy, worked together as a team on their dessert cart.  In a gentle way, the young lady asked the guy, "OK - can you name all of the desserts on the cart?"  A little reluctantly but with enthusiasm, the young man started to point at different desserts and say their names.  "Chocolate mousse.  Pecan pie.  Cherry cheesecake."  He had two levels on the cart that he had to cover, so his task wasn't an easy one!  When he stumbled over a name - "Moo-cha tort?" - he was gently corrected by his teammate - "No, that's moe-cah.  Mocha tort."  It was a delight to watch the two of them work together, help each other, and enjoy their service together at a wonderful event.

The Valentine's Dinner is quickly becoming a beloved tradition here at First Pres.  It's a truly intergenerational event - people of all ages and stages in life getting together for dinner in a great setting and for a great cause (all of the proceeds from the dinner benefit student missions, and students who plan on serving on our mission team are required to serve at the dinner).  While I certainly love the high-quality meal we enjoy and the fellowship at each table, my favorite part is watching students serve together and achieve goals they might never have considered possible - like memorizing the items on the dessert cart.  Mission and ministry like this happens because of the grace of Jesus, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the mercy God gives to each of us because He first loved us.  That's how students like the team I mentioned above could love and serve each other, which then became the foundation for their service to our guests.  I hope this becomes a model for all of us to follow in our life together at FPC.

Solo Dei gloria,

Travis

Pastors and Parents

"So how do you make it work?"

This was the question that pulled us together.  Standing in a hotel lobby on a beautiful January morning in Orlando, several other young pastors and I talked about living in the tension between pastoral ministry, schedules, self-care, and most of all - family.  How do we make it work?

It was a wonderful conversation that happened - funny enough - through the combined connections of Facebook and the Fellowship of Presbyterians.  Each of us came to Orlando for the annual gathering of the FOP, which was wonderful and rich.  We all wanted to find peers and colleagues with whom we could ask that tricky question: how do we make this work?  We came from very different ministry contexts - major cities, rural churches, from the Southwest to the Northeast.  So how did we get together?  I put up a post on a Fellowship discussion forum on Facebook, wondering if anyone else was interested in meeting up in Orlando to talk about the family/ministry tension.  Because of our shared commitment to gospel-focused mission and ministry - made clear by our alliance with the FOP - we all "got" each other and could share freely without having to wonder about where the others' theological convictions might be grounded.  Pastors worry about this kind of thing.  :)

The biggest thing we uncovered was that there is no "best" way to make these competing duties work perfectly in our lives.  One of the people from our group has found that working late at night is the best fit for their family.  Another suggested keeping a record of your daily activities, both for ourselves and our sessions' review, so that we stay accountable for the schedule-flexibility afforded to us in our callings.  One thing was clear: having the discretion of a pastor's schedule is a privilege, and the danger of using that discretion to spend too much time away from family is real.  My hope is that we'll continue our conversation at future FOP gatherings, keep in touch from time-to-time, and most of all, to pray for each other as we seek to follow Christ and share his Word in our ministry contexts.

Solo Dei gloria,

Travis

Leadership and Family Systems Theory

Our families are the single most critical "incubator" for the way we develop into adults.  Every one of us starts out with the same basic identity: the imago Dei - the image of God.  Every person you've ever met shares this trait with you and I; God made us in His image, and therefore, every person has value.  Our value isn't reduced or increased in any way by our life circumstances, but our ability to function in society is deeply driven by the way we grow up and who takes part in our development in our family of origin.

Leaders, of course, come from families.  Duh.  :)  But what if, as a leader, you and I look a close look at the ways in which we were raised, the language and culture surrounding us when we were kids, and also looked back at our family history and could see patterns of relationships played out across generations?  What if we could grow and develop as leaders by looking at who we are in Christ through this lens?

This, in essence, is what I got to do at a 4-day conference this past month.  I'm still toiling over my notes and scribbles from the conference, but in a word, it was a rich experience.  One of the main voices in our conversation came from the late Edwin Friedman, a psychologist and social scientist.  I've found his books to be deep and complex (in other words, I got lost in just a few pages).  The following video does a good job of expressing several facets of his work on family systems theory:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdcljNV-Ew

Based on this video, what does it mean to be a differentiated person?  A differentiated leader?  How might this be applied to the life and ministry of FPC?  Leave a comment below and let's see where the conversation goes.

Solo Dei gloria,

Travis