Have We Got A Deal For You

                                             It's that old-time religion

                                             It's the kingdom they would rule

                                             It's the fool on television

                                             Getting paid to play the fool

                                                                             Rush

                                                                             The Big Money

According to a Fuller Insitute / Barna Research / Pastoral Care Inc. study (cited here) the profession of "Pastor" is near the bottom of a survey of the most-respected professions, just above "car salesman".

First, let me say that I am not offended. I’ve long thought that being a pastor requires a certain amount of salesmanship. Since our culture is filled with competing advertisements persuading us that a product or lifestyle can “change your life” or “change the world,” it’s only natural that people see one of the chief jobs of the clergy is to convince and motivate people to participate in a certain belief system that promises to do the same.  Many of the techniques used in selling cars (or any goods or services) are assumed to translate well into the arena of faith.

Unlearning

When it comes to faith one of the hardest things for me to do is to unlearn something that I have taken to heart. Sometimes it is something that I am certain is true but later find evidence to the contrary. Other times a person that I respect tells me something and presents it as a truth they have learned over a span of time. Later, I might discover that what they taught me was true for them but not necessarily true for me. Both of these are different than just learning something new that can be added into my knowledge bank. I actually have to unlearn something, to untangle it from all the other thoughts that it touches and (in some cases) to repent from the ways in which I have passed on the erroneous information when I have taught others.

When I was in seminary one of the preaching professors told us that the time we spent reading the Bible as pastors didn’t count as time spent in personal devotion to God. He told us that we had to reserve time each day for personal Bible reading. I took him at his word. After all, here was a white-haired elder of the church who had spent much of his life teaching people how to be pastors. His soft-spoken manner emanated nothing but concern for our personal, professional and spiritual well-being.  I assumed that this advice was learned during his many years preparing his own sermons and classes and I was eager to put his wisdom to work in my own life.

The Wonderful Church of Disney

On a recent trip to Orlando with 320 high school music students I spent three out of four days at Disney theme parks. On day 1 we were at Animal Kingdom from the moment it opened until 4:00 when we “park hopped” over to Epcot staying until it closed. The next day we spent 13 hours at the Magic Kingdom. Two days after that we spent the day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park, again from open until close. I spent much of that time with another chaperon who, like me, was content to see a few attractions but also spend significant amounts of time sitting on a bench watching people and thinking about what the world’s number-one-tourist-destination says about our culture and how similar it is to the Christian church in America.

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.

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.

A No Win Situation

    Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation in
    which there is no possible way to succeed. What
    are we supposed to learn from those experiences?
    To avoid them? To endure them? To make the best
    of them? Or is there another lesson lurking in the
    failure?

One of the hoops that I was required to jump through in seminary was a 10 week stint as a chaplain intern at a hospital. Clinical Pastoral Experience (CPE) was designed to introduce us to working with people who were sick and/or dying. But CPE was also used as a means to expose each intern to the personal issues within us as we ministered to people. In addition to meeting patients and serving their spiritual needs, six of us would meet with a full-time Chaplain to review our work. The goal, it seemed to me, was to have each intern break down and sob in front of the group so they could be lifted up and supported. Definitely not my learning style.

 I didn’t like being a chaplain. I didn’t like going into a room and asking if someone needed some kind of spiritual tending. I am extremely thankful for the men and women who do this kind of ministry every day in the military, at hospitals and at care centers. But for me it seems too impersonal. It’s spiritual care based on the model of medical care in our culture. Each component of a patient’s health (mental, physical and emotional/spiritual) is handled by different teams of experts that are each trying to fix what’s wrong with the patient. Maybe I didn’t understand what was really expected of me but it seemed like I was being asked to join in a team effort to treat what was wrong with each patient.

Feeling ill-equipped for this role I spent my days  doing the bare minimum to pass my CPE course. I would see the people who requested visits and chart anything I thought was significant to help the doctors. I would meet the new patients on my assigned floors. Then I would hide out in the medical library or a visitor’s lounge and write verbatims (word for word transcriptions of visits I did with patients) for my group of peers to pore over and critique.  

