A Still Small Voice

There is a voice in my head that I believe is the voice of God. (See my previous two posts: The Voiceof God and Not My Voice.) One of the reasons I believe that it’s God’s voice and not my own internal monologue is that I can’t control it. I can’t will it to tell me something I want to know. I can’t even will it to speak to me at all.

Not My Voice

At first I was hesitant to believe that this voice I heard in my head was the actually God speaking to me. I’m still not one-hundred percent certain about it. At the time, there was only one way to find out if it was or if it wasn’t God speaking to me. So I started to listen.

The Voice of God

Trusting God implies that we know what God wants us to do. That’s not always so clear and it’s not hard to find different interpretations from different people. Where is that clear voice that speaks from another realm like it did for the people in the Bible?

Church Politics

Anyone who is actively involved in a congregation quickly learns about church politics. Nobody likes them but it seems impossible to do anything without running into them. As in most institutions, politics in the church does more to hamper good ideas than to help them get done.

I had been called into the senior pastor’s office to meet with the president of the congregation.

“It appears that we didn’t follow the rules to the letter when we called the special meeting,” the president said. “Nobody put the notice in the local paper.”

It had been four days since the meeting and we knew that there were people who were upset about the decision to buy a new house to serve as the parsonage. The house was located adjacent to the church property and the owner, a member of the congregation, was giving us an unbelievable deal. The house was in better shape than the current parsonage and it made sense to own the property right next to the church. The people who had been at the meeting approved the proposal to purchase the property by a margin of 60-40.

But another member, who also had property adjacent to the church, was upset by the decision because he had plans to offer the same kind of deal to the church when he retired in a few years. After the meeting he went home and combed through a copy of the church constitution and found the loophole he was looking for. The church council had made the proposal and notified the congregation of the meeting two weeks in advance by newsletter and in the weekly Sunday bulletin. But nobody was aware of the by-law requiring special congregational meeting notices to be published in the local paper. The decision made at the meeting, therefore, was null and void and the disgruntled member was threatening legal action if the congregation went ahead with the purchase.

While in seminary one of my professors had worked in a steel mill as an electrician’s assistant when he was a student. He said it was important to know how the power was designed to flow through the wires. But he said that the electricity didn’t always flow the way it was designed to flow. “It’s more important,” he said, “to know how the power really flows. It’s the same in congregations.”

I am a process person. I believe that a good decision making process helps everyone get involved and is transparent to anyone who has questions about how a decision is made. A lot of my work as a pastor has been to clarify and improve these processes. Nothing frustrates me as much as when a process is agreed upon and then decisions get made outside of that process.

An elderly colleague told me early in my ministry, “A German congregation will argue tooth and nail before a decision is made but then they will all go along with it. A Scandinavian congregation will go along with a proposal until a decision is made, then they will argue tooth and nail about it in the parking lot.”

I grew up in a congregation where the former was the rule but I’ve worked in congregations where the latter is the way business is done. It’s a recipe for hair-pulling exasperation. I’m always embarrassed when someone asks me who they need to talk to when they need a decision to be made. Do I send them to the person/s that is designated by our agreed upon policies or do I send them to the person/s who will ultimately make the decision? (These are often different people.) Do I pretend that the process makes a difference or should I just be honest about the way business is done?

It has been my experience in the Lutheran church that decision making processes that are outlined in constitutions and by-laws are not reflective of the way that decisions are really made. Talking to colleagues, I see this to be true of most congregations not just the ones that I’ve served. People often refer to this as “church politics” and it has the ability to suck the life and energy out of an otherwise vibrant ministry. Unfortunately it’s what occupies the energies of too many congregations.

In the end the congregational council had to declare the vote at that special meeting to be  invalid. The person who owned the property withdrew the offer, not wanting to create more contention within the congregation. The member who was upset had tipped his hand to his intentions and basically ruined his chances of selling his property to the church. The congregation missed an opportunity to upgrade its property and ended up spending money to repair the existing parsonage. Nobody came out a winner.

Spiritual Authority?

