"Unsustainable"...that is one of 2010's words of the year. I have heard it all through the year as people have talked about government, the government's role, deficit, stimulus and spending. Everybody is using the term. We cannot go on like we are. The president's deficit reduction team has come back and one of their key words about our present patterns of governmental spending is "unsustainable".

As the fabric of our society seems to be fraying at the seams-and it's a fray vectoring straight from our families and family structures that are disintegrating-government is being increasing looked upon as a "savior". But we can't afford the saving...it is much too high a price. In a word, our current patterns are unsustainable. God never intended the government to do His job. Government is such a failure at saving. Jesus Christ is the Savior.

But there is one social structure that is promised to be sustained and one that may provide great help in this moment where government is demonstrating it cannot provide the reach to help. It is an institution that Jesus argued even death itself could not vanquish (Matthew 16:18). The people of God, resourced by the presence of God, are sustainable. We were made to shine and called into existence-God's new humanity-for such a time as this. I believe this "unsustainable" is our Esther moment. We can show the world that God made a structure that holds people together in their brokenness by living among them as He holds them up.

But there is a price to this showing...and we have to put up now that we have sung. Let me explain. In a former day we frequently sang, "Rescue the Perishing" with its grand lines of caring for the dying. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to sing and how much harder it is to live?

While the fabric of society rips apart, the church has the great opportunity to knit together the broken in a fellowship of love, healing and redemption. Brokenness is hard. Pre-consummation travail is not fun. Suffering hurts and yet is a part of everyday life in this place where the curse is "as far as" can be found. So indeed, this is our moment. Shine Jesus' body, shine!

In high school I shared company with a girl whose family took in their uncle, as he was dying. I have a friend who adopted a lonely man in a nursing care facility and made regular company with this man pretty much estranged from all that he had ever known. My sister took in two boys whose home was shattered, followed by the court divvying them out. Those boys hit the family lotto in my sister's home of love and grace orbiting around Jesus Christ. My college buddy was bragging on his wife today. She sat down and developed an individualized plan for development for a broken lady in her city. She got her permit, learned to drive, studied for the GED, passed the GED...and in the meantime was loved by a devoted follower of Jesus who has shared Her Savior with this gal along the way. Another college buddy adopted a little girl. She is having the life she would never have had. A bunch of my friends mentor kids.

The future will hold government services scaling back. The system is not only broken, it is not affordable. To whom will they go? What if this moment all along was designed by God to be our moment to shine; to demonstrate to a watching selfish indulgent world that people matter to God-that all of us are image bearers of God and have worth? What if God wanted to stir the attention of the "up and out" by our ministry to and with the "down and out"? Brokenness is fair...it gets around to all of us at all levels of society. We're unraveling at all levels. Financially, relationally, vocationally... God has positioned the church everyone, high and low, right in positions of need. We do not lack for exposure to opportunity. Let us be found in this, our moment, knitting together in love (Colossians 2:4, 2:19) a culture coming apart in the consequence of sinful indulgence. We were made as a church for such a time as this. Let's get after it for Christ sake and leave them marveling, "My, how they love one another." John 13:35. We as a lot are great sinners. Jesus is a greater Savior!

I just returned from twelve days abroad with God%u219s people. There is nothing that is quite like the refreshment of being with the body of Christ all over the globe. There is unique encouragement in the experience. This trip was no exception.

Leaving US soil is good for making you appreciate the greatness of our country, but even that evident conviction is nothing in comparison to the immediate affinity with brothers and sisters who are a part of God%u219s family in all pockets of this globe. They are a delight to be with and can teach American Christians much about what it means to authentically follow Christ.

