Lunch

We are supposed to have lunch with Gay and Tony today but I'm not sure I ought to do that. Tony suffers from emphysema and I have this horrible cold and rough deep cough. If he got sick, he might not be able to recover. I took my temp awhile ago and it is 100 degrees so I have a low grade temp.

I probably need to call Gay after awhile and explain the situation to her. We can take a rain check on the lunch.

Bob and I had intended to go to the church's reunion grounds tomorrow and help assemble bunk beds and clean the campgrounds in preparation for the camping season. I don't know if he will go on without me or not. They certainly need the help.

On top of that, I had an e-mail from Scott this morning and he plans to come this weekend. He has a date with a girl from Tulsa. I answered him that I was sick and he might not want to come.

I haven't felt like doing anything this week. The house is dirty and I haven't felt like cleaning it. The beds need changing but I'm not up to that either. Thank goodness Slinky has chosen to spend his nights outdoors this week. He hasn't woke me up at 5:00 to fix his food this week.

Everything happens at once.

Update: Well, I am better again so I guess all plans are back on. The terrible cough is gone and the fever is broken. Scott is coming NEXT weekend...not this weekend.

Ministerial Alliance Day

Today is Ministerial Alliance and I have spent the morning working on the agenda and copying the minutes for everyone. We have 15 reservations for today. We meet at Windsor Place and they fix us a nice lunch.

I am feeling somewhat better although I have been blowing my nose all morning. I did sleep well last night.

About 11:30 last night, Slinky decided he wanted to go out and then he decided he would just sleep out on the chaise so I left him out. It was 50 degrees and I knew he could handle that. He came in for his breakfast this morning but wanted to go right back out so I put him out.

Bob has been working on his shed door this morning. He had me come help him hold it in place while he screwed in the hinges. I really wasn't up to it but he has very little patience with anything like that so I forced myself to help.

We will leave for Windsor Place in about an hour and fifteen minutes. Till then, I will just rest. I have all the agenda and minutes printed off.

Planning Day

I went to Independence this morning to get my hair done and afterward to a planning meeting for our Palm Sunday services at Independence. We've pretty much got it all together. I came home intending to attend the Lenten Luncheon but the closer I got toward home, the worse I felt. I called Bob and canceled and went home to bed. I don't feel any better though now. This is an up and down problem but I don't have a temp so I can't see going to the doctor. Besides, in my weakened condition, I would probably catch something worse in the reception room.

It's a beautiful day but I just can't work up any energy. I feel like going back to the bed instead of going outside. I fixed myself some tomato soup awhile ago and put something in my stomach.

Another Quiet Day

I have spent several hours working on the symposium. I think I have gone about as far as I can until we actually get there in April. I did learn that the seminary has cut back on their administrative support and their full time secretary has been laid off. So I don't know what that will mean for the symposium.

This morning I went over to my sister's at 6:45 and stayed awhile so my brother-in-law could go have breakfast with his group of friends. He got back a little after nine since I told him to go vote in the primary before he came home.

My cold...or whatever it is, is loosening up now. I have nothing but a raspy cough. My nose seldom runs and my sore throat seems to be gone. I took some Benadril the last two nights so I could sleep. I have slept like a log. This afternoon, I did something I very seldom do, I took a nap. I am very spoiled. It's been three years or so since I've had any health problems.

Bob has gone to a Red Cross retreat this afternoon so I have had the house to myself. I am reading Dom Crossan's book, "In Search of Paul". So far it's pretty boring. Maybe it will pick up later. Right now he's bogged down in the culture of the Roman Empire.

Busy Sunday

Yesterday was a very busy Sunday. We left here at 9:00 to go to church and get the furnaces going and the building heated up. My brother-in-law and sister are the deacons and they're incapacitated right now and find it difficult to attend services. The services were very good and we served the communion to 17 that attended. Several were ill or otherwise incapacitated.