How do you think of your pastor/s? Do you want them to be spiritual experts that tell you what you should believe and how you should believe it? Or do you want them to help you see connections between faith and life that you might be missing on your own? Do you want someone who is an authority or someone who sometimes struggles with faith and belief and is honest about it?

I came into ordained ministry with the idea that I would be the spiritual authority for the people I served. I had been through four years of post-graduate studies and had promised to uphold the theology and doctrine of the Lutheran church. Furthermore, I found that people came to me looking for spiritual advice and many were willing to accept what I told them as absolute truth without another thought.

What I found out was that there are a whole bunch of people who know a whole lot more about life and are more acquainted with the Bible than I was. Whenever I sat down at a Bible study there was always someone who had spent more time reading the Bible than I had. Whenever I applied lessons from the Bible to daily life, there was someone present who had experienced more of life’s ups and downs than I could imagine.  

It was hard not to feel like an imposter. I was in my late twenties and had just started a family and a career. How could I even begin to talk about the relationship between faith and life? What could I tell people in their fifties or eighties that they didn’t already know deep inside themselves? I wondered how long would it take before people noticed that I wasn’t the expert that they expected me to be.

This is the tension and dilemma that I live with most days. I am trained and called to lead a community as an expert while at the same time I am certain that I am no more an expert on the ways of faith and life than anyone else. Yet every time someone asks, “What I am supposed to believe about                                   ?” I’m reminded that I am expected to be that expert.

My natural impulse in the face of this dilemma was to become even more of a spiritual expert. I didn’t want people to think that I wasn’t qualified to be their spiritual leader. Instead I wanted them to think that I was able to provide something they didn’t have. I wanted them to turn to me when they were in need of spiritual care and guidance. So in my spare time I read more theology books and attended leadership conferences. I spoke with certainty and confidence in my sermons and classes even though I didn’t feel that way inside.

That I would do this based on the fear of being discovered as a charlatan should be a clue that it is not a good impulse. Whenever I hold myself up as an expert in faith and life I sustain the notion that a spiritual life is a complicated endeavor filled with indecipherable theological thoughts and language. I also give the false impression that there is one, right way to think about God, faith and our relationship with the world. And because many people believe that what happens to them after they die depends on making sure they have that one, right way figured out (even though I was telling them it does not) I was likely adding to their anxiety at some level.

 

When religious belief is tied to communal identity it is important to believe the same thing as everyone else in the community. This is the way religion has been for ages. But up to this point in history personal identity has been tied community. Today we live in a world that is increasingly individualistic and identity is found in things other than community. (This has been a long and gradual change in the Western world but now accelerating and becoming a global shift in the way we understand who we are.) Therefore what it means to be a spiritual authority has to change as well. At best I can share with someone what I believe to be true and perhaps help them discover what it is that they believe. This is a very different than trying to be an expert.

These days I find myself straddling the line between being an the expert in faith that many people expect in a pastor, and trying to be more like a spiritual partner and guide to those who are trying to travel their own faith journey. I find a greater sense of peace surrounding those people who look to me as a partner and resource in their journey than in those who want me to be an expert. Maybe that’s because of my own place of comfort or maybe they really are more at peace. I don’t know for sure.

And that is a phrase that I am trying to become more comfortable with every day.

Soloing

Do we all crave the attention that comes with being great at something? Does everyone have the desire to step out on stage and solo? Or do we simply think “my way is the best way” and long for a chance to prove it?

After serving in my first call for three years I was eligible to receive a call to another congregation. I wasn’t in a hurry to move to a new church but I started getting phone calls from other congregations asking if I would be interested in interviewing to fill a vacancy. I was also recruited to undergo an assessment to determine whether or not I would be a good candidate to start a mission church from scratch or to lead a small congregation in a rebuilding effort. Both of these requests required that I fill out denominational mobility papers describing my ministry style and experience which, in turn, brought more requests for interviews.

Many people believe that church work is like the corporate world. They think that pastors start out as associates or at small churches and then work their way up to a medium sized church as a solo pastor. Eventually they move on to a larger congregation as a senior pastor. To be honest, that is the path many pastors follow. Fortunately I enjoyed my work and my colleague and didn’t feel compelled to move. So I did some interviews when a particular call intrigued me but never really felt called to any of them.

