Obliviously

This is the sixth 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.

For being oblivious to the deeper concerns of your life that peek out at the edges of our conversations, I am sorry.

This one is on  me. Personally.

I’m just not very good at listening to what is buried in our conversations.

I know pastors who can scan their congregation during worship and identify the people who are struggling with something in life. They can, with just a word or a look as they shake hands, determine that something is amiss and they are sure to give a call or drop a note to invite that person to open up. And it isn’t just a gift that some pastors seem to have. I’m sure you know someone who just seems to be able to tell when you are down and they have this way of making you feel better in the midst of your suffering.

But it’s not me.

Oblivious is the right word here. I am usually so wrapped up in my own head that I can’t even tell you how I’m feeling, let alone be aware of what the people around me are feeling. No matter how hard I try (and believe me, I do) I can’t seem to get the hang of it. I don’t believe it’s a matter selfishness either. I believe that it’s a spiritual gift; one that I don’t have.

That doesn’t mean that I have an excuse to be unsympathetic. It just means that people need to spell things out in order for me to catch on. And a lot of times they can’t because they don’t know what’s bothering them. But other times it gets buried in our conversations because it’s hard to open up and let one’s self be vulnerable.

It sometimes amazes me that I still have a job when I think about the number of times someone thought they had opened up to me in a vulnerable way and I just missed it. Then my obliviousness is interpreted as uncaring or even contempt. By the time it finally gets back to me, and someone explains what I was supposed to see in the first place I have a lot of apologizing to do. And sometimes, unfortunately, it is not enough.

I wish I could blame this one on our shifting culture, or on the fact that I am busy making sure other aspects of my job are complete. But I can’t. This is just one that I’m not good at and I’m sorry. Just please don't stop trying.

And speaking of being vulnerable: Here are a couple of talks by professor and researcher Brene Brown on the subject. They are well worth the time to watch. Both videos are about 21 minutes apiece. I hope you enjoy them.

From Authority to Resource

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.

For believing that the one-size-fits-all model of spirituality and piety was ever a real thing that could be attained with enough training or persuasion, I apologize.

As I go through this week I am finding that writing these gets harder and harder. I have been struggling with this one for years and I find that I am not the only one who has trouble with it. Lay people are struggling with this one too.

In a wonderful TED Talk about learning through our mistakes, educator Diana Laufenberg shares how her grandmother attended a one room school house to be educated. She went because that’s where the knowledge was: stored in the teacher’s mobile memory device (her brain). When Diana was a student her parents bought a set of encyclopedias. She didn’t need to go to the library anymore to get information for a report since she had access to a reliable memory device at home (books). Today, with computers and even smart phones we no longer have to go where the information is. It comes to us. Instantly.

This change in where we store and retrieve the knowledge we need to learn and grow means that the principal role of the educator has changed. A teacher is no longer the authority who carries information in order to pass it along to someone else. A teacher is now someone who facilitates interactive, self-directed learning. It is a process that avoids rote memorization of facts in favor of learning by exploration.

The same can be said about church. I was trained to be the local authority on spirituality, scripture and doctrine. People came to church to learn what God said through the scriptures. Pastors and priests taught spiritual practices that reinforced what they said from the front of the church. We even wear clothes that symbolized the learning and authority we had acquired. (The clerical collar is a modernized version of the old doctoral collars worn by professors. In some denominations the pastor’s robe is similar to a graduation gown.)  

The thing about teaching a large number of people at one time is that you have to find a way that reaches everyone in the group. Basically, you have to find a one-size-fits-all piety. Then you try to cram everyone into that shape. You repeat it over and over from the front of the congregation. You back it up with bible studies printed by your denominational printing house. You invite other authorities with the same view point to “give a fresh perspective” to the congregation. And you limit the knowledge that you pass on, in part because you yourself have limited knowledge and in part because it's easier that way.

But in a world where finding information about other spiritual traditions and beliefs is as easy as typing a question into a phone or computer, people don’t need an authority. I am no longer the mobile memory device for spirituality in the community. I am another resource in the spiritual journey of each individual. At best I can serve as a trusted guide as people explore their own spiritual path. One size does not fit all in this new world. It probably didn’t in the past either but we all make do with what we are given.

In my ordination I promised to uphold the doctrine of the church (with the assumption that my tradition was the one who did, in fact, hold on to THE correct doctrine of all that is holy). I promised to be an authority. But now I see that what the community needs is a trusted resource. The transition from an authority to trusted resource is a humbling and difficult transition. In many ways it feels messy and out-of-control.

