Browsing Tag

alan rudnick

Advent, blog

Advent devotional dropped to your inbox

advent1

Looking for a great, spiritual, and thought provoking Advent devotional dropped into your inbox daily?

Look no further than the folks at Blue Truck Publishing to give you what you want!  Each daily devotional are emailed daily. The daily devotionals draw from the rich Biblical texts surrounding the birth of Jesus, as well as the prophecy of his coming. Not only are the devotionals useful for personal growth but could also be used with:

  • Interesting opening to lead a class or small group.
  • Quick ideas for public speaking.
  • Sermon starter
  • Friends & family gifts

What’s great about Blue Truck content is that it is very affordable and usable. Blue Truck Publishing writers are leaders, speakers, pastors, and authors who specialize creating content and devotionals that address contemporary topics. This Advent devotional is only $1.99, which is delivered daily for the season of Advent. This is a great price for a devotional sent to you for the Advent season.

Check a sample:

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Culture, Thanksgiving

Thanksgivingization

It seems every year retailers are pushing holiday seasons earlier and earlier. I walked through the home improvement giant, Lowe’s the day after Halloween and saw Christmas decorations, holiday goodies, and Christmas lights already on sale. Was that too early or is it just me?

This year, maybe my anecdotal evidence is backed up with fact. The Associate Press published an article entitled, “All Day Shopping Frenzy on Thanksgiving?”. The article reports on how retailers are trending to open  stories on Thanksgiving instead of the day after:

It’s a break with tradition. Black Friday, which typically is the year’s biggest shopping day, for a decade has been considered the official start to the busy holiday buying season… Meanwhile, Thanksgiving and Christmas remained the only two days a year that stores were closed.

Now Thanksgiving is slowly becoming just another shopping day. Over the past few years, major retailers, including Target and Toys R Us, slowly have pushed opening times into Thanksgiving night to one-up each other and compete for holiday dollars.

This year, more than a dozen major retailers are opening on Thanksgiving, including a handful like Macy’s, J.C. Penney and Staples that are doing it for the first time… Indeed, retailers say they’re just doing what shoppers want… That’s an important opportunity for chains, which can make up to 40 percent of their annual revenue during the last two months of the year.

Based on this evidence, retailers are pushing up holidays to sell goods. More and more, our holidays (both religious and non-religious) are turning into opportunities for retailers to draw in consumers to buy and well, consume. Thanksgiving is now no different. What remained as the last holiday were retailers did not make their employees work, has now turned Thanksgiving into another shopping mecca.

This is what I call Thanksgivingization:  Continue Reading…

social media

Using social media during crisis

Churches and organizations will face an opportunity where social media can greatly impact how you respond to a crisis. Whether the crisis is a natural disaster, community problem, or an internal church conflict, how a message is crafted can produce positive results if done correctly.

During the recent #chsocm chat that I moderated, our church social media group discussed the best practices for using social media during a crisis. Here are my 4 topic/questions that we discussed:

  • T1: Name a crisis that emerged in a ministry community and how could it have been improved by social media? Could be your church or another.
  • T2: What tools or strategies can churches use during a crisis to improve communication & trust?
  • T3: How should an external community crisis be handled differently than an internal church crisis via social media?
  • T4: What can be shared via social media from a crisis that reveals a greater truth about God?

Here were some good ideas and responses to the topic of using social media during crisis:

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blog, social media

I’m moderating #chsocm tonight

I’m moderating #chsocm on Twitter tonight @ 9:00 p.m. If you are a church-ie social media type, just join in on Twitter with the search and hashtag #chsocm. It’s pretty easy to join in. Just keep #chsocm in your search on Twitter and follow the conversation.

My topic tonight will be centered around handling crisis within the church using social media. 

A lot of you are wondering, “What the heck is #chsom?” It’s Church socialmedia. #ChSocM (ch-sock-em) is a weekly Twitter-based chat about using social media to build church and faith. Welcoming, informative, ecumenical. Tuesdays, 9PM, ET. Commentary, interviews, transcripts, and fun stuff on the blog.

