As the Associate Pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Hutchinson, KS, I write a weekly article for the newsletter article. I invite both members of the church and other visitors to my blog to share their thoughts!

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As many of you already know, as of July 1 I am full time at Trinity!  It has been a long time in the coming as I finished up school, but we are finally here.  Thank you for walking with me for the last part of my seminary journey!

What you may not know, however, is what exactly I will be doing.  Of course I will continue to do the things I have done up to this point: helping with worship leadership and planning, pre-marital counseling and weddings, relating to our Youth Fellowship, leading occasional classes, etc.  But now I will also join in providing leadership for adult education, community and global ministries, and young adult ministries.  I will also get to join with Pat and members of our congregation and staff in visiting those at the hospital (finally!)

So many transitions are happening this summer!  You’ve not doubt already heard about the other transitions in Trinity’s staff: Lynn Borchardt’s retirement and Jim Rhaesa’s moving into the role of Pastor of Congregational Care.  July 1 is also the date transitions happen in the United Methodist Church in our area, which is, of course, part of our larger church family– my wife Amy is a perfect example of this as she prepares for her first Sunday at Stafford UMC.

I hope you will join me this week in praying not only for our own staff but for those of all churches.  May we all be faithful together!

As always, I welcome comments on my blog at http://ministrygeek.net.

As the Associate Pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Hutchinson, KS, I write a weekly article for the newsletter article. I invite both members of the church and other visitors to my blog to share their thoughts!

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As many of you know, my wife has been appointed as the pastor of Stafford UMC.  She and I will be living in the parsonage there; I will drive into Hutch each day to continue serving Trinity.  By the time this reaches you the movers will be here– that means my life as I write this is all about packing.

In the United Methodist system pastors are itinerant.  It’s a tradition that goes back to the early preachers on the frontier, riding from town to town on horseback with no permanent roof to their name.  These days pastors tend to change churches and towns every few years on average, but there is still the atmosphere that change is always on the horizon.  It keeps fresh faces in front of congregations and it keeps pastors fresh by always giving them new challenges.

It’s not a bad metaphor for how God works in the world and in our lives…  We all say we don’t like change, but the truth is that the Holy Spirit is all about change.  God’s Spirit is often compared to wind: impossible to see but easy to feel– and always on the move.

When we move from one house to another, it forces us to throw out the garbage we’ve collected and look at our lives with fresh eyes.  To some extent it’s a chance to start over, a chance to re-arrange things to fit the world as it currently looks, not how it used to.

When was the last time you “moved” your faith?

As always, I welcome comments on my blog at http://ministrygeek.net.

I had a good emergenty-type thought today that I thought I would share (and record so I don’t forget it.)

There is quite a bit of talk about the appropriateness of enculturalization of the gospel.  In other words, is it right to take the gospel and “clothe” it with the culture of a people or does that cheapen it?  The other option is to let the gospel stand “pure,” whatever that means.  Neibhur famously called these options “Christ in culture” and “Christ against culture,” adding a third category, “Christ transforming culture.”  I have read emergent type blogs debate this furiously, often going into meticulous detail on passages from Acts to support their claim.

Well today I had a “duh” moment and realized how obvious the bigger picture is on this one.  The gospel as presented in Christ and by Christ is itself intimately enculturated in first-century Jewish culture, even to the point of interacting with the ancient Jewish sacrificial system.  Jesus was a Jew, period.  True, he threw out the unhealthy portions of Jewish culture, but he remained a fully enculturated Jew.

But here’s the “duh” moment: Jesus wanted the gentiles included, too.  As Paul makes abundantly clear, the gentiles are to be included without the need to “convert” to Jewish culture first.  The result is that the work Paul and Co. did is to take the gospel and re-contextualize it for gentiles as well, trying to hold together a body of believers that was diverse yet united in Christ.

So there you have it, my contribution to the enculturalization argument.  Jesus himself embodied not only God incarnated, but also the gospel enculturated with intent for it to be spread to ALL cultures without forcing them to change the parts that were already good and true.

