Brian Holt's blog

So our church just put down some earnest money on some land that we plan on building a church on.  The land cost a lot of money and quite honestly it isn’t all that special.  The land isn’t on the main road and a small percentage of the land is on a flood plain.  The difference however is that someday the area where the land is will be brimming with new homes, schools and parks.  Someday the area will be full of families and individuals living the American dream.  Someday many of those people will potentially be looking for a church and hopefully some of those people will find our church to be what they are looking for.  Others, however who won’t be looking for a church at all. They will have no need for God and don’t really know or care that our church is one of their neighbors.  It’s those people that will be the driving force behind the mission of the church and that is to make disciples for Christ and to make Jesus’s name famous in our community.

I have the privilege of serving as the Children’s Pastor at my local church that meets at a public middle school.  We pay the school district a great deal of money each month to use their facility.  Part of what we pay for each month is the Janitorial service that is contracted by the School District.  The gentleman that the janitorial service has blessed us with to clean up after us on Sunday mornings is a man named Jose.  Jose is from Central America and is perhaps the hardest working man I’ve ever met.   He works 2 jobs, 17 hour days – 5 days a week and probably another 20 – 24 hours on the weekend doing other work plus be our church's amazing janitor.

Warning!!!   This blog will offend someone!
What I’m going to do is share what I perceive is some of the many "flavors" of God that people have created as they have developed thier views and understanding of God and Jesus.   It’s really from personal experience, personal observation and a general understanding of people – especially in America.  So as I go through these various “flavors” please take in mind that these are just my opinion of how people perceive God and/or Jesus.  Here we go: 

1. Your Relationship with God – It may sound generic but just think about it. We spend time with our co-workers, friends and even family on a daily basis and yet none of them will have a greater impact in our lives than God.  It’s amazing that so many of us will go through an entire day and won’t even give God a mere thought.   I’m guilty of this myself, especially when I’m overwhelmed with “stuff” of life.  It’s the “stuff” that ends up being the best tool of the devil because that’s where he creates chaos in our hearts and minds.

Ok, I just had to share a couple of cool stories that I’ve experienced lately in my Children’s ministry that deserve mentioning.  One of which was a pretty cool moment and then one that was well…less than cool.  They both happened a week from each other and I think they represent the highs and lows of children’s ministry pretty well. 

This is a small list of reasons why I believe kids more easily accept the Gospel and why adults don’t:

No, this is not a deeply theological statement; it’s more of an observation and a hunch!  I base this on my collective observations of Christmas and my kid’s reactions to the gifts they received.  Let’s start from the beginning and I’ll try to explain the title. 

Ok so I know this doesn't apply of any of you but just in case you know anyone that has struggles in their marriage, you might share this blog with them and just let them know that this was written by a guy who is imperfect, doesn't have a Doctorate in Marriage & Family counseling and is really pretty goofy overall...but really loves his wife and is blessed with an extremely awesome

Recently I was asked to lead a devotional for our volunteers at church and I thought since it was near Thanksgiving at the time I did the devotional, I would look up the roots of Thanksgiving.  I knew the story of the first Thanksgiving, the pilgrims, the meal with the Indians (excuse me…Native Americans) and all that good stuff but I wanted to dig a little deeper and find out more

For those that don’t know, my wife and I have three kids at home ages 12, 10 and 4. The older two are brother and sister and the youngest is the little brother. The reason I explain it that way is because the older two are more rivals then siblings and then there is this little brother thing that interrupts the older two’s ecosystem and that presents a whole new element of fun that I’ll get into shortly. For the time being let’s go into why this blog is entitled what it is what on Earth that has to do with God or Jesus or anything Kingdom related for that matter.

While watching the last two presidential debates, something struck me a little that I thought I would share.  I noticed that in all of the discussions, moral arguments did not play a very big part.  The debates seemed like they were mostly centered on economics, foreign policy and energy.  Why didn’t they hash out more controversial subjects like abortion or prayer in schools or displaying scripture on Government buildings? 

I just found out my original post did not post. So here is the original post. Our Church is in a season where tithing is down and our budgets are being shrunk. It’s the time of the year where families are spending a ton of money on school needs and kid’s extracurricular activities and just life.Considering that we are dealing with this situation right now I thought it would be cool to help people understand a little more about the value of church from a very secular monetary point of view and hopefully open their eyes to what they are getting each Sunday morning for absolutely no cost to them. The value in my opinion is tremendous…In fact it’s ridiculously awesome!

This weekend my church will be holding its semi-annual Baby Dedication ceremony during the morning worship service. It’s a wonderful time for those dedicating parents to show off their beautifully or handsomely decorated babies to the congregation and celebrate what God has blessed them with.

Lately, many of my friends and family have come up against challenges in their lives that have thrown them for a loop. I would say in many cases a downward spiral. The challenges could be from a work situation, a personal health scare, marriage crisis, kid challenge, money, friend or family breakdown or personal sin issue. In any case it’s caused their lives to be unbalanced. And of course, when your lives are unbalanced it’s amazing how much it affects everything else. It’s like life is a boat and as the boat goes to one side everything tends to fall towards it. The ideal situation for a boat is to be on a steady and smooth course.

