(Nick the Geek is a guest post champ. In addition to knocking out his own blog, he occasionally jumps onto SCL to enlighten us with the kind of ideas that only a full time minister can elaborate on. Today he answers the age old question, “So what do pastors do all day?” Growing up as a pastor’s kid myself, I often had friends ask me, “What does your dad do when it’s not Sunday?” Nick has the answer. Enjoy.)

Wondering what your pastor does all day.
I want to start by thanking Jon for allowing me this opportunity. He is super frigintastical, insightful, and funny. I want to get that out of the way now so I don’t forget later.

As a minister I am always asked, “What do you do all week?” Sure people know about the church time things but it can’t take that long to make a sermon so what does the rest of the week look like? I am bound to get in trouble with the Alliance of Ministers Union (AMU) but what’s a fella to do? I’m tired of lying about my week.

I tell people about how much “time” the sermons take but no one believes it. Sure AMU gives us a scale that suggests we can claim 20+ hours a week for sermon preparation but people don’t buy it anymore with so many resources available online. Hey guys, they know we can just steal other sermons on Saturday night and be done with it, why would we spend hours praying and researching before ever writing down point one? It’s time to come clean.

I tell people about the meetings and building and event planning and relationship building and prayer and reading/studying but that doesn’t add up to the 60+ hours I claim to work each week so I have to tell people about the side projects and graphic work I do for the church as well. They keep asking me what I do all week and always seem surprised at how much work I say I’m doing. How can it take half a day to clean the Youth building after youth have been inside? They just don’t seem to believe me anymore.

So, it’s time to tell the truth.

On Monday morning we have a big party. All the ministers get together and we share stories so we can pretend “God gave us this message” because it is being shared all over the country. Then we make a big pile of money and roll in it because we are all ridiculously wealthy.

That takes up most of Monday so on Tuesday lots of ministers go play golf. I can’t because I have a knee problem so I won’t be able to tell you how that goes. I hang out with the Youth pastors and play Ultimate Frisbee instead. I have a Young Adult class that meets on Tuesday so I take a 5 minute break in the afternoon to write a few notes.

Wednesday is Youth day so I sleep in till about 4. Then I start playing video games and drinking Monster so I’m super energized for Youth service. I try to find some time to get online and download someone’s sermon so I can listen to it while playing Wii but if I run out of time that’s OK, I can always wing it.

Thursday I’m recovering from all the work I did on Wednesday. Seriously when you are used to taking it pretty chill the whole week, yelling for a few minutes can really take it out of you. Then I take my “day off” on Friday and do some house work on Saturday. If I have to do a Youth Sunday or anything then I skip the house work and download another sermon and listen to that while I play with my kids.

Well, AMU, the truth is out there. That’s what ministers are really doing during the week. It’s just like everyone suspected. People aren’t stupid enough to keep falling for the old lies. We need new ones that account for the internet. Not every church has a super successful blog but I think we can pretend to. Most church people aren’t that tech savvy. So AMU if it’s ok with you I’m going to start talking about the hours I spend on my blog reaching the lost online instead of trying to convince people that I actually go to band practice and help community groups like the Not On Tobacco class.

What do you say ministers, what do you do with your weeks? Afraid of the AMU? Leave an anonymous comment.

Everyone else, what are your suspicions about how your ministers really spend their weeks?

(For more great stuff from Nick the Geek, visit his blog My Experience as Youth Pastor)

That’s it, I’m doing it.

This time it’s serious. This time I’m going to strike out on a huge adventure with God and the very first thing I need to do, the thing that all Christians know God wants us to do at the start of a new adventure with Him is to quit my job.

Sure we don’t know what Jesus was doing for the first 30 years of his life and Moses spent 40 years learning how to be a shepherd before the burning bush and Paul was making tents even after he’d been called by God, but like 80s rockstar Roxette said, you should always listen to your heart, when’s he’s calling for you. Listen to your heart there’s nothing else you can do. I don’t know where you going and I don’t know why, … Soooo, so long job.

