Author Archives: cobbmic

Reworking the Blog

March 28, 2013 – 10:57 PM

This blog will be (mostly) inactive until June 1, 2013. Why? Read on…

I have struggled to find focus for this blog. I know I have not written new posts as frequently as I’d like, but a big reason for this is that I have never settled on a focus for this blog. Is this going to be a collected of far-ranging thoughts? Am I going to focus my content around ministry? Or philosophy? Or theology?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this problem since the year’s beginning. A goal for this year is to grow my readership. But all the advice I can find––and my own intuition––tells me that I need to find a focus for this blog before I spend considerable time each week writing new posts.

A few days ago, an obvious solution hit me, and I’ve celebrated it like it was a Nobel-Prize-winning idea: focus the blog on helping college students deal with the spiritual and intellectual challenges of college.

Why is this an obvious solution? Because I’m a campus minister, and my thoughts do not stray far from helping college students grow in their faith.

Time for Change

I need to redesign and refocus this site. So I am setting aside the next two months to do that. What do I plan on doing?

  1. Looking into a new design.
  2. Developing a new site layout and navigation.
  3. Reworking old and relevant posts around the new focus.
  4. Moving or removing old and irrelevant posts.
  5. Planning future series and posts.
  6. Possible rename the blog.

So expect to see a lot of changes on the blog over the next two months. But I will not be posting any new posts until June 1, 2013. I am going to develop new content and rework older content. (For this reason, many of my older posts will begin to disappear.) All the new and recycled material will begin appearing after June 1st.

New Goals

What are the goal of the new site?

  1. Help college students mature in their faith.
  2. Help college students deal with the intellectual challenges to their faith (i.e. apologetics).
  3. Provide some reflections on college ministry (for other ministers).
  4. Provide some resources for parents of college students (or soon-to-be college students).

I hope that any regular readers I might have would continue to read the blog regularly. Even if you aren’t a college students, I think you’ll find the content helpful.

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Five Reasons I’m Scared to Talk About the Holy Spirit

March 27, 2013 – 11:41 PM

Okay. I’m a minister. So I should want to talk about God––Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is a large part of the job description.

I have no trouble talking about the Father. And I have no trouble talking about Jesus Christ. But the Spirit is a different story.

I am preparing to teach on the Holy Spirit in my campus ministry. No, I’m not merely mentioning Him in a lesson. I am planning a teaching series. Soon I’ll have to stand in front of college students and talk intelligently and helpfully about the Holy Spirit.

And I’m a little scared.

Why?

Because I don’t like to talk about the Holy Spirit. And that’s a bad thing for a minister.

I spent some time today meditating on these fears. I thought I would share them with you. I am only going to tell you why I am scared to talk about the Holy Spirit. I’ll let others tell you how to overcome these fears.

Five Reasons I’m Scared to Talk About the Holy Spirit

1. I haven’t experienced the Holy Spirit like I would like. I know the Spirit should be a strong presence in my life. And I can see the effects of His work in my life and in my ministry. It’s just that I can only point to a handful of times I “felt” the work of the Holy Spirit in my life.

I feel uncomfortable talking to others about something I haven’t fully experienced. But I have to throw off any pride and allow myself to speak as a fellow traveler, not as a tour guide.

2. I’ve never heard the Holy Spirit talked about much. I grew up in churches that were not merely uncertain about the work of the Holy Spirit. They were certain He didn’t do almost anything anymore. He did a few miracles in Bible times, inspired the Scriptures, and then flew back into heaven.

As a result, any time I make a statement about the Holy Spirit, I instinctively feel defensive about that statement. I imagine being challenged on that statement by old preachers. This makes talking about the Spirit quite a chore for me.

3. I don’t see others experiencing the Holy Spirit like people do in the Bible. As Francis Chan says in The Forgotten God, the lives of most Christians don’t show the Spirit’s power like we see in the New Testament. Some are uncertain whether miraculous spiritual gifts still exist. And the churches that still clam that the miraculous spiritual gifts sometimes display them in ways you don’t see in the New Testament (showy and man-centered).

Even apart from the miraculous spiritual gifts, you often don’t see the moral changes that one would expect to see in people empowered by the Holy Spirit. In some Christians, I don’t see the love, joy, peace, and other fruit of the Spirit.

Since many Christians haven’t obviously experienced the Holy Spirit, I sometimes feel that talking about the Holy Spirit would make them uncomfortable.

4. I am aware that the Holy Spirit is a controversial topic. Okay. This point should be the easiest for you to see and agree with me. When it comes to the Holy Spirit, you would be hard pressed to find two people who have the exact same beliefs about the Holy Spirit.

Some people think the Spirit still works miracles. Others don’t. Some think the Spirit speaks to them and directly guides them. Others see this as dangerously subjective. Some think that the experience during a Christian concert is the Spirit moving. Others think that is is simply emotions, similar to what one would feel during a secular concert.

And these disagreements can become nasty. One party says the other is questioning, or outright denying, their religious experiences. The other party believes that all the talk about the Holy Spirit is too focused on misleading feelings and dangerously close to challenging the unique authority of the Bible.

Who would want to talk about the Spirit upset others because you are too “charismatic” or because you are “quenching the Spirit”? No one…especially ministers, since some have been fired for being on the wrong side of the debate.

5. There are many misuses of the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to do much research to begin finding story after story of charlatans who have claimed they were doing great works through the Spirit, when all the while they were deceiving their followers. And in the process these “ministers” got rich.

Some abuse the Spirit because they wrongly attribute their feelings and wishes to the Spirit. People often claim that the Spirit has placed a burden on their heart to go somewhere or do something or marry somebody. Sometimes this is true. But sometimes it is just their own wishes and feelings, evidenced by how quickly they turn aside from their previous plans or dreams. The Spirit is not fickle, but listening to some Christians gives you that impression.