South Africa is a diverse world with many different ethnic sectors making up the varied fabric of South African culture. The Zulus are the dominant native African tribe and the largest of the three major tribal groups indigenous to South Africa. The Afrikaners are the English and European settlers who have been here for a long time. They are primarily of German and Dutch descent. Throw in the Indians who were brought here as slave labor a while back and you add another rich layer of culture and diversity. Many Indians have done quite well in South Africa. Of course, there are Chinese, who are every where in the world these days with brilliant people cutting deals with money and brain power to harvest resources for China%u219s developing culture and life. They are joined by a few Japanese here to make for quite a mix of Asians here in South Africa. Now that is a mix. I think I was told that there are eleven dominant languages in South Africa. And how on earth could all of those peoples ever get on given this history, sordid as it is with Apartheid and ell else?

Enter the genius of God in forming this new humanity through the second Adam in the body of Christ. Yes, the church in South Africa shows the only hope for this fragmented culture. What a thrill to be with God%u219s people there and to experience the fabric of the culture of the church%u226where all of those cultures are coming together under the commonness of faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the hope for our globe to move the fragmented and estranged of the world on to the New Jerusalem.

Then onto Jordan in the Middle East and to the story of a different kind of church altogether. Ninety seven percent of the country is Muslim. Three percent of the country is loosely defined as Christian, that would include the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. But the rich luster to the evangelical church in Jordan sticks out like a single rose. The joy they have and share is fascinating. Spending time with them reminds me of what true hope is and they have much to teach us about how to live in the midst of pressure and repression. Their sense is that they are on the verge of God doing something very special in their day. Such faith was an insult to my own.

All over this globe God has an amazing family. They have much to teach American followers of Jesus about joy, perseverance and pressure. There is nothing like a trip abroad to clean out your categories and get your vision out of the routine and the mundane. What a great experience to share company with those whom the world is not worthy. Maybe they are just shy of such a Hebrews 11 standard, but certainly unworthy of our unbelieving and skeptical world. God%u219s people stir my faith, enlarge my heart and call me to stretch myself out on God%u219s promise and keep digging for his glory in all of my pursuits. Surrounded by this cloud of global witnesses%u226let%u219s keep going!

I just returned from twelve days abroad with God's people. There is nothing that is quite like the refreshment of being with the body of Christ all over the globe. There is unique encouragement in the experience. This trip was no exception.

Leaving US soil is good for making you appreciate the greatness of our country, but even that evident conviction is nothing in comparison to the immediate affinity with brothers and sisters who are a part of God's family in all pockets of this globe. They are a delight to be with and can teach American Christians much about what it means to authentically follow Christ.

South Africa is a diverse world with many different ethnic sectors making up the varied fabric of South African culture. The Zulus are the dominant native African tribe and the largest of the three major tribal groups indigenous to South Africa. The Afrikaners are the English and European settlers who have been here for a long time. They are primarily of German and Dutch descent. Throw in the Indians who were brought here as slave labor a while back and you add another rich layer of culture and diversity. Many Indians have done quite well in South Africa. Of course, there are Chinese, who are every where in the world these days with brilliant people cutting deals with money and brain power to harvest resources for China's developing culture and life. They are joined by a few Japanese here to make for quite a mix of Asians here in South Africa. Now that is a mix. I think I was told that there are eleven dominant languages in South Africa. And how on earth could all of those peoples ever get on given this history, sordid as it is with Apartheid and ell else?

Enter the genius of God in forming this new humanity through the second Adam in the body of Christ. Yes, the church in South Africa shows the only hope for this fragmented culture. What a thrill to be with God's people there and to experience the fabric of the culture of the church...where all of those cultures are coming together under the commonness of faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the hope for our globe to move the fragmented and estranged of the world on to the New Jerusalem.

Then onto Jordan in the Middle East and to the story of a different kind of church altogether. Ninety seven percent of the country is Muslim. Three percent of the country is loosely defined as Christian, that would include the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. But the rich luster to the evangelical church in Jordan sticks out like a single rose. The joy they have and share is fascinating. Spending time with them reminds me of what true hope is and they have much to teach us about how to live in the midst of pressure and repression. Their sense is that they are on the verge of God doing something very special in their day. Such faith was an insult to my own.