I’m chasing God’s vision for me and it just so happens that vision leads right out of this company. And anyone that stands in my way, any family members or small group friends or anyone else that even dares ask a question about the wisdom behind starting an adventure this way is just a doubter. They’re not wise counsel, they’re a bunch of wusses with tiny faith who don’t believe in the almighty power of God to do great things. A power, that by the way, I have been able to discern has nothing to do with me having a steady job. The mission field is out there, not in here at work where I’m surrounded all day by non Christians that desperately need to know the Lord. I want to reach people, just not these people.

Soon I’ll be living day to day, chasing my dream with God, probably going to need to buy some rope and maybe a bowie knife.

And if I don’t quit my job, if for some reason I’m unable to, I’ll just grumble. I’ll just pout because I’m not being used for the Lord at my job and I’m capable of so much more for Him than this boring cubicle job. And eventually when my bad attitude gets loud enough, God will notice and say, “Yes, the harvest is full and I’ve been waiting for you to have a bad enough attitude so that I could send you out into it. Come my son, Europe was right. It is indeed the final countdown.” Dahnalala, dahnalalali (That’s how you spell the guitar part in that song. Promise.)

What’s that you say? Do I currently spend every spare minute of my free time after work and before work doing the thing I feel called to? Am I squeezing every last bit of margin in my day so that I can spend at least one hour playing music or writing or serving people or whatever my particular “thing” is until God grants me the freedom to spend all 8 hours a day doing it?

What kind of question is that? No, I’m not if you must know, you dreamsnatcher, but that will all change magically and instantly when I unleash the shackles of my job.

This is it, I’m doing it. I’m coming for you Lord, I’m coming for you. I’m quitting this job for you God!

(I have this conversation in my head at least once a week. Have you ever thought this way?)

A friend of mine is starting a church and fortunately some haters have materialized out of thin air. I say fortunately because only ordinary things ever get full consensus from people. Doing something extraordinary should never make complete sense to everyone in your life. People will always support photocopies of what’s always been done, but if you start something new, something different, you should expect resistance. (That last paragraph was the first time in months I’ve heard the faint whispers of the Newsies’ “Open the Gates and Seize the Day.” It’s been too long Crutchy, it’s been too long.)

When I called my friend and asked him how the church plant was going, he said that a member of the first church he started in the 1980s had written him a letter. In it, this former member that had not spoken with him in close to a decade said that he felt my friend was starting the new church out of ego.

Then, in what baffles me, he told my friend, who has a degenerative eye disease, that he was “Praying more earnestly than I’ve ever prayed in my life that God would destroy the rods and cones in your eyes so that you would go blind and only the sight that God gives you will be able to guide you.”

That’s not a direct quote because my friend’s wife tore up the letter in a fit of justified pastor’s wife rage, but the gist was that he was praying for the destruction of his rods and cones.

Wow.

That is crazy. Maybe this was just the angry ramblings of an 80-year old former minister who has lost touch with the whole love your neighbor thing. Maybe the letter writer just had access to a typewriter on a day when whatever bitterness that was bubbling inside of him had a chance to spill out. Maybe he’s just a messed up human being like me, but whatever his reason was, that is one crazy letter. The really crazy thing though is that I think I understand what he was trying to say.

Sometimes, if you’ve come to Christ through some tragic circumstance like a death in the family or an all consuming addiction or a specific pit so deep only the light of God could find the bottom, it’s tempting to think everyone needs to have that very same experience you had.

So you start to develop this weird kind of “brokenness pride.” That sounds completely stupid and impossible, I know, but I think it’s true. Or rather it’s true of me. A few years ago I made some mistakes that no amount of intelligence or wit or temporary, “I’ll do better this time, I can fix this” could remedy. In the midst of that, Christ grabbed hold of me.