It was somewhat of a surprise in my fifth year of ordained ministry when my colleague and senior pastor called me into his office and told me that he had accepted a call to a congregation in another state. Many people in the parish I served assumed that I would become the senior pastor but there were two things that stood in the way of that transition: The church governing body prefers that this kind of “promotion” doesn’t happen and, after talking things over with Amy, I felt that I wasn’t called to be the senior pastor of the parish. Instead, I would serve as the only pastor while the parish looked for a new senior pastor.

Doing the work of two pastors was difficult. That year I presided at 14 weddings and 23 funerals instead of doing only half of those. The parish scaled back to three worship services every weekend and they invited pastors from nearby towns to fill in one Saturday evening service each month. I doubled the amount of time I was in the car driving to hospitals and doing visits since there was no one to split these duties with.

But in some ways the job was easier. The buck stopped at my desk now. I was responsible for the day to day running of the parish and didn’t need to consult with someone else. There was a certain amount of freedom to shape my ministry the way I believed was right for me and for the parish. It was also a relief from the hard work of doing joint ministry with a team of pastors. While I was (and still am) committed to the benefits of shared ministry it can be a frustrating and fatiguing endeavor. Having a year to be a solo pastor while the parish searched for a new senior pastor was a great experience.

What I discovered about the church and about myself in that year of solo ministry is that congregations tend to be shaped by whatever pastor or team of pastors is leading them. They tend to take on the personality of the pastoral leadership. I also learned that this is the exact opposite of what I believe should be the case. I believe that a congregation should define their ministry and seek a pastor that can help them do that ministry. at one point in the year I even mentioned this in a sermon, pointing out that it seemed the congregation only participated in programs as long as the pastor pushed them. But when the pastor left there didn’t seem to be any interest in continuing the program. Someone actually told me, “It’s nice to see someone finally figure it out.”

In the years since this discovery I have become more convinced that congregations relinquish this responsibility to their pastors who willingly accept it as their own. Congregations are thus shaped in the image of their pastor. Sometimes this is referred to as the pastor’s “vision” for the congregation. But no matter how well intentioned a pastor is, it’s difficult not to structure things in such a way as to ensure that the power to shape a community is retained in the office of the pastor. Pastors working together with congregations in a healthy, mutual ministry is not as common as those in the church would like to think.

Having a year as a solo pastor opened my eyes to see the way this works in my own life. I have no doubt that I could be a senior pastor or lead my own church. And I like to think that I would do a good job. But I can also see the ways in which I would arrange things for my own benefit and I’m not interested in leading a congregation just to prove that I can do it.

Learning to Preach

We all try to fall into a groove where life becomes more manageable and we can be comfortable. But then something happens to move us out of that comfort zone and we have the opportunity to learn and grow. When that happens we are faced with a choice: Do I return to the old way as soon as possible or do I take a risk and open myself to a new way of being in the world?

At the three-point parish where I started ordained ministry, the senior pastor and I presided at four worship services every week. One of us would lead worship at the two churches in town on Sunday morning. The other would be at the Saturday evening worship in town and then drive to the country church on Sunday morning.  We would do this for a month and then trade. This rotation meant that I had to write and deliver a sermon every week. Most associate pastors don’t get to preach that often or even close to it. Since I enjoy preaching it was a great opportunity to do something I felt I was good at. The frequency also helped me get better.

Coming out of seminary I worked hard to craft each sermon, carefully choosing phrases and editing my words until they were just right (or until I ran out of time and couldn’t work on them anymore). Having put all that time into them I would print them out on the dot-matrix printer connected to my computer, double spacing them so that I could easily read from my manuscript as I stood in the pulpit. I would rehearse by reading through a sermon two or three times before worship, making sure I was able to look up from my text and make eye contact with the congregation. This, I was told in preaching class, made it more personal for the people in the pews. At the end of the first service I would greet the worshipers at the back of the church, pack my bible, sermon, and whatever else I needed into my briefcase and take it all with me to the next service.