So I’m afraid that when I talk about the Holy Spirit, people will assume that I am misusing the Spirit.

Conclusion

I hope no one mistakes what I’ve written as encouraging others not to speak about the Spirit. I rather hope that Christians will talk about the Spirit more.

Sure, the ways we talk about the Spirit needs to be formed by the Scriptures. But we need to talk more about the Spirit.

I hope that this article helps unearth some of the reasons you are reluctant to speak about the Spirit. After all, you will not freely talk about the Spirit until you remove these barriers to doing so.

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Five Lessons Learned in My First Two Years of Ministry

March 11, 2013 – 12:11 PM

Two Years Down…

A few months ago, I finished my second year of full-time ministry. As a campus minister, my job differ somewhat from a youth minister’s job or a preaching minister job. But I still think I have learned a few things from two years of ministry that might be helpful for any minister who is just starting out.

Five Crucial Lessons

Here are the five crucial lessons I’ve learned in my first two years of full-time ministry.

1. Teach the Word of God. When I was a ministry intern, I spent a lot of time thinking about all the things I would do when I became a full-time minister. I thought about programs I would start, evangelism initiatives, fundraising, and so on. Without knowing it, I was creating a ministry philosophy that focused heavily around my efforts and ingenuity to grow a ministry. What was wrong with this? I didn’t make the center of my ministry teaching the Word of God.

Thankfully, shortly before I was started my current job, I came to see the true importance of teaching God’s Word. I have been amazed at what God has done through His Word. God has developed leaders in my ministry, created a passion for outreach, transformed the students, and given many students a passion for studying His Word.

This didn’t happen because I’m a great teacher. I’m still an inexperienced teacher, cramming too much material into my unstructured lessons. But God works through His Word.

2. It’s easy to dilute your efforts by overcommitting. Time management experts advise people to learn to say “No” to taking on extra projects at work. Otherwise, so many things will consume your time that you will be overworked but performing poorly.

I’m guilty of not taking this advice. When I started this job, I wanted to do well and get noticed. So I overcommitted. In my ministry, I taught 2-3 times a week. I promised a lot of people that I would have coffee with them or go to lunch with them. I tried to talk with everyone that wanted to talk with me. I tried to take visitors out for coffee or lunch to get to know them. I did a lot of things for my church that fell outside of the sphere of my college ministry.

And none of these tasks were bad tasks. But I overcommitted. And what gets cut? Study. Prayer. Proper preparation for lessons and sermons. Intentionally discipling student leaders. Rest. Family time. God has blessed my ministry these last two years, but I was so overcommitted that I didn’t give him much to work with. Now I’m in my third year, and I’m doing a much better job of focusing my efforts.

3. Spiritual leadership is more than just making good decisions. In my job, I am supposed to teach the Bible, model a godly life, and disciple students. These tasks make up my spiritual leadership role.

But I am also the administrator and the event planner at my ministry. And I have to oversee our ministry programs. So I have to be a leader in these areas. Each week I juggle all these tasks.

And this makes it easy for me to deceive myself about the quality of my leadership. The leadership I exercise in my administrative tasks is primarily displayed in making good decisions. It is easy to equate all leadership with making good decisions. But this is not true of spiritual leadership. Spiritual leadership is much more about modeling the Christian life in my actions, faithfully teaching the Word of God, and discipling students.

Both administrative leadership and spiritual leadership are important, but spiritual leader is certainly more important than the other. And if I look back over the year and think of all the good decisions I’ve made, I could conclude that I’ve been a good leader. But if I haven’t lead a godly life and discipled and taught students, I’ve been a poor leader in the more important area of spiritual leadership.

This year, I’m trying to be more intentional about ensuring that I’m being a good spiritual leader and not just making good decision.

4. Energy management is as important as time management. My first point was about time management. But even when I’m focusing on the right tasks and not overcommitting, my work is low quality when I am not managing my energy well. If I’m not getting enough sleep or letting my sleep habits become irregular (which is easy for a coffee drinker to do), then I am inefficient when writing Bible lessons or sermons, planning, and talking to students.

And there is another dimension to this too: the spiritual dimension. When I’m exhausted and burnt out, I’m less inclined to pray and study the Word of God. I tend to become less caring with students and less passionate when I teach.

If I have been slow in learning any of these five lessons, it is this one. But I’m trying to do better. And I think I’ve done better in the last few months than I ever have.

5. It was easy for me to become so involved with my job that I neglected my own spiritual life. Older ministers nearly always warn advise younger ministers to take care to “feed yourself.” But it is easy for me to neglect prayer and reading one’s Bible. And though I spend so much time talking and thinking about where others are spiritually, it is easy to spend almost no time talking and thinking about where I am spiritually.

I must admit that I’ve found it difficult to maintain good study habits and prayer habits. Reading my Bible makes me think about my next lesson. When praying, I begin thinking about all the people I need to meet with or talk to.

I still need my personal habits to mature more, but I do believe I’m doing a better job of this than I was when I started. I just hope and pray that I can continue to improve this area of my life.

Conclusion

I find it hard to believe that my first two years of ministry are past. God has not only blessed my ministry, but he has blessed me by allowing me to learn a lot about ministry without too much pain or disruption. And I am grateful for that.

I hope my reflections will help other young ministers grow as ministers. If you are not a minister but you read this anyway, I hope this will give you a little insight into the struggles of a minister. It is a peculiar job, burdensome yet full of joy. I count it a blessing from God to spend my days in ministry.

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