Man, I sure have been slacking when it comes to making time to journal through this electronic medium we call a blog. I have been so inconsistent. Although when I think about it I would rather be inconsistent than incontinent. At my age you start to think about crazy things like that.
These days my head is slowly trying to wrap itself around the needs of the local church. The local church, whether large, small, house, coffee shop or whatever is all that we’ve got to make a collective difference in this great big world that we call home (for now). I am concerned that we, the church, have at our disposal all these amazing resources that could impact our local communities in crazy ways, and yet we seem to tend toward squandering many of these resources on ourselves.
In what I do for a living, I have the opportunity to meet pastors from all over the country. It’s a wonderful thing to meet so many people with such diverse backgrounds. One thing I have learned from listening to these men and women is that the most difficult aspect of ministry is dealing with not nice people in their churches.
So here we are big churches, little churches, amazing churches, etc, and we are dragging ourselves down by our infighting and and squabbles. I found what seems to be the common denominator in all of these internal quagmires – the common element seems to be people’s need to be “right.”
Small seemingly insignificant problems escalate to large scale conflicts all because someone decides that they are right, and that is that. Sadly, this demand to be right not only ruins relationship but it can halt the effectiveness of the church where the conflict is occurring.
If we can learn to give up our need to be in control and our seemingly insatiable appetite to be right, I think we can make some pretty great progress as a Christian community.
I actually didn’t intend to journal about this today, but it’s what came out. I hope that you and I can learn to let go of demanding to be right, and of having to be in control. That whole thing that Jesus talked about . . . the two great commandments – love God and love one another, seem to come into play in all of this don’t you think?
Watters Words 