A World of Expectations

We are born into a world of expectations. People expect us to think and behave certain ways because of who they think we are. There are expectations based on our culture, our gender, our social status, financial status, educational level, age, occupation and religion. When we try to break out of these expectations and discover who we really are we can cause great distress for others.

Recently, in front of a large group I was asked what I disliked the most about being a pastor. My response? That I’m always a pastor wherever I go. People treat me differently because I am a pastor. Some treat me with more respect than they show other people and some treat me with less. Usually the only time people treat me like a regular person is when they don’t know I’m a pastor.

When I first started my life as an ordained pastor I tried to live up to all of the expectations. I dressed like a pastor, wearing shirts with clerical collars on Sundays and other official occasions like weddings and funerals or when I would visit homebound members. I was careful to not have a beer in public or to swear when something went terribly wrong. I worked hard to keep my emotions in check and appear to be in control at all times. As a brand new pastor I also made every effort to convince people that I knew everything there was to know about faith and theology.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I didn’t want to live like this, nor could I. People where getting to know Pastor Kevin but not me. Then one day I realized that God didn’t call Pastor Kevin to ministry but that God wanted Kevin. If God was okay with who I was and called me to ministry then it would be okay to be me and in ministry.

That’s when things started getting a lot harder.

It turns out that people don’t want their pastors to be ordinary people. They want their pastors to be shining examples of virtuous living and paragons of faith. And furthermore, they will go to great lengths to make sure you live up to those unrealistic expectations or they will make your life miserable.

One Sunday morning I was preaching a sermon about spiritual gifts teaching about the gift of Mercy. A person with the gift of Mercy has the ability to recognize when someone is hurting and is able to empathize with the hurting person and find ways to comfort them. Many people have this ability, including people who aren’t religious. As an example I told a story about another pastor I knew who was able to look out over her congregation during worship and identify those who were suffering. She would then quietly say something to them after the service or would be sure to call them the following week. I, on the other hand, do not have the gift of mercy. I tend to be oblivious to the signs and the depth of people’s pain. I shared that I was a envious of this other pastor’s ability but I believed that there were people in our own congregation who had that gift and God was calling them to use their gifts.

The following week I met an elderly woman who had been caring for her disabled husband for years as he continued to decline. By and large she seemed to be a rather timid person but on this particular day she attacked me with the tenacity of a mother tiger protecting her cubs.

“Don’t you ever say that you don’t have the gift of mercy,” she said,  wagging her finger at me. “Pastors are caregivers and if they aren’t then who can be? I don’t want to hear you talk like that ever again.”

At first I thought that she was afraid that I was being too hard on myself. As I tried to assure her that it was okay and that I had been given other spiritual gifts she interrupted.

“No! Don’t say that,” she pleaded. “You are a wonderful caregiver and have been great to my husband and me.”

That’s when I started to realize that she had to believe something that was not true about me in order to allow me to serve her. She couldn’t bear to think that she was getting less than the best care in the world.  It was the wrong time to correct her false image of me. But playing along meant that I wasn’t free to be the flawed person I am. It meant I couldn’t live in the truth of who I was.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t an isolated incident. I, and other pastors I know, are constantly bombarded with expectations to be someone or something we are not. Fighting those expectations takes energy that we would rather put into helping people. So too often, we take the path of least resistance and put up a façade and play along with the expectations until we either begin to believe them ourselves or until we are burned out. Either way it leads to a bad end.

Pastors aren’t the only ones caught up in a world of expectations. The only way out is to be honest with ourselves and live with integrity and openness until those who try to make us into something we are not face the issues within themselves that cause them to mold us in their image.

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.

Approval

Is there anything harder in life than realizing your fate is in the hands of someone else? Whether it is an illness that can only be treated by skilled physicians or a jury that can vote you up or down, we all face times when we have done all that we can and then have to trust that someone else will do the right thing.

Every candidate for ordained ministry in my denomination has to be sponsored by one of the local synods of the church. (Synods are geographical groupings of churches in which a Bishop is given oversight to help them work together.) During my four years of seminary I met annually with two members of my Candidacy Committee. The meetings are meant to be encouraging and supportive, and they are in many respects, but it was also stressful. Knowing students who had been denied approval for ordination after four years of seminary and all the other requirements made the process that much more nerve-wracking.

