Struggling with Service

This Sunday, my church's senior pastor presented a great challenge about service and hospitality. He made some great comments, including (paraphrased)

1. Burnout is not a result of doing too much but of wrong motivation.
2. Availability/life station should be a factor in our service, but not an excuse for not serving.
3. We should not let our gifts pigeonhole us into a certain venue of service.
4. Our gifts need development through use.
5. The best way to discern our gifts is to start serving and see what people notice about us. (Could this be considered a genetic algorithm? But I digress provocatively...)

It occurs to me that, not only does the church struggle to put these truths into practice, but the university does, as well. Service is one of the "Big Three" when it comes to faculty expectations (along with teaching and scholarship), and faculty (Christian and non-Christian) also struggle with motivation-based burnout, a sense of unavailability, pigeonholing themselves, lack of development, and lack of self-awareness.

If Christian faculty proactively learned to adopt these principles in serving the church and the university, one can only imagine how it would revolutionize our example to other believers and our witness to the academy.

How have you struggled with service? How have you dealt with motivation, availability, self-awareness, and development?

What should an ECC elder believe about the creation of the universe?

This was the question posed to me as an essay assignment (only one page!) at a leadership development class at my church (ECC).

 

I found this question very interesting not just because of its relevance to my professional life, but because it was the only question on the assignment list phrased in terms of "What should an elder at ECC believe" and because, in my opinion, it offers the most room for disagreement and debate out of all the questions on the list.

 

I'm pasting in my answer below.

 

Beliefs

An elder at Eastside Community Church (ECC) should believe…

1. God made the universe good.
   
2. God made the universe out of nothing.
   
3. The universe is separate from and dependent on God.
   
4. The universe reveals God's glorious character (including, but not limited to, His wisdom and sovereignty).
   
5. The universe inspires worship of God.
   
6. The universe glorifies God, even apart from the worship it inspires.
   
7. The universe was placed under humankind's care.
   
8. Humans, specifically, are part of creation, are radically different from the rest of creation, are created in God's image (in particular as creators and cultivators), and are the pinnacle of creation.
   
9. The universe is fallen.
   
10. The universe will be restored.
    
11. God's truth and nature's appearance do not always seem to agree.
    

Many of these Beliefs are depicted pictorially in Figure 1.

 

Applications

Based on these Beliefs, an elder at ECC should…

1. Actively engage and support the efforts of congregation members to understand, care for, and cultivate creation.
   
2. Affirm the significance of human beings, especially in light of our present day's dehumanizing intellectual and moral culture (which is desperately seeking an answer to this problem).
   
3. Assess present-day challenges (from the external world and from within the church) to these Beliefs and respond accordingly.
   

Open Issues

On the following list of creation-related issues, an elder at ECC should allow disagreement and encourage healthy, informed discussion among the elders and within the congregation. In such discussion, an elder (and all Christians) should seek to understand how each opinion can be seen to glorify God. To be conversant in these issues, an elder should strive to understand relevant scientific research & biblical interpretation and adopt the appropriate terminology.

1. The interpretation of quantum mechanics.
   
2. The age and development of the universe.
   
3. Evolutionary theory.
   
4. The origin of humans.
   
5. The origin of carnivorism/omnivorism.
   
6. The development of language.
   
7. God's relationship to time.
   

Figure 1. Pictorial representation of the Beliefs summarized in this essay.

-----------------------------

Your turn: What should a leader at your church believe about your field of study?

The Moral Dimension of the Mind, a la Sire

I've been rereading Sire's Habits of the Mind, and just finished his challenging Chapter 5: The Moral Dimension of the Mind. In it, he lays down the truth that should haunt all Christians:


We only know/believe what we obey. Or, we are responsible for living based on what we know.


Thus, Christian intellectuals bear a great deal of responsibility.

Here is the great dichotomy that I found on this reread:


We fail in our responsibility as Christian intellectuals, and so Christian intellectualism needs the gospel. But living out the gospel (the actions he describes as aspiration--setting our minds on what is good--and mortification--denying our flesh) requires Christian thinking (and therefore Christian intellectualism). Each necessitates the other.


In general, in fact, the only way to respond to the gospel is in obedience, and the only way to obey is to believe the gospel.


But what does all of this have to do with being a Christian physicist? I came up with a few answers...

• I need to connect physics to worship.
• I am a teacher, and not just a physicist. (This thought also led me to consider the differences between the terms "physics teacher," "physicist teacher," and "teacher physicist." I'll tease out those differences in another post some day...) I need to value my students, their learning, and their future.
• Physics is applied to help creation. (I normally say, "help humanity," but with all the thoughts of the oil spill floating around in my head, and my multi-year-long fascination with the Cultural Mandate in Genesis 1, it occurred to me that I needed to expand my understanding of my own sphere of responsibility. Again, probably more about this in a future post...)