My good Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest friend Meredith Gould started the Twitter chat topic/community about 2 years ago. Since then, it has grown into a weekly meet up for lay people, pastors, seminarians, and social media church geeks (that includes me).

Don’t be a non-participate observer! Join in! (I loath the word “Lurker” or “lurking” for social media listening. It’s too creep-stalker-ish. See you tonight on #chsocm!

Associate Pastor

Don’t forget about associate pastors

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Last week I spoke to a group of associate pastors at a continuing education program with the  American Baptist Churches of New Jersey. This group of associates was very diverse demographically, but they all shared the same challenges.

I started speaking on the topics of identity, calling, and role of the associate pastor. Then, several folks brought up other associates books, “Leading from the Second Chair” or “Second Chair, Not Second Best”. Though I’m pretty enamored with “The Work of the Associate Pastor“,  I spoke about how those other books fail to see one thing: the power dynamic in the analogy of “second chair” is fundamentally flawed.

As I shared with this group of associate pastors that the power dynamics of #1 verse #2 pastor is not helpful. Ordering pastors with numbers frustrate associates into seeing themselves as lesser instead of seeing themselves into a different calling than their senior pastors. The relationship between the senior and associate pastor should be one of mutuality. Obviously, there is a supervisory role that the senior pastor must take, but that doesn’t mean that pastors cannot treat one another as equals.

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blog

I’m a guest on HuffPost Live, join in

UPDATE: If you missed the discussion, you can see it its entirety here.  

huffpostlive

I’ll be a guest on HuffPost Live talking about Jason Collins, faith, and sports today.

HuffPost Live’s segment is billed as

Jason Collins is 34, black, and gay—and religious. Collins’ coming out presents an intersection of LGBT rights, religious freedom, and professional sports. What role does faith play for athletes and what it means to be gay in the NBA?

  • Rev. Paul Raushenbush, HuffPost Senior Religion Editor, New York, NY
  • Rev. Alan Rudnick, Pastor of First Baptist Church of Ballston Spa, Albany, NY
  • Esera Tuaolo, Former NFL Football Player; Author of ‘Alone In the Trenches,’ Minneapolis, MN
  • Paul Shirley, Former NBA Basketball Player; Author of ‘Can I Keep My Jersey?’ Los Angeles, CA
  • Tom Krattenmaker, Author of ‘Onward Christian Athletes’ and ‘The Evangelicals You Don’t Know,’ Portland, OR

Some have suggested that because Collins identifies as a Christian he cannot be a Christian because he is gay.

Join in on the chat, watch the live interview, and comment. Everything starts today, Thursday at 2:30 EST.

blog, Leadership

The Church Draft

 

As millions of football fans will undoubtedly will be glued to their televisions and social media, they will hunger for the latest information about NFL draft picks. The NFL draft is part pageantry and part celebration for football teams and their fans. Draft day means that a team can have hope for a better season as new athletes come on their roster.

This is also a tense time for football teams. Owners, coaches, agents and managers are all trying to work together to pick the best player. With all those high powered people trying to work together sometimes egos, tempers, and anxiety can play a major role in the team’s success. In order to get the best draft position teams will give away players, negotiate terms, trade draft spots, and participate in a number of complex agreements. The world of the NFL draft is truly a dizzying drama for teams but also there is tremendous opportunity.

In the world of the NFL, resources and money are seemingly endless as players are paid multi-million dollar contracts. For churches, the search for staff and volunteers is a frustrating process. Many churches lack the financial resources for say a full time youth minister or education minister. Often volunteers have to take on that work load without pay. Unlike the NFL, churches do not have ability to search for and pay for staff that could grow their organization.

In the church world of limited resources, what if churches joined together to have a Church Draft?