Additionally, two members of the faculty would be brought in to meet with the student and the candidacy committee. Their job was to vouch for the academic success of the student. They asked probing theological questions about the connection between what we were learning in class and how we would apply that in ministry. In my case, the faculty members liked to play good cop, bad cop. One would ask convoluted questions about ministry that I could barely understand and the other (my academic advisor) would rephrase my convoluted answers so I actually sounded pretty good. I don’t know if this was everyone’s experience or if I simply had one good member of the faculty and one bad.

At the end of my time at the seminary I was faced with one last hurdle. I had to appear before the entire candidacy committee and the Bishop. The meeting took place at the Synod office and I was one of about four or five candidates that were being interviewed that day. Because it was a two hour drive to get there, I had arrived at the Synod office early. As I sat in the reception area and waited I thought about the way my entire future and everything I had worked for the past four years was in the hands of a roomful of people who barely knew me.

Forty minutes after she was scheduled to begin her interview, one of my fellow candidates came out of the conference room pale and sweating. She sat down and slumped with exhaustion. When I politely asked how it went she replied, “That’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever been through. Good luck!”

Yikes! That was not what I needed to hear. But it felt like I would be prying if I asked her anything else. So I nervously sat with her as the committee discussed her approval among themselves. In a few minutes she was invited back into the room to hear the verdict. All I could do was wait for my turn.

When the door to the conference room opened the Bishop quietly escorted her to the front doors of the office and spoke quietly to her. She nodded, turned and left the building. The Bishop then faced me and said, “Are you ready Kevin?”  and bounded across the room with his hand extended to welcome me.

Inside the conference room I was shown to a seat directly across from the Bishop on the long side of the table. The rest of the committee members were getting to their seats after bathroom breaks and coffee refills. The Bishop introduced everyone at the table and briefly outlined the procedure.

The first question came from the seminary faculty member on the committee. I kept my answer brief. If he wanted more he could ask a follow-up question but I wasn’t going to hang myself by talking at length. The second question came from a committee member I had never met. Something in my answer prompted the seminary professor to ask for clarification. As I felt myself beginning to sink under the waves of judgment, and before I could respond, the Bishop interrupted.

“Let’s cut to the chase. Kevin, we know we’re going to approve you for ordination. What we want to know is if you can serve in the same synod as your dad. I’d like to have you be a pastor here in this synod.”

“My dad and I get along well,” I said. “I think it would be best if I wasn’t in a neighboring town so I can develop my own style of ministry. But I know I would enjoy seeing him at synod assemblies and conferences.”

“Well then,” the Bishop continued, “I don’t see why we need to take up any more time with this. Why don’t you have a seat in the reception area while we make this official and we’ll call you back in here in a few minutes.”

And with that, I was approved for ordained ministry. I can’t describe the relief and elation that I felt. It had been a long journey from the first day I sensed the call. And it would be several more months before I would actually be ordained. There were a few hoops left to jump through but they were minor.

I can see the importance of having an approval process for ordained ministry. Not everyone who feels the call is right for the job. And I’ve personally heard the call to ministries that, in the end, I haven’t been chosen for.  I always try to see how my involvement in the process can be beneficial to me and also help those who are responsible for choosing the people to lead those ministries.  But nothing ever feels so good as having that sense of self validated, of having someone else say that they see in you what you hope is really there.

Something Completely Different

Some of the hardest things in life to see are the incongruities that we have been taught to overlook. Life is filled with actions, symbols and meanings that contradict the things we claim to believe. Becoming aware of these contradictions and resolving them can be both heart breaking and liberating.

The seminary is an accredited institution of higher learning. Pastors graduate with a Masters of Divinity degree but the seminary can also grant other Masters degrees as well as Doctorates. So in the spring of every year, those who have fulfilled all the necessary requirements get to participate in commencement exercises.

 My graduation from seminary took place at Central Lutheran Church in downtown Minneapolis. Central is a huge, cathedral-like building with gothic architecture, ornate wooden carvings and magnificent acoustics. It’s a church building that was meant to inspire the worshiper and magnify the wonder of God. The seminary used the church for graduation ceremonies because it was one of the few churches in the area that could hold all the graduates, faculty and guests.

Because I played tuba in a brass ensemble that performed at graduation, I had been to the commencement ceremonies in the past. One of the traditions of the ensemble was to let the graduating seniors choose a song from the group’s repertoire that would be played as part of the prelude. As a tuba player I love John Philips Sousa marches and, since there were a couple in the collection of songs that we played, I requested “Liberty Bell March.”