And yet somehow I found a way to turn that into pride. I started thinking things like, “That guy hasn’t been broken yet. Look how deep my faith is compared to his. He hasn’t seen the depths of hurt or darkness I have and is still holding on to things I had to let go of. Maybe someday, he’ll get broken like me and experience a real relationship with God.”

Ugh. When you start to define faith by the tragedy that helped bring you there it’s tempting to pray some really weird prayers. I wish I had a dollar for every time a parent has told me, “I just pray it doesn’t take a horrible tragedy to bring my son to Christ. I just pray that when he hits rock bottom it doesn’t kill him.” The hard thing is that at the heart of that is a truth. I want people to know the love of God more than anything else in this world. So losing a job or going into credit card debt or a million other things that temporarily hurt is not nearly as important as missing out on a life-changing relationship with Christ.

But I don’t think that means you pray for someone’s rods and cones to deteroiate. I don’t think that means you pray someone goes blind. I don’t think that means you identify a tragedy and pray that it befalls someone.

I think it’s weird to pray for something bad to happen to someone so that they will see how good God is.

Fortunately, my friend who received that letter is smarter than me. When I asked about it, his answer was perfect. He told me,

“I’m not mad at the guy who wrote that letter. I just wish he would have prayed that God would have restored my sight and in that experience I would have been able to see His great love for me.”

Pray for love. Pray that the people in your life will experience the deep, all consuming love of God in a way that only God on high can predict and orchestrate. It might take something big and scary to quiet someone’s life enough so that they can hear the voice of God. That was my personal experience four years ago but I know my parents and my wife didn’t pray for a tragedy to occur. They prayed for love and hope and God shaped that in the way that only He can shape it.

Above all, please don’t tell that 80-year old rod and cone guy about this post. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read blogs and I don’t want him praying I get in some freak cougar accident and lose all my typing fingers.

That’s not the official title of the leadership article I wrote for Catalyst but it should be because that’s pretty much what the piece is about. (I mentioned this on Twitter last night but not everyone follows me on Twitter, so I thought I would mention it here too.)

The article is about the four leadership lessons Stuff Christians Like taught me:
1. Leadership involves a lot of empty rooms.
2. It’s easy to get addicted to the measurement of your own awesomeness.
3. It only takes one follower to make you feel like you should fake it.
4. It is tempting to exaggerate your own cool.

If you’d like, you can check out the whole article right here.

Oh I did this. I did this. I did this. I did this!

I wish I could joke about this topic and say, “Ha, those people that confess sins to other people that don’t even know they’ve sinned against them are ridiculous!” But today, those people are named “me.”

A few weeks ago I wrote a post titled “Who are you jealous of?” In the post I shared how a friend encouraged me to celebrate my rivals. So I did that. I wrote about four people I often get jealous of and then attempted to celebrate them by writing about them on Stuff Christians Like. But in my attempt to do that, I think I might have perpetuated the core idea that this post is about. I think I might have become one of those people that comes up to you and says, “I want to confess some sin in my heart that I’ve been harboring against you.”

Sometimes in situations like this, the person is trying to honestly apologize but sometimes it’s just a weird, confusing interaction that leaves both parties feeling baffled. And I think I might have done this. The reason I say that is when I emailed the people on my “jealous list” and asked them if there was anywhere special they would like me to link because I was giving them a big shout out, one of them wrote back, “That’s kind of you … I think.”

Does that mean I was guilty of doing what this post is about? Was my heart not in the right place? I’m not sure, but I can take some small comfort in knowing that I didn’t execute the worst possible case of this phenomenon, which is when a guy confesses to a girl that he has been lusting after her in his heart.

A reader named Jeff reminded me of this the other day in the comments section on SCL and he wrote it better than I could. Here is how he describes what happens:

Guy: I have a confession to make, oh female best friend of mine.

Girl: What is it?

Guy: I have sinned against you.

Girl: Really? I never even noticed.

Guy: No, really I did. And I want to get right with you and God about it.

