Long-Haired Hippy Freak

On a late spring, Wednesday evening, when the kids can taste the end of the school year and the beginning of summer, I reach into an open topped box and pull out a creased slip of paper. Everyone in the room holds their breath to see what the next question is going to be. It’s “Ask the Pastor Night” and the 100 plus middle school students and adult confirmation guides can ask me anything. I read the question quietly to myself. I've seen this question before and it’s one of my favorites.

I started this tradition seven years ago when it occurred to me that Jesus did a lot of teaching simply by letting his disciples ask questions. People learn best when they are interested and invested in the topic. Over the years I've discovered that there is some serious spiritual thinking going on in the minds of 12-14 year olds. And, as you might suspect, there are some stupid things as well. There is usually a 50-50 split between serious questions and questions intended to stump me or make the class laugh since I allow them to ask me anything.

I smile as I read the question out loud. “Why do you wear your hair in a pony-tail and grow your beard so long?” This is a question that every adult member of my congregation wants to ask me. Most people have become accustomed to it by now but every once in a while someone makes a stray comment. Personally, I find it interesting to discover who is bothered by my personal style choices. In a community that is supposed to be based on love I am always surprised by the insistent presence of social convention and stereotyped expectations.

“Sanity,” I say. “It’s to keep me from losing my mind.”

Twenty Years

The envelope was hand addressed to The Rev. Kevin Jones in a black ball point pen. The cursive mailing address filled most of the front. The back flap was imprinted with the return address from the Seminary Relations department. Usually that meant a letter asking for a donation of some sort but this was a card-sized envelope; maybe an invitation to a fund raising event of some sort.

The flap wasn’t sealed all the way around so I skipped the letter opener and slid my finger inside tearing a jagged line along the top. I pulled out a folded card. On the front was a picture of the entrance to the one building on the seminary campus with the traditional roman columns seen on campuses across the country. In the upper left hand corner the seminary logo on a mustard yellow background and on the bottom the word “CONGRATULATIONS.”

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.

Two Themes

When we find ourselves struggling with something in life it’s both amazing and a little depressing to realize just how long we have been dealing with that issue. Two themes that I thought were recent developments in my ministry turned out to be present even before I was ordained.

My first call as an ordained pastor was to a parish of 800 members that was made up of three individual congregations that worked together. Two pastors served the congregations. (The Senior Pastor had been called to the parish just a month before I was interviewed. I was to be the Associate Pastor.) There were two churches in town, just six blocks apart from each other. The third congregation was located about seven miles from town  and was surrounded by dairy farms. Each congregation had their own budget and leadership councils. There was also a parish budget that each congregation contributed towards based on their membership as well as a parish council that had representatives from each church.

In the Lutheran church each congregation issues a call to a qualified pastor. This is done after a series of interviews. During the on-site interview I was given a tour of the town, was walked through the parsonage (church owned house) that would be our home, and was shown each of the three church buildings. The first church was the largest of the three and hosted the parish offices for the two pastors and the part-time secretaries. The second church I visited was the country congregation and the third that we visited was the church that owned the parsonage in which we would live.

At the country church I noticed a large portrait of a man and a woman in the fellowship hall. By their attire the portrait looked to be about twenty years old and I assumed that it was someone who had donated something significant to the congregation. At the third church we visited I noticed the same portrait hanging in an overflow area where it could be seen by all those who were in worship. But this time I wasn’t left to guess who it might be.

The 72 year-old man who was showing us around walked me right over to the portrait and said, “This is Pastor Urberg and his wife. He and his father served as pastors to this church and several others for 80 years. The parsonage was built the year he was born and he lived in it all his life except when he went to college and seminary. He was the mayor in town and the street outside is named after him. He died while still serving as pastor, just like his father, and his widow still attends church here. The last pastor we had didn’t think this picture should be hanging here. What do you think?”

At the time I knew that I was being tested. It was obvious. And I was aware that the test wasn’t about the former pastor or their loyalty to him. It was about whether I would accept them the way they were or if I would force them to become something else. I don’t recall my exact words but in my answer I tried to honor the tradition and the path that particular congregation had travelled. 

What I didn’t realize then was that this episode would introduce two themes that I have struggled with throughout my ordained ministry. First is the theme of tradition and legacy. As a pastor, I stand on the foundation of more than 4000 years of recorded thought, debate and reflection on the meaning and purpose of life. This accumulation has been passed on to me through ritualized tradition and theological education. The problem is that the rituals and the way of thinking about the essential Truth that is contained in the tradition are not as timeless as the Truth itself. New rituals and new ways of thinking about and expressing the Truth are needed in order for what is True to be passed on.

