Author Archives: jledmiston

 “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.” Jesus in Luke 7:22

Sometimes people send emails or texts saying, “I’m hearing good things” about The Church where I live. Love that. And I always want to know what they are hearing.

• I hear you have a great staff.
• I hear your churches are taking some interesting risks.
• I hear your churches are addressing racism.
• I hear your churches are building affordable housing.

Our staff is indeed great because we collaborate well, trust each other, and can share hard things.

Some of our churches are calling pastors they wouldn’t have called even 5 years ago. Not all the churches but some of the churches are taking faithful risks to call leaders who don’t look like previous leaders.

We have been requiring anti-racism training for a couple years now and lots of our leaders haven’t taken the training yet. We’re working on it.

And yes, several of our congregations are building/planning to build affordable housing both on their campuses and on properties donated or purchased in other neighborhoods because housing is a crucial issue where we live.

Thanks be to God.

As we celebrate the bounty of our lives in the next week, it’s a fine time for our congregations to dig deeply into the reasons why things might not be going well.

Have you heard these not-so-good things lately?

• Young people aren’t coming to church anymore.
• We can’t afford a pastor.
• Nobody wants to volunteer.

Better conversations might be:

• How are we building trust in our congregation?
• How are we partnering with other churches or organizations for mission?
• What are we doing to address conflict between members or groups of members?
• If not racism, what hard realities are we addressing as a congregation? Poverty? Addiction? Domestic Violence?
• What risks are we willing to take to help our church thrive? Invest in a life-giving mission project? Call a leader who doesn’t look like our previous leaders?

If God is leading us, we can take on the not-so-good things and become a congregation that helps the blind see, the lame move, the deaf hear, the ostracized accepted, the dead resurrected, and the poor feeling hope. These things are possible both literally and figuratively.

When I hear good things about the 21st Century Church and it’s always from those congregations who have abandoned the notion that the Church is about us to remember to the truth that the Church is about loving God and neighbor. I can’t wait to hear good things about your church in 2023.

I am the person charged with sharing resumes (we call them “Personal Information Forms” or PIFs) with Pastor Search Committees looking for temporary pastors. Churches hire temporary pastors when they need a Transitional Leader before calling their next “Permanent” Pastor or they can only afford to have a pastor for the next 12 months – unsure if they can afford a long term leader, or they know they can only afford a part-time pastor.

I remember sharing three PIFs with the committee of a small church who could only afford a part-time pastor, and in a moment of sharing Too Much Information, I said, “Here are three PIFs – two retired pastors who don’t drive at night and a young pastor searching for a first call. If you don’t call the young pastor, you are deciding to close your church.”

Yep. Maybe I said too much, but it was true.

I wrote about the issue of church leaders making decisions that will inadvertently but eventually close their church in 2015 here. It’s still a difficult truth that we continue to make decisions to close our congregations.

Although I’m repeating myself, I still maintain that these decision will result in church closings. It might happen next year or in five years. But until we shift the culture of our congregations to become most concerned with our Neighbors, our Organizational Structure, and our Partnerships (some of which will be unlikely) we are not going to be able to survive in the future much less thrive. FYI: Jesus calls us to thrive to the glory of God.

• The decision to make our pastor the professional Christian, believing that it’s the pastor’s job (and only the pastor’s job) to do ministry.
• The decision to morph into a club, more worshipful of our building than God.
• The decision to perpetuate an institution rather than make disciples or love our neighbors.
• The decision to choose mission that either separates us from the community we are trying to serve (“We’ll send money but we don’t really want to know those people“) or elevating ourselves over the community we’re trying to serve (“We go help those people because they are too uneducated/irresponsible to help themselves.“)
• The decision to become landlords (renting our property to “tenants”) over engaging in relational ministry (using our buildings as tools for ministry with partners whose names and needs we actually know.)
• The decision to choose the wrong pastor or to choose not to listen to the right pastor.
• The decision to do ministry on the cheap even when we could afford more.
• The decision to forego basic building maintenance to the point that maintenance becomes impossibly expensive.
• The decision to allow ineffective volunteers and paid staff to keep their jobs too long.
• The decision to leave the praying, the Bible study, the continuing education to the person who went to seminary.
• The decision to hold our pastor to impossible standards.
• The decision to devote our congregational efforts to something less than God.

The truth is difficult. But we have a choice and many of us are choosing to close our churches in the not-so-distant future.

Sometimes we don’t know that actually we are the ones keeping our congregations from thriving. Ouch.