I live and minister in a small community with five mainline churches within a mile of one another. Our worship is similar and so are our ministries. We pastors get along very well. Back in 2009, we started meeting regularly and formed a clergy organization. We started to dream of the ways in which we could work together. We already had a number of connected ecumenical gatherings, but we wanted to do more.

One day, I jokingly asked if I could steal one of the other pastor’s secretary since we were in search of one. He replied that I would have to trade my choir for her.  A few months later we were searching for an office manager. I went back to the same pastor and reminded him of our trade agreement but this time it was for real. I wasn’t going to give up my choir but we negotiated terms to share his staff person for our church office administrator position. BOOM! It worked. Fast forward a few years, and now all of our churches are talking about sharing a community youth minister and are supporting community based youth ministry! And, we continue to negotiate and draft ministry people to work in all of our churches.

In our community, it makes sense to work together and “draft” staff and volunteers. Each individual church may not have the resources, but together we are able to work together as one team and not five teams working against one another. Churches in the 21st century need to think about their staff and volunteers as players in the big game of ministry and not see each other as competitors.

Alan Rudnick is the author of “The Work of the Associate Pastor”, Judson Press. 

sin

Not enough sin on this blog?

Apparently, I don’t write enough about sin.

Amanda Greene over at Wilmington Faith and Values alerted me to a piece that one of her colleagues wrote. Daniel A. Thompson writes about faith and sports and he responded to my post on Robert Griffin III and dying churches. Thompson’s article is here and it’s entitle, “Sin and Sardis: what’s football got to do with it?”

Thompson liked my connection with rookie phenom RG3 but thought it fell short. I found Thompson’s take interesting because he thinks that we don’t talk enough about sin:

I think Mr. Rudnick made a nice parallel between RG3 (Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III) and the dying church, however, I don’t think he got close to what the problem in the church is today nor the remedy for the dying church…in the Book of Revelation, Jesus speaking through the Apostle John, makes it clear what is expected of the “dead” church at Sardis… To the dead church at Sardis, he instructs with these words in Revelation 3:3: “so remember what you have received and heard (the Gosple); and keep it, and REPENT… I believe Mr. Rudnick got close to some of the problems of a dying church in the words I highlighted… but sadly, he does not address the real problem in most churches today – repentance of sin and focus on the life-long process of sanctification.

The issue of repentance within a dying church is a concept that I really didn’t think too much about. But, it does raise the question, “To what degree does sin play in the role of a dying church?” And, is that a missing conversation on this blog?

What do you think? Read. Respond. Render.

Church Leadership, clergy burnout, Leadership

Underestimating staff burnout

You don’t think your staff are stretched thin? Don’t think you are above burning out? Have you checked the health of your organizational staff? Perhaps you underestimate the power of staff burnout in your congregation or organization. It’s real and it can hurt not just your organization, but families.

Recently, a high-profile Baptist pastor in North Carolina became the latest ministry burnout case. Rev. Steve Shoemaker, who leads a 2,200-member Baptist church in Charlotte, entered a 30-day treatment program. In a rather quick move, Shoemaker sent a letter to his congregation outlining his need to step away. He wrote, “I’m physically, psychologically and spiritually depleted and must get help.”

What leads to such powerful emotional wounds?

Pastors and church staff often succumb to burnout. Long hours, high expectations, lower pay, being “on” 24/7, and stress all bring a higher work load to staff. This is often an under reported story in mainstream media, but in 2010 the New York Times wrote a story on clergy burnout. The first two paragraphs were striking and left no room for doubt of the power of burnout:

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blog

Make way for AlanRudnick.org

It is with mixed feelings that I announce that I’m giving up On The Bema in order to segue to AlanRudnick.org.  I started On The Bema in 2009 to blog on issues regarding Christianity and culture.  The blog racked up over 74,000 hits in its nearly 3 year life span. On The Bema accomplished as much as it can.  It enabled me to share ideas that were featured on Christian Century, WordPress.com, and other blogging websites. Some of the most shared and clicked blog posts are:

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