Monthly Archives: November 2012

No pastor accepts a call to professional ministry to get rich.  But, of course,  money pays for life’s necessities and extras, and we need it to live.  

Part of my work involves overseeing the Terms of Call that spell out what congregations agree to pay their pastors in terms of salary and benefits.  I’ve sadly found that it’s rare – if not unheard of – for congregations to be generous with their pastors without some people in the congregation protesting.

First of all, there are very few congregations that could genuinely be called generous to their pastors and other church staffers.  Many small church pastors are paid the minimum required salary and – if there is an annual raise at all – it tends to be only a cost of living adjustment.  Many small churches would like to pay their pastors more, but cannot afford to do so.  Or they don’t think they can.

What I’ve seen and heard:

• Churches hiring a pastor, not because they’ve discerned that he/she has been called by God to lead them, but because he/she is the only one who can live in their manse/rectory which saves the congregation money.
• Churches hiring married co-pastors to share a single position – each working half-time, but bragging openly that they will get more than “two for the price of one.”
• Churches calling very part time pastors (1/2 time, 1/4 time) but expecting them to work full time, and resenting them if they try to set boundaries.
• Churches that refuse to give sabbaticals to their pastors, even after 10, 15, 20 years of ministry.

With all of these situations, some education and interpretation is needed.  In fact, of the marks of a healthy 21st Century Church is the ongoing education of church leaders – beyond the pastor.  The elders, deacons, and support staff all need continuing education.  Some of that education is about what a pastor actually does or should be doing.

• First, everybody needs to remember that successful ministry begins and ends with the Holy Spirit.  Search Committees must pray for their future pastors (it’s fun to realize that this future mystery pastor is walking around somewhere right now), pray for clarity, wisdom, and insight, and recognize that God is guiding the process – or should be.  Just as churches should not be unduly influenced by a potential pastor’s charm and good looks, churches should also not be influenced by the fact that a certain pastor might save them money (by living in the manse, arriving with a personal trust fund, etc.)
• If we call a part-time pastor, we must – especially – respect and encourage limits to the pastor’s time.  A 10 hour/week pastor (barely) has time to write and preach a sermon, plan and lead worship, and moderate a monthly meeting.  No emergency visits.  No teaching classes.  A 25 hour/week pastor can preach, lead worship, teach a Bible study and do hospital calls (if nobody dies and the boiler doesn’t break down.)  But there’s no time for general pastoral care, premarital counseling, training the ushers, etc.  Even at 50 hours/ week a pastor cannot get everything done.  A solid full time pastor – even one that takes a regular day off – works a lot, doing  a broad array of duties from the holy to the banal.
• Because of the nature of pastoral work, we have got to give our pastors a sabbatical.  Three.  Whole.  Months.  Every.  Six.  Years.  (Some congregations offer a sabbatical more often than every six years.)  If you don’t think you can spare your pastor for three months, your church officers are not doing their jobs.  Even the poorest congregation can work something out.  There are grants!  And for those of you say, “I don’t get a sabbatical from my bank/plumbing company/dental practice/auto repair shop.  Why should we pay our pastor for taking a three month long vacation?!”   First of all, maybe you should get a sabbatical from your work.  And secondly, teaching pastors need space for further learning without the distractions of the regular duties of professional ministry.  Those who refuse their pastors a sabbatical clearly have no idea what it means to be a parish pastor and the toll it takes on a person emotionally, physically, and spiritually.  And thirdly, a sabbatical not only refreshes the pastor so that he/she can return to benefit the church, but the congregation has the opportunity to take a sabbatical too, in that they can explore something new for their church.

There are some thoughtful churches out there who offer an extra week of vacation when pastors have family emergencies.  They remember their pastor’s ordination date and the anniversary of their pastor’s arrival.  They give little bonuses for an especially good job in special situations.  They tell their pastor what she/he does well and they love their pastor enough to share constructive criticism.  They partner with their pastors to do the work of ministry, rather than assume that “it’s the pastor’s job” to fill the pews and balance the budget.

