Practicing Peace

Having nearly exhausted my iPod’s musical offerings, I’ve started something new: listening to an engaging Great Course from the Teaching Company called Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft. It’s my newest brain fad.  Brain fads often overtake me, occupying my attention for a week or two, illuminating my world, arming me with new vocabulary, and sometimes annoying Dr. Ingalls.

I don’t know how helpful, stringing “free modifiers” along after my “base clause” will be to my construction of sentences, but the course is fun, distracting, and helpful, and another fantastic entry in The Great Courses catalog.  Having listened to Philosophy of Religion, Story of Human Language, and Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning, I can say it with authority: Great Courses make great brain fads.

Pastors need brain fads.  We grow stale, the rhythms of regular ministry eating our imaginations, the cries of our congregants distracting our wills, the drudgeries of administration atrophying our souls — souls which desperately need space to grow.  (How was that for a sentence?) We need brain fads to keep us fresh.

Eugene Peterson suggests books, setting aside time on our calendars for appointments with Faulkner or Pascal or Dostoevsky.  I suggest audiobooks, where you can reclaim your commute and allow yourself personal space by filling your mind with new ideas and fresh expressions and apprenticing yourself to masters.

But, be warned.  Brain fads can be dangerous.  They can interrupt our lives, sparking conversions, revolutions, renovations of our thinking, and, potentially in the process, annoying our parishioners.  If you haven’t done it already, you will be tempted to air your new insights in every situation, including each sermon you preach during your brain fad.  While sermons are your platform, remember that they are for the Gospel, not your brain fad.  The brain fad is an aid, not a new message putatively expressing or replacing the Gospel of Christ.

Airing your brain fad is for Sunday school.

Also, don’t try to administrate your church through brain fads, thinking the new thing from California or England will save your congregation.  It won’t.  In your ministry, stick to the basics, staying on top of your work, writing effective sermons, teaching good adult education, overseeing quality children’s and youth ministries,  administering the Sacraments.  These don’t change and never grow stale.  But, you can grow stale.  Get ye, therefore, a brain fad.

If you know me, you know I love David Allen.  His book Getting Things Done revolutionized the way I work.  I went from being the flighty pastor who over-promised and under-delivered to someone who is known for being “organized.”  This personal transformation convinced me that organization is not innate, but a skill.  If anything, David Allen taught me this one thing:

It’s all in your head.

I had organization confused with organization technology.  I thought if I would just use my paper calendar or my Palm Pilot, then I would be organized.

I was wrong.   It was all in my head.

But, it wasn’t about keeping things in my head.  Organization isn’t remembering a lot of things.  All it is is remembering to do five things over and over again:

• Collect – get everything out of your head.
• Process – decide what to do with everything, and if takes less than two minutes, do it.
• Organize – if it takes more than two minutes, put it in a trustworthy place where you can find it later, like a calendar and/or to-do list.
• Review – look over your calendar and to-do list so you know what’s there.
• Do – do the thing that’s best for you to do given your context, time, energy, and priorities.

These things have to happen in your head (whether you’re aware of it or not) before any organizational system or technology will work for you.  One of the values of an organizational system like the Five Steps to a Peaceful Ministry Day is that it fleshes out the steps REVIEW and DO for ministers.  It is an implementation of something that happens between your ears.

So stop buying Palm Pilots or iPhones to get organized.  Remember: it’s all in your head.