Summertime

...and the bloggin is easy. Apparently not, since I haven't posted most of this month! I think I'll post sporadically over the summer. It's been a good year but my brain is tired...

A few personal updates:

• My five year anniversary with Amy Lane is this Friday!
• I started teaching Aviation Physics as a hybrid course last week. I've never taught (or seen) a hybrid introductory physics course. So far it's going well. (Of course, we haven't hit free-body diagrams yet...)
• I'm listening through Beethoven's Symphonies, as conducted by Leonard Bernstein. I'm halfway through #5, and find it sad that the second movement is so often upstaged by the first.
• I'm trying something very different in my Electromagnetic Theory I course in the Fall; more on that later...
• I'm re-reading Sire's Habits of the Mind. As always, when I re-read a book, I find myself wondering why I highlighted some of the things I did, and why I didn't highlight others. Sire & Newman are right: The mind is like a mountain climber...

See you around!

Expo Pics and the Questions that Matter

The EPA Expo weekend before last went great! We're very proud of our students. You can find pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/110636788435437003869/EPA_EXPO_2010#.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

LOST is quickly drawing to a close. There are three regular episodes left before the two-hour finale. As the title of the show implies (and as conversation with any LOST fan will reveal), LOST is a show that raises many questions. What happened to so-and-so when she disappeared? Why did That Guy kill That Other Guy? What is The Monster? (For those of you who stopped watching mid-stream: No, we still don't know!)

There are perhaps 1,000 little questions that LOST has yet to answer, and many of us are wondering how the writers are going to answer them in only 5 more new hours of programming. I'm beginning to wonder if they intend to answer any of the little questions.

In fact, that seems to be their point as we head toward the finale: Not all questions matter equally. (In fact, one character even explicitly stated this back in Season 4: "Why don't you ask the one question that does matter?") They want us to focus on the big questions, which right now are basically boiled down to: What is the Monster? What is the Island? Who is Jacob?

While this frustrates me as an academic (I should have the ability to find the answer to any question, no matter how obscure!), I wonder if I need to be reminded that this is, in many ways, how God works.

In Scripture, we don't get the answer to every detail-oriented question: How many angles & demons are there? Was John the Baptist really saved before he was born? How old is the universe? What is "gopherwood?"

And from the point of view of the main themes of Scripture (the "Monster," the "Island," and "Jacob," if you will), these questions don't ultimately matter.

And perhaps this is not contrary to an academic mindset. After all, don't we teach our students to pick out the main ideas & themes of a work? Don't we want them to identify and readily employ the primary equations of a section?

Looking forward to May 23!

I'm off to Washington!

(I've enjoyed saying that all day...)

Tonight, I leave with a group of students and faculty to participate in the EPA's National Sustainable Design Expo. Our students are presenting the results of their (EPA funded!) residential water reuse system. I'm looking forward to it!

You can pray...

1. for our safety.
2. for this to be an opportunity for me to live out God's love and grace to my students & colleagues.
3. for our students to represent their project and their university as they compete with 41 other teams for a second phase of funding.

I'll post pictures to my Picasa page.

Have a great weekend!

Bloggin' Bout my Generation, Part III

So... what's the answer to this generation dilemma?

I don't have a foolproof solution, but I do have a suggestion.

My generation needs to transition from feeling challenged to feeling called.

We needed challenges. We needed to be pushed out of our comfort zones. We needed to be inspired to sacrificially serve God. We needed See You at the Pole rallies and Newsboys concerts and Summer Projects. Even those of us who haven't gone into "full-time ministry" needed them. (Perhaps we're the ones who needed them the most.) Those experiences, I believe, have made us unique, and we need to not be ashamed of that uniqueness.

But to hold onto our uniqueness, we need a sense of calling. Os Guinness defines calling as "the truth that God calls us to Himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have in invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to His summons and service." Challenges come in lumps (sometimes mountain-sized lumps); calling is continual. Challenges lead to growth in fits and spurts; calling leads to a journey. Challenge brings change from the top down; calling brings change from the bottom up.

Here's to praying we become a generation that answers its call. Not a call to abandon our "normal" lives in exchange for something "better," but to live out our extraordinary relationship with God in our "normal" lives. I think that's how God wants us to change the world, and I think He's prepared this generation of Christians to do it in a unique way.

The other side of the question is how the church can help us do that. I don't exactly know. But I hope current and future church leaders will see this need and dream of ways to encourage a new, called generation.