Growing Edge - Christianity Today

REVIEWED:

Halftime

by Bob Buford

Helping Worriers

by James R. Beck and David T. Moore

7 Online Services

(America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, Ecunet, The Microsoft Network, eWorld)

Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching

by William H. Willimon and Richard Lischer, editors

The Care of Troublesome People

by Wayne E. Oates

STRAIGHT TALK

How to live the second half of life.

This year I hit 50, which called for some reflection. I read Bob Buford’s “Halftime–Changing Your Game Plan from Success to Significance” (Zondervan, 175 pages, $15.99) and thought back a quarter century ago, when I was a 25-year-old Green Beret in Vietnam.

My cheek was pressed in the mud of a small trench at Dak Pek, a Special-Forces A Camp. With elements of a North Vietnamese regiment surrounding our perimeter, the thought occurred to me that I could die here.

I asked myself, What difference will it make that I have lived?

That question started a process that continued a few months later in another tropical valley, this time in Hawaii, with my wife and our 16-month-old son. As I held the woman I loved and romped with my boy in the sand, the answer to my question began to form in a conversation with the Ancient of Days.

“Lord, if you choose to give me another twenty-five years,” I prayed, “I would like to invest them in my family and your family.”

Bob Buford would say I had begun to experience some of the symptoms of Halftime.

To be sure, the trauma of combat had provoked an early onset, but I had begun to pay attention to my life. I had begun to redefine success in terms of significance. As Buford says, I had begun the “somewhat haunting thing [of thinking] about your own gravestone while you are vitally alive.”

TURNING OFF THE AUTOPILOT

So at age 50, I’m doing it again. 1995 marks the completion of that original 25-year vow. The church we started and continue to pastor is healthy. The three sons God gave us are launched. This spring Linda and I sat down in our empty nest and asked ourselves, “If our Lord should give us another 25 years, how might we use them to finish strong?”

“The first half of life,” writes Buford, cable television magnate and founder of Leadership Network, “has to do with getting and gaining, learning and earning. … [F]or the second half of life to be better than the first, you must make the choice to step outside of the safety of living on autopilot.” Linda and I joined Buford in the conclusion “that the second half of our lives should be the best half–that it can be, in fact, a personal renaissance.”

We’re not the only ones calling “time out” to strategize for this crucial half. Some 75 million people in America are in the midlife zone of from 35 to 55 years of age.

Buford argues that midlife doesn’t have to be a crisis; it can be a season for focusing on genuine fulfillment and drawing specific plans to reach it. As he writes, “Halftime is the perfect opportunity to shift from trying to understand God to learning to know him.”

Halftime is clearly addressed to business professionals asking the inevitable questions of midlife. (I recommend giving copies to key men in your congregation.) As a pastor, I found it helpful in evaluating my approach to ministry. I realize I can’t settle in to business as usual. Scripture is full of those who started well and fizzled. Unfortunately, so are the records of Christian ministry.

But there are those whose second halves had far more impact than the first–Moses and Paul, for example. Buford insists that like sporting events, life and ministry are most often won in the last half.

Not just another melancholic midlife navel gaze, this book is encouraging, stimulating, and practical. I found the author warm and personal, exposing his heart as he tells the wrenching story of his son’s death.

Halftime is a book you should have in the locker room during your halftime.

–STU WEBER, pastor

Good Shepherd Community Church

Boring, Oregon

HELP FOR HAND-WRINGERS

A new resource to help church members remove the wart of worry.

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy”–not everyone subscribes to that catch phrase. Pastors invest much time on the phone and in the office assuring worriers, “God will work things out.”

Can hard-core hand-wringers learn to trust God? Can pastors spend less time bolstering the fretful?

A hands-on tool that might be your answer is “Helping Worriers” (Baker; 143 pages, $16.99) by James R. Beck, professor of counseling at Denver Seminary, and David T. Moore, pastor of Southwest Community Church in Palm Desert, California.

The beauty of this book’s model is the “time-limited counseling format”–perfect for pastors. Beck and Moore suggest no more than five sessions.