Last weekend I experienced one of the greatest joys in professional ministry: I was invited to return to a congregation I served for many years to celebrate a church anniversary and witness how much they have accomplished to the glory of God since I left. Fairlington Presbyterian Church is not a large church in terms of membership but their impact is enormous. Not only have they done what many/most churches do (serve dinner at shelters, offer space to 12-step groups and other congregations, collect money, furniture, and non-perishable foods for those in need) but they opened a computer training lab over 20 years ago which has since trained over 5000 adults from over 99 countries in computer skills. And they will be dedicating Waypoint – an affordable housing community with 81 apartments in the coming week. God is amazing.

Before worship last Sunday, we all gathered to tell the story of how Waypoint came to be, led by the Pastor Juli Wilson-Black and – in a circle – each person shared a piece of the story. The best contribution – for me – was when one of the elders who was a leader when I was pastor and who continues to be a leader today said something like this:

We couldn’t move forward with our next big thing until Jan left.

Yes! And I’m so grateful that God called me away. After 27 years in parish ministry (5 in my first call and 22 in my second) I”ve been able to do some cool things that I could not have imagined.

Sometimes we are the ones who have to step away for ministry to bloom.

All church leaders can name people who get in the way of congregational growth.

• There’s the long term member who says “no” to everything new (and threatens the church either by withholding money or sabotaging the vision.)
• There’s the church pillar who doesn’t want anything to change until after they die.
• There’s the elder whose only power in life is in the congregation (being in charge of the candlesticks is better than not being in charge of anything at all) and it’s more about the power for that beloved child of God than Jesus.
• There’s the pastor who needs to leave but can’t find another call.
• There’s the pastor who is tired and should retire, but retirement is another decade away in their timeline.

I once worked with a person who – upon being advised to consider leaving their church position – commented that they hoped that – if they did leave – everything would fall apart like a Jenga tower, because they couldn’t bear for the church to thrive after they left.

Okay – this is terrible. To hope things fall apart when we leave is the opposite of healthy leadership. If we are good leaders then things will bloom after we leave because we have equipped others, we have shifted the culture, we have cast a common vision. Unfortunately too many of our congregations may find that – after their current pastor leaves – things fall apart because the pastor did everything themselves or they never moved their church from a 1970s model of ministry or there was never a clear vision.

Who needs to step away for ministry to bloom in your congregation? With humility and grace, we need to acknowledge that it might be us. Thanks be to God for those leaders (clergy, educators, musicians, elders, deacons, volunteers who’ve “run” the same program for over a decade) who constantly ask, “Am I still the right person to lead? Or do I need to get out of the way?”

(And I would add “PRAY.”)

There are several Scripture passages about being consistent in our life and faith. I’m not going to try to proof text here. But as we go to the polls today in the USA, let’s be consistent in terms of what we say we believe and in how we vote.

• If you love your LGBTQA+ friends and family, please vote for candidates who will prioritize their civil rights.
• If you love pre-born babies, please vote for candidates who also love babies who are born along with older children supporting programs like Head Start and healthy free school lunches.
• If you worry about the Ukrainian war, please vote for candidates who do not support Putin.
• If you are concerned about high gas prices, please elect those who force corporations (including oil companies) to pay their fair share in taxes.
• If you live by a set of ethics and morals and you want your children to have similar ethics and morals, please elect officials whose ethics and morals align with yours.

I will never understand LGBTQA+ people and allies who vote for people who don’t support them. I’ll never understand those who oppose abortion but don’t support food and housing resources for children and their families. I don’t understand those who see innocent citizens of Ukraine suffer and think Putin is a “great leader.” I don’t understand how citizens worried about inflation don’t want to tax billionaires who don’t pay their fair share in contributing to this country. And I really can’t understand people who are generous, kind, honorable citizens who support candidates who are greedy, mean, and dishonorable.

My trust is that God will use whatever happens in this election. The Israelites eventually reached the Promised Land. But it didn’t have to take 40 years. I pray it doesn’t take 40 years for us to reach where God is leading us.

Please read this article. It’s about the realities of rural homelessness featuring Sandra Plantz, the homeless liaison for school kids in Gallia County, Ohio. One of my favorite parts is this:

Every school in Plantz’s district has boxes of supplies — children’s underwear, toiletries, prom dresses — and she is always looking for ways to destigmatize the process of getting those items to the students who need them. At River Valley High, they are stored in the Raider Room (named for the school’s mascot), which also has a shower. She brings kids in and out to do various school-related chores so that visiting the room is not seen as a sign of poverty. When one of her students, a cheerleader, stopped coming to school because her unstable housing situation made it impossible to do her hair in the morning, Plantz bought her a $14 hair straightener from Walgreens and put it in the Raider Room.