The second theme highlighted by this episode is my struggle with what it means to be a pastor. Pastors are servant leaders, which means a congregation has to take ownership for its own ministry. The congregation has to determine what its purpose is and how it will function in the wider world. Unfortunately, most congregations are willing to let the pastor decide. Charismatic personalities can grow large churches because they are able to convince people to follow their “vision.” But there is danger in letting one person, no matter how well-intentioned they are, define the identity and purpose of a whole community.

As I continue retracing my journey into ordained ministry these themes will loom ever larger in my thoughts to the point where they are of great concern to me today. Hopefully this task will take me closer to some kind of resolution or at least give me some insight about where to go next.

Reeled In

Even when I tried to ignore my call to ordained ministry and find another path I didn’t get very far before I found myself in church again. Fortunately, it didn’t take something as violent as a storm and spending a few days in the belly of a whale to get my attention. In my case God used something I was already focused on to lead me where I needed to go.

When I left home to attend college at Central Michigan University I made one feeble attempt at connecting to a church community. I called the local Lutheran church and asked if anyone could give me ride to worship on Sunday. I didn’t have a car and there was no bus service for the local community. The pastor told me that the congregation wasn’t set up to serve college students (I’m sure he phrased it a bit less bluntly) and that I should stick with a campus ministry organization. That was all the incentive I needed to explore what life apart from the church might be like.

I found that I didn't miss the church as much as I thought I would. If to this point in my life home was where I lived, school was where I went, and church was where I belonged, college now owned all three parts of my life. There was plenty to do simply adjusting to my new independence and responsibilities without adding the social obligations of belonging to a church. With no mandatory worship to attend each week I discovered lazy Sunday mornings and the joy of reading slowly through an entire Sunday newspaper before returning to school work. (I have a serious suspicion that this is what is meant by Sabbath and I still covet the once or twice a year when I get the chance to dwell in that kind of time.)

Sitting in my English writing class one afternoon during the winter/spring semester of my freshman year I found myself ignoring the professor’s lecture in order to gaze at the profile of the cute blond sitting one row up an over from me. She leans forward with both arms resting on her notebook. Her legs fold back under her chair. She is the model student, fully engaged, ready to participate. As I secretly admire her I feel the ball of nervousness grow inside of me. This was the day I had resolved to ask her on a date.

As class ends we stand up to gather our books and bags. She turns to face me as she slides her arms into the powder blue and cream white ski jacket and begins to zip it up. She smiles and her pale blue eyes shine in the white fluorescent light of the classroom. At the beginning of the semester we discovered that our next classes were in the same building part-way across campus. We had gotten in the habit of walking together and talking about whatever happened to be on our minds. It was my plan to ask her out as we walked together.

Evidently I was unable to bear the nervous anxiety until I could slip it into our conversation casually and I blurted out, “Hey, I heard there was this thing going on next Friday. Would you like to go with me?”

This wasn’t how I had rehearsed this in my mind. Gone was the suave, casual and in-charge persona that I had secretly hoped would emerge in moments like these. In its place was a sputtering rush of words vomited out in a semi-coherent splash on the floor by my feet. Did I really say, “this thing?”

“What thing?” she asks, tilting her head the tiniest little bit.

“Umm,” I stumble, not sure whether I am being given a second chance or just being set up for a bigger drop. “It’s a party. Like a dance. But I don’t know if there will be dancing. A social kind of thing at the Student Union. You know.”

I stand there trying to look confident and certain which, in this case, would have won me an Academy Award had I been able to convince her that I was.

Then, out of some magical place where grace and goodness come forth, she says, “Sure, I’d like that.” Her eyes radiate warmth and her smile washes away the anxiety. But before I have even the slightest moment to savor this little victory, before the tiniest swell of pride begins to bloom she continues, “But I have one condition. You have to go to church with me next Wednesday night.”

“Sure. I’d like that,” I say without thinking to ask, “What church?” I know church. I can go to one Wednesday night service without getting all caught up in it. Church is easy. A simple tradeoff in exchange for a date.

I’m too excited to understand what is happening to me. I’m too involved in the moment to recognize that God has baited my path with a cute blond woman and a pair of pale blue eyes.  It would be fifteen more years before I would recognize how I was lured back into the church after my brief hiatus.

It seems like most people who are involved in a church community have experienced a time of leaving before returning once again. The impulse to return is sometimes a spouse, sometimes it’s for the sake of their children, or sometimes a tragic or life-changing event that sent them in search of meaning and community. Strangely enough, these are some of the exact same reasons that people leave the church.

I think I’ve always assumed that belonging to a church was the goal. But what if that’s not the case? What if God led me out of the church that first year of college for a reason? What if God didn’t lure me back to the church but called me forward into the church only after I had experienced a time away? And what if God is leading people out of the church now for a reason that we can’t yet see?

