Karl Westerhof

Thank you, Jim.  Frankly, your posting almost leaves me (literally) speechless because my heart is so full. Yes the pressues on pastors (and other public leaders as well) are enormous.  And yes we only sometimes do a decent job of responding and following up when leaders fall.   God help us all.  The enormity of this challenge facing the church is daunting, and it's growing right along side the increasing demands on pastors in a time of big change in the Church.  Are we attending to preventative measures with urgency?  Are we committed to a healing process for all involved?   Can trust be restored?  You suggest there are limits to the extent we should assume the answer is Yes.  Jim, on the one hand I want to say that OF COURSE complete restoration is possible - even to the extent of return to public leadership.  On the other hand I feel the force of your cautionary word.  I know that even though a person can be forgiven, healed, restored, yet it makes sense to avoid situations that are filled with temptation.  Until I read this, I had always just assumed that full restoration always included at least the possibility of return to public leadership.  In fact you even leave open the option of "reinstatement as clergy".   So where you ended up surprised me.   But the bigger thing about your posting is this - how will the church deal in more Christ-like ways with leaders (not only clergy) who sin in public ways that betray their families and congregations and their Savior?  That seems like a terribly urgent question.

Farewell, Melissa!   On to the next phase of the journey!  Thanks for your service here!  I cannot believe it's been over two years!   OK, enough exclamation marks!  May God bless you as you continue to serve him.

DK, I want to think that competent preaching using the lectionaries would in fact speak to the 40 year old mom's heart.  Would you agree?

The conversations we need to have about racial attitudes and inter-racial cooperation in the Body are as important now as they ever were.  But our willingness to have them is still, well,  spotty at best.  And maybe it's even harder to have those conversations now because we want so badly to believe that we don't really need them anymore.  But we do.  May the Spirit give us the words and the hearts to have the loving and honest conversations we need. 

Larry and all,

Very exciting conversation, and germane to many issues and questions now percolating in the CRC....  shaping and training urban leaders, diversity, interagency strategies, World Missions/ Home Missions conversations, how to encourage and equip existing suburban and rural congregations while shifting strategy to urban, what should our structure look like....  and lots more besides.   I hope Home Missions will be one of the lead agencies to convene the big conversations we need to get going!  This challenge has been around since the sixties, and we've dabbled at it.  It's high time to be "all in"!   

"...we don’t find a community of people who will take a journey with us to elevate our desires into something that is truly life, who will help us live a life less ordinary."  This line really resonates with me.  The community, the Body, needs to be a safe place to have the talk, AND a safe place to take the risks.   Of course individuals can think and act on their own,  and sometimes they must; but it seems to me that the Body of Christ is exactly the arena designed to foster this kind of disciplined, discipled thinking and obedience.  Thanks, Larry, for this pointed call to radical discipleship - and to think through together what it looks like in our society.

Thanks for this perspective on "the church in the city"!  It sure is helpful for thinking about the mission to which God is calling us today.  Puts us in the position of addressing directly some of the most painful social patterns that result in loneliness, injustice, despair....   opportunity for missional ministry.   and a roadmap for being the church in the metropolis.   May Home Missions lead us as a denomination to a new vision for being the church of Jesus Christ in our society.

Thanks for telling your story, Norm,  You give me hope that the Body of Jesus can indeed be a place of healing and renewal.  You say "These are things no classis could provide."   I suppose in a sense I can agree, but I also want to say that I think there are some important things classes can do, and we need to get much better at doing them.  When classes are a safe and supportive place, where morale and hope are high and anxiety and stress are low, we will have gone a  long way toward creating the new culture we'll need to deal with the inevitable storms of change.   Idealistic?   OK, I am.  But the more I learn about the Holy Spirit, the more hope I have for a new day in our denomination.

Hey, welcome, Norm!   Great to see you are already writing.  As things now stand, I'm still the Classis Coach, working with the Classis Renewal Ministry team, one day per week, encouraging and assisting classes to experience renewal.  Within coming weeks we anticipate that a few more structural issues will be clarified in the denomination, and that will shed light on my role and the classis renewal journey.  We'll keep you posted here.  We certainly don't anticipate any reduction in the momentum of classis renewal - it's too important for serving and empowering  congregations.   

       You point out a very important issue when you mention losing momentum.   One of the things I"ve noticed is that the renwal process needs regular attention, because it's easy to slide back to business as usual, and then things look a lot like they did before renewal!   Disheartening for the classis that worked hard to bring about change.  Sustainable positive change generates its own energy and continuity and persistance.   The Holy Spirit is a power source, even in the middle classical machinery.   Learning to listen and follow -- that's the journey we're on!

Great list!   Great idea!  Thanks.   

I want to encourage folks to take a look at the book you cite, "When Helping Hurts..."   It is unusully helpful for anyone who is concerned about showing compassion, being merciful, being a developer instead of just a helper, in short anyone who is or plans to be involved with Jesus and his ministry here and now.

The opening story is  worth the price of the book and then some!  

Deacons could read and discuss this together over a period of a year, and a small group in the church could read and discuss together.  I think that deacons could share this book with the pastor, and study it together for spiritual growth, deaconal concepts and insights, a sermon series, and then have a retreat to pray and dialog and develop a deaconal vision for the church that flows out of the book.  

It's rich stuff.  You won't agree with everything, but you'll learn an immense amount of powerful practical stuff about how to be helpful in a Christ-like way.  If you've read it already, please find someone who hasn't read it yet and keep it movin'!