If I was in town for the month the drive was just six blocks to the next church. If I was going to preach at the country church it was a beautiful, winding drive through the hills, valleys and farmland of western Wisconsin that took between 15 and 20 minutes. It was, of course, one of the days when I was at the country church that I arrived for worship and discovered that I had left my sermon manuscript sitting in the pulpit after the Saturday evening worship.

I dug through my briefcase one more time hoping that it would miraculously appear. Looking at the clock I did the math with the sickening realization that I didn’t have time to run back into town and retrieve my sermon. It occurred to me that I could send someone from the congregation into town but there was no guarantee that they would be back when it was time for the sermon. I either had to explain to the congregation what had happened and tell them there would be no sermon that day, or I would have to preach from memory. I chose to risk the embarrassment of preaching from memory, possibly forgetting part of the sermon over the embarrassment of admitting that I was unprepared.

When it was time for the sermon, instead of stepping up into the pulpit, I descended to the floor in front of the congregation. In that old, country church the pulpit was a raised platform that jutted out from the front wall above the congregation. Whenever I stood in the pulpit my feet were at eye level with the worshipers sitting in the pews. The architectural design was meant to be impressive and authoritative. Stepping down to be at the level of those in worship had a very different feel; definitely more casual but more intimate too. Instead of being someone who stood over them I was standing among them. I realized the symbolism and significance of that gesture immediately.

As I preached that day without manuscript or notes I discovered a sense of freedom. I had been using my manuscript as a crutch. I knew what I was preaching but was too worried about the exact way in which I said things. I knew the points I wanted to make and the illustrations that I had chosen to make those points. I had been telling stories by memory for years and a sermon is simply a story of how we understand something written in the Bible. By stepping away from the manuscript I sounded more like myself. Preaching became a personal thing, a way of sharing what I understood about the text, faith and life.

The encouragement I received after the service caught me off guard. The sermon I preached was not as concise as my regular sermons with a manuscript, but it seemed to have struck a chord with those in worship that day. Sheepishly, I admitted the real reason behind the change in preaching style while in my mind I committed myself to making the change a permanent one.

Noted media professor Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message.” Preaching a sermon from the heart, without notes, sends a message to the listener beyond the meaning of the words. For me it meant more work rehearsing what I wanted to say. It also brought a change to the way I prepared sermons. I no longer spend time fretting over exact wording in front of a computer screen. Instead, I spend time listening to the words that come out of my mouth, wondering how I would hear it if I were sitting in the congregation.

Had I never left that manuscript in town I might never have discovered the style of preaching that works so well for me. In the years since then I have continued to experiment with that style, searching for my voice in a world that is ever changing.

Speaking for Others

A colleague once pointed out to me that pastors speak to the congregation as the voice of God in sermons and we speak to God as the voice of the congregation in liturgy and prayers. I still fight within myself to do these things with any sense of honesty and integrity.

“Pastor, would you mind giving the blessing?”

“Pastor, could you open our meeting with a prayer?”

“Pastor, when you go to the hospital can you stop and have a prayer with               ?”

At first it feels like an honor. People turn to me for something they want and it feels good to be of service. I am valued and looked up to. People wait for me to say something to God, to ask for something from God and I like it. It’s what people expect a pastor to do. It’s what I’ve been trained to do. And it doesn’t seem to be that hard. At first.

There are Psalms and prayers written in the little books that pastors keep in their pockets. There are prayers for blessing a house, for losing a job, for relocating, for people who are sick, people who are dying, people who are getting married or divorced or having a child or just about anything else a person can experience in this life. All I have to do is find the right page and insert the person’s name in the blank as I read it.

But sometimes this doesn’t work. These specifically generic prayers don’t quite speak to the exact issues at hand so I begin to develop my own prayers. I learn to ad-lib. Good sounding petitions get repeated and before long I have a list full of phrases that can be mixed and matched to sound like fresh prayers straight from the heart. This, by and large, seems to work. It might not be completely genuine but it becomes my “style” of praying.

I begin to wonder though, “Why am I the only one who prays out loud in a group setting?” I’m aware that my prayers reveal one perspective; my own. Where is the voice of elderly wisdom? Who is giving voice to the feminine viewpoint? How can I speak the grief of someone who’s child or spouse has died when I’ve never experienced that? I can ask God to be with and bless these people but how can I ever truly be their voice?