Girl: But you’re already right with me.

Guy: No, no, I’m not. You see, I have lusted in my heart for you.

Girl: uhhmm… ewww?

Guy: Really, I lusted deeply, heavily, and thouroughly. In my heart. For you.

Girl: Oh. That’s ducky.

Guy: I’m so glad that we’ve cleared the air. Aren’t we so much closer now that we’ve cleared the air?

Has someone ever made an awkward, possibly unnecessary confession to you? (Sometimes they are heartfelt and actually help heal a wound, but sometimes they are straight silly.)

Have you ever done that?

Has this ever happened to you?

Dear Christian Radio,

I owe you an apology.

You too Carmen. You need to get in on this as well. I don’t really know where to start so I guess I’ll just come right out with it …

My name is Jon Acuff and I’m a recovering Christian culture snob.

What’s that you say? What’s a Christian culture snob? You were always so inquisitive Carmen, that’s one of the things I love about you.

A Christian culture snob is a Christian that makes fun of people and things that are deemed “Christian.” I believe am cooler than you and able to edit “Love your neighbors” to actually say, “Love your neighbors unless you deem them cheesy and then instead feel free to kick them like a hacky sack woven of burlap and sarcasm.” Basically, I am prone to turn my nose up at some of the things you do.

Although I’ve reduced my degree of Christian culture snobbery in the last few years, during high school it was at an all time high, which is when I ran into you Carmen. I think you were doing that Champion song with the devil cameo and maybe the whole God’s Army thing with the dog tags at the time. And Christian radio, you were just so bright and chipper all the time. I had a field day with both of you. But looking back on it, and fearing that I’ll fall prey to Christian culture snobs when my book comes out, I realize that I was wrong and really unloving. And even though I wish I could eradicate Christian culture snobbery, I am but a meager blogger, one man who wears a retainer at night, a unibrowed writer with only a small voice. But the least I can do is to help other people know if they’ve fallen into the same trap as me. The least I can do is create the …

Christian Culture Snob Scorecard

1. You’ll give incredibly cheesy, secular TV shows, like the Bachelorette, the free pass of being a “guilty pleasure,” but would crucify a Christian program that was equally cheesy. = +5 points

2. You’ve ever used the phrase “Jesus Junk” to describe the knick knackery that Christian bookstores often sell at the front. = +3 points

3. You’ve ever used Chris Tomlin’s music as a piñata when it comes to busting on Christian culture. = +1 point

4. You publicly make fun of the song “I can only imagine” but secretly love it and get goosebumps when it comes on in the car when you are alone. = +3 points

5. You’ve ever liked a song until someone told you it was Christian and then you immediately stopped liking it. = +5 points

6. You make fun of the typical fundamentalist Christian uniform, “Blue long sleeve shirt, pleated khaki’s, loafers, Republican haircut.” = +2 points

7. You did so while wearing a graphic tee. = +3 points

8. And oranately embellished jeans. = +4 points

9. And metrosexual worship leader hair. = +5 points

10. You convinced yourself that wasn’t every bit as much a uniform. = +6 points

11. You tell friends that the lyrics to Christian music are “too overt” or “not layered enough” and you like to hear faith expressed in a way that’s not so blunt. = +3 points

12. You’ve ever said that you found Man on Fire or any other non Jesus movie to be a better story about Christ than the Passion of the Christ. = +3 points

13. You would like Switchfoot 17% less if they said “Jesus” all the time in their songs. = +1 point

14. Ditto “The Fray.” = +1 point

15. You lie about the first concert you went to when people ask that question because you don’t want them to know it was that Amy Grant/Michael W. Smith tour. = +2 points

16. You have an abnormal amount of disdain for the movies “Facing the Giants” or “Fireproof.” = +2 points

17. You’ve never seen them, but still feel compelled to offer up a critique. = +8 points

18. Seven of your top 10 favorite Christian songs are actually by non-Christians. You just like the way they express the sense of longing we all feel without getting all Jesus in your face. = +2 points