When we got together to rehearse for graduation I was not surprised to be informed that my request had been turned down. I was, however, annoyed by the short, but stern rebuke from the campus pastor who sat next to me in the group and played baritone.

You see, Liberty Bell March is the theme song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Most people don’t know it by name but when you hear it you immediately think of the irreverent comedy show. Someone on the worship planning team caught it and didn’t see the humor. Not only did my request get rejected but as a punishment I wasn’t allowed to make another request. I remember something being said about the seriousness of the occasion, apparent disrespect to my classmates and the whole seminary community, and disappointment that I would try such a prank.

I thought about playing dumb at that point but I didn’t really care.  It would have been so amazing and more than fitting, in my mind, to hear the strains of the Liberty Bell March echo through that august sanctuary right before my graduating class processed in. The only thing that would have made it even remotely better would have been to shout “And now for something completely different” immediately before we launched into the song.

To me this was more than a prank. It was a statement about everything I had been through in seminary. It was about the hoops and hurdles. It was about the seriousness with which the church and its leaders tend take themselves. It was a statement about the silliness of the whole commencement exercise compared to what we were being asked to do as pastors. It was about the incongruity of graduating in a building that was the showpiece of 19^th century, urban church architecture and the reality of being sent to serve in rural churches with cracked walls, crumbling foundations and mildew issues. It was about the sheer audacity to put on this show of pomp and circumstance highlighting our mastery of a theological education without the slightest hint of irony in claiming that we were going out to be servants.

There are other places where the symbols of master and servant clash in the church . The stoles that pastors wear over their robes represent the yoke of Christ and are a symbol of a servant. Clerical collars that peek out from under the same robes are modernized versions of the collars professors wore in centuries past to symbolize their authority and learning.  We are taught that these are symbols of the “office” of ministry so we overlook the way they contradict each other. But you can’t be both master and servant at the same time.

I am frustrated by the incongruities and the lack of clear vision within religious systems. And yet such uncertainty seems to hint at much greater liberty for individuals and communities than most of us expect. Opening our eyes to the contradictions between our personal (and corporate) actions and beliefs, being able to laugh about them in a forgiving way, and making adjustments to resolve them is the way towards peace.

A Prophetic Voice pt. 1

There are times when we think we are joking around but in reality we get glimpses of deeper truths.  Perhaps this is just a way for us to become aware of ideas that are too much for us handle at the time.  Returning to that deeper truth later can be less daunting because of the non-threatening way in which we were introduced to it.

My third year of seminary education was a year-long internship at a congregation in Marin County, California. Working full time in parish ministry I hit my stride and knew that all the hoops and hurdles of seminary that I had to go through were going to be worth it.

It was the winter of that internship year that I received a phone call from a young woman representing the Alumni Relations department at my college alma mater. They were putting together an Alumni Directory that would, they claimed, help graduates of the university to stay connected. It was, of course, a thinly disguised effort to collect information that the university could use for promotional and fund-raising purposes.

Four months earlier I had filled out a questionnaire for the directory and this was a follow-up call to make sure they had all the right information. She verified my address, the year I graduated, and my major. But when it came to my occupation, instead of telling me what I had written on the form she simply asked, “And what is your occupation?”

I smiled, remembering what I written on the card. I didn’t want to say that I was a student. I wasn’t a pastor yet either. I was serving as a pastor but I wouldn’t be ordained for another year-and-a-half. So on the blank line behind the word Occupation: I had written, “Prophet.”

It was a smart-alecky answer that I knew wouldn’t fit into any of the categories the university would publish publicly. There were no pictures of prophets in the catalogs or brochures the university sent to prospective students. When people think of prophets they conjure up images of street corner nut-jobs dressed in dirty clothes, pointing fingers, waving a Bible and making dire predictions about end-times through a megaphone. I had also hoped that this would lead someone in the alumni relations department to put me on a list of people who were unlikely to be a source of charitable revenue.

The young woman hesitantly asked me to spell it, as if she wasn’t sure she heard right. More likely she was concerned that she was on the line with one of those nut-job, college campus doomsayers who somehow managed to squeak out a degree between his lunatic rants in front of the library. “P-R-O-P-H-E-T,” I obligingly spelled out for her and then listened to concerned silence from her end of the line a thousand miles away.

