This week, the new www.gsumc.org has gone live.

Months in the making, blood, sweat, and tears in the planning, the new site is a significant upgrade from the old one.  While not all the pages are filled yet and a few isolated bugs need to be repaired, the site is overall much more streamlined and user-friendly than we've ever had before.

Here are the Top Five reasons why:

1.  Gorgeous new color palette that's designed to "pop" on today's high definition computer screens.

2.  A special "I'm New" tab which has an array of special features, including our welcome video (see below) and tips for planning a guest's first visit to the church. 

3.  A "Watch A Service" tab that takes you not only to the previous Sunday's service, but a whole page full of options stretching back several months.

4.  Links to our strategic heartbeat:  LifeGroups and ServeTeams.  The ServeTeam section is helpfully divided into both Sunday ServeTeams and Outreach ServeTeams.

5 (tie)  Opportunities to give online, connect directly with this blog (yea!), and to get all the information in Spanish.


In case you didn't see it before, here's our new Welcome Video:

Welcome to Good Shepherd Church from GSUMC on Vimeo.

There are two kinds of people:  those who think to talk and those who talk to think.

Those who think to talk very carefully measure their words in their minds before they let them escape from their mouths.  Think-to-talkers tend to speak in short bursts, often in softer voices, and find themselves uncomfortable in the presence of long-winded friends. 

They rarely get in trouble for what they say in the heat of the moment because in those heated moments they don't say anything.  Instead, they process information mentally and only when they know what they're going to say do they circle back around and say it.

In contrast, talk-to-thinkers process their thoughts and the information around them as they speak. Talk-to-thinkers begin their reflections on a certain subject not knowing where it will go, and only in the process of speaking do they organize their thoughts and come to a conclusion.

They do sometimes get in trouble for what they say in the heat of the moment because they have to say something as part of figuring out how they feel about the matter at hand.  Talk-to-thinkers become frustrated at their more reticent friends who often sit in silence trying to determine where the conversation should go next.

I am at the extreme end of the think to talk scale.  Though my sermons come without notes, there is very little there that I haven't figured out and planned ahead of time.  Spontaneity is not my strength.  And in personal conversation, I do my best to measure my words, to speak with clarity, and not to ramble.

My dear friend and beloved teammate Chris Macedo is on the extreme end of the talk to think scale.  It's why he can start to talk about something and five minutes later announce, "and so THAT'S what I think about it . . . "  Our different wiring is one reason our partnership works as well as it does.

But here's why I give you all that background (and I guarantee you will spend the rest of today placing people into one of those two categories):

Over the past week, I've led a completely talk to think kind of life.

First, I had a conversation with our Discipleship Director Chris Thayer (a think-to-talker if there ever was one) about an upcoming sermon.  I was having difficulty figuring out how I wanted to say what I wanted to say and as I often do, I asked Chris to help me.  Usually we'll finish talking, I'll go back & brood, and VOILA the sermon will come.  Not this time.  We were speaking through the issue, a collection of words came out of my mouth and I realized, "That's it! That's how I want to say what I want to say!"

Second, I had that exact same experience in the middle of one of the one-on-one discipleship meetings I do throughout the week.  I sure didn't know where the conversation was headed when it started, but I was delighted with where it ended up.

Third, towards the end of the week, my wife Julie and I took a completely unplanned, spontaneous mini-vacation.  We came up with idea one afternoon and were gone the next morning.  In almost 30 years of marriage that's never happened before.

Finally -- and perhaps most importantly -- in church yesterday my role was to give the invitation to a living relationship with Jesus Christ in our closing moments.  I didn't preach -- the extraordinary Defining Moments short film did that for me -- but at the video's conclusion I went to the platform and gave people some prompts to respond.

And I didn't give the content of that invitation one thought all week.  I didn't script it, didn't mull it, didn't rehearse it. 

I wanted to gauge the response to the film in the room -- to feel the pulse of the gathered community -- and then tailor my words accordingly.

So that's what happened.  And on this extemporaneous day that culminated a week of spontaneity, God did the rest.

I talked to think and the Father then took over at 8:30, 10, and 11:30.  Decisions for Jesus galore.

