Dear brothers and sisters,

What a tumultuous time we are in: pandemic, racial strife, economic struggle, political turmoil, and what might be called “unsocial media” frenzy.

How are we as believers in Jesus to respond?

First of all, we should not be surprised by all the signs of the fallenness of the world. Instead we should be always amazed that the Lord has extended his grace towards us. We are called to always rejoice in the Lord, no matter what (Philippians 4:4).

Secondly, as grateful as we should be for our country and its freedoms, we need to remember that we are only temporary citizens in a far-from-perfect and also temporary Nation. Our primary focus and hope must therefore not be on any kingdom here. As Paul reminds us, “. . . our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3:20-21).

Along these lines, I commend the letter below that the Rev. David Trautman shared with his parish. Please pray for our Nation and its leaders in this decisive month, regardless of the election results. Most of all pray that we as the Church, whatever our political positions, would remain unified under the Lord Jesus, the only eternal ruler of all things who is worthy of all praise and honor.

May the Lord Jesus bless you all in everything you face, enabling you to rejoice in the midst of all things.

Leading a local church during a major time of change is clearly hard. We know this because we’ve all been doing it this year. It’s not just something we’ve read about in a book. A major reason it is hard is that it requires changing the way we do things. It means letting go of ways of doing things we knew and were comfortable with. It means reorienting and adapting to different ways of operating. Nobody likes change, even people like me, who long ago embraced change as a necessary part of having a healthy, growing church.

Considering this, one comforting thought I’ve had during this unfortunate season has been the fact that we’re not the first church leaders to have had to adapt the way the church does things due to changing external circumstances. We are certainly not alone in leading during hard times.

Think about what it must have been like if you were a church leader at other times in church history:

Since this is a blog not a book, I realize I may be oversimplifying with these examples, but I think you get my point. Being a church leader during times of major transitioning is hard. It always has been, and it always will be until Jesus returns. Letting go of the ways we’ve always known, reorienting and adapting to new ways of how we do church given the new external circumstances is not easy. However, changing what the church does in these difficult times is always easy. It’s easy because regardless of how the external circumstances change, what the church does, never changes.

What the church does has not changed in nearly 2,000 years. How the church does what it does has changed and continues to change as needed. That is a big distinction.

Is everyone out there brimming with confidence, or, like me, do you find the following exhortations of Paul hard to imagine saying to another disciple yourself?

Our adventures in discipling the young believers under our own roof frequently found us, as their parents, pleading the exact opposite. Some poor behavior or angry outburst would cause us to fervently hope we would not be imitated by our kids!

Context is important here. Paul was a first century rabbi, and what he pleads expresses the difference between Western and Hebrew thinking pretty perfectly. In our context we tend to think of training in the faith as a mastery of a particular content, a set of convictions to be whole-heartedly embraced. For Paul and rabbis in his day, including Jesus, faith was formed as the disciple literally followed his rabbi around, not just to listen to what he said, but to observe all he did and then imitate everything. Our teachers in Israel say that in Hebrew thinking it was more important to notice how the rabbi responded to stubbing his toe in the middle of the night than it was to absorb his theology. Genuine faith was more concerned with mastery of self than mastery of doctrine.

The same is still true for how the faith of the next generation is formed in our homes and in our church communities. Are we living imitable lives?

As a young parent and pastor’s wife, I remember the sobering thought that my girls would learn more about grace from the way I welcomed the unexpected visitor at the door than they might from my overt Bible lessons. I wondered if my son would come to anticipate, or fear, attitudes from a possible future wife which he saw in his mom.

This flows naturally from the principles of obedience and transparency we have already discussed. First, whose examples are we following, and then, who is learning from the shape of our lives? There are a few ways we have seen this principle of imitation work out in practice.