Moving from authority to resource means stepping away from the front of the community and walking with people where they are. It means letting go of the need to control details. It means being available when an individual is ready, not making them be ready when I am available. It’s a lot more one-on-one. It’s an overwhelming task in a large congregation. As people walk their own path they will make mistakes. They will venture beyond the bounds of “correct doctrine.” As they serve in the church community as part of their spiritual journey they will pass along bad ideas and misinformation about the faith. But they will also inspire others and give birth to new ways of understanding the mystery of the Holy.

Many lay people resist this transition because it means they have to be responsible for their own life of faith and that's a difficult thing to do. So I feel caught between the people who want me to serve as guide and those who want me to serve as authority. I find that doing both is impossible. I flip-flop back and forth and am aware that this isn’t helping. I am hearing God’s call to make the transition to resource/guide but don’t know how to do it. I’m still waiting to see how that might happen. 

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. 

Recruiting for Christ

This is the third 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 for the way I deceive myself and others about the real reasons for evangelism. Honestly, my evangelism has a lot to do with recruiting people to share the burden of ministry with their time, talent and treasures.

I am an introverted Lutheran of Scandinavian and German descent. Evangelism is not something I do eagerly. Or often. I just can’t seem to engage a stranger in a discussion about something as deeply personal as faith. And yet Jesus commands his disciples to go and make more disciples. (Matthew 28)

The way that I’ve done this over the years is to adopt a Field of Dreams approach to evangelism: Build it and they will come. I have focused my time on developing inspiring worship, engaging classes and programs, and fun fellowship activities. Then I employ “bridge events” that encourage congregation members to invite friends to “come and see” in the hope that they will want to become a part of the congregation.

I have begun to see that this type of evangelism is all about recruiting people to become members of the congregation (see yesterday’s post When Faithful Looks Like Me). The true reasons for my congregation’s evangelical efforts are revealed when we speak with muted hope about prospective new people who will help us do the work and support the congregation’s programs with financial gifts. Now there is nothing wrong with inviting people to invest their time and treasures in ministry. The underlying hope, however,  is that someone will take my place, do my work and pay my share. We want more people involved so we don’t have to do as much.

It’s taken me 20 years to see it but my approach to evangelism creates an addictive cycle: I create programs and worship designed to get people to join the church. More people in the pews equals more money in the offering plate. More money the plate means more resources to hire staff and create new programs and better worship. Investing in programs and worship draws more people. It just keeps going.

  If another organization invited me to join them with thinly-veiled promises of fellowship and fun and then expected me to joyfully hand over two or more hours every week and a percentage of my paycheck for the rest of my life I would be very suspicious. Yet here I am doing that very thing.

So how do I keep Jesus’ command to make disciples without selfish, ulterior motives? What does evangelism look like in a church that isn’t trying to fill the pews and offering plates? Is it even possible?

My gut instinct is that evangelism has to do with showing people, with my words and actions, how close the kingdom of God is to this life. It’s about caring for people without regard to getting something in return. It’s more about the way I live than about where I belong. In fact, it actually begins to look like ministry and service, not recruiting. 

When Faithful Only Looks Like Me

I am sorry for assuming that the only way to live a faithful life is the way that I do it, within the confines of a congregation like mine.

 First of all I need to come to terms with the fact that I make this assumption regularly. I see it in the way I am disappointed when people won’t commit to a program that we implement. I hear it in staff meetings when we (with loving intention) refer to people who don’t belong to a church community as people whose lives are less-than-complete. Whenever I nod my head or commiserate along with another church member about those who “just don’t get it,” I live out the assumption that non-members are not as fulfilled or blessed as I am.

I think the obvious reason I do this is because it has been drilled into my head to think this way. Belonging to the community of believers is a large part of what Christianity is all about. And what better way to show that you belong than by participating in the activities of the community. Growing up, and even in seminary, I was taught that we are in competition. No one ever called it a competition but faith has always been referred to in terms of  “We” and “Them.” “We believe this way. They believe that way.” It was implicit in the descriptions of faith. You are one of us if you believe and behave the way we do. You are not one of us if you do otherwise. The social ramifications of being in a group or exiled from it are buried so deep in our heads that we barely recognize them even when they are pointed out.

Another reason that I assume the only way to live a faithful life is within a congregation like mine is because I want my work and my life to be validated. As a pastor I want to know that the work that I do has meaning and value to others. So as I preach and lead worship, as I teach classes and try to inspire people to live more selfless lives I want to know that it’s happening. For many reason I’ve come to equate participation in church activities with changed lives. No matter how many times I tell myself  that I am just planting seeds I really want to see the harvest to know whether or not my planting has been in vain.

As a pastor it is also easy to let the church become my whole world. I’m here at the church building or meeting with other church leaders or members almost constantly. I take continuing education classes sponsored by church agencies  My friends are members of the church or other pastors. It is a very insulated world in which I live.