 I feel bad about hiding when so many people needed help but I was certain that a 10 minute chat with a seminary student wasn’t going to do much more than calm them down for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe that was enough for that moment but I could see they needed more. Most patients on my floors were dealing with life-threatening ailments like cancer, brain tumors, diabetes or emphysema. Whenever I entered a room I frequently sensed two competing expectations: One was the expectation that I was there to heal them. The second was that I would do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. What they wanted was a  quick fix. What they needed was a healing presence that lasted more than 10 minutes. Very often, what they needed was for someone to walk with them slowly through their suffering.

The trouble was that I wasn’t able to do either of these things.

I have seen the power of grace at work to calm and relieve an anxious heart instantly so I know that spiritual healing can come quickly. But all too often a carefully chosen quotation from the Bible can come across as trite and meaningless, especially to someone struggling with their faith. We tend to use Bible verses and theology like spiritual Band-Aids when the patient is hemorrhaging.  We want them to work like magic because we are just as uncomfortable in the presence of suffering as the person to whom we seek to give aid. While I was comfortable reading scripture to those who requested it, I didn’t have a go-to verse that miraculously set everything right.

Neither did I have the time to sit and chat about seemingly trivial matters and let the bonds of companionship grow. I know I can’t be all things to all people. But I met a lot of people who had no one in their lives who truly knew them. Sometimes it was because the person who did know them passed away. Sometimes it was because they were guarded and didn’t ever let anyone get to know them. Sometimes it was because they had been abandoned by family and friends for various reasons.  All I know is that I couldn’t give them the time and attention they needed to feel loved.

In CPE I was put in a situation where I was set up to fail. It was not possible for me to give people what they wanted the most and what, at some level, they needed the most.

I thought that parish ministry was the answer to that dilemma. In parish ministry I would be able to take the time to get to know people. But I am finding that the conditions that existed in CPE now exist in the congregation. The demands of my job restrict the time to truly connect with the 1300 people in my congregation or even a significant fraction of them. And while applying scriptural Band-Aids is all that many people seem to want; something to patch up their spiritual dis-ease, I don’t feel comfortable leaving it at that. I don’t believe faith is meant to work like that.

So is there some lesson that I’m missing in all of this? 

Doubt and Certainty

After taking a few days off from the blog to prepare and participate in the religious observances of Easter weekend I’m back at it. I had hoped to finish this series during Holy Week but found that I ran out of time and energy. This is the eighth post in a series about ways that I have missed the mark as a pastor. It is 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 participate in a church culture in which any kind of doubt is viewed as suspect and I tend to hide my own struggles with faith behind a veneer of certainty. For that I am sorry.

Well, I did it again. Just yesterday. As the pastor who led Easter worship said, “He is risen!” I responded, “He is risen indeed!” The thing is, I didn’t just join in this Easter tradition.  I was the one who pieced together the parts of the liturgy in which we said it. I was responsible for including it in our worship.

For a Christian there is no more important article of belief. We believe that Jesus rose from the dead. To affirm that belief with certainty has been the definition of Christianity for a very long time. A Christian is someone who believes that Jesus is God and that he died on a cross and was raised from the dead. It has codified in creeds and doctrines for thousands of years. For many, many people, if you can’t say that Jesus is risen from the dead with certainty then you aren’t really a Christian.

As a part of the religious establishment I find myself participating in this culture out of habit and out of a sense of obligation. These are the things that have been passed on to me. It is what I have been taught in my upbringing and in seminary. It would seem downright weird to hear the congregation respond to “He is risen!” with a resounding, “We have no doubt something important happened but can’t be certain exactly what.” I can call what I do tradition but when tradition fails to convey meaning then it has simply devolved into a habit for me.

The problem is that traditions do carry meaning for a lot of people. Just because it has lost its meaning in my life doesn’t mean that it has lost meaning for everyone. So I feel obligated to use forms of liturgy that convey certainty of belief for other’s sake.

One of the biggest surprises I have found in ministry is the way people pin their beliefs on their pastor. Peter Rollins explores this in his book Insurrection at length. In my experience people have attacked me for expressing even the slightest bit of doubt or for even questioning an article of faith. It seems that many people simply want to believe in belief. When they struggle in their own lives to believe, they want to know that someone has the kind of unshakable belief they aspire to. Often that person is a pastor. So when the pastor hints at personal doubt it forces others to deal with their own questions and uncertainty.  Maybe forcing them to do that is the loving thing to do. But this comes at a pretty serious cost to the pastor who is willing to do that. People will try to destroy or get rid of pastor as being “unfaithful” before they turn to the pain of their own shaky faith.