Their first step is to identify and address specific goals. Having done so, pastor and counselee join in a “time-limited partnership that focuses on immediately putting a plan into action.” For example, particularly stubborn areas of worry could be targeted: money or health matters. Each session is summarized with an “irreducible concept,” which the client takes home to ponder. The irreducible concept for session one, for example, is “Worry is wrong.” Session two, “Feelings are fickle.” Session three, “Thinking turned toxic.” The irreducible core of the entire process is “Faith is the oil of the machinery of life; worry is the sand.”

Pastors who worry that counseling relies too heavily on psychology should have no fears with this book. Beck and Moore use Scripture as the foundation of the process. Although they utilize techniques from several counseling models, they focus on God’s remedy for the worrier.

“Helping Worriers” concludes with a “Case History of a World-Class Worrier,” a helpful session-by-session journey through the process with a counselee named Allison. Allison, who on a worry scale of 1 to 10 ranks herself at 9.75, observes change almost immediately.

“Helping Worriers” and its accompanying workbook, “Why Worry,” are part of the ten-volume counselor’s library “Strategic Pastoral Counseling,” edited by David G. Benner. Pastors will delight in the practicality of this book and may find themselves worrying a lot less.

–BILL DONELSON, singles pastor

Fellowship Community Church

Aurora, Colorado

CYBERMINISTRY

Seven online services pastors should consider.

Pastors are online for many reasons–communicating with missionaries and ministries, doing research, and finding empathetic electronic ears, to name a few.

The major players–America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy–offer similar services, though with different names and prices. Ecunet, although smaller than the big four, focuses on the church and parachurch community. The Microsoft Network has yet to be explored, and eWorld benefits those with Apple computers.

Information about each service:

America Online (800/827-6364). America Online’s ease of use and aggressive marketing have resulted in phenomenal growth to some three million users.

Of interest to LEADERSHIP readers, the journal can be found on AOL, in the Christianity Online area operated by Christianity Today, Inc.

If you are a Macintosh or Microsoft Windows user, AOL will seem familiar; options are located in the same places as in popular programs.

AOL costs $9.95/month for five hours, additional time going for $2.95/hour.

CompuServe (800/524-3388). CompuServe has been around for almost three decades and has continuously added publications and services. CompuServe’s interface, like AOL’s, is intuitive.

CompuServe’s pricing structure is complex. The standard pricing plan costs $9.95 a month and allows unlimited access to more than a hundred basic services, after which there are some charges. An Alternative Pricing Plan costs $2.50/month. Hourly connect-time charges are in effect at all times except when in the free services.

GEnie Information Services (800/638-9636). GEnie’s interface is not as slick as others, and GEnie has been slower to construct gateways to the Internet, but it offers reputable reference material, information, and discussions. GEnie is the least expensive ($8.95/month for the first four hours; $3/hour after that).

Prodigy (800/776-3449). Prodigy was the first major online service to provide access to the World Wide Web, a popular area of the Internet. Prodigy subscribers can create their own “home pages,” or areas, on the Web. Prodigy’s interface, though less intuitive than AOL’s or CompuServe’s, is still user-friendly.

Prodigy has a three-tiered pricing plan. The basic plan costs $9.95/month for five hours of service and $2.95 for each additional hour, with certain premium features incurring additional fees. The value plan costs $14.95/month for five hours plus $2.95 for each additional hour and adds free use of Prodigy Plus features. The 30/30 Plan costs $29.95/month for 30 hours plus $2.95 per additional hour.

Ecunet (800/733-2863). Each of the previous four online services has religion areas, but religion is the primary focus of Ecunet. Ecunet brings together denominational bulletin board systems, so you’ll find discussions among and between American Baptists, Anglicans, Black Religious Studies, the Brethren, Disciples of Christ, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Mennonites, National Council of Churches, Presbyterians, Quakers, Roman Catholics, United Church of Canada, United Church of Christ, United Methodists, and others.

Ecunet does not have a local access number (unless you live in Louisville, Kentucky). Using the 800-number incurs a surcharge. The new Convene for Windows software, however, gives the Windows user a familiar look and allows the subscriber to do many things offline, thus saving connection charges.

Convene for Windows software is $75, and the still-available Convene for dos is $50. The cost for unlimited direct-dial access to Ecunet is $11 per month, plus the telephone charges from your office to Louisville, Kentucky.