A few years ago I began to get out of this insulated world. I took a continuing education class sponsored by the local university. Through that program I have met a several people who have shown me that Christ is at work outside of the church as much as in it. Then as part of a volunteer opportunity at my children’s high school I began meeting people who lived in very Christ-like ways even though they didn’t belong to a congregation. The peace, patience, kindness and forgiveness that I saw in them was in direct contradiction to a lot of the infighting I saw within the church.

Both of these experiences have helped me see another reason I continually make this assumption. It has to do with arrogant self-righteousness. I want to believe that I’ve made the right decision. I want to feel good about my decisions in life. Whenever someone decides to participate in a congregation like mine it’s like someone congratulating me for being on the winning team. Whenever someone goes elsewhere I find that I rationalize their decision so it doesn’t reflect negatively on me.

I want to believe that community of believers is much more than the people who show up for worship on Sunday morning. At some level I believe that it is. But I also want to be able to see it. I want to point at it. I want it to be visible when I have been told it is like the wind or like yeast in bread dough.  I can know that it’s there I just can’t separate it out and draw a circle around it.

Changing the way I think about this is turning out to be a long, slow transition made even harder by the abundance of people within the church who make the same assumption. With each passing comment I am reminded of my own false assumptions and my limited view of the work the Spirit is doing in the world. I understand the impatience of waiting for me (or others in the church) to bring my thinking alongside the evidence that I am being shown.

So please don’t believe that you have to belong to a church to be a part of the Church. The Spirit will provide community and support as you need it. Be open to the opportunities for fellowship, learning and worship that look different than they have in the past. That is where you will find the Church in faithful living.

With Apologies

Recently I have read some blogs by people who, by all accounts I can see, are God-centered people. What they have been writing about is why they, or others, have left the church. (Here are a couple by Christian Piatt: Seven Reasons Why Young Adults Quit Church and Four More BIG Reasons Young Adults Quit Church and one by Rachel Held Evans: 15 Reasons I Left the Church.)

My first response to these articles is, “Yeah. Me too.” These are the reasons I want to leave the church. But I can’t seem to do it for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that, as a pastor, my family and I depend on the paycheck that I collect for being a part of the church.  I truly believe that the Holy Spirit it at work outside of the institutional church and I want to be at work where the Holy Spirit is but I’m genuinely having trouble making the transition.

My second response is that I want to apologize. I want to apologize on behalf of the Church. But I can't. I can only apologize for the way that I have represented the Church as a leader and for the way that I have participated in the very things that have driven people away. I apologize for:

Another Look at Cell Phones in Church

This morning I received an email from a friend and fellow pastor with a link to a YouTube video about cellphones in church. It's cute and is meant to be a humorous look at the way electronics can be a distraction in worship. Then I saw another pastor post the same video on Facebook.

So here's what bothers me about this video:

First of all I completely understand the frustration of having sermons, prayers and worship interrupted by ring tones and other electronic alarms. It's disrespectful. There really is no other way to put it. It is disrespectful to the preacher as well as to other worshipers. It draws our attention away from what we are doing in worship. It pulls us out of the moment even if we don't answer the call and even if it isn't meant for us.But so does a crying baby or a someone with a cough.

Right now our culture is trying to decide whether or not constant interruptions in our daily life are worth the ability to stay connected to our network of family and friends. The cultural jury is still out on this one. I personally think that there are times when we should turn off the gadgets but I grew up in a different time, before digital communication. I'm not native to this culture but I'm trying to adapt.

Part of adapting means learning how phones are becoming an extension of who we are as people. We use them as additions to our memory storage abilities. We use them to expand our knowledge base. I have at least two members of my congregation who have talked to me about how they use their smart phones in worship to remind themselves to reflect later on something said in a sermon or to look up a reference on the spot. Using their phones actually deepens the worship experience for them. And what would it be like to have people in the congregation Tweet or post to Facebook statements and ideas they received in worship?

The trade-off is that whenever we are connected to the outside world the outside world is connected to us. And that's not always a bad thing. Too often worship is understood as this "other-worldly" activity where we try to isolate ourselves away from the distractions of the world in order to focus on God. The problem with this is that God is actually trying to get us to focus on the world. Isn't that why we believe that Jesus is the embodied form of God? Isn't that why we use earthly elements (water, wine, bread) for the sacraments? Isn't that why we preach a Gospel that frees us from the power of sin and death so that we are freed to serve this distraction-filled world in the name of Jesus?

If we, as the leaders of the church, don't start to get over ourselves and meet people where they are then the important and relevant message of our faith will get lost in a cultural language that is being spoken by fewer and fewer people. The very fact that we meet them where they are is an experience of grace. Insisting that people conform to a particular pattern of behaviors (laws?) to be welcomed into the worshiping community is exactly the opposite.