All over this globe God has an amazing family. They have much to teach American followers of Jesus about joy, perseverance and pressure. There is nothing like a trip abroad to clean out your categories and get your vision out of the routine and the mundane. What a great experience to share company with those whom the world is not worthy. Maybe they are just shy of such a Hebrews 11 standard, but certainly unworthy of our unbelieving and skeptical world. God's people stir my faith, enlarge my heart and call me to stretch myself out on God's promise and keep digging for his glory in all of my pursuits. Surrounded by this cloud of global witnesses...let's keep going!

Pastoral ministry is one great adventure. It will certainly break your heart and test your spirit, but it holds out exhilarating joys and privileges. One of the great privileges is to relate to God's people and care for them as a Shepherd, to share their joys and bear their burdens. The longer the pastoral tenure the deeper and wider the connections you can have with people. That was vividly brought home to me in a visit I had recently with a dear sister.

I got a message that I was to return a call to my dear sister who is eighty six. She is now a widow and I had heard that these were not the easiest days for her even as I had noticed that she was attending worship with less frequency. Our friendship goes back some twenty three years when I served here at Southgate as an associate. She and her husband, one peach of a guy, started coming to Southgate to help their granddaughters through their broken home. The couple had a church background of a mainline protestant sort. From the outset, on this errand for their granddaughters who had a prior history with our church, God seemed to capture their hearts with what they were experiencing here at Southgate.

Andi and I invited them to an outreach Bible Study at our home then on Overlook Drive. Her husband was taken aback by the invitation. He was such a pleasant and neat guy. He was an invader through the Normandy Beaches during World War II, albeit nine days after the first wave. As I recall, he strung communication wire across Europe following the tide that would liberate Europe from tyranny. He was a great athlete in high school and valorous soldiering just fit him. He set the state record for the high school long jump back in his day. I remember it as 19' 10 ¾"...but I would always miss it when I tried to guess as he would ask. He never forgot the length. It was embedded in his memory. He barbered and was a gifted conversationalist for years. But this valorous man wanted no part of a group discussion in Bible Study. He was first guy to come to my house and let me know that he would not be participating in the discussion in the Bible study...but he would come. The great irony was that he may well have said the most out of all in the group. I miss him.

I had the privilege of baptizing him in the mid nineties. We had by then a measure of shared history together as a threesome. He had gone through colon cancer which sent him into a deep reflection on his on journey with Jesus Christ. He got on his knees and got squared away with Christ before the surgery went down. His wife had been a prior pacesetter, having responded after a Billy Graham invitation as she began with Christ several years earlier.

I had been in their home and prayed with them and laughed with them and shared happy and sad times together. My friend who came to visit me always had such an elegant spirit about her. She is a classy gal, always taking good care of her self. She dresses well and with a quiet smile was just made for what was pleasant to be around. She was full of a sort of English-proper, but as kind and common as the best of mid-western culture. I will always remember the afternoon her husband died. He was waning in the hospital and I was just coming up to the room as he breathed his last. When I joined her she was just realizing that the Lord had come to receive her husband to Himself. I have been around those tender moments before but this one was different. She was sad and gently weeping, but she was savoring...yes, savoring. She was savoring all that it meant for her to be his wife. We sat together and she rehearsed all the ways God had blessed her in giving her Roger. She was releasing him to heaven savoring all that was theirs on earth. It was striking and touching. While deeply wounded with grief, she was greatly moved to praise God for the years they had shared together.

Several more years have past and she is going it alone...with Jesus. They had already moved out of their place into a nice condo. Her sister was close by to enjoy contact and shared errands. But fatigue sets in and memory fades out (I'm arriving forty years early to my sister) and sustaining life gets more difficult. Now was the time. She was moving to Alabama with her daughter for a season. At eighty six, it may be the closing season. God knows. We both felt the texture of what could be as we said goodbye. She told me, "I just did not want to leave without coming to say goodbye."

What a good visit we had. It was the fat of the pastoral landscape. It was sweet and affectionate. What a privilege to commit her to the Shepherd of our souls who exists and therefore, we are not left in want of anything. She will be fine and then in due time better than she has ever been.

