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BestPractices
 November 18, 2009
Sabbaths 2002, X

Teach me work that honors Thy work,
the true economies of goods and words,
to make my arts compatible
with the songs of the local birds.

Teach me patience beyond work
and, beyond patience, the blest
Sabbath of Thy unresting love
which lights all things and gives rest.

(A poem by Wendell Berry. Happy Thanksgiving!)

Blessings
Loren
IN THIS ISSUE
Job Networking as a Ministry
Book: Learning from the Stranger
Reading: the lifetime value of a customer
Media: Gaspar Colón
Quotes: "A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't."
Dan Day on discipleship
News & ideas: Bob Mason reviews a book by God
Events: TechnoEvangelism
Practicing Pastor
Loren in capThe Ministry of Job Networking
by Loren Seibold

Usually I leave this space for others' ideas, but I wanted to share a ministry we're doing at Worthington that has been timely and successful. In a down economy, we're helping people find jobs.

The program isn't original with us: we adopted it, almost like a franchise, from a local Methodist church. It's called the Scioto Ridge Job Networking Group. SJRN is a way for mid-level professionals looking for work to make connections with career counselors, human resource experts, and employers. The group meets twice a month, and we often have 50  job seekers from the community gathered in our fellowship hall. SJRN has developed a great reputation in the city, and we're getting support and interest from many civic and business leaders.

This isn't just a meet-and-greet, though. The evening begins with news, usually about people who have "landed" (found a job), or job openings others have heard about and want to share. That's followed by a half hour of small groups, whose purpose, besides getting acquainted and encouraging one another, is to practice one's "elevator speech" (explaining the job you're looking for in a minute or less - the time  you'd have with someone on an elevator). The last formal segment of the evening is a presentation by someone in human resources about networking, creating a résumé, interviewing, making online connections, or general encouragement. Often people remain for an hour afterward just to visit. (See our agenda for more details of an evening's activity.) I see new people each week, and often they leave encouraged and ready to try again.

The leader of our chapter is a young man from the Scioto Ridge Methodist Church, who from his experience with other chapters is providing the guidance we need to get the ministry going. There are a number of chapters meeting in metro Columbus, but they're spaced out so that none is too near another, or meeting on the same night. We're fortunate to be well-located, so have had a strong and growing attendance. The support staff is from our church family, who set up chairs, AV equipment, lead groups, take care of registration and refreshments, and anything else that needs doing.

This has been an ideal ministry for a church with many professional people. Younger church members have embraced it, and are gratified by the response from people they can relate to. Another plus: SRJN has been revenue neutral to us. Most of the work is volunteer, but sponsors - employers or career counselors - pay a fee to the SRJN organization (this pays for the website and promotional materials) to have their information on display and to be introduced to the group at chapter meetings, where they get clients or employees. Each attendee contributes $5/meeting if they can afford it, which we keep for our expenses.

SRJN is faith-based, which means we don't preach, but we do talk about faith where appropriate, and we end the evening with prayer. As pastor, I've been on hand to do that most evenings, and our Methodist ministry leader always tells the job-seekers in attendance what a great church we have, and invites people to come visit! (They've also invited me to make one of the presentations, which I gladly did, and have been invited to other chapters to speak as well.)

Criticisms? Only one: we're not offering anything for blue collar workers. A perfect adjunct to SRJN would be clinics to help immigrants and others looking for manual labor jobs with résumé writing and online application.
Resource Review
learning from a strangerBook review
Learning from the Stranger: Christian Faith and Cultural Diversity, by David I. Smith

This is a book about how Jesus' call to love our neighbor involves learning from cultural strangers, not just imparting our own ideas to them. Claiming that we are reluctant to relinquish pictures of the world that place ourselves at the center, the author exposes how even our seemingly unselfish desire to share the gospel gets infiltrated by our own cultural egocentricity. The book is a blend of theological and practical insights - peppered with stories from the author's experience.

Reviewed by Raj Attiken
Reading For Pastors

Recommended by Jay Colburn, this piece from Seth Godin's blog: What's the lifetime value of a customer? (Or church member or church school student?)

Another review of IC5, the fifth annual Vervent Innovation Conference.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (a bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic future) has been made into a motion picture, and is being marketed to churches as of value to ministry. You'll have to decide for yourself, but it's a rather dark story, and has been mostly ignored by the Christian press.

Is there any value in studying other religions for clarity in your own? That's been the topic of a couple of pieces in the New York Times. The first looks at Christianity through a Buddhist lens. The second reviews Samir Selmanovic's book "It's Really All About God."

Recently a friend gave me this interesting little pamphlet on Adventist guidelines for movies and television. Are they still good advice, or quaint and outdated?