Soaking It In

Sometimes when we are paying the least attention we gain all kinds of knowledge and experience that will benefit us in surprise ways later in life. During the time that I quit thinking about becoming a pastor I gained so much knowledge about leading a faith community that I am still sorting out what I learned.

Moving to Dubuque changed everything about my life. The three places that my life took shape; home, school and church, all seemed to be completely reversed. Dad was now home instead of mom who was working in a department store. There was less income, a smaller house with a tiny yard and neighbors so close it felt claustrophobic. School was huge; an overcrowded limestone monolith containing more than 1600 strangers. Church was bigger too. It was more formal, less friendly and it certainly didn’t need the kind of help that I was familiar with offering.

What choice did I have but to make the best of it? That doesn’t mean that I did so happily or quietly. I remember making my family, and especially my parents, miserable at times. In those four years of high school I did my share of rebelling and of being a jerk. But I did some good things too. I got more involved in music. I explored some artistic endeavors. (Don’t ask my mom about the way I painted my bedroom. She still gets the shakes when she thinks about it.) I eventually made some good friends and learned to navigate the changes at home, the hallways and social situations at school and the very different feel of faith in the new church.

While I was preoccupied with my particular strain of teenage angst and ignoring any sense of call to ordained ministry two things became everyday events that would shape my understanding of ministry. First, my dad took a part-time job as custodian of the church we attended and he invited me to join him. I emptied wastebaskets and cleaned floors in the evenings and on Saturdays. I witnessed all the behind-the-scenes activities that keep a church going. I got to know the people on staff; the pastors, the secretaries, the youth director and some key volunteers who were frequently present. I found the people who work at a church to be ordinary people. They had lives outside of the church. They struggled with family issues, grief and stress. They showed up to work exhausted because there was so much going on in their lives. They had good days and bad days. They lost their temper when things weren’t going well and they could be very forgiving and encouraging too.

The second thing that happened is that my dad started processing what he learned at seminary as we sat at the dinner table. He told us about conversations in which he and his classmates speculated on different subjects. What if Jesus had gotten married? What if he had died a different kind of death? What if Mary wasn’t really a virgin when Jesus was born? For the first time I was becoming aware that open-minded speculation about some of the hard and fast doctrines of the church was okay. Suddenly, faith became something that I could participate in beyond memorization and regurgitation. Faith was something that could be tested and explored. God became bigger than my Sunday School lessons and catechism explanations. It was as if all the recorded scripture and theology was a leaping off point instead of a landing zone. It was there to help launch us into a life-long experience of finding God wherever we find ourselves to be physically, emotionally or spiritually.

The lessons I learned when I wasn’t paying attention have done more to shape my understanding of ministry than any class in seminary. They are the places I fight the hardest to maintain my sanity and dignity in this calling. They are the issues that cause me the most heartache and joy. Perhaps being an ordinary person willing to explore extraordinary possibilities is what we are all called to in whatever ministry we serve.

Called to Ministry

In the church we like to talk about the way God “calls” each of us to ministry but we don’t often talk about what that means or how we discern the call. In the days ahead I want to share my experience of being “called” and how that led me to where I am today and eventually where I end up in the future.

The question comes from a middle school student in a large group discussion at Bible camp: "How did you know you wanted to be a pastor?"

Instantly a picture forms in my mind. I see the line of large box elder trees to the south side of my family’s house near Fowler, Michigan. A rope swing hangs from a limb in the tree closest to the road. A scrap-wood fort is nailed among the sturdy branches of the tree farthest back.  It’s the summer before my seventh-grade year and I’m riding the old Wheel Horse mower across the front yard. I drive into the shade under the canopy of braches and cross the two-rutted path that wraps around three-quarters of the old farmhouse and connects to the gravel driveway near the milk-shed. On the other side of the ruts the lawn continues for about twelve feet and ends where we let the grass grow tall.  It’s the one field on the 40-acre property that is not defined by a barbed-wire fence. The dark-green tips of small evergreen trees, planted in rows just a few years earlier, poke up above the wavy grass. 

"I don't know," I begin, "But I remember this time when I was a kid mowing the lawn and I noticed something about the trees and the short grass of the lawn and the tall grass in the field. I remember thinking that what I noticed would make a great example for our pastor to use in a sermon. It would help to explain what he was trying to teach us."

"What was it that you saw?" someone else in the group wants to know.

I shake my head, "I don't remember exactly. I just remember having the sudden realization that what I saw could be used to help people understand more about God. I think I knew then that I would be a pastor but I didn't admit it for a long time.”

The conversation moves on to another topic and I sit for a time, half listening to the conversation around me and half thinking about that day on the lawn mower. At the seminary I was asked about my call to ministry on several occasions. It was a question I had to answer in my application essay. I was asked to answer it again for the Candidacy Committee of my sponsoring synod and again to faculty panels who were charged with determining my fitness for ordained ministry. Never once in all those opportunities did I mention or even think about that day on the lawn mower.