The Microsoft Network (800/426-9400). Bill Gates’s proposed online service will be a reality by the time you read this. Bundled as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system, The Microsoft Network aims to make the difference between the user’s local computer environment and cyberspace as seamless as possible. Thus, according to news releases, msn will look and act just like Windows 95 and vice versa. Microsoft will offer a three-tiered membership plan that includes the Annual Plan ($49.95 per year for three hours of service per month, each additional hour costing $2.50), the Frequent User Plan ($19.95 per month for 20 hours of usage with each additional hour being billed at $2 per hour), and the Standard Monthly Plan ($4.95 per month for three hours of usage plus $2.50 per additional hour).

eWorld: Apple Macintosh users have their own network as well, known as eWorld, which is included on Macintosh computers purchased after August 1994. It is also available free to owners of older Macintosh computers by calling 1-800-775-4556. The service costs $8.95 a month for the first four hours of use and $2.95 for each additional hour thereafter.

–Bill Gartner (gart@aol.com)

senior applications analyst

Chicago, Illinois

THE PREACHER’S OTHER BIBLE

A new preaching resource from Duke University professors Will Willimon and Richard Lischer.

All I really need to know about preaching I can find in the “Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching” (Westminster/John Knox Press, $39).

Well, almost.

It may be concise, but its entries range from biographical (“Phillips Brooks” and “Robert Schuller”) to technical (“inductive preaching” and “voice”) to theological (“spirituality of the preacher” and “apocalyptic”) to historical (“baccalaureate sermon” and “homiletics and preaching in Asia”). Two Duke University professors, William H. Willimon and Richard Lischer, edited the volume.

Because I’m shifting to preaching without notes, I devoured the article on “memory,” and I’ve been foraging through the biographical entries to study the delivery styles of various masters. While Dietrich Bonhoeffer invariably prepared a manuscript, he took no notes into the pulpit but committed the flow of ideas to memory. F.W. Robertson brought only a few notes into the pulpit and often crumpled them in his hand while preaching. Even Spurgeon carried only a small page with an outline.

The common denominator, I discovered, to successful preaching without notes lies in writing a manuscript with a clear progression of ideas. Repeated review of this manuscript will enable preachers to fill in a bare-bones outline they memorize or slip into their Bible.

Articles in this encyclopedia typically run from one to three pages in length and are written by leading authorities. The articles are arranged alphabetically. Biographical articles offer the flavor of the subject’s preaching by concluding with an excerpt from one of his or her sermons.

I plan to salvage those “10-minute dead spots” in my daily schedule by reading and reflecting on an article from Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching.

–Steve Mathewson, pastor

Dry Creek Bible Church

Belgrade, Montana

TOUGH LOVE

A challenge to care for critics.

More than once I have threatened to write a book about some of the troublesome people I have had to contend with–the stories I could tell.

But what pastor couldn’t?

What pastor couldn’t write pages about the power-hungry parishioner who challenged him, making him look weak and ineffectual? Or the quiet schism-maker with a pernicious talent for creating dissension and division? Or the fellow who clings to you like a dependent debtor? Or the spotlight grabber with an insatiable need to be the star performer?

In his brief book “The Care of Troublesome People” (Alban Institute, $10.95, 77 pages), Wayne E. Oates, senior research professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, insists that to care properly for “troublesome people represents no small demand on us as pastors and lay leaders. But my life–and I’m sure yours–has been enriched by troublesome people.”

With that bold and hopeful assertion, Oates proceeds to describe five common types of troublesome parishioners–the backbiter, the authoritarian person, the competitive person, the dependent person, and the star performer.

The author sees troublesome people not as prodigals to be coped with or dealt with, implying “that we are managing or manipulating people.” Rather, he believes that “troublesome people may well be ‘runaway creativity’ that needs to be slowed down to a contemplative pace. It may be the stuff of God’s calling that plainly needs direction, purpose, and appropriate expression.”

Our calling in caring for troublesome people, he says, is to “search out their gifts with them and challenge them to the consecration of their gifts to God and in considerate use of them in relation to God’s community of faith.”

Pick up a copy before you answer the letter from your latest critic or confront the guy who torpedoed your idea at last night’s board meeting. It will make a difference in how you care for that person.

–Gary D. Preston, pastor

Bethany Baptist Church

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