Jeff Bjorgan

Jeff is the Spiritual Formation Pastor at Emmanuel Church in West Kelowna, BC. With a degree in Christianity and culture, his primary interests revolve around how faith intersects with all the various layers of contemporary society. Jeff enjoys writing, reading, and anything hockey. He is happily married to Nikki and they have a bunch of children.

  Emmanuel Church Home

jeff online

  twitter

  facebook

  redeemable pieces

•jeff*Question from Redeemable Pieces

Wednesday
Jul212010

Busyness is the enemy of spirituality

I also wrestle with the tension between doing God's work and just plain being busy.  The North American corporate approach to pastoral ministry often places the pastor's primary duty on making the church -it's programs and apparatus- run.  And I'm often far too comfortable giving into that paradigm.  I mean, it's often a lot easier to manage programs and create visions and goals than doing the hard work of spiritual disciplines, study and prayer and the shepherding of souls.  Who has time for God when it's all taken up doing God's work?

When the relationship between God's work and church work becomes unbalanced, I often turn to the writings of Eugene Peterson.  Like a close friend full of wisdom and encouragement, his writings on pastoral theology are an anchor for me.  He reminds all of us pastor-types to keep the main thing the main thing: reclaim our pastoral calling and get back to the business of caring for souls.

This is my Peterson contemplation moment of the week:

Busyness is the enemy of spirituality.  It is essentially laziness.  It is doing the easy thing sintead of the hard thing.  It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God's actions.  It is taking charge.

...Busyness has nothing to do with activity, and spirituality is not the absence of activity.  You either enter into what God is doing or you don't.  A busy person is a lazy person because they are not doing what they are supposed to do.

...The pastor's primary work is leading people in worship on Sunday morning, proclaiming the Word of God, being knowledgeable in theology and Scripture, and being committed to pastoral care which does not have the therapeutic model for its structure.  Teh pastor is the one who is available one-on-one through the week to personlaize, to customize, and to deal with the uniqueness of everyone's situation.  Pastors pray a lot.  Prayer is hard work, but prayer should be the distinctive about us.  We should have a deliberate or a conscious intelligent, personal relationship with God which is articulated in prayer.

-excerpt from Peterson, Subversive Spirituality, 1994, 1997

Tuesday
Jul202010

Family and the confusion of technology

I came across this article about how technology is causing families to spend less time together.  I came across this other article saying that the lack of technology is keeping families apart.  The first article was based on research done by the Annenberg Centre for the Digital Future, a think tank based out of the University of Southern California.  The second article was based on research commissioned by Panasonic, a tech company.  So what's a family to do?

Tuesday
Jul202010

Family, Fun, and Sabbath Keeping

Earlier this week my family and I participated in an Okanagan tradition.  Every year we gather up all of our inflatables and head to Penticton to float down the canal connecting the Okanagan and Skaha lakes.

We usually have a bit of a go of it at first.  We either agonize in the parking lot using hand-pumps to inflate our stuff in the heat of the day or we save our lungs and line up to get someone else to do it, for a questionable fee.  It’s kind of a lose-lose situation.  We also often find ourselves playing a game of “hurry up and wait” while we send friends down to the other end of the canal to drop off a vehicle so we have a convenient way to get back home. 

This time around was no exception; it took us over an hour after arriving at the canal to actually get into the water.  Everyone ritualistically slathered on sunscreen (not I, although my macho-ism got the best of me.  Halfway down the ride I started to wonder if someone was cooking bacon.  No, It was just my skin sizzling in the afternoon sun), and jumped awkwardly into our already semi-deflated boats.

Now we could relax.  The best thing about floating down the canal is the time spent together as a family.  Looking to have some family time?  Try throwing the kids on some inner tubes, tying them all together (the tubes not the kids) and sitting there while the current does its work.  What else can they do now but sit there and laugh and talk?  And eat a crazy amount of snacks?  And burn?  And say, heaven forbid, that they’re bored?

I got to spend two hours interacting with my family.  We talked about everything and nothing.  At one point my oldest son kept asking me which “skater brands” were cool when I was a kid.  I’m not sure if there were any skater brands when I was a kid.  For that matter, I probably wasn’t cool enough to know!  But the conversation led to questions about how I was raised, what grandma and grandpa was like to live with, and the choices that I made, good and bad, when I was his age.  As I was answering the questions, all I could think was, why don’t we do this kind of thing more often?

Surveys have shown that when kids are asked what makes a happy family they respond that a happy family is one that spends time together.  It’s sad then that as a society we’re actually spending less time with our families than ever.  The danger of this is in the transitioning of family units from loving support networks where the nurturing of character takes place to a kind of pseudo social housing.  The basic support apparatus may be in place, but a deep-rooted connection, shared story, and legacy is missing.

We have to be assertive when confronting the distractions that threaten family time.  Kids are busier than ever with all their activities, and parent(s) are often consumed with work.  But if our children are suggesting that happiness is found in time spent together, we need to get more aggressive with re-prioritizing our schedules. 

