Joe Pursch

I’ll be speaking once again next Tuesday to an audience of marketplace Christians at the Job One Event at Bayside Church in Granite Bay. Will be telling Joseph’s Story of Divinely Powered Opportunity from Genesis 39-41.

Details on the venue can be found by clicking here.

Francis Chan continues to make us think about pursuing the “naturally impossible” in our ministries. I’m finding that God is continually pressing me into a need for supernatural ministry simply because the ministry itself is humanly impossible when done right…i.e when we are opposing sin’s hold on lives and minds.

Francis writes:

When you’re alone with the Word of God, you probably have less peace than you’re willing to publicly admit.

You’re fine at church, attending conferences, or spending time with churchgoers. But when you’re studying God’s Word by yourself, a sick feeling creeps into your stomach. How can you reconcile Jesus’ teachings with what you see in the Church? read more here

Turned up this gem from ESPN’s Bill Simmons piece on Phil Jackson. Who knew developing a bench of ball players and pastoring people ran so parallel?

“Steve Kerr told me once that what made Jackson special — and Popovich too — was that he cared about his twelfth guy as much as his best guy. He spent time with his players, bought them gifts, thought about what made them tick. He connected with them, sold them on the concept of a team, stuck up for them when they needed him. His actual coaching — calling plays, working refs, figuring out lineups and everything else that we see — was a smaller piece of a much bigger picture. His players competed for him for many reasons, but mainly because they truly believed Jackson cared about them. Which he definitely did.”

ESPN’s Bill Simmons on retiring Lakers Coach Phil Jackson

Years ago when I was a skeptical and often hostile critic of Christianity as a college student, a bold Christian student challenged me to consider with an unbiased mind the historical claims surrounding Jesus Christ and the validity of the Christian faith. I agreed and entered into a series of conversations with him about Biblical Christianity. I’ll never forget the day when I realized that an honest handling of the historical facts pressed me to an unavoidable conclusion: Jesus Christ lived, died, and rose again. I soon gave my life to this living  Christ.

Ever since then, I’ve sought to be open to skeptical hearts. I know first hand that the validity of the Christian faith is solid, and that well-placed arguments can be critical pathways for a heart that is opening  to the faith.

With this in mind, Easter Sunday services have always been a thrill for me to be involved in as a pastor. I enjoy taking the opportunity on a day when so many inquirers and skeptics are present in my audience to present a message targeted on the reliability of the Resurrection. This past Easter I approached the facts for the bodily resurrection of Jesus from an entirely secular point of view, and compared how the deaths of other famous leaders from His time have been handled by historians.

Below is the audio link for the message I preached this past Easter Sunday morning.

Fact, Fantasy and The Resurrection Acts 2.31 April 2011

The prayer that Rev. John Stott has used to begin many of his mornings:

“Good morning, heavenly Father; good morning Lord Jesus; good morning Holy Spirit. Heavenly Father, I worship you as the creator and sustainer of the universe. Lord Jesus, I worship you, Savior and Lord of the world. Holy Spirit, I worship you, sanctifier of the people of God. Glory to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Heavenly Father, I pray that I may live this day in your presence and please you more and more. Lord Jesus, I pray that this day I may take up my cross and follow you. Holy Spirit, I pray that this day you will fill me with yourself and cause your fruit to ripen in my life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, three persons in one God, have mercy upon me. Amen.”

“But we were gentle among you, even as a nurse cherishing her children: so being affectionately desirous of you, we were willing to have imparted unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our own souls…”  1 Thessalonians 2:7-8

It’s so easy to become clinical as a pastor; to begin treating people as parts of the system, or checkboxes on a do-list. This becomes especially tempting to a pastor who is walking through an unusual season of people demands or pressures (as if there’s any “usual” season in our work!).

Lately I’ve been in one of those seasons. We’ve been walking as a church through some constitutional changes, a major leadership transition on staff, and more than one shared experience of tragic death. The last of these has been an especially difficult course. I struggled with being emotionally present with all those who needed my care. But I think I can say that I’ve learned something about “preceding critical moments” with a short season of private prayer. Before I stepped across the threshold of a hospital room, or pressed on the screen of my BlackBerry the name and number of a particularly grieving friend for whom I had no words, just ushering myself into the presence of the Father made a difference. Because of this, I may not have been “spectacular” in my wisdom in those painful moments, but I think I was real. And I know I wasn’t clinical.

Sir William Osler, a famous British physician of generations ago wrote words of caution for all of us in the caring professions. Consider them:

“The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish. To you, as the trusted family counselor, the father will come with his anxieties, the mother with her hidden grief, the daughter with her trials, and the son with his follies. Fully one-third of the work you do will be entered in other books than yours.”

I’ve been thinking recently about what makes a preached message persuasive. As I have done so, it has occurred to me that the preachers of the past had a benefit that modern preachers lack: a background in rhetoric.

Bible teachers in past generations were trained in rhetoric and its companion skill of logic. But many modern-day practitioners of preaching, myself included, saw those as unpleasant electives to skip in our university journey. It’s a pity that we did so, because though the times may have changed, the structure and the processes of peoples minds have not altered. The soul remains the soul, generation to generation.