The adage “you get what you pay for” is not necessarily true for church staffs.  I know pastors who devote their highest devotion and greatest creativity to their churches and are among the lowest paid pastors in their presbyteries.  But we have got to end the practice of attempting to get a pastor on the cheap.  Believe me, when the pastor is happy and healthy, the congregation is happy and healthy.

Churches tell me they want to grow and they can’t understand why they aren’t growing.  They see themselves as “friendly.”  They are “welcoming.”  They specialize in “hospitality.”

Or do they?  Do we?  There are a lot of good church people out there who are sabotaging our ministry as people who model our lives after Jesus.

For example, try this simple test if real life scenarios:

Situation #1:  A church in a major city is located along the path of a large, long-planned citizen protest against what they consider to be corporate abuse.  The protest is to occur on a Sunday morning just as the church  gathers for worship.  Does the church:

a.  Cancel worship because traffic will prevent the members to get to their church building, and they don’t want protesters coming into their building?

b.  Increase the insurance on their church building in case the protesters are unruly and damage their building as they march by?

c. Serve water bottles and coffee along the parade route, while inviting protesters to come in for prayer, to use the restrooms, to rest in the sanctuary.

Situation #2: During coffee time after worship, a group of middle school boys from the neighborhood shows up asking if they can use the church gym for 30 minutes.  Does the Elder of the Day:

a.  Answer a quick, “No”  adding “And that’s that” ?

b. Remind the boys that they are not welcomed there.  They aren’t even members and neither are their parents.

c.  Offer to chaparone their game for 30 minutes while coffee hour is being cleared up?

Situation #3:  A parishioner is in the hospital for a holiday weekend and the pastor takes communion into his room, to be in solidarity with the congregation which celebrated communion that morning in worship.  The parishioner shares a room with another patient who is lying awake in the next bed.  The pastor offers communion to her parishioner and then asks the other patient if he would like communion as well.

a.  The parishioner explains to the pastor that “We wouldn’t want to embarrass Mr. X by assuming he would want communion.”

b.  The parishioner signals to the pastor that she’s his pastor.  “Please do not disturb him,” the parishioner says to his pastor.  “You’re here for me, right?”

c. The parishioner introduces his roommate to his pastor and invites the roommate to share communion with them, if he wishes.

I would love to tell you that hospitality won out in all these stories, but that wasn’t the case.  I don’t mean to offend the church people I love, but we are all guilty of being unwelcoming, unloving, judgmental souls. And eventually, this will kill the institutional church as we know it.

Every day God presents us with people to include, welcome, and serve.  But more times than not, we miss this completely.  And we wonder why our faith communities are not growing.

And so it begins  . . .

Magazines, websites, newspapers, and maybe even church newsletters are already publishing their Recommended Charities Guide for the holidays. One of my favorite magazines recommends Ten Charities Worth Your Charity – with a list of nonprofits ranging from organizations fighting hunger and poverty to scholarships.  The point is to match your personal interests (saving rain forests, saving stray animals, etc.) with solidly managed organizations:  combining “Scrooge’s fiscal discipline with Saint Nick’s generosity.”  Right.

I get that many of us want to offer our support to far away needs – especially when we see footage of post-Sandy destruction in NY or Haiti, and we don’t happen to live in NY or Haiti.  But one of the problems with sending money only to those faraway, well-publicized places of need is that we can merely write a check or text a quick $10, feel good about ourselves, and then put the need out of our minds.  This is not what Jesus was talking about when he charged his followers to care of the naked and hungry.

Yes, give to those faraway places of need, but give even more to the local needs in your particular neighborhood and community.  And how do you find out what those needs might be?

HERE’S MY PITCH FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH:

The Issue –   All of our communities have social needs.  There are refugees in some of our towns who need sheets and towels.  There are students in our local schools who need winter coats.  There are men in area homeless shelters who need socks and underwear.  There are women in safe houses who need toiletries and work clothes.