I'm ready to enter back into my think to talk world -- it's so hardwired in me that I really can't help it -- but from now on I'll keep my eyes and even my mouth open for opportunities to meander into the sheer craziness of talking to think.


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Here's the Defining Moments short film that was our sermon yesterday:

 

I'm reading When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss' massive biography of Vince Lombardi.

Early in Lombardi's coaching career (and therefore, early in the book!), he got a job at Cathedral High School, a small Catholic institution in northern New Jersey.

The school's administrators apparently did not share Lombardi's love for football.

Here's what appeared in the Cathedral Annual Yearbook for 1931:

Many undesirable results and conditions, physical, moral and intellectual, are brought about by football.  Ahtletes are very liable to physical injury and strain through overemphasis and overspecialization.  Football tends to further the advancement of destructive and detrimental moral results.  It indubitably leads to the adoption of questionable ethical practices and unsportsmanlike conduct.  It sanctions the evasion of rules, trickery, undesirable recruiting practices bordering on professionalism, and a lack of courtesy.  There is a regrettable psychological effect on the players.  This effect is brought about by newspaper publicity, building up individual prestige instead of praising the machinelike functioning of a team.  False attitudes are taken by the student body which revels in its athletic accomplishments while neglecting the real purpose of education.

So:  Depression-Era Seers Or Depression-Suffering Sourpusses?

You decide.


 

Not long ago, I was involved in cyber-communication with a new Methodist friend, and we were discussing the same-sex conundrum within the United Methodist Church. 

My friend (who knows about this post, by the way) and I align on most  issues, but I sensed a divide on this one.  Meaning: we have similar views regarding the divinity of Christ, the authority of the Scriptures, and the sublimity of ancient thought but different viewpoints on performing same gender weddings and ordaining practicing homosexuals into Methodist ministry.

Yet here's how he phrased our different perspectives regarding homosexual intercourse and the Methodist Church:

While you and I may have some disagreements on social issues, I appreciate your witness for doctrinal fidelity.

To which I immediately thought -- and replied --  "No, no, no.  You can't separate those categories.  It's not merely a social issue. The sexual IS the doctrinal!" 

Why do I say that?  Because your body is the most theological thing about you.

(Note: theology here is "thinking about & reflecting on God" while doctrine is the kind of official teaching the results from that earlier thinking.  Theology produces doctrine.)

So back to the theological nature of our bodies:

Life was breathed into the human body at our origins.

Once we marred the beauty of our creation, it took a body to redeem us:

²¹ Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. ²² But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation  (Colossians 1:21-22).

Paul then reminds the Corinthians that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.  In a real sense our bodies are the dwelling place of God.

Finally, at the end of all days we will dwell with God not as immortal souls but as resurrected bodies.  From the dawn of creation to the end of time, then, our bodies are God-breathed, God-dwelled, and God-honoring.

And that same rich heritage that teaches us about bodily sacredness also teaches that the most intimate use of our bodies -- sexual intercourse with another -- is blessed on the marriage bed and there alone.  All other expressions of sexual intimacy are . . . and pardon the use of the word . . . sin.

It's why, in the same paragraph as "your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit," Paul tells us to flee sexual immorality (I Corinthians 6:18).  Behind that imperative lies this reasoning: all other sins are outside the body yet this one is against our own bodies.  Our own dwelling places of God.

And in Paul's beautiful logic here in I Corinthians, all these individual "temples of the Holy Spirit" form one corporate Body of Christ.  So what one believer does with his or her body has an impact on both the witness and the unity of the larger Body.

Such a profoundly consistent witness on the subject suggests to me that the theological nature of our bodies and our sexuality should result in clarity around Methodist sexual doctrine:  celibacy in singleness and faithfulness in heterosexual marriage.

So when we Methodist speak of the sexual issues roiling our denomination, separating the conversation into the doctrinal and the social won't fly.  It's like the Greek dichotomy of body and soul: it sounds like a way forward but it doesn't align with the Scriptural revelation.

Because when it comes to sexual intimacy, every act has theological implications.

The sexual IS the theological.

And therefore it is the doctrinal as well.