The other reason I hide my own struggles with faith is because it can indeed feel like I have lost my faith. It can feel like I’m abandoning so much of what I believe when I start asking myself questions like, “Can I be a Christian even if I admit some uncertainty about Jesus’ resurrection?” or “Is this passage from the Bible really what God wants for us or was it inserted by someone for other reasons?”  If I combine these feelings of lost faith with the insistence of others to be rock-solid-certain of my beliefs then add that to the sense of obligation I have for those who rely on the traditional forms of expressing faith, I sometimes feel like I have no choice but to hide my struggles behind a veneer of certainty.

One of the most amazing discoveries that I have made recently is that I can enter these places of doubt and questioning and still have a strong faith without ever coming to a resolution about them. There is something much deeper than the questions and doubts. And as unsettling as doubts and questions can be I also find a great comfort and even joy in the fact that I can explore these dark places. Now as I read the Bible I see more and more uncertainty written within its pages. I see people and communities struggling to come to grips with the meaning of life. Sometimes they choose ways that prove to be beneficial and sometimes they choose ways that aren’t.  I’m also finding that I enjoy working with people who want to engage their own faith on a deeper level by struggling with questions and doubt.

The question that haunts me right now is whether or not the culture of certainty that has taken root in the church can be transformed. I am skeptical but not without hope. When I read articles by people who are leaving the church but staying engaged in their faith it gives me hope that even if the church can’t be transformed, a new way of being church will be born that will welcome all doubts and questions as a path to greater faith.

The Tidiness of Doctrine

This is the seventh post in a series about ways that I have missed the mark as a pastor. It is 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’m sorry that I engage so much of what is happening in our culture and our world on a doctrinal level and not as a matter of faith that is sometimes messy and unsure.

My faith lives in my head.

This is one of the main criticisms of the mainline Church in America and Lutherans are champions of this kind of faith. It’s why we are so good at theology. We think about faith. This was the faith in which I was raised and, as one of my favorite songwriters penned it, “you can only grow the way the wind blows.”

But it’s also where I find I am most engaged with God. I love to meditate and reflect on what I see God doing in the world. I can spend hours trying to sort out the relationships that we humans have with both creation and the creator. I find peace while listening for the Divine to speak in a variety of ways (except when I experience frustration at hearing nothing or hearing something that I don’t want to hear). I find joy whenever a new insight inches me closer to understanding what this life is all about.

To be honest, though, I like living out my faith in my head because it’s safe. It’s like sharing your faith in a sermon. Many people think that preaching in front of a large group is difficult but, once you get over the fear of public speaking, you soon find that sharing what you are thinking in a place where people aren’t (usually) welcome to respond, refute or rebuff can make a person pretty bold. (If you haven’t already, see my post from a couple days ago From Authority to Resource to get an idea of the kind of authority that is granted in preaching.)

I also like to let my faith live in my head because it is always a bit neater and more tidy than in the world of emotions. I can sort things out and categorize them. I can rationalize and reason. I can remove myself from the roller-coaster ride that emotions take us through. Again, it’s all about finding a safe place. So when someone comes to me with the raw emotion of life’s messy issues overflowing around them, retreating to the safe confines of religious doctrine is my first response for all these reasons.

The thing that I am being forced to learn is that faith doesn’t lead to a safe place. That’s where we want to end up: In a place of safety and comfort. But faith (and life) leads us to places of risk. As one conference presenter put it, the major stories of the Bible are all about leaving home, over and over again. Life is a constant leaving of the places where we have become comfortable in order to risk and grow, not just for ourselves but to help others grow as well.

I am constantly learning and relearning the importance of staying in the moment no matter how thrilling or anxiety-producing it is. I am a firm believer in a ministry of presence; just being there with people in their sufferings and joys. But it is never my default mode of ministry (or existence). I have to catch myself as I turn to doctrine to tidy up a messy situation and be mindful to just sit within the pain, the tension and even the delight. That doesn’t mean I can’t reflect upon it later or that I can’t help someone else reflect on it when they are ready. It just means that sometimes I have to experience life before I try to make sense out of it.