It seems right to let others pray too. But when I ask for a volunteer to pray on behalf of a group that is gathered, there is a moment where it feels like I’ve requested a volunteer for a suicide mission. The problem with public prayer is that it is extremely self-revealing. When we pray out loud other people get a glimpse into our soul, into our most personal and private beliefs. When we pray in front of others we risk exposing our deepest doubts, fears, longings and joys. And the truth is, we don’t like being exposed like that in public.

I realize that as a pastor I’ve learned how to hide behind the prayers I say in front of other people. I’ve learned how to construct prayers that are theologically correct but not true expressions of my own feelings. I’ve learned how to create formulaic prayers that sound good to the ear but never speak to the heart. I’ve learned how to pray with bold confidence but have never been willing to pray with the uncertainty that lurks below the surface.

What would that be like?

What if a pastor stood before God and spoke out loud the uncertainty of faith; the doubt, the wonder, the speculation, the hope and the disappointment of the congregation? How would it be received? How would it change the pastoral role in the community of faith? Would it make things better? Is it even possible?

Thin Places

There are places and times when we feel a deeper connection to all of life; past, present and future. I was once told that the Irish call them “thin places.” Births, deaths and ritualized transitions like weddings and baptisms often bring us to those thin places where we experience pain, wonder, hope and joy all at the same time. As a pastor I have had the privilege to be present when families invite me to be with them in these sacred moments.

The first memorial service I ever did for someone was at the request of the deceased’s girlfriend. When I sat down with her to talk about the service I learned that her boyfriend died in a car accident while running from the police because he was on parole and there were drugs in the car. He was on parole after serving time for setting a local church on fire to hide a robbery. When I finished the service I thought that was the strangest funeral I could ever imagine.

Not even close.

The next one was for an elderly man whose grown daughter had Down’s Syndrome. Her brother had wrapped their dad’s ashes in a gift box so as not to upset his sister. Instead, she thought the present was for her birthday and she spent most of the service begging to open it and throwing a fit when her brother wouldn’t let her.

Another time I was asked by one of three sons to preside at his dad’s funeral. About half-way through the service, at the conclusion of the sermon, the eldest brother stood up and said, “Dad didn’t believe in this bullshit but he loved his beer. We’re takin’ this celebration down to the bar.” And they did.

At another funeral the cement vault wouldn’t go all the way into the grave. The funeral directors and I spent 15 minutes jumping up and down on the vault to get it to settle below the surface after the family had gone back to the church for lunch.

And it would have been nice if someone had told me that when a person dies it doesn’t always happen like it does on TV and in the movies. Involuntary muscle contractions sometimes cause the lungs to gasp for air for up to two minutes after death. Nobody wants to hear the grown man in the clerical collar scream like a little girl in the peaceful and solemn moments after grandma passes away.

I’ve presided at weddings where the rings were left in another room and more at more than one where the Unity Candle wouldn’t light or ring bearers and flower girls refused to walk into the church. At one wedding, the bride looked at me during the vows and I thought she was going to run. At an outdoor ceremony the Unity Sand was missing so the bride’s aunt walked to the parking lot to retrieve it and then tried to sneak it into place behind me during the service while everyone watched what she was doing instead of paying attention to the couple as they said their vows.

I have seen grandparents act like paparazzi, standing in front of the congregation with cameras flashing to capture the exact moment when a grandchild is baptized. I’ve seen parents of baptized infants stand like stone statues while an older child distracts everyone, exploring the front of the church.

You might think that these are not sacred thin places but they are. We long for moments when we experience the eternal. But even when things go exactly as planned we still bring our humanity with us into those moments. Sometimes our fear and insecurity cause us to balk in the presence of the eternal. Sometimes our excitement and joy can’t be contained. But most of the time it’s simply because we are human and we have no choice but to bring our humanity into these thin places.

The fact that our human foibles can’t ruin these thin places makes me think that perhaps there are way more of them than we realize. Maybe we encounter thin places every day and we just miss them because we are too caught up in the drama of the world around us.

What thin places have you experienced? Will you run into one today?