19. You regularly criticize the cheesy nature of Christian culture but don’t do anything to change it. Like volunteering to rewrite a billboard for your church so they don’t have to run the same “Got Jesus?” billboard this year at Easter. = +2 points

20. You’ve ever used Stephen Baldwin’s name as an adjective to describe what you’re not like. E.G. “I’m a Christian but not a Stephen Baldwin kind of Christian.” = +3 points

21. You make broad blanket statements like, “I don’t like Christian music,” even though that should be impossible on some level because it’s not a type of music. There’s Christian jazz, techno, country and a million other genres underneath that umbrella phrase. Really? You hate all those types all at once? = +10 points

22. Kirk Cameron is your go to, “weird Christian guy” example when you want to make fun of weird Christian guys. = +2 points

23. You wrote a critique of Christian radio for being so shiny happy but completely missed the point that you might not be the intended target audience. Of course you don’t like it, it’s not designed for someone your age in your stage of life. = +3 points

24. You’re friend had to convince you to check out the Stuff Christians Like blog because your first thought was, “Oh jeez, another Christian rip off of a popular secular idea.” = +8 points

25. You were right to think that way, I ripped off the Stuff White People Like idea, but upon reading the site sent me an email I get often, “I wanted to hate this site for being a dumb Christian rip off, but …” = +16 points

26. If you see any of the Left Behind books on a friend’s bookshelf you admittedly discount that friend’s ability to make wise decisions about anything in life. = +4 points

27. You’ve abused the popular church mantra “doing things with excellence” to actually mean, “doing things according to my personal definition of excellence.” = +3 points

28. You have a go to joke in your back pocket at all times in case someone ever mentions the name “Thomas Kinkade.” = +3 points

29. You complain about the quality of Christian fiction books that feature women being rescued on the cover by a strong, Godly man with a mysterious past, but secretly wish you could be rescued by a strong, Godly man with a mysterious past. = + 4 points.

Let’s add it up

0-10 points = Look at you. You don’t get caught up in nonsense discussions about how cheesy Christian culture is? What are you spending your time on instead? Reading the Bible? Loving people? Focusing on stuff that matters? How weird.

11-25 points = You’re in the closet, the Christian culture closet. Come out, it’s OK to like music that other people might deem cheesy or think is silly. Who cares about what other people think?

26+ points = You are deep into snobland my friend. You spend more time critiquing than creating. The only kind of sweaters you should wear are mock. Upon reading that cheesy joke you immediately started making fun of it.

How did you score? To be honest, I fluctuate a little but on most days, I am on off the charts. But what this site is teaching me is that mocking doesn’t really do awesome things for Christianity. I’ve definitely blown that sometimes with what I write and am probably the guiltiest of all of us, but I realized something the other day. I’ve never once had a non-Christian say to me, “You know, this faith you’re making fun, this Christian culture you’re mocking sounds really intriguing. I think I do want to start an everlasting personal relationship with Jesus. Thank you for being so willing to make fun of Carmen for me.”

What did I miss on this list though?

Certainly there are other Christian culture snob items I forget?

What’s missing?

The Contest is closed. Thanks so much for the great comments. I’ll have the three winners posted next week.

Author Jennifer Schuchmann came over for dinner a few weeks ago and dropped some serious author knowledge on me and my wife. From the speaking tours to writing a book with NFL QB Kurt Warner, she told some crazy stories and was incredibly generous with her wisdom and awesomeness.

Today, I thought it would be fun to give away three copies of the book she wrote with Mark Herringshaw called “Nine Ways God Always Speaks .”

The best three answers to the question of the day that are submitted via comment by Wednesday, August 5th will win a free copy of the book.

Here is the question:
Who in your life has shared wisdom with you? It can be a family member, a friend, a colleague, a pastor, anyone.

Who has shared wisdom with you?