They do not sell the treasures of relating at Wall Mart. They are on the priceless aisle of living. As she left I savored again the rare joy of being a Shepherd. It is good work that on its best days fills your heart with joy.

People matter. When will we get that? Self indulgence is self defeating and does not at all deliver on what is promised. Looking out for number one can lead you to be estranged from family and friends and living out your days in a cold sterile room at some forsaken rest home. People are life's great treasure. God knew that all along and spared nothing to send Jesus to provide us the chance of life right side up.

Pastoring is the people business. It has its own reward well before the great day when all of the final judgments will be in. May we be found valuing the right things as we live out our very few days. People are the right things and relating well is a treasure and a privilege in life.

"Shepherd the flock of God among you...with eagerness." 1 Peter 5:2

I read once where Abraham Lincoln died with articles in his pocket that spoke well of his presidency and his leadership. Those in leadership understand this gesture. Everyone wants to feel like they are making a difference and that they are doing a commendable job.

October is pastor appreciation month. It is a month where congregates are told to affirm their pastors. Through the years, not only in October, but all through the year, simple little notes and not so simple gestures have been enacted to affirm my own efforts in pastoral ministry. I actually keep the notes. They are in my tax records for each year; yes, right there next to the utility bills are the notes in a file collected all together. I do not keep them to re-read them. Hardly ever do I go back through and read any of them. But I see them if I poke around in an old tax year trying to find something. It is the visual equivalent to the vitamin for ministry-a shot in the arm to keep you going.

Quite a part from cards, I can remember some life altering encouragement which reshaped the trajectory of several situations. I remember once a few days out from going on vacation in the mountains of Tennessee that my car did not check out right. Because of the need for some special parts, my brakes could have potentially failed and my mountain vacation car was on the fritz. I went to the Saturday morning prayer meeting and we all prayed about it. I got a call later that afternoon that a local car dealership had worked out a matter and I was to pick up a new car for a week for my vacation. The kids were amazed. Their parents had their hearts filled with gratitude. The stories are legion. How much good beef have I eaten through gift cards of thanks through the years?

Some of the stories are funny. I had a lady once bring me her husband's camel sport jacket for dress. It was beautiful and it fit just right, seemed hardly warn. I wore it out. The first Sunday I wore it, it looked great. I wanted to thank the guy for giving it to me. I went right up to him and started the conversation only to notice her in the background gesturing me away. Come to find out, it was his graying hair and the mix with the camel jacket and her taste that was not working. He had no idea I was wearing his jacket...and she wanted to keep it that way. That is ethical tension. One time a group of anonymous families put together a coalition and had a "clothes horse" man take me to a men's store to spend the money on a few suits. I was flabbergasted. My heart was full of joy, until I began to contemplate just why this gesture had emerged. Was it about their love for me? Or was it, in the end, about their sense that I dressed like an idiot? I was afraid to ask. Was it grace or a referendum on my wardrobe?

Maybe another reason why these affirming gestures mean so much is because of the other comments that pastoral leadership receives. I cannot print what I have been told...about myself. Some one wrote a book once called "Well Intended Dragons". Maybe you have to be there in pastoral ministry to appreciate the title. Believe me the dragons are out there. It is their fire breathing feedback that makes one appreciate all the more the encouragement from others. I have had associates fight back their emotions as they repeated to me what they had been told. I have picked up the fragments of their vision of themselves and sought to glue it back together. That old "sticks and stones" proverb is a lie. After a while, you come to expect negative feedback and listen for the truth and do not take it so personal. As Warren Wiersbe used to say, "In time they shoot through the same hole. It does not hurt as bad." As Gordon McDonald encourages one looks for the kernel of truth in every bushel of criticism and grows from it and prays through it.

