Shut Up & Pray

I believe the kingdom of God is so much bigger than we can fathom and yet we are constantly trying to contain it and rationalize it with our own thinking. 

No one beats up their own like "Christians" and yet we wonder why the "nones" are the fastest growing sect of religious affiliations. Before we beat up another, know that it really boils down to who Jesus is. There are incredible people having a tremendous impact on this world and we get caught up criticizing the words they used, how they said it, or their interpretation of scripture. Really, ask "but who is Jesus" in all of this. You might be surprised.

I'm not sure love is expressed by publicly criticizing before you have confronted the one being criticized. Shut up, pray, then confront (provided you feel compelled after actually praying about it). Okay, stepping off now...

I Can't Hear You Through the Complaining

As so often happens, I was recently in a church running audio for the weekend services. This was the second time I had operated audio for this church. There were no less than five comments made about the audio levels. I know that when someone new comes in to mix there will always be a difference. It got me thinking though, how  often do we listen to the one negative comment and adjust to it. 

As far as i know there was one comment made by someone in the front row that it was too loud. I;m not sure what was too loud but the comment was delivered to me and I was instructed to turn it down a couple of notches (whatever a notch is). When the adjustment was made, I then received a couple of comments that it needed to be turned up a bit. Perhaps I went three notches instead of two.

Most likely there were several hundreds people in the space that enjoyed how it sounded or at least they were not offended by anything, but because one person spoke up changes happened that precipitated more changes, ultimately resulting in an inconsistent audio quality.

I have a suggestion: How about we determine the environment we want to create and do it. Make no apologies for it, be intentional. This doesn’t mean we don’t listen to the negative feedback, in fact, I encourage you to provide a forum for such feedback to occur. I suggest though that we do not try to make everyone happy, we will fail and be miserable while doing it. Don't you think?