There are some great jobs in this world with some amazing perks.  The President of the United States (POTUS) is one.  The president gets to fly around in Air Force One–how cool is that.  But in case you haven’t noticed, people who become president age very quickly.   Another great job is probably special agent for the FBI–badge, gun, inside information, and hunting down bad guys is meaningful and outstanding work.  The problem is, other people shoot at you and you can’t really ever talk about your work to others.  What a buzz killer to have a great job and not be able to talk about it!

I, however, have the best job in the world.  I pastor a great church (which is really more of a calling than a job) with great people.  The truth of this came through in the past three days as we’ve had some very important new year’s get-the-year-off-right meetings.

DEACONS:  It all started Sunday night with our deacon meeting.  There were two joys in that meeting.  One is that we celebrate the addition of four new deacons going through the DIT (deacon in training) process and hopefully ordaining them in either the summer or fall.  The second joy was that someone brought snacks.  Awesome.

TEACHING ELDERS:  Right after that meeting I led the teaching elder meeting.  These are men and women who lead our small groups.  This was our first meeting since the second week in December.  We decided on curriculum for later in the spring and then we worked through the lesson for this upcoming week and learned some theology about biblical inspiration.  There is no better way to finish a day of ministry than to spend it with these people talking about the Bible and how to help our church engage in spiritual formations.

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP:  Last night we finished off the trio of boards that govern FBCPO with the church council.  We talked about a lot of things related to various ministries, but mostly we worked on the upcoming Big Day strategy (Feb. 5), reviewed the proposed budget and did some mission/vision review.  The thing I love most about our executive leadership; and some of you might think this odd for a meeting that lasted almost two hours, but we had fun.  It was enjoyable.  There was a lot of laughing and smiles as well as deep intense spiritual conversations.

My prayer is that every pastor is blessed with the kind of great laity leadership FBCPO has.