But thank God for the Barnabas-s out there that encourage. They are worth their weight in gold. I was particularly amused at a recent prayer meeting when a brother identified October as the month of pastoral encouragement. He charged the group to encourage the pastoral staff. He was waxing on in his challenge and he may have over reached when he drove the point home with "we need to really tell them what we think of them". It got real quiet and there was a lull...and then he quickly added "I mean, tell them something good." The whole room exploded with laughter. We laugh at times so we do not cry. Everybody knows there will always be those who take the freedom to tell them what they think of them...good or bad feedback. Thank God that the lion's share for me through the years has been encouraging. What a privilege it is to serve God's great family...the church of Jesus Christ.

The "at a boy" we in pastoral ministry yearn for is the last one, the one from the Great Shepherd of the sheep. We live and work to hear in the end "Well done, you good and faithful servant." Pray that we may order our lives to make that a reality. It is required of a steward that he be found faithful.

Bill Maher, late night comedian and recently minted social commentator was interviewed by Larry King on CNN last week. Maher's sarcasm and cynical humor is a hit with his following. He is irreverent and edgy in driving home the barbed ends of his humor. If you are on his ideological page he can be very funny.

The interview took place a few days after mega-church pastor Rick Warren hosted the presidential candidates for a discussion. Maher has a jaundiced view of what he calls "religion". His take: "It's not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die...They believe in this comic-book figure called the devil who's going to poke your ass in hell if you're bad."

It is healthy for the church to ponder her critics. Are we disinterested in the common good of society? That position is certainly off mission for Jesus. Luke said of him, "You know about Jesus of Nazareth,...how he went about doing good..." Acts 10:38. His ministry was certainly much more, but at root it was not any less. If a church is not concerned for the common good of humanity, they are not following Jesus. John Wesley, a follower of Christ from the 18th century, said, "Do all the good you can in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can." Maher is for Wesley's vision.

Jesus winsomely combined doing good with offering hope. He knew that what ails us at root is our sinful selfish heart. We need a change of heart. We need to be saved. Heaven is our hope. Hell is reserved for those estranged from God who could never stand being around Him. Dallas Willard said, "Heaven is for everybody who can stand it."

Hell is an obnoxious thought until you ponder the justice for which we all yearn. Everybody wants the murderer to face the charge, the rapist and the pedophile to face "the judge". The sexual trafficker will face "the judge of all the earth" (Genesis 18:25). Liars complicate our lives. Oddly, I am attracted to God by hell. Hell is God's response to evil. I want a God who gets ticked with evil. What I was less free to acknowledge for a while was the destructive seeds of evil present in my heart. I myself was estranged from God. How could that sixties slogan have become one of our culture's most deeply held convictions, "Hell no, we won't go!"? We still need a Savior from our culpable guilt before a holy God. Yes, Bill, we need to be saved. And the good news is still "there is Savior who has been born who is Christ the Lord!" (Luke 2:10). And the news gets better at Good Friday and Easter.

What critics with Maher are less willing to acknowledge is that these saved folk are the same people who are engaged in more work for the common good in America and around the world. Ask FEMA who provided the most volunteer labor in the aftermath of Katrina. Whole sections of the worst of New Orleans were given over to Franklin Graham's Samaritan's purse. Why? No one else could muster those volunteer armies. Those armies of the saved got their butts to New Orleans and found high joy in serving for the common good, and they would argue, for the glory of their Savior.

Sure, Maher is right. There are churches who are simply after saving their "ass from hell". But they are not following God's entire book. People do all sorts of things in Jesus' name that are not in the book. There is some pending justice for that as well.

Southgate is pleased to be a part of a band of volunteers from churches all over Springfield who find joy in serving others in Jesus' name and work for the common good of all of us. Bill, you protest too much! We do not need less engagement, our world needs more of these volunteers whose involvement stems from their gratitude for God's work in their life to save them from the eternal consequences of their sin. According to the book, when your butts are saved, you just can't help but pour your life into making life better for all in the name of Jesus Christ. And along the way, you invite them into life, forgiveness and peace through knowing Jesus Christ as Savior...in deed and in word!