I am always a little skeptical about the things that well known pastors and spiritual leaders have to say about ministry. This is rooted in the reality that a local ministry is much like a finger print: each is original. There might be similarities in one context and another but you cannot apply a blanket strategy to address all of the needs of a congregation.

So in listening to this book, I entered in expecting to hear something like, “This is what we did and this is how it works for you”. It’s the formula most well known pastors follow when they are presenting their successes. But that isn’t what Peterson set out to do.

His memoir is a journey from the genesis of his call into ministry. Not the moment he determined he would be a pastor but in what some might call the prevenient moments of his development. His experiences as a child and as a student in seminary when he still assumed that he would be a scholar and a professor; this memoir is the story of his formation into a pastor.

I am a pastor. I am a much younger pastor than Peterson. All of the time I wonder what it means to actually be a pastor. What do we think we do? What do others think we do? and How often do we actually live up to the name and title of Pastor?

I think that I’m going to start exploring these questions here in this place. I think I’m also going to start working out my story, just as Peterson did in his memoirs. I’d like to look back and see how God was using various moments in my life to develop me into this leader that we call a pastor. 

I’m not really certain where to start with this story. There are a few natural places to begin. I could start at birth, I could start with the first time I remember going to the altar. But the story probably starts around the time dad became a pastor.

I grew up in the house of my parents and a lot of time I consider to have been raised the son of a pastor. That’s not altogether true for myself or for my older brother. Dad didn’t feel the call to become a pastor until his 40th birthday. If I do some quick math that means I was 12 years old when he was called to be a pastor. I was probably about 13 and heading into 7th grade by the time I officially associated myself as being a Pastor’s kid.

You would think that in that time I would have experienced all of the good things about being a PK but the reality was different. The first place he was a pastor was a fine experience for us. It happened in a place that I still consider my  home church… in fact I’m writing this in the office of that church. We had great friends and deep roots in this place. It was a second home for me.

But as is the case in a lot of ministries, that time came to an end. For us it was because the senior pastor at the time resigned his position and as is the custom in our church all of his staff also resigned to ensure that the incoming senior pastor would be able to enter with fewer hurdles in setting up his pastorate and pastoral staff. Whether or not that practice is wise isn’t really the point of this post (though it will be the point of another!), it was simply the catalyst that thrust our family into nearly a decade of transient awkwardness in pursuit of God’s calling.

Dad stayed on with the church after the senior pastor left until the church hired his replacement. And at that point we made our transition to his second pastorate. It wasn’t all that far away; about an hour and a half to the north. But in terms of the community the church provided, the new environment, the make up of the neighborhoods we lived in and the new schools I was in a foreign land. It was a really tough time because all of those friends and roots I had were taken away.

This was the time just before the internet and instant communication that we have now. I remember that one of the last things that we did before moving to this new place was taking down the addresses of my friends so I could write letters to them (it was cheaper to write a letter than to call long distance). It wasn’t that long ago but it was a different world than the one we live in now.

The new place wasn’t horrible. In fact a lot of people look at this place and they think it’s an ideal place to live. But for me it was very different compared to the home that I had begun the process developing my identity. It was a safe place but mostly because it was fairly homogeneous. It is an affluent place that’s identified by the main agricultural product of the area: grapes. While the city we lived in was the dominant community of the area with over 100k living there it was looked at then as a rustic town. I think that it still is but it has continued to grow over the years since our family lived there.

The church there was a more traditional church than the one we had just left. Dad would be an associate pastor for a man that had been a missionary earlier in his ministerial career. He was well loved in the church but not as much as a particular pastor of an earlier generation. That pastor had been a leader in the denomination at the highest level and he cast a very large shadow over that church even though he had passed long before our family arrived. This was a church that was steeped in history and the memory of “better days”. When we arrived, there were roughly 300 regular attenders, but that paled in comparison to the 500-600 that attended when the previous pastor had led them to glory and back.

This church would be the place where I would learn to hate the church;  patch of my life that lasted nearly a decade. In the short time my father was employed at this location I would see him lead the church in good directions only to see the leadership chew him up and spit him out when he no longer served their purposes. It was a tough place to be, especially as I was learning what it meant to be a member of a church and a follower of Christ.

It would take me a long time to get the taste of that experience out of my mouth.

the reason: Around Christmas time, Ashley was making treats for a lot of people. One of the tasks that we tried to undertake was truffle making. She found some basic recipes for making Oreo based truffles along with some other “store bought” cookie based truffles and we went to work. Everything went fine until the moment we turned to dip them in chocolate.

The internet is great but when it comes to receiving instruction on how to temper chocolate; let’s just say that the internet is lacking. We did our best and I think that in the end we came pretty close to tempered chocolate, but as we would find out we did not temper our chocolate at all.

So after working through that difficult project (and incidentally the truffles were awesome! My wife is pretty talented with an oven), I started looking for some type of instruction on how to work with stuff like that. Also, since it was nearly her birthday anyhow and she had really stepped up her baking efforts, I figured that taking a baking class together might be a fun gift.

enter: bakingarts

Yelp has become a real go to on the internet and so I checked into some baking schools. bakingarts had the highest yelp.rating so I looked into their class schedule. Lo and behold, there was a basic chocolate class on the calendar for this past weekend, so I booked it.

The class took place in the loft apartment of the instructor that was really nice. It’s the kind of place that you could really enjoy… if you could pony up like $3000/mo for rent. Anyhow Ashley and I took our stations and prepared to learn how to work with chocolate.

The class taught us a handful of recipes, but the real value of the class was two fold: the technique of tempering chocolate and having fun with my wife!