Have you ever said something in a completely innocent way, goofing around actually, and when you hear it spoken out loud you become aware of the truth buried in the words?  That moment on the phone felt like one of those transparent moments in a Stephen King novel or an episode of the Twilight Zone when the main character makes a remark that will be taken to drastic extremes sometime in the near future with chilling effect. I remember having this vague thought that I was playing with fire.

Writing “Prophet” on the card that I had sent in didn’t seem like such a big deal. Saying out loud and it over the phone to someone made it more real. It took on a certain weight and seemed to actually materialize there in the world. A little voice inside my head asked, “What if it’s true?” I stopped pacing through the kitchen and realized that it might be true and not true at the same time. The seed of truth was there but it was not yet fully grown.

Today I am wondering if it’s time to revisit that premonition.  What would it look like to be a prophet in this day and age? What message would such a prophet bring? Is it possible to be a pastor and a prophet at the same time? Twenty years ago I wasn’t ready to wrestle with these questions. But the idea has been germinating for a while now and it doesn’t seem as far-fetched as it once did.

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? 

Hoops & Hurdles

One of the frustrating things on the road to achieving our goals is that there always seems to be some sort of requirement that needs to be fulfilled to satisfy someone else. While these requirements are often put in place with the best of intentions they can easily become bureaucratic hoops that take more time and energy to jump through than they are worth.

The report from the chair of the Evangelism Committee took less than a minute of the council’s time. “Most of the people in the neighborhood are either black or Indian, and they have their own churches they like to go to, so there isn’t much for the Evangelism Committee to do.”

I sat up in my seat, ready to take the chair of the Evangelism Committee to task for missing the whole point of evangelism. Besides, there was a less-than-subtle hint of racism buried in his observations. The pastor of the congregation, who was sitting next to me at the table, pressed his hand against my leg to get my attention. He silently mouthed the words, “Not now,” and shook his head ever so slightly. Reluctantly, I held my tongue.

For my Contextual Education class I had been assigned to an urban church on the north side of Minneapolis. It had thrived in the city expansion of the post-war 1950’s. But in the 1960’s and 70’s an exodus of people to the suburbs started a steady congregational decline. The people who moved into the neighborhood didn’t look or live like the affluent suburbanites that returned to their home church every Sunday morning. By the time I was assigned to the church in 1989, the beautiful sanctuary that was capable of seating over 400 people, regularly hosted about 60 every week. Most of the Sunday school rooms had been repurposed for special groups since only four of them were used for their intended purpose. The gymnasium echoed with emptiness every time I passed by in the hallway.

The point of contextual education is similar to teaching practicums for people who are studying to become teachers. Even though everyone has been in a classroom as a student, being the teacher is quite a different experience. Sitting in a pew every week and teaching a Sunday school class is different than being a pastor. Since the seminary is responsible for training qualified pastors, making sure that people know exactly what they are getting into is important. Contextual Education is the way to do that.

But Contextual Ed assumes that a person has never been on the business side of the church. For many people this is true. But some people came to seminary with years of experience in congregations. They were aware of the behind-the-scenes squabbles, the infighting and the politics of local congregations. They had years of teaching and leading experience. Yet they too were required to work with a church.

I was probably somewhere in between. I had experience with the inner workings of a congregations having spent so much time in churches. What I needed was experience leading the leaders. Leaving someone unchallenged when they were so clearly in the wrong about the church and about the people who lived in the neighborhood was not the kind of training I needed. This was a teaching moment for everyone at the table. It demonstrated the kind of thinking to which so many churches adhere. Unfortunately, the chance to inspect the speck in our own eye, so to speak, silently slipped by.

With any experience in life there is an opportunity to learn. I met some wonderful people in that congregation who were genuinely loving and worked in unofficial ways to reach out to the surrounding community. But there were some in my class who didn’t need Contextual Ed experience because they had it before they came to the seminary.

I will admit that some requirements for certification or graduation that felt like hoops at the time ended up being valuable learning experiences. I don’t always know what’s best for me at the time. But creating one-size-fits-all models of education can waste a lot of valuable time and energy as people find themselves jumping through hoops and fulfilling requirements that don’t teach what they are meant to teach. It’s simply a way of making it fair to everyone. Creating individual learning programs for students is more work for the educators but it is not impossible.

Maybe it’s time to stop putting hoops and hurdles in front of people and calling it faith development. Maybe we, as a church, need to find ways to let life teach its own lessons if we are willing to learn.