The Bigger Issue – If we cannot personally name those needs in our communities then we are blind at best and merciless at worst.  Or maybe we are just in our own personal bubble.

The Biggest Issue – If we are a faith community in a neighborhood/town/suburb/city and we do not personally know the needs of those in our local area, then we are missing the point, unless the point of our existence is to love ourselves first and foremost.

If you want to help your neighborhood, connect with a church.

Attention churches:  if someone comes through your doors this week and says, “I would like to do something to help our neighborhood,” what will you have to offer that person?  Note: Please don’t invite them to come to a New Members Class.

In two weeks, Thanksgiving will be over and Christmas Eve is a mere six weeks away.  What if we committed to serving the specific needs of our neighbors before writing checks or texting donations or jumping into a service project we think would be fun – whether it’s needed or not.  (**It’s important to  ask what is needed before taking action.  Many homeless shelters are inundated with cute child-sized winter gloves this season, when what they really need are wool socks for men or shampoo for the group bathrooms.)

Check out I Live Here, I Give Here based in Austin for ways one city decided to serve locally.  We in the church could learn from this organization.

A friend invited me to go to her Prayer Group back in the 90’s and I soon realized that everybody was a lesbian but me.  It was fine.  Actually, it became fine, but I have to admit feeling strange at first because I’d never been the only non-lesbian in a group before.   I learned that we had more things in common than not.

Recently I was talking with a friend who told me about her daughter’s school in Chicago.  My friend is a single mom who lives in an apartment in a part of town that’s often in the news because of shootings.  Her daughter’s Spanish teacher doesn’t speak Spanish so she is trying to save some extra money to have her daughter take a real Spanish class in a community college.  I consider this friend “like me” because she’s a mom and we often talk about our kids together.  But her life is very different from my own.

I’m already pondering New Year’s Resolutions for 2013 and – especially in light of the recent election – I would like to suggest a global resolution.  (I’m kind of bossy that way.)

What if we commit to getting together socially with someone who is not like us at least one time – not to “convert” the person or to judge the person or to congratulate ourselves about doing one small act of reaching out, but to simply reach out.  To engage someone who is not like us.  Not only is our church, our nation, our world doomed if we don’t get to know people Not Like Us, but we cannot follow Jesus if we don’t do this.

We will find that:

• Not all lesbians love KD Lang (although, honestly, they should)
• Not all Republicans are insensitive to the poor
• Not all Democrats are financially irresponsible
• Not all immigrants cause crime to rise
• Not all African Americans live in the inner city
• Not all Mormons are white
• Not all sexually active young women are promiscuous
• Not all men love sports and cars
• Not all poor people are lazy
• Not all rich people are hardhearted.
• Not all Muslims are terrorists.
• Not all Christians believe homosexuality is a sin.

What if we started 2013 with an eye on hanging out with someone so different from ourselves that a just-like-us friend might wonder, “What is she doing talking to that person?”  What if we enjoyed it so much that we made it a regular part of our social lives?  What do you think?  Possible?

Image is a 16th C. orthodox icon of Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman.

The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me,and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote;  so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing.  Isaiah 29:13-14a

I was talking with the amazing L. yesterday about why a person who is not now part of a church would join one.  So many of our worship experiences are boring.  (Rote prayers.  Joyless singing.)   So many of our people do not share what’s most interesting about them. (Their questions.  Their doubts.  What God is doing with them.)  So many of our congregations are stuck. (No vision of the future.  No energy to shift what isn’t working towards spiritual growth.)

This could kill the institutional church.  And maybe it should.

God is not boring.  The God who creates the human eye and snowstorms and coral reefs, the God who moves people to create glorious art in the form of films and music and baked goods and poetry and architecture – this God deserves the most splendid response possible from us.  But we are boring.

As we are sitting in worship this weekend, or meeting with church about an upcoming event, or gathering for a book group or Bible study we need to ask ourselves:

• What is interesting about this?
• Why would this particular event be engaging to a new person?
• How would our favorite unbeliever find this?

