Timothy's Thoughts

I woke up this morning with discipleship on the brain. For the past three days our church leadership has been talking discipleship and now I’m trying to figure out where that all fits. Part of my struggle is because we went through DiscipleWay training a few years ago and I can’t help but compare the two. All of the stuff we heard on night one this week seemed awfully familiar. I know we need to be making disciples who make disciples. In spite of the instructor saying that wasn’t what he was taught, I can’t say that. I grew up in a small church and for all the disadvantages of small churches, discipleship comes naturally to them. And then you have DiscipleWay, which is a very practical method of disciple making. Even if I’m not leading people through the material, I find that in teaching situations I am drawing on it to teach people the proper way to study the Bible, to pray, etc. Someone said they felt discouraged by the implication that we’ve been doing it wrong all these years. I d...

G asoline shortages is the word of the day. Some stations have shut off their pumps and it is expected to get worse until the refineries that were shut down by Harvey come back online. Recognizing that we are producing about twenty percent less gasoline than we normally use, we ought to drive less so that people who need gasoline the most will have it available. But let’s get real. For most of us the real concern is that we don’t want to get stuck waiting for gas at a gas station or have to go station to station until we find one that has gas. So here are nine ways to not get stuck waiting for gas. 1. Buy Gas Early in the Morning The reality is that there is gas available, so if you get out before everyone else then you are more likely to find gas. During the night there are truck drivers out refilling tanks and demand for gas is low. 2. Use the Most Fuel Efficient Vehicle If you have two vehicles and one uses less gas than another then you won’t have to buy as much gas. But there is ...

W hy are young adults dropping out of church? It’s a question I’ve been giving thought to lately and I write this not so much to answer the question but to put those thoughts in written form. More specifically, I’m not so interested in why young adults are dropping out as much as I’m interested in why they are missing. Of course, they would be missing if they drop out, but 30% don’t stop attending church and about 75% either don’t stop attending or they return to church. Effectively, that means there is only a 25% dropout rate, but you sure can’t tell it by looking at some churches. We often see churches where they have students and they have senior citizens, but there is a gap between the age groups. If a church is running 25 students in their children and teen ministries, they should expect to see about 35 who are between the ages of 18 and 54. A church that has fewer people between 18 and 54 than they have between 0 and 18 isn’t doing something right, but what? They Aren’t What We T...

A theists aren’t very open minded but they do ask some interesting questions. One atheist asked, “where is your God?” and then he said, “Show me your God without using science or a book that is clearly written by idiots.” Clearly, he doesn’t want me to actually show him God, but hidden behind his vitriol is the question, “Why can’t we see God?” Why do we need the Bible to tell us that God exists? Why do we need science to show us that there are things that simply can’t be done without an intelligent being creating the Universe? For that matter, can science show us that? I suppose we all have some form of image of God. For some it is that of some big guy on a big thrown with a long white beard. I suppose I saw a picture like that one time. In Sunday School when I was a kid the images of God were a drawing that showed a big bright spot. Interestingly, when the Children of Israel left Egypt the image of God that they created was that of a calf. And just in case you doubted that’s what the...

A re your prayers like mine? When I pray to ask the Lord for something I find myself expecting a miracle. But let’s real. Miracles are rare. Even in Bible times they were rare. If they weren’t rare then they wouldn’t be a miracle. So, if millions of people are praying and looking for a miracle, that probably means that millions of people are looking for something they will never receive. I know that sounds terrible, but that’s the way it is. Let me reword that so it is clear. Because miracles are so rare, you will probably live your whole life and never see one. And if your prayers are like mine and you pray hoping that the Lord will answer through a miracle that means you are going to experience a lot of “unanswered” prayer. That may be why so many of us don’t fully appreciate the value of prayer. We set ourselves up for failure by praying for God to do things he isn’t going to do. He’s not going to miraculously make the traffic in front of us disappear. He’s not going to miraculously...

O n Facebook I posted a quote without context. It was interesting that people took it in so many different ways. I didn’t tell them who I was quoting or what the person was talking about when he said it. It may be beneficial for me to add some context. The quote? “People aren’t looking for a friendly church; they are looking for friends.” [1] Without context people will read their own assumptions into this statement. For example, there are plenty of churches that want to be known as a “friendly church.” Many churches think they are friendly whether they are or not. So, a person at one of these “friendly churches” might take this statement as saying that the reason people don’t want to be at church is because they would rather hang with their friends. Or they might read something into the “friend” part of the statement and assume that the “friend” is Jesus. Neither of those had anything to do with why I posted the statement. I was looking at some articles about growing a Sunday school c...

I n stories we often see a character known as the “half-man.” This character may or may not be person, but I always think of a man sitting on the ground with his legs cut off. The purpose of this character is to give strength to the villain. The half-man does this by telling the protagonist about how he faced the villain and was defeated. The stronger the half-man appears to be the more powerful the villain and the greater the challenge the protagonist faces when he must test his own strength against the villain. One of my favorite half-men is Rock Biter in The Neverending Story. This character is a mountain of a character who causes the earth to quake when he walks, but the protagonist finds him sitting on the ground looking at his powerful hands because they weren’t strong enough to keep The Nothing from snatching his friends away. But a half-man can be as simple as an image or a symbol. Suppose our protagonist is walking through a forest and he finds a human skull on a stake. We kno...

S he left a comment in response to mine in agreement with what I said and yet it changed my point of view. The original post was about a mall that like so many is dying. Once the crown jewel of the community, only a few retailers remain to keep the lights on. The article was talking about the owners of the mall looking for ways to innovate. My comment was that all malls are dying and that it is because of online shopping, but I don’t think brick and mortar is dead because mixed use properties that combine living, retail, entertainment, etc. have advantages that even thirty-minute delivery from Amazon.com can’t compete with. Online retail will never be able to compete with the spontaneous purchases made by someone walking past a store window. But her comment added something to the list that I hadn’t really considered, churches. We all know that churches are struggling right now and those of us involved in church leadership spend a great deal of time thinking about how we can get more pe...

I skipped church the other day, but this isn’t about that. Instead it is about age group separation. I read an article that suggested that maybe the reason young people leave the church is because they were never a part of the church in the first place. We start them out in the nursery because who wants to hear crying babies in a worship service. Then we move them into Children’s Church because they would just be bored in worship. Then they go into the Youth Group. So when they reach adulthood “church” is very different from what they are familiar with. I can buy into that as being a problem, but what do we do about it and what does that have to do with me skipping church? On Wednesday night our church is broken into several different groups. I am one of the Awana leaders, but because of Christmas break, Awana and Fear One (youth) weren’t meeting. That left one available activity, the Wednesday evening prayer meeting. Because the young people meet in other groups the Wednesday night p...

W e laugh when people talk about treating people in the real world like we do on Facebook. One such post begins, “every day I walk down the street and tell passers-by what I have eaten, how I feel at the moment, what I have done the night before, what I will do later and with whom.” The post continues with other things and ends by saying, “I already have four people following: two police officers, a private investigator and a psychiatrist.” Yes, we laugh, but what if we really did apply the same principles that we use on Facebook to the world outside? Suppose your car won’t start one morning and you decide to take the city bus to work. While you’re waiting at the bus stop you see a stranger approach the bus stop. You make eye contact and you say, “Good morning. How are you?” The stranger replies, “I’m fine. How are you?” “Good, but my car wouldn’t start this morning. Now I’m going to be late for work.” “My wife went to see her mother, so I’ve been without a car all week.” “Have ...