Time is Not on My Side

This is the tenth and final post in a series about ways that I have missed the mark as a pastor. It began as a response to several articles about why young adults are leaving the church. You can begin here if you want some background to this current article.

I get so overwhelmed by the programs, meetings and all of the minutiae of sustaining a congregation that I don’t have the creative energy to explore new ways of being the church together.

In the 20 years that I have been responsible for the worship practices of various congregations I have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of time that it takes to prepare for weekly worship. When I first started planning worship I helped lead two worship services every Sunday morning. Each week we followed one of two liturgies that were printed in our hymnal. The three or four hymns that we sang would be chosen by the pastor from several hundred available in the hymnal. The order of worship was printed in a weekly bulletin and a worshiper could follow the service by turning to the correct page in the hymnal. Both services on a given Sunday morning were identical with the exception of inserting a choir or a baptism at one service or the other.

Today I am responsible to plan, oversee and, at times, lead four unique worship services every week. Each one has its own special order of worship. At one we use an organist and traditional hymns but now rotate between six different liturgies. At two worship services our contemporary praise band leads the singing but each has a different order of worship. At the fourth service, on Wednesday evenings,  an acoustic music group provides a mix between the traditional and contemporary styles.

All this variety means that more time has to be spent planning. There are elements of worship that change each week but are used at all four worship times (prayers, scripture readings, dialogs etc…). These changes need to be prepared up to six weeks in advance so that the teams of people who now choose the music for each service can coordinate the music choices with the theme and message for the day.

This variety also means that we have to prepare five bulletins to help people follow the order of worship. One bulletin has all the community announcements and an outline of the orders of worship. It is given to those who come to worship. Then we have a separate “leader’s” bulletin for each of the four services with more details and cues for the musicians and worship leaders.

Instead of a hymnal we use a computer, a projector and a screen to put all the lyrics to songs and hymns, scripture readings and prayers in front of the congregation. All of these things need to be put into the special presentation software not once, but four different times; once for each service. And heaven forbid that we put these words up on plain backgrounds. Artwork needs to be found, purchased or designed to enhance the entire worship experience and tie in with the themes and messages of the week.

Using the projector and screen also means that when I preach I have to prepare pictures and words to put on the screen. To do that I spend time searching for pictures on the internet or modifying pictures with Photoshop and then create a graphic presentation to go along with my sermon. This has easily added two hours to my preparations each time I preach.

All this extra work has been created just for worship. It doesn’t include required duties like teaching confirmation, staff meetings, council meetings, committee meetings and fellowship events. Each of these also has a certain amount of prep time and follow-up time. All of these things are primarily about keeping the institutional church running.

It doesn’t leave a lot of time or creative energy to explore new ways of being the church. As a woodcarver and someone who likes to dabble in other artistic ventures I know the importance of having enough time to let thoughts and ideas percolate before a vision or idea can take shape in your head. The church used to leave room for pastors and leaders to do that kind of thinking and reflection. But the extra worship styles, the outreach programs and the need to fund them all have robbed church leaders of that time. The irony is that these things are started in an attempt to breathe new life into the church and welcome in new people. But again, is making more people members of the church the same as making disciples of Jesus? (See my earlier post in this series Recruiting for Christ).

Concluding Thoughts

Ultimately this leads me back to the place that I started from. Should I expect the church in its present form to be transformed to meet the needs of the emerging culture? Or is something new being born outside the traditional confines that we have called church? But as my spiritual director recently reminded me, the Church is bigger than the membership of every congregation and as a disciple of Jesus a person could be working for the Church even if they no longer worked within the church. Maybe so many young adults are leaving the institutional church, not because there is anything inherently wrong with it, but because they are being led by the Spirit to start what will become a new expression of the church.

The only thing I know for sure is that I wish I had more time to explore together what it all means.