It’s so wrong to be boring as followers of Jesus.  Think about it.  If we discover a new restaurant or a new book, we can’t wait to tell people about it.  A fabulous new recipe on Pinterest sparks more interest than the average church mission fair.  Why is that?

If we are excited and moved by the message of Jesus, we can’t help but talk about it, live it, crave it, want it.  It’s a sin to be boring if we are serious about following Jesus.

Praying for peace for our divided nation today.  That is all.

Image is Fingerpaint USA by Jasper Johns

The political world is abuzz with who will be elected today. In the spiritual world, we speak of ourselves as The Elect.  The Christian Doctrine of Election is about God electing us. 

Being among those elected by God for special ministry (and I believe we are universally elected, by the way) is not cause for feeling like we are All That.  I heard Richard Mouw explain it this way:

Once someone has been “elected” (either politically or spiritually) the work has just begun.  Nobody wants to elect a president or other government official and then have her/him do nothing.  The election is not the end; it’s the beginning.

• It takes work to be elected if you are a political figure. 
• It takes grace to be elected for regular human beings. 

But both of us have work to do to make the world look more like heaven, especially for the least of these.  Prayers today that our politics won’t get in the way of our faithfulness.

“Being gay for a year saved my faith.“

The Cross in the Closet feels especially timely in these days of vicious election conversations – if we have conversations with “the other side” at all.  Tim Kurek is not gay.  But he decided to plunge into the life of The Other for one year, living as a gay man as a  sort of personal spiritual discipline.

Tim grew up in a conservative Christian home within a conservative Christian culture in which gay people were demonized and feared.   When he told his own mother that he was gay, she said she would have preferred he had terminal cancer.

I loved this book for the story of Tim’s commitment to meet and care for people whom he had always been taught were beneath him spiritually.  I loved watching his own journey to discover what it means to be gay.  (It’s not about clothes or gait, by the way.)

What felt discomfiting, though, was that – in order to live as a gay man for a year – Tim had to deceive people, because he was not in fact gay.  He even had a pretend boyfriend so that he would not be put in a position of having a real physical encounter with another man.  Unlike the spiritual discipline of living for a year as a Biblical Woman (Rachel Held Evans) or taking her family through a year of intentional Sabbath (MaryAnn McKibben Dana), Tim had to pretend to be something he’s not.

I remember a friend finally telling me he was gay after watching the funeral scene in Three Weddings and a Funeral.  He didn’t want me and others to find out at his or his partner’s funeral that they were a couple.   But it hurt a bit that he’d pretended to be straight – replete with a “girlfriend” at one point.

Trying to imagine how Tim’s new GBLTQ friends felt about the eventual revelation that he was not actually gay made me uncomfortable.  That, and the fact that gay Christians – and non-believers alike – have been trying to tell this story for years but have not received the attention Tim has received for pretending.

Nevertheless, this is a great read which – in my mind – is more about connecting with The Other than gay-straight relationships.  We who follow Jesus believe that God became the ultimate “other” to connect with us.  God gave up supreme privilege to become one of us.  Tim Kurek’s personal journey to become one with the GBLTQ community offers some important insights, especially for Christians who have vilified people for being different.  Read it.

I am 56 years old.  My retirement date is closer than my ordination date.  I could no more serve as a youth group leader than I could wear a leather mini-skirt in public.  Even if I could pull off the mini skirt, it would look ridiculous and be wholly inappropriate, just as it would be for me to start a church in a trendy bar.

And yet, I still remember being the 30-something pregnant pastor.  I remember always being the youngest pastor – and often the only woman –  in interfaith leader gatherings.  I remember what it was like to work part-time in a church while raising three kids under the age of four.  I have tried to stay fresh, read current books, keep informed through conferences and conversations, learn from seminarians.

