As a pastor, you are afforded a front row seat into the lives of your congregation. Normally this is wonderful as you get to see their growth and share in their positive life events. Unfortunately, you also get to see the negatives and this is where you discover whether they are going to be, spiritually, a fight or flight person.

Most people react spiritually in one of two ways to challenging life circumstances, they either pull closer to the Lord or they move further away. There is no middle ground in this reaction. I have never seen anyone be neutral in their perspective towards God under difficult conditions. As a pastor it is important to work with your congregation members to guide them towards the option of drawing closer to God. The reason for this is that experience has shown me that there are seriously different likely outcomes from the two options.

Those who hold on tight to the Lord have a strong track record of emerging from their personal dark time much stronger in their relationship with God and with their friends and family. If you've read Psalm 23, this really shouldn't surprise you. Whatever form your dark valley takes while you are walking through it, you have the personal promise of the Lord that he will be walking alongside you the entire way.

A few years ago my wife and I wrote a bible study called Questions (available on Amazon.com, rush out and buy copies for all of your friends, they'll love it) and this morning while sitting in my favorite coffee shop I was thinking that it would be a good follow up to look at some of the answers we find in the scriptures, concentrating on the answers of Jesus as these are definitive, being the answers of the Lord himself.

The first of Jesus' definitive answers that I'd like to look at is found in Mark 12:28-31. A similar exchange is also found in Matthew 22:34-40, but it's hard to say with 100% certainty that it's the same encounter as Mark describes the questioner as a scribe, while Matthew describes them as a Pharisee. Matthew also does not include the proceeding verse (Deuteronomy 6:4) whereas Mark does (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). The fact that it seems like Matthew omitted arguably the most important verse of Old Testament scripture seems very strange and is an argument for their having described two different exchanges. Deuteronomy 6:4 deserves it's own essay, but it's important enough that it has its own name, being referred to as the Shema (pronounced Sha-mah), named after the first word of that verse of scripture. Either way the answer is based upon the same passage of the Mosaic Law, so I'm going to go with Mark's version because I think that it makes more sense when you include the Shema.

Before we get to the answer I want to observe that the question itself is also interesting. Jesus was asked many questions during his time of earthly ministry and many of them were intended as tricks to get him to say something that could be used against him. Trick questions though generally brought a question as their response, but here we see in Mark 12:34 that Jesus was impressed with the sincerity of his question and the tenderness of his heart towards the Lord.

Sometimes change arrives like London buses, nothing for a while and then several all at the same time. My life currently resembles the all at the same time scenario. Got a couple of things going on that I can talk about and several more that I can neither confirm nor deny and especially not talk about.

A reasonable number of people know that I am no longer working at SWTC. While not my wish to move on, it was in the Lord's will, so I turned in my notice and tried to make sure all outstanding obligations were handed off to appropriate people before riding off into the sunset. At the same time I am also in the process of "un-pastoring". At the January board meeting, I let the board know that I wished to step down as pastor. This did catch them by surprise and while there was no actual wailing or gnashing of teeth, they did eventually persuade me to agree to stick around until May, so my last day will be 5th May 2024. So much for the ol' 30 days notice! :-)

Going forward I will be concentrating on my next chapter of ministry and maybe a little IT work here and there to help stretch the funds. The Lord has been calling me to more of a writing ministry and I've been procrastinating for several years, but finally swallowed hard and said yes. I have a couple of self-published books already (one was even carried by my ministerial organization's bookstore for a while) so writing is not new to me, but it's time to step it up and scale it up. I will post updates here and I have a Facebook Page called "Dodgeville Bible Project" that I may resurrect for making it easy to get updates via social media. (The Queen of All She Surveys does not care for the name of the page, so it may get renamed if she catches me during a moment of weakness.)

Just wanted to announce that I'm not dead yet.

Is there a good way for a Christian to know if something is a good idea and likely in the will of God? This is a question I ponder frequently, as I strive to live a life within the will of God. I accept my continuing imperfections and periodic missteps (kinda have to as they don't seem to be going away), but I do want to be pleasing to the Lord more often than not, so the bigger the task that I feel that I'm called to, the more certain that I want to be that it is within the will of God.

Some smaller tasks can be evaluated using what I like to call the "Stoneking Test". This is advice given by evangelist Rev. Lee Stoneking, who explained (paraphrasing) that if you're unsure about whether something is from the Lord, if it's good, do it anyway as it's extremely unlikely that the Devil will ask you to do something that positively benefits the kingdom of God. This has always seemed to be a good and pragmatic heuristic for most people, most of the time and I strongly recommend it. After all, the worst that can happen is that you do something good and that's, well, good.

Back to the question of big tasks, the kind that involve uprooting your family or changing churches. These are a bigger deal and deserve a more careful consideration. Just as the small to medium tasks can easily be evaluated with the "Stoneking Test", I propose that the larger callings can be easily analyzed by what I'm going to call the "Pastor Test". The "Pastor Test" is pretty easy, considering the importance of the outcome. You talk to your pastor, explain what you feel the Lord is calling you to do and then wait for their response. If they say that it's awesome and that absolutely you should do it, then the prospective calling has passed the "Pastor Test". If their response is no or "hmmmm, I'm not sure about that", then the prospective calling has failed and you should resume being helpful at your local church.