For some reason, the month of August is just flat out hard for me and my family. It’s hard schedule-wise, work-wise, and financially. There’s ministry ramp up time, back to school prep, juggling schedules, higher utility bills and overall more irons in the fire. I won’t get into details but I believe many others can relate with me on this. August is just crazy!

I just got back from a week long family vacation and I’m reminded how much hard work “taking off” really is. I’m convinced it needs to be an Olympic sport…just harder. Call it the 1000 mile Family Dash! Like an Olympic sport it takes tons of preparation, sacrifice, blood sweat, tears, discipline and of course tons of money.

I hate to use this blog as a place to rant but I can’t help myself this time. This past week I helped lead our annual kid’s camp for a week of fun, sun and Jesus. The camp is really very cool though the rooms were outdated and the food was horrid, but overall it was a good camp. The issue I had was that throughout the staff’s effort to present the Gospel to the kids I kept wondering to myself “what audience are they are speaking to?”

Today I had the privilege of dealing with the customer service department at Apple. I talked to a very nice young man named Jared. I explained to him that I noticed that I had received two ITunes charges to my bank account for $20 each and that I believed this to be mistake since neither my wife nor I had purchased anything more than a 99¢ game on my IPhone in the past few weeks.

This week is our church’s annual VBS and as the Children’s Pastor of my church I’m neck deep in the middle of it. My lovely wife and ministry partner has been working for countless hours trying to organize, plan, create and assemble everything from people to snacks to registration to well…everything! She is the greatest blessing an ol’goofy west Texas boy like me could ever have.

Parents all over the world are making a horrible mistake with their children and they don’t even know it. They are setting the stage for disaster by throwing a wrench in God’s plan for their children’s lives and they are oblivious to the consequences. They are taking a very simply priority plan and switching the order of it to best fit their desires of the moment. Do you have a clue what I’m talking about? It’s the Priorities of Parenting Plan that states the following:
1) God First – Luke 10:27, Matt 6:33
2) Spouse Second - Eph 5:21-33, 1 Cor 11:3
3) Kids Third – Eph 6:1, Col 3:20, Deut 6

A Good Old Fashion Scam!
Recently a member of my family had the craziest experience with a couple of con people. Through intuition, the tug of the Holy Spirit and the con people’s mistakes we were able to reveal them and get our family member away from them before too much damage had been done. I’ll share the story someday and boy it’s a doozy but for the purposes of this blog I’ll summarize it and move forward with my point.

A great marriage starts with the man! Bold statement huh? I agree but it’s true. If a couple wants a great marriage, that last, then it all starts with the man. But here’s the trick the man needs to be a man and not a boy or at least not act like a boy.

Have you ever treated a waiter, waitress, cashier, clerk, phone solicitor, door to door salesman, bellboy, maid, or any other service oriented/servant type person less than good or nice? I know I have. In fact the more I think about it, the more I realize what a “jerk” I’ve been to at least two or three of those kinds of folks. Sometimes, I don’t even look at their eyes when they speak to me. Shame on me! The truth is we all do that! We blow people off all of the time and sometimes treat servant-oriented people less than they deserve. Oh come on now…admit it you’ve been a jerk too! You’d be lying if you said you haven’t. I don’t even know why we do it but we do! The sad thing is that we are actually acting completely the opposite of Jesus. You see Jesus would never blow off anyone, especially the lowly servant. He would look into their eyes and talk to those people and share His good news with them. He might even wash their feet! Yikes!

For those of us who serve on a church staff, you will relate with this tag line. Can I get amen? It seems like every week I personally meet people who tell me all kinds of things about churches they have visited, attended and even became members of.

Ok, so I thought I would ride down that slippery slope of this subject but instead of getting all theological and stuff I thought I would take on this subject from the traditional church perspective. First of all, I really have no idea how Jesus would celebrate Easter if he was hanging out here on earth. I guess it depends on where we think he might be on Easter Sunday. Would he be at church dressed in his best Easter Sunday clothing? I doubt it; He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was into sport coats and Easter Egg ties. Would he be hanging out with the guy dressed in the pink bunny suit at the church’s annual “Easter Egg-stravaganza”? Na!, I think he might be amused and he would love to hang out with the kids but I think he would want to avoid the scandal of the other churches in town getting all jealous that The Savior of the World was at that one church and not theirs. All the Baptist churches in town would actually have an egg throwing war over the matter. I’ll leave that one to your imagination!

What does it really take to be a children's pastor or minister? What is "It" that is required to make it in Children's Ministry? An early childhood education? Maybe extensive day care experience? How about a Masters degree? Nice, great, wonderful but NO! You can have all of these and more and you can still not make it in Children's Ministry.  No way Jose! At least not for long.  You may make it a few years and then before long you'll be looking in the Small Groups ministry for a job.