This means that people think, imagine, and commit to action along the same tried-and-true lines that they always have. But today we pastors operate in a generation that is thoroughly committed to believing that people are actually, by and large, emotional creatures, completely divorced from any activity of the mind or logic. Postmodernism has, to borrow a phrase from its own vault, flattened the world of preaching into a subjective experience, powered by storytelling but bereft of thoughtful conviction. Well, I’d like to put a few wrinkles back into the landscape of your thinking about effective preaching.

What I’d like to do is to describe what preachers in earlier times understood to be the elements of a persuasive message. There used to be five commonly agreed upon points that needed to be placed in any message that a preacher of the past wielded upon the hearts and minds of the people. They have been described by many different authors on the preaching art in the past, under various titles. However, these five key elements of a persuasive message can be described with this overarching premise:

To persuade in preaching, we must appeal to:

The Reason

The Conscience

The Imagination

The Emotions

The Will 

You can see already that, in line with “older thought”, there is a linear progression to this approach. The classic preaching message began by landing upon the soil of reason by making an argument from a truth premise. That argument settles as a seed into the open soil of conscience and begins to confront the new heart of the regenerate listener. The stirred conscience sends out a seedling into the imagination, and there is birthed the first tendril of contemplation or conviction. Conviction then presses its tender folds up through the soil and touches the next element in the preaching cycle, which is that of the emotions. The emotions, under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, then produce an array of responses ranging from godly sorrow to fiery commitment, and these divinely stirred emotions finally barge their way into the decision center known as the will, where action is taken in line with the call of God through the preaching.

I believe this is the way the Word of God moves through the mind and heart of the listener, and drives along the pathway of understanding to produce commitment. Pastor friend, I want to challenge you to consider how you are building each one of these steppingstones of commitment, these Rocks in the River of Persuasion, into your preaching. It’s been a great exercise for me to revisit these elements in my own preaching work as I appeal to souls for Jesus sake.

It’s time to remember that it was not an idle statement for God to introduce His encounter with His people with this phrase “Come, let us reason together.”

Keeping the faith with you,

JP

The moral and even the spiritual dimensions of leadership are becoming a more frequent topic in the secular journals on organizational influence. Evidence? Here’s a snip from the Korn-Ferry Briefings on Talent Leadership:

Leadership is complex — a combination of innate and learned traits. It is about inspiring others, building teams and causing individuals, organizations and institutions to move along a given path to a common goal. There is a spiritual quality to it, and one hopes, a moral quality, too. Leadership and ethics should be linked.

Leadership is also about courage — the ability to make a decision with less than perfect information, on behalf of others as well as for yourself. It is about taking a stand and standing for something. As Thomas Jefferson said, “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

For the full briefing, click here.

I know…that sounds like a heretical headline, doesn’t it?  I mean, what could possibly be wrong with wanting to get something out of the Bible, right? Well, let me explain. Lately I have been struck by the sheer level of presumption that we regularly bring to our reading of the Scripture. We seem blissfully happy to ram our own impressions into the motif of the Word in any given context, so confident are we not only in how we see things, but in what we want to see in Scripture itself… in what we want to get “out of the Bible”. I wonder in fact if we Westerners have actually invented the concept of “getting something out of the Bible” without ever considering for a moment that such an idea may do great violence to the intent of God in our lives. Who are we to believe that our greatest need when we come to God’s Word is to get something out of it? Doesn’t this imply that we come to God and to His Word with a deadly presupposition, and that is that we can “use” Him and His truth in any way whatsoever, guiltlessly and confidently?

What if we are meant to come to God’s Word not to find some information to use but rather to discover a Person to know? There is a universe of difference in those two approaches. In the first we can get a whole lot from the Bible without ever meeting the God of the Bible. We can in fact spend hours, even years, gaining all kinds of factual data from the Scripture without ever bending our human wills to submit to the teachings of the Author of Scripture. We can become like the knowledgeable but spiritually ignorant Pharisees whom Jesus condemned in the Gospels; ecclesiastical experts who searched the Scriptures daily but never caught one glimpse of the supreme subject of the Scriptures: Jesus Himself.  I fear that our modern Western penchant for practicality is leading us into spiritual poverty in our encounter with the Bible, if indeed we can even call our engaging with the Bible an encounter. For after all, an encounter only happens within a relationship.

Recently I was blessed to be interviewed on Growing The Kingdom Television regarding how pastors can be effectively and sensitively involved with Pro-Life issues in their churches.

In the interview I was able to tell the story of how my journey in pro-life ministry began during my college ministry years when I was fortunate enough to be able to counsel a young woman to keep her child and choose life for her future and her son’s.

I also talked about how to sensitively relate pro-life teachings from the pulpit without alienating listeners, as well as how to minister to the many “post-abortive”women and men in our churches today.  I was appearing with Jennifer Zachariou, Executive Director of Alternatives Pregnancy Resource Centers of Sacramento.

To view the entire 30 minute broadcast, simply click here: Appearance on Growing the Kingdom TV