you never bring me flowers anymore


have you ever heard a story in church that you could have sworn you heard somewhere before? yeah. me either.

the most difficult thing about the derek lowe signing for me is that the braves will still be paying him 15 million dollars in four years when he's 39. i don't want to make it out like 39 is old. i hope i am still chewing up the infield dirt at new covenant or some other crappy softball field when i am 39. i just don't know if i trust the braves made the most fiscally responsible decision yesterday. for this year? yeah, absolutely. gimme some of that. but...,"we" just gave lowe 5 million less than we offered burnett. desperate times call for desperate measures. and desperate measures usually call for choices whose results will not stand the test of time. we'll see.

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so, the church voted to maintain the relationship with our alternative worship service sunday night, which i think is, ultimately, a good choice. there are two things here that are important for us to note, though, moving forward.

if you were to have come by the church on a tuesday night about two months ago and saw two white guys running around on a basketball court with nine black guys, would we start referring to this group as our black ministry? if the answer is "no", then maybe we, as a church, should start to think about some other term for the group that is represented in the basement of our church come 11:00 on sunday mornings. i know this is an oversimplification, but the thing that separates "them" from "us" is not their race, but their opting for spanish as their primary language over english. am i wrong? if "them" and "us" have any chance of ever becoming a "we" on more than a sponsorship level, i hope that we can begin honest conversation to this point sooner rather than later. if we are calling it a hispanic ministry/mission/whatever just because it's easy or we don't know any better, well, that's just lazy.

second, there's this notion being perpetuated that ruben's group is somehow outclassing "us" in the game of making christians, whatever that means. i think this, too, could be potentially harmful in that, in my opinion, we are comparing apples to oranges. first of all, where is this idea coming from? if it is consensus that we are terrible at communicating with each other, how are we so sure that this number that grows exponentially every time it's tossed about with regards to that service's attendance and professions of faith is truly accurate? who is officiating this "game"? who is in charge of authenticating the state of another person's soul? and most importantly, who the crap cares??? is this what we do church for? to champion how many or poo-poo how few "disciples" we have or have not made? is that really the point? i understand that is part of the equation. i've read and totally understand the commission laid forth in front of us, but how much of that plays into what our mission as a church really is.

what was our mission again?

and while we're asking questions no one has the answer to, should i be voting or not?

i better stop. inside jokes are for losers, right? and it wasn't that funny anyway.

here's the deal, guys and girls. these are not, in spite of anything you may hear differently, dark times for our church. they are just different. is it just me, or have we been stirred for one reason or another in the last few months in ways we haven't been in years? if we haven't changed the direction of the ship yet, we are at least acknowledging that the navigator may have misplaced the correct map. and we, we as a group, are left to figure out which direction we must now proceed. what is so dark about that? people learning to speak to each other again. people trying to make eye contact with those they don't agree with. a church aflurry with "what's going to happen next?". this is a bad thing again, why? i don't know. you'll have to tell me. and then i'll argue with you.

you don't bring me flowers anymore, but that's ok. the flowers, most of the time, were just a compensating and thoughtless gesture anyway. a romantic metaphor for what used to be and what seemed comfortable a long time ago.

captain's log...14 days in, the crew remains optimistic.