A bit of a digression here…  So what would Paul, who is in this understanding a master of re-enculturalization, say to the Moderns and Postmoderns in the Church today?  Perhaps he would say that just as there is no longer Jew nor gentile, slave nor free– so there is neither Modern nor Postmodern in Christ Jesus.  We should respect each other’s culture and build one another up, realizing that neither worldview “gets in the way” of the gospel or cheapens it more than any other.  NO culture can stop the unimagineable love of God from transforming the world.

As the Associate Pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Hutchinson, KS, I write a weekly article for the newsletter article. I invite both members of the church and other visitors to my blog to share their thoughts!

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This is wedding season at Trinity.  We typically do six or eight weddings each year, but most of them happen in May and June.  This year we have weddings three weeks in a row– this Saturday is the last of a long chain!  I preside over all of these weddings (with the help of fantastic staff, of course), and also do 3-4 premarital counseling sessions with each couple.

What a blessing it is to see so much young love (and I include older couples in that)!  Sometimes I wonder how much I can really say to them, having only experienced a year of marriage myself.  But the principles of living in a loving relationship are universal whether you’ve been married many years or called instead to singleness: love like God loves.  I always remind the couples that since God IS love (1 John 4:7-8), what they see in each other is a little piece of God living in them.

I also remind them that their marriage will not always be as rosy as on their wedding day– they will annoy one another and even hurt one another, it’s just a part of life.  Sadly, there are some offences (like abuse) that can damage a marriage beyond repair.  But for everything else, I tell them they would do well to follow the example of God’s grace and forgive each other as freely as God forgives.  We would do well to focus more on the good than on the bad that is part of every person and every relationship (Philippians 4:8-9).

Now I know many of you have been married long enough to have gained more wisdom than I.  But I thought I would share these ideas since we all need a little “refresher” now and then.  What is your secret to a healthy, happy marriage for you?  I hope you’ll let me know in person or by sharing a comment on my blog, http://ministrygeek.net.

We had a bit of an experience eating at the Yard House restaurant near the Kansas Speedway last night.  The restaurant was negligent to the point that I wanted to share it for posterity here and for anyone else who might think of going there.

Below is the e-mail I sent to the restaurant, telling the whole story.

For any family that read this, a quick note…  I was following the storm closely with radar data and storm reports on my phone and strongly doubt the tornado sighting you will see in the following e-mail.  I was also watching the sky very, very closely.  If I had thought there were any real danger I would have spoken up and would not have left the restaurant (this will make more sense once you read the account below.)

Still, this does not change the fact that Yard House did a truly negligent job with the data they had to work with.  I would recommend avoiding them just for their demonstrated ethics…

I wanted to share an experience my friends and I had at your restaurant in Kansas City yesterday (12 June 2008).

As we were eating a tornado warning was issued for the area and the tornado sirens sounded outside.  Rather than taking us to shelter, since a tornado warning means either a tornado has been sighted nearby or one may develop at any instant, our waitress came by saying she had instructions from the manager to secure our payment for the meal.

After some table discussion about Yard House’s poor priorities and our plans for never eating there again, things got worse.  A man whom I assume is the manager announced on the far side of the room (we couldn’t hear, but a waitress told us a couple of minutes later what he had said) that a funnel cloud had been sighted “directly overhead” and began ushering the patrons out the door suggesting a long walk to the other side of the Legends complex to take shelter in the basement of the movie theater– a long, outside walk.

I recently changed careers, but I used to be (and technically still am) a meteorologist.  However, it doesn’t take a four-year college degree to know that if a funnel cloud has been sighted outside the restaurant, to send people outside is not only ignorant, but negligent.  Possibly even criminally negligent.  We weren’t given the option of taking shelter immediately in the restaurant, but were pushed out the door (after our payment was secured, of course…  Priorities…)

Fortunately, some kind employees of a sports apparel store saw the exodus of people coming from Yard House and hurriedly ushered us through their store into an access hallway with an interior stairwell (good, sound shelter, clearly part of a pre-determined plan) where we waited out the storm.  While there we received word from an officer that a tornado had indeed been sighted from the complex– by all reports, our lives had indeed been placed in grave danger when we were sent outside by your manager.

