Dan Dick has a good post on four common sins of congregations. The final part of the final paragraph sums up what needs to be done:

Avoid the “sin-dromes”.  Do the hard work that makes it work.  Know your context.  Know your people.  And know that the key to a truly effective, successful church is already yours — in the gifts, passions, and deep faith of your own community of faith.

A few caveats: I think Dan Dick has a lot of things to say that the church needs to hear, but I also think he is often more critical than necessary (and don’t even get me started on the reader comments). I also think he has a tendency to confuse duplicating, emulating and learning from. From my own experience, I think he is to hard on Church of the Resurrection (COR). I was initially skeptical of COR’s apparent success, but through the years I’ve come to respect what God is working through them. I don’t want  to be at COR, I want to be at Coffeyville First. I also don’t want to try and duplicate what COR does, but I do think we can learn from them and apply what we have learned to our own context and people.

Link: http://doroteos2.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/four-sin-dromes/

Via Sojourners:

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God … gloried in becoming a member of the human race.

—Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours

John Wesley preaching John Wesley preaching at a meeting house in Nottingham, England, in 1747. Note that his listeners are separated by gender which was customary at the time.

This coming Sunday (March 14, 2010), I’ll be preaching on Luke 15.1-2, 11-32 which tells the story commonly known as the parable of the prodigal son. My working sermon title is “The Prodigal Who Stayed Home.” The actual lectionary reading is Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32. But I think the revision to 15.1-2, 11-32 is truer to the gospel of Luke while still providing the setting in which Jesus told the parable.

Via Sojourners:

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

— Anne Lamott,Traveling Mercies

My office hours have been revised. I’m in the office today because the the organ tuning has been postponed due to atmospheric conditions. (In response to the question this raises: you really don’t want to know.)

One of the great things about being United Methodist is the ability to participate in what God is doing through the church throughout the world. Next week we’ll be observing One Great Hour of Sharing which funds the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR). From United Methodist News Service:

Eight days after the January earthquake in Haiti, Melissa Crutchfield led a small team to the island to start assessing emergency needs for the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

The ability of her team to get to Haiti quickly was due in part to One Great Hour of Sharing, an annual churchwide offering for UMCOR taken on the fourth Sunday in Lent. This year’s offering is on March 14.

To Crutchfield, who coordinates international emergency response for the relief agency, One Great Hour of Sharing “is the backbone of what makes everything possible.”

Because that fund pays for everything from staff salaries to electricity to cell phones, UMCOR is able to pledge that it will use 100 percent of donations earmarked for specific disasters and projects on the projects themselves.

And by supporting UMCOR’s headquarter operations, One Great Hour of Sharing allows for both emergency and long-term responses to a wide range of domestic and international disasters and ongoing projects related to hunger and development issues. “All of that takes an enormous amount of coordination and communication,” Crutchfield said.

The high-profile disasters that receive extensive media coverage—the Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami—generally draw enough donations to finance UMCOR’s long-term recovery projects in those places.

But other small-scale disasters do not.

In 2009, for example, localized flooding in New York, Illinois, Hawaii and North Dakota drew requests for assistance but little attention. However, UMCOR can still help with money from One Great Hour of Sharing or other undesignated funds, said the Rev. Tom Hazelwood, who oversees U.S. disaster response.

I’ve always supported giving to One Great Hour of sharing to fund UMCOR’s administrative costs (which are kept very minimal). I’m even more happy to learn that part of the money we contribute to One Great Hour of Sharing helps those affected by disasters that draw little or no media attention and thus do not receive designated relief funds.

This year we will again be hosting a come-and-go Easter breakfast between the 8:10 am and 10:50 am services. (Easter is April 4, 2010.) Hope to see you there.

From United Methodist News Service (UMNS):

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS)—A Moravian preacher is bringing the film “Wesley” to a movie theater near you. The two-hour movie that is slowly building a platform in theaters across the United States brings to life the story of the founder of Methodism. The Rev. John Jackman, 53, pastor of Trinity Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., says he got into the movie business as a way of telling stories of redemption, and John Wesley’s story has enough action for several films. “I wish I could have made this into a mini-series,” Jackman says. “There is enough great material here to make an eight-hour film.”

I’m hoping (but I’m not confident) that this will be as good as the movie “Luther” from 2003.

The earthquake in Chile damaged churches and schools as far away as Santiago. UMNS photo courtesy of Jan O. Spixeles.

From United Methodist News Service:

Methodists in Chile are beginning to assess damage after the massive Feb. 27 earthquake.

As hundreds of aftershocks continue to jolt the region, residents searched for food, water and other supplies. More than 700 people died from the earthquake.

The United Methodist Board of Global Ministries and its relief agency, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, were in communication with the church in Chile soon after the earthquake. UMCOR is making an initial $10,000 emergency grant to Chilean Methodists.

UMCOR officials do not believe that relief supply kits are currently needed in Chile, but the agency has set up a special fund for financial support for relief work in Chile

Donate Online to Advance # 3021178. If you prefer to right a check simply write “Advance # 3021178″ in the memo line and drop it in the offering plate on Sunday or mail it to the church office.

Read the original article.

All told, we ordered 45 copies of Get Over Yourself; God’s Here! As of today there is only one left.