Letters to a Congregation
Every Thursday I write a pastoral letter to the west congregation of The Austin Stone Community Church. These letters are simple, pastoral musings on what it looks like to live a life that is attentive to God in the midst of a shared context.
The One About Habits, Hype and the Sunday After Easter
It isn’t lost on me that the most discouraging Sunday in church ministry is often the Sunday after Easter, as auditoriums and parking lots return to normal and as people’s sense of the reality of Christ’s resurrection seems like a distant memory.
Part of this discouragement is because we do measure the wrong things and I know that. We usually measure number of attenders, which is an interesting metric, but not a real guage on the impact that the gospel is having on a group of people. But, part of this discouragement is the nagging sense that we know that if we were all really paying attention to the reality of the resurrection, then every Sunday would feel like Easter Sunday. The fact that it doesn’t just shows what a distracted group of people we are.