At the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, attention is finally being paid to the role of religion:
  • Non-violent church activism appears to have been a major catalyst for the fall - a fact that is being forgotten. Quote: "Any reporter in Berlin in the tense weeks before Nov. 9, 1989 knew the Protestant (mostly Lutheran) churches sheltered dissidents and was working for reform."
  • An interview with The Rev. Christian Fuhrer of St. Nikolai Church in Leipzig in East Germany. Quote: "'We were ready for anything, except for candles and prayer,' the police said."
  • The movement that led to the fall started not in Berlin, but in Leipzig.
  • Calvinist scholar John Frame, in support of Christian activism. Quote: "In the Kuyperian view, all the ills of society are essentially religious. They stem from people worshiping false gods. Either sinners worship the gods of some pagan ideology, or they give primacy to their own autonomous thought."
Featured Media
As the thanksgiving season approaches in the United States our hearts are turned to the needs of the less fortunate. This week's featured videos include Chapter One of the Stained Glass Church Documentary. Watch as Oakland Ave wrestles with how to minister in an envirornment where one out of a hundred residents are homeless.

Sit at the feet of Dr. Gaspar Colon as he gives a Holistic Ministry foundation that includes much more than just public evangelistic crusades. This lecture was recorded at the 2009 Adventist Urban Congress.
To the Point
Writing is a shield as much as a window.
 - Carey Tennis

This is the true joy of life: The being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one: being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. 
 - George Bernard Shaw

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
  - Hermann Hesse

Man forgives woman anything save the wit to outwit him.
  - Minna Thomas Antrim

Television has raised writing to a new low.
 - Samuel Goldwyn

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?
 - Laurence J. Peters

A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't.
 - Unknown

Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
 - John Andrew Holmes

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
 - Napoleon Bonaparte
Discipleship
Dan DayDiscipleship: just about being spiritually "buff"?
by Dan Day, Director, NAD Church Resource Center

Adventists don't live in a gilded cage. We see what's happening around us. So, as we think about discipleship in a distinctly Adventist context-what we'll see in the upcoming discipleship resource from the Adventist Church in North America-we also want to understand it through the eyes of others, including the broader evangelical community.

As the website gotquestions.org puts it: "Christian discipleship is the process by which disciples grow in the Lord Jesus Christ and are equipped by the Holy Spirit...to overcome the pressures and trials of this present life and become more and more Christlike."  They add: "This process requires believers to respond to the Holy Spirit's prompting to examine their thoughts, words and actions and compare them with the Word of God. This requires that we be in the Word daily-studying it, praying over it, and obeying it."

Gotquestions.org is associated with Calvary Theological Seminary, and while there is more on their definition of discipleship at their site, it is typically evangelical in that it sees the term primarily through the prism of spiritual gymnastics. A disciple is someone who "examines their thoughts, words and actions," who is "in the Word, daily," in order to "overcome the pressures and trials in this present life."

These are all good things, of course. Christianity has embraced spiritual disciplines all the way back to the time of the religious hermits in caves and desert hermitages, where monks secreted themselves from temptation. The Adventist community from its beginning has embraced the call for a deeper spiritual life.

The question is, does such a description adequately encompass the reality demanded by today's circumstances? Is discipleship just about getting really buff, spiritually?

It's the sort of thing that makes you go: "hmmm," doesn't it? The rest is yet to come...
News, Ideas & Reminders

  • From Byron Dulan, the announcement of TechnoEvangelism: The Conference on Local Church Technology and Evangelism, to be held December 7 and 8, 2009 in Huntsville, AL in conjunction with the Annual Pastoral and Evangelism Council.  It is sponsored by the Office of Regional Conference Ministries. For registration and more information go to www.washingtonconference.org/te.

  • I asked a few friends for book reviews for Best Practices, and got this from Bob Mason:  "Best-selling author, God, definitely proves He doesn't shrink from controversy in His classic work, The Holy Bible. He deftly takes the reader on a roller coaster tour of the best and worst of humanity, adopting many different voices along the way. Despite His lack of formal education, His broadly expansive yet finely nuanced analysis of the human condition is unsurpassed. The reader who trustingly signs on for this incredible ride will be richly rewarded."
  • Paul Kotanko and others have written to say that in the MS Outlook program, Best Practices comes through as messy text rather than formatted as html. Does anyone know how to fix this in email readers so folks can see Best Practices fully formatted?
Got a tool, resource, site, article, idea or seminar that you like a lot? Share it with us at BestPractices@ameritech.net.
Upcoming NAD Events

Do you have an event you'd like to invite NAD pastors to? Send details to BestPractices@Ameritech.net.
Best Practices is a Vervent publication of NAD CHURCH RESOURCE CENTER. Editor: Loren Seibold, Senior Pastor, Worthington Ohio Seventh-day Adventist Church. E-mail: Best Practices. You are free to republish pieces from Best Practices in your own newsletter or blog, with attribution to the Best Practices newsletter and the author of the piece.