We went with our daughter and son-in-law and Cyndi to Hong Kong Delight to eat lunch after church and then came home where I did my notes and read the rest of the afternoon. I finished my book, "The Upside Down Kingdom". I was asked to read it in preparation for the retreat I will be attending over the weekend of March 27 - 29. It was a very good book. I am surprised at all the modern writers who have finally come to the conclusion that Jesus taught the Kingdom of God on earth (relationships) and not the salvation theology that emerged later in the early movement and with Paul.

Last evening, we attended our Living the Questions group. There was a good attendance and we had a good time. After the discussion, ice cream and cake were served as a celebration of Joyce's birthday.

I am fighting a cold, something I seldom have to deal with and have not felt up to par the past two days. I am taking my Cold Ease, which usually cuts a cold off at the pass or at least cuts it down to two or three days. We had several days of 70 - 80 degree weather and then Saturday it snowed and got down to the teens. Nothing more is required to challenge one's immune system. It certainly challenged mine.

Searchers and Church

The George Barna group, a marketing research group that serves churches, reports that one in seven adults changes churches each year, and another one in six attends a handful of churches on a rotating basis. Church shopping isn't a matter of merely changing congregations: A recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life last year indicated that 44 percent of American adults have left their first religious affiliation for another.

Part of the discomfort with church shopping has to do with the way today’s growing churches attempt to attract spiritual shoppers. That simple marquee in front of a church with the sign that says ("Prevent truth decay: Brush up on your Bible") doesn't really suffice to recruit searchers. These people are looking for something that message doesn’t always provide.

Furthermore, since there is no state church in America, preachers have had to learn to get along without support from the state. It has made the ability to recruit and keep a flock—and encourage them to give generously—crucial to a church's survival. This has produced a ministry often modeled on capitalism, with pastors and church leadership acting as the church's sales force.

Salesmanship sometimes degenerates into telling people what they want to hear and, in the case of religion, into a faith that never comes down too hard on the faithful. That doesn’t sound like the teachings of Jesus, who told everyone what they needed to hear.

In 1776, Stark and Finke write, fewer than one in five Americans belonged to a local church. Today, the figure is more like 67 percent. That definitely is good news.

And, let’s face it; the free market in faith has been good for America's religious life. All that changing churches across denominational lines has likely helped produce a less rigid, better informed, more ecumenical religious culture.

Knowing that churchgoers have so many options should keep pastors and preachers on their toes. But what churchgoers are looking for may not be doctrine and dogma. It is believed they are looking for acceptance and a sense of community lost in today’s society. If we and our congregations can provide that, our churches will succeed in meeting the needs of these modern day searchers.

Joplin Today

Today, Leslie and I will go to Joplin for a meeting of congregational pastors and CFOs. There we will learn about a "new" way of coming up with our Mission Center assessments. That way will be volunteering just exactly how much each congregation can afford to donate toward the Mission Center budget instead of being assessed according to the number on our rolls. Assessing according to the rolls has never bothered us at Crossroads since we have our rolls cleaned up. Cleaning up the rolls means transferring inactive members that you cannot get activated to the "general" rolls instead of congregational rolls.

When a member has been inactive for three years or more and been visited and encouraged to attend without any response on their part, they qualify for being transferred to "general" and the congregation is not assessed for that member.

Nine years ago, when we had districts and our congregation had a CFO that was the DCFO for the entire district, that's the way he handled assessment and it worked beautifully. Congregations did the best they could to donate as much as they could afford to donate and the budget was always made. Then he died and we changed to Mission Centers and the next Mission Center MCFO went back to the old way of assessing congregations according to the number on their rolls.

Some congregations struggled with this. They had never made the effort to clean up their rolls. And it is an effort. It takes visiting inactive members regularly to encourage and invite them to full participation. Only when all efforts fail are they transferred off the congregation rolls. Congregations may have been assessed for 40 members when they only had 20 attending regularly. That put a hardship on the congregation. So now they have decided to go to a "new" method of assessment. Some things never change.