We can do this by adopting a Sabbath attitude for our families.  Sabbath is a time or day set aside to resist cultural norms and revel in the joys of life.  When we adopt a Sabbath attitude we don’t allow outside pressures to dictate our time together.  A Sabbath attitude reclaims time, allowing leisure to be food for our family’s soul.

Here are some ideas for incorporating this attitude into your family schedule.  Try having a no-screen day.  Shut off computers and TV’s and ipods, and plan to revel in the great outdoors together.  Make sure to have family dinners together, at least one meal a day, and revel in the stories your family has experienced throughout the week.  And commit your family to a social justice project; instead of going to another movie, revel in the joy of helping others in your community.

Of course you can also float lazily down the canal in Penticton, roasting your collective bodies under the unforgiving sun of the Okanagan, but reveling in the time spent with the people you care most about.  Now that’s a happy place.

 

Thursday
Jul082010

The creative work of preaching

I just finished reading Calvin Miller's Preaching: The Art of Narrative Exposition.  I've been working through it over the last 6 months or so.  I have a nasty habit of reading 4 or 5 books at once, although I wanted to take my time through this one.  Preaching can be a neglected practice in the church.  Having a "preaching check-up" can be more than beneficial to the soul; it can bring life to your congregation.  Preaching is hard work.  It's something that most pastors fret about every time they are approaching the pulpit.  There is always some doubt at play: am I representing this text well?  Will the text shine through more than my personality?  Will my idiosyncracies get in the way?  And will any one show up?  Will it be a transformational message?

Preaching is also very rewarding.  Sermon preparation is one of the most favorite parts of my job.  It gives me opportunity to engage the text as well as the time to search my own heart when it comes to its application -long before the message is every preached.

Although there are many helpful nuggets of truth throughout the book, I like how Miller talks about the need to have a sermon speak to our emotions.  He calls it creative preaching:

"...creative preaching depends upon the feeling or sensual faculty.  We who continually give out the substance of our souls do as well.  The problem is that preachers are so bound by the logical hunger (how is this Scripture to be explained?) that they give little time to the sensual world (How is this Scripture to be felt?).  The latter poses the primary question for the creative person."

"It is pointless to say that great preaching is mainly teaching the Scripture.  Great preaching is making the audience feel the Scripture."

 

Tuesday
Jul062010

An Environmental Conscience

In light of the massive BP oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico, there is great concern over the environment.  Make no mistake; this spill is massive.  A friend of mine sent me a link to a site where you can see how large the oil spill would be if it was in your neck of the woods.  Apparently it would run from Chilliwack, British Columbia, all the way to Banff, Alberta.  Imagine that: traveling with the family for 8-10 hours and seeing the same stream of tar whenever you look out the window.  Imagine what that would do to the forests, creatures and communities caught in its path!  There is no way to mince words: this is a horrible catastrophe.

But do Christians care?  I mean, the church is not at the forefront of the catastrophe the same way it would be if it was a humanitarian crisis, like the earthquake in Haiti or the Tsunami in Asia -at least as far as I know.  It would seem that Christians are only interested in people not porpoises, and souls rather than sea creatures. 

This presence-in-one-area-but-absence-in-another causes many to scratch their heads.  Are Christians merely partisan, caring only for their own pet agendas?  Is their compassionate response to the world’s cares and concerns too narrow?  These questions instigate the following problem: on a public level Christians are often dismissed as being interested in only one or two issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage. (Counterpoint:  for an interesting article questioning multi-issue evangelicals click here).  

However, although the Christian community does not always help themselves, when it comes to public concerns there is a much broader range of interest than many people realize.

The fact of the matter is that Christians do care about the environment.  They care a great deal.  And they care a great deal about a lot of things.  The Christian conscience informs all of life, both our individual life and life found in community. 

You could go as far as to say that Christians—at their best—are big-picture environmentalists, interested in the environment of not only the natural world, but also the spiritual and cultural worlds they find themselves in.

Faith communities often engage these environments through cultivating and nurturing practices.  They can be seen cultivating spiritual environments through worship and spiritual disciplines.  They nurture cultural environments through investing in the arts, funding foodbanks and shelters, and promoting fair economies.  And they cultivate natural environments by cleaning up the streets of their town or practicing simplicity and Sabbath.

They also engage these environments through conservation and protection.  This explains why there have been concerns over religious rights in Canada.  But it also explains why Christian groups have campaigned for funding to remain for non-profit groups who make a difference in our communities, or for old growth forests to be protected.    

No, not all Christians are big-picture environmentalists; the same can be said about any society in Canada when the members don’t always live up to the creed.  Regardless, we should take note: as a movement, Christianity is interested in more than just a couple of hot button issues.  The Christian conscience cannot be pigeon-holed.   At its best it operates under the conviction that this world, our world is one worth cultivating and conserving.   So when it comes to environmental disasters like the terrible oil slick in the gulf of Mexico, the church is (and should be) equally as dismayed as the rest of the world.