Now, when someone asks what led me to ordained ministry, I retell this story of mowing the lawn and conclude it by saying that after that moment, “I just knew.” In all honesty, though, it wasn’t as if the clouds parted that summer day and a booming voice told me that I would be preaching in front of a congregation someday.  It’s my earliest memory of a growing knowledge, that eventually became a certainty,  that I was being led in a particular direction.

Sometimes people talk about being on a path in life. There have been many days when I wish the path was more clearly defined, days when I have cried out to see what lies ahead of me. Reflecting back on where I have been I realize that I have not been led down a path at all. It has been a direction. It’s like walking through a field of tall grass. I can only see a path when I turn around and see where I have been. 

It’s funny that the image of a field is what comes to mind as I describe my life’s journey. To a farmer with livestock a field of tall grass is known as a pasture, a place for the animals to graze and be fed. The word pastor is derived from the same word for pasture. A pastor is one who feeds the flock.

My entire life I have been moving towards and within the field of ordained ministry; into the pastoring field if you will. My identity as a person has been formed inside the church. For 23 years (19 years as a pastor and 4 as a seminary student) this identity has been centered specifically around my call to be a pastor. As I look back on the trail I have made I see that it meanders and wanders through the field. But I also see that the meandering has moved me across the field, away from where I was and towards something that lies beyond.

Reducing Ministry to Numbers

This is the fourth 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 apologize for using the metrics of business to evaluate the success of our programs as if the effectiveness of ministry can be determined by numbers, charts and graphs.

Here’s where it gets really difficult to apologize. I believe that one of the reasons the Church is so slow to change is that we rarely evaluate what we do. We assume that because something worked in the past it will continue to work just as well in the future. So we need to look with a critical eye at what we do to determine its effectiveness. Unfortunately we have adopted evaluation tools from the world of business where efficiency and profitability are the goals. Even when a congregation can come to some kind of agreement about its goals (which is rare) finding a way to accurately evaluate what it does is almost impossible.

I remember the first time I asked a group of church leaders, “Why are we here?” We were sitting in the church basement on metal folding chairs huddled against the darkness that enveloped most of the room since there was no reason to light the whole room if we were just sitting in one section. After a brief silence someone asked, “You mean tonight?”

“No,” I said. “I mean why is the church here? Why do we keep going to all the trouble of being a church here in this community?”

If you ever want people to look at you like you were the biggest moron walking the face of the earth become a pastor and ask people to explain the purpose of the church as if you had no idea. That particular night the best reason they could come up with was along the lines of, “Because that’s the way it is supposed to be.”

Over the past 20 years congregations have become better at defining their purpose and goals. My experience is that it helps a congregation understand that they can’t live up to everyone’s expectations.  In Acts 6 the disciples wrestle with the issue of how to best use their time in service to others when some in the community begin to complain. They eventually decide that a particular ministry is important enough to continue doing but that it needed to be done by someone other than the 12 apostles. Even in the early church they struggled with both the purpose of the church and evaluating the effectiveness and details of the ministry.

In addition to simply needing a way to evaluate what we do I am also acutely aware that we have limited resources at our disposal. I have to be a good steward of what I have been given responsibility for. People also want to know that their money is being used wisely. If I can’t demonstrate some kind of return on their investment I can be sure that they will find ways to be generous with their time and finances in other places.

The problem is that the effectiveness of ministry can’t be shown using the metrics of efficiency and profitability. How do I evaluate the effectiveness of sitting with someone as they die? What level of efficiency is required to maintain a ministry that feeds the hungry without getting taken in by scam artists? What multiple choice answers do you put on a questionnaire to determine the impact of a sermon? How do I evaluate the internal response that parents and kids have when they see me supporting them at sporting events or music concerts? How do we determine whether it is a more profitable to use pastoral time having coffee with a congregation member or praying for the people who participate in ministries by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless or mentoring at-risk youth?

These things don’t fit on charts and graphs. There are no numbers that can easily translate the effectiveness of ministry that isn’t meant to be efficient. This was the struggle that met the disciples when the woman anointed Jesus with the expensive perfume (Matthew 26). The disciples saw a more efficient and practical use for the perfume but Jesus praised the extravagance of the act both for its symbolism and for the way it demonstrated the woman’s love and devotion to Jesus. We just can’t put numbers on love and devotion.

I want to be extravagant and generous with the love and resources that I have at my disposal. But I want to be a good steward too. I feel trapped. There is a need to evaluate what we do as a Church but the metrics of business can’t be the tool that we use. So for the way I have reduced people to percentages, statistics and numbers I’m sorry.