Tempering chocolate is a lot easier than I had anticipated, but it does require that you take more care with observing the temperature of the chocolate than we had done with our first attempt. The first attempt was more like slowly reheating hardening chocolate. Instead of maintaining a temperature we would work with it until it was too hard to work with then reheat. I truth, we heated the chocolate to hot… we let the chocolate get to cool. We didn’t understand that by letting it run out of a range that the chocolate would untemper. Anyhow, the class was interesting.

But I got to spend the day with Ashley. It feels like we haven’t done something like that in FOREVER! I know that it’s just a figment of my imagination, though. The fact is that we spent the past few weeks moving out of the apartment so any free time we had together was spent packing and hauling stuff to Goodwill, storage and to the new place. That’s not an ideal use of time but it is a necessary use of time.

This type of stuff effects Ashley more than me most of the time because I try to keep a good watch on how I use my time. I get that I’m really busy with the two churches and everything else that’s going on, but some times it feels to Ashley like we never do ANYTHING together. Most times, it boils down to the fact that we haven’t done anything special with each other in a while, because we do spend a lot of time with each other. It’s just that she likes to read and I play video games so some time that we spend together is not special time.

That’s why a day like this last Saturday is really important for our relationship. We both blocked out time to do something together. We both like to bake and we both wanted to figure out this whole chocolate mess in case we decide to make more truffles in the future. It helps to give us a marker in our recent memory of a time that we did something special together. We don’t have to do something super special every time we hang out (we’d go broke!) but we can’t just sit next to each other doing separate things and hope for the best.

And now that we’ve done one baking class I’m already starting to look into more! They have a few cake classes that look awesome. We’ve also alreadey put our new tempering talents to good use. We’ve got a tray of milk chocolate truffles sitting in the kitchen, so if you’re lucky you might just get one of them.

Sooner or later I’m going to convince my wife to take a bread class with me so we can both start working on those recipes.

Most moves are stressful. If for no other reason, the organization and process of the move frustrates me greatly. However, I think I’ve been finding that in-city moves like our most recent three moves are way more stressful than ones that draw us to a new city, region or even a new state. Big moves build up to a single point in which the movers load and move what is owned into a new place. In-city moves stretch out and extend over way to long of a period.

Ashley and I have been in the middle of this move for more than three weeks! Everyday there is one more thing to transport or one more thing to clean… It’s quite frustrating.

We should be able to finish the last piece of our move out tonight. Then the long process of finding room for all of our stuff begins. Wish us luck as we stretch that out into the next move!

• Major Retreat with NSM
• New College small group in San Francisco: iLLuminate
• New College small group in Fremont
• Joined House Studio Street Team, will be doing some book reviews on the website.
• Moved out of apartment
• Moved into room at mom and dad’s place
• Working on a new Bible Study
• Getting ready to review College Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture
• Trying to make babies

And that’s about it. I’ve lost some weight but I’ve largely put it all back on, so starting tomorrow (my favorite expression) I will be back on track to hitting 180lbs. 

Needless to say, this has been a transition.

Personally, I like to be able to grow some things in order to be able to think that I’m self sufficient on some level but living in an apartment has really limited my ability to grow anything. We’re on the second floor so we don’t have any ground to play with so I’m stuck trying to find ways to grow things in planters.

We have a few folks in our church who have used these things called Topsy Turvey’s in the past. Basically they work like this: You find a place to hang the Topsey Turveym choose a plant that you want to grow (tomato in my case) and you place the small plant that you’ve choosen into the topsy turvey. Then you flip the whole thing upside down, fill it with soil, hang it with the plant shooting out of the bottom and then you water the plant. The plant grows upside down so we don’t have to worry about putting it into the ground, which means with tomatoes that we don’t have to stake them. It also means that there is less of a chance that pest will get at them (at least not the traditional ones).

We haven’t gotten any tomatoes just yet and I’m not sure that we will because we get late day sun and not morning sun. But the second there is an edible tomato I’ll have that satisfaction one gets when they’ve made something on their own. That tomato always taste’s the best!

Check out this website: www.newstartsf.org

This is the website of the third church in our church cluster. Pastor Joe and myself are pulling double duty right now as we are preaching and teaching and leading a multi-cultural, multi-congregational and now multi-campus church!

The congregation meets in San Francisco’s Sunset district on 38th Ave. and Moraga. It’s an extremely young church that is active and full of energy. I’m very excited that they are joining us in this process of building God’s kingdom!

Check out the website (put together by Jackie Phung) and let me know what you think!

Dad bought tickets to the NLCS home games (3,4 and 5) and at the time I was excited because I’d get to go watch some good postseason baseball…

Then I looked at the calendar and realized I had all sorts of events scheduled on the same days and at the same times as each of the games. And doubly unfortunate for me, they are the kind of events that I can’t reschedule! Bummer.

So I’ll be watching the entire NLCS from home. Let’s go Giants and make it into the World Series! I want to see that parade!

I’m not a happy camper.

So instead of complaining about it I am getting active. I will start recording my weight as I start to work out and change my eating habits. I’ll add the weight into the title of each post like I did with this one just to keep track of where I’m at.

At my fittest I weighed in at 160lbs. now I am at 217lbs. Something has got to change… it might as well happen now.

Wish me luck as I set off to lose this weight. I know I’ll need it! Is it strange to think that I could get get back down to 160lbs? we shall see.

I’ve added a couple quick posts to my blog www.theintentionalconversation.com. One about Sabbath and another about living communally.

Enjoy and Good Luck Giants!!!

Update: Giants did win the west (though they didn’t do it that night… or the next night… to which I also had tickets). They waited in typical Torture Fashion to wait until the final day of the season to get the job done. Go Giants!!!