You should know that I will also be posting this on my blog in hopes that others may know the priorities and policies of Yard House.

Thank you,

Jeff Slater.

As the Associate Pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Hutchinson, KS, I write a weekly article for the newsletter article. I invite both members of the church and other visitors to my blog to share their thoughts!

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My office looks out on the edge of the courtyard on the south side of the sanctuary.  As I write this, Trinity Treasures, our after school program, is having a party out there.  No special occasion, but why you do you need one to have a party?  There are two of those big, blow-up “bouncy” things…  One of them is a huge obstacle course for kids to quite literally bounce through– complete with tunnels, giant bowling pins, and a slide.  They are running and screaming and having such a good time!

I love watching kids play, totally oblivious to the cares of the world.  It’s not that they don’t have problems in their lives, of course, it’s that they’re able to set them aside so easily and so completely to simply enjoy life.

When do we loose that ability, do you suppose?  I know I have to work hard just to escape the things I think are important for a even a few precious moments.  Personally I don’t think we loose the ability, we just get “rusty.”

When was the last time you set aside your cares and just played?  Children help, and I’ll bet grandchildren help even more.  It’s a beautiful gift God’s given us to be able to play.  We can play with each other, but I think we can also play with God.  What could be more wonderful than just setting aside everything around us to simply laugh and run with God?

Take a moment this week to laugh and run and scream– it’s good for the soul!

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”  He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
- Matthew 18:1-4

As always I welcome your comments at http://ministrygeek.net.

As I’ve explored the sense of call I feel both to the emerging church movement and to the United Methodist Church, I’ve often felt the “chafing” that leads many emergent-types to declare that postmodernity simply cannot exist within an organization as modern as the UMC.  I still feel deep in my gut, though, that postmodernity not only CAN emerge from within organizations like this one, indeed it is most healthy if it stays connected to it.  Therefore, I believe that a big part of my call is to be a sort of “postmodernity gardner,” doing all I can to nurture the signs of postmodernity I see emerging all around me.  The details of that I might go into later, but today I want to explore an observation I’ve had sitting here at the Annual Conference of the Kansas West Conference of the UMC.

One of the true hallmarks of the postmodern church (indeed of the church of any age) is true, authentic community.  The term I like is common in the emergent conversation: generative friendship.  (I vaguely remember hearing that Tim Keel coined the term???)  In other words, friendship that generates, that naturally works to create life within and outside of the individuals and the community.

One of the great things about Annual Conference is the “family reunion” aspect of it.  Most of the people here haven’t seen their closest friends/colleagues in a year, and so the bond of friendship is incredibly strong and very, very apparent.  It doesn’t spread much beyond the clergy into the laity (probably because of the “colleague” nature of it), but there is at least the beginning of this communal friendship spilling over into others.

But here’s the issue as I see it– most of it is not generative.  It is a very, very supportive friendship, but I see little “generated” from it.  Sure there are pockets of generative-ness, but as a whole it is more sustaining than life-giving, at least from my admittedly limited perspective.

If I am to fulfill what I see as a call to help postmodernity emerge from this Conference, one thing I don’t question is that it cannot be a “top down” leadership thing.  That puts me, who is much closer to the bottom, in the perfect place to effect positive change.  The idea I am playing with is, “How can I help move this wonderful, beautiful community to a place that is more generative?”  That in itself would be a tremendous force to move the Conference toward postmodernity.

I don’t quite know how to answer that yet, but perhaps the best way is simply to move “hallway conversations” away from the superficial, “catching up” nature they usually take, and instead instigate informal conversations about deeper matters, like for instance theological ways to think about whatever happens to be going on.

Just a few thoughts.  All I really know is that this community means a great deal to me, and nothing would make me happier than to see it move to the next level of being a truly creative force for the hundreds of churches that make it up– and to see it become a creative, life-giving force for the transitioning culture of our time.

I have lots of other thoughts from Annual Conference that will probably never make it to my blog (such as the incredible disconnect between a denomination crying out in pain from decline and an Annual Conference that spends it’s time celebrating– denial, anyone?), but here’s some food for thought.

I love Annual Conference.