But I see a trend  that older pastors (meaning every pastor older than 50 and especially those over 70) and younger pastors (the 20-40 somethings) are clearly engaged in a huge mutual disconnect.  I see this especially here:

• In yesterday’s news my denomination’s Board of Pensions proposed
  a new health care dues structure that makes health care much more expensive for pastors with children starting in 2014 while continuing to give incentives for postponing retirement.
• In Boundary Training events when older pastors and younger pastors clearly hold different understandings of who is vulnerable in clergy-parishioner relationships and why.  Say “boundary issues” in a room full of pastors and individuals have a much different idea of what this means, depending on generation.  (Example:  For the older generations of pastors, it was perfectly normal to marry a parishioner.  For younger generations, this would be considered misconduct.)
• In preaching that finds many older pastors still proclaiming the Word with three points and a poem while younger pastors experiment with new forms of proclaiming the Good News, often involving dialogue, art, and group spiritual direction.
• In what it means to be a pastor in general.  Older pastors are more likely to spend their time at their desks preparing sermons and classes, doing pastoral care, and moderating meetings while younger pastors are more likely to focus on missional outreach and equipping others to do ministry.

There are older pastors – mostly men – who have given their lives and energies to serve the institutional church during the glory days of the mainline denominations.  They were respected in the community and they have been doing ministry for a long time.

There are younger pastors who are serving – or trying to serve –  a church that, for many in our postmodern culture, is obsolete,  flailing, and shifting.  Many young pastors have school loans, and there are few possibilities in terms of available calls, especially calls that are open to creative ministry for a new season of Church.

I remember in serving my last church that it was very much like serving two different congregations.  There was the church that expected ministry from me like the ministry they had experienced for the majority of their lives.  And there was the church for people who had been hurt by the church, had never been part of the church, and who would never walk through the door of a traditional church.  Today serving in a Middle Judicatory (in my case a Presbytery), I serve two sets of pastors and two sets of churches.  There are the churches who want a pastor who preaches, teaches, baptizes, buries, and visits the sick.  And there are pastors who know how to do this, both with and without enthusiasm.

And then there are the (rare) churches who want a pastor to lead them into the 21st Century, to equip them to be ministers, to teach them not so that they are smarter but so their faith is deeper, who train others to do pastoral care, and who spend more time out in the community than in their church buildings.  There are especially younger pastors who long to do this usually with great passion.

So here we are.

I believe that both kinds of pastors are faithful and good.  But our church has got to focus on the future.  What do we imagine for our churches over the next ten to twenty years?  And how might the older generations make way for the younger generations to lead?

Mosaic includes images of some of the generational rock stars of the Christian Church.  (And there are countless others.)

My genius friend AD was telling me that she hopes to one day have church business cards that say something about the responsibility of church members to wear aprons, not bibs – but she had a much more poetic way of putting this.

She heard about the idea in a class, and then we found this post which spells out the details.  Amen Mountain Wings.

“Bibs are for people who only want to be fed.  Bibs are for those who are not yet ready or willing to feed themselves.  Bibs are for those who are more interested in being served than in serving. Bibs are for those who insist that the church exists for them and their needs. Bibs are for babes in the faith, those who haven’t  caught God’s vision for the church, or those who are not yet of the faith.”

“Aprons are for those who have a heart to serve others in Jesus’ name.  Aprons are for those who know they are the church.  Aprons are for those who don’t mind getting their hands dirty.  Aprons are for those who take the time daily to feed their spiritual hunger.  Aprons are for those who are growing in faith, and hunger to help others grow.”

It occurs to me that an apron would be the perfect “Welcome to This Church” gift for new members.  If new members receive “welcome gifts” at all, it’s often a coffee mug or a key chain or a Church Cook Book.  But what if we required a commitment to service – in the image of Christ – before asking people to join.    “Membership” would become less about receiving ecclesiastical benefits and more about committing to serve others in Jesus’ name.

Even Jesus wore an apron when he served others according to scripture.  If true saints are those in the church who follow in the likeness of Jesus, shouldn’t we all be wearing one?  Something to think about on All Saints’ Day.

Image by Ford Madox Brown is Jesus Washing the Feet of Peter (1852-56)