Sandra Plantz, homeless liaison for Gallia County, Ohio Local Schools.

Sandra Plantz is a hero and I wanted to send her money. And so I tracked her down and heard back from her about what the Raider Room needed next. And then it occurred to me: I wonder if every school system in the United States has local Homeless Liaisons for their students.

Yes, they do.

Where I serve the Church in North Carolina, we cover seven counties and not all of them are rural. Every Church in every county in the United States needs to know the name of the Homeless Liaison in the place where your congregation is located. There are homeless students – more than we realize – in each of our counties. The very least our congregations can do is partner with the liaison in your county. Find out what they need. Form a relationship with that liaison office. Help those students with anything that would possibly make their lives more comfortable.

It could be a winter coat. It could be a hair straightener. For the love of God – literally – we can prevent kids from living in shame because their families struggle with homelessness.

If you live in my own Presbytery, here are the people you need to know:

• Anson County – Mary Ratliff, Administrator Student Services
• Cabarrus County – Amanda Smith, McKinney-Vento Liaison
• Mecklenburg County – Courtney Lacaria, Community Support Services
• Montgomery County – Tracy Grit, Associate Superintendent, HR
• Richmond County – Kim Childers, McKinney-Vento Liaison
• Stanly County – Beverly Pennington, Student Services Director
• Union County – Lori Spruiell, Title 1 Specialist

Look up the names of the liaison in your local county government and contact them. Schedule a meeting. Invite them to lunch. Find out what they need.

Find. Out. What. They. Need.

If you do not live in the Charlotte Presbytery area, google “homeless liaison” in your home school district. And make friends with them. This is an essential task for this week. Holidays are coming. Winter is coming.

Send money to Sandra Plantz in Ohio and also connect with your local school district. You might be surprised how many housing insecure students attend your local schools. They are our neighbors. They are our children.

We probably disagree on what makes a Great Pastor.

And I’m not talking about Great Preachers here. Pastors do considerably more than preach.

For some The Great Pastor is the one who has no life and happily works 60+ hours a week, whose priorities are church and calling over personal wellness and family responsibilities. For others it’s the Total Package Pastor who is supremely gifted in all pastoral skills (bedside manner, preaching, teaching, administration, evangelism, community organizing, fundraising, personnel management, and personality.)

In my opinion, Great Pastors . . .

• Love God and their congregations.
• Have a balanced life and good boundaries.
• Know what they excel at and what they need to work on (or who to call when they don’t want to work on it).
• Care about their community beyond the walls of the church building.
• Are lifelong learners who read books, listen to podcasts and attend classes/webinars/conferences.
• Have a team to support them (i.e. a therapist, a coach, a mentor, a spiritual director, a financial planner, chosen family).
• Have an approachable personality.

By this definition there are hundreds and thousands of Great Pastors out there.

And there is also a dearth of Great Pastors.

What I’m not saying: that our current pastors are imbalanced, weak, faithless, close-minded, unhealthy, and cranky. Those leaders are out there, but they are not in the majority.

Nevertheless, congregations need to have a realistic understanding of what a pastor is supposed to be and do and what a pastor can humanly be and do. And we pastors need to be honest about who we are and how God is calling us to serve right now – not 10 years ago.

Here are some realities/truths for these days:

• Fewer people are going to seminary.
• Fewer seminary graduates are seeking traditional parish ministry.
• Fewer churches can afford a full time called and installed pastor (and most pastors cannot afford to live on a part time salary.)
• Fewer pastors are willing to move to a different part of the country (away from family) to accept a call.
• Fewer churches can afford to move a pastor from a different part of the country to serve in their part of the country.

Note how often I use the word “fewer.” We seem to have fewer options, fewer candidates, fewer resources and yet I believe that we have all we need. God is doing a new (and disconcerting) thing and we need to shift our priorities and perspectives.

Some Pastor Search Committees tell me that they can’t find a pastor they like. This is certainly not true for all search committees.

But small town and rural congregations are having a challenging time calling a pastor willing to move to regions of the country with a depressed economy – especially if that pastor comes with a spouse who will need to find work. Our historically African American congregations and Korean and Spanish language congregations are finding their choices very limited if they are seeking leaders who look and speak as they do.

We seem to be missing that pipeline of new, energetic, visionary pastors who know how to lead in these transitional days.

Where are all The Great Pastors?

They are here and truly wanting to serve God’s people and make a difference in Christ’s name. And they may not look or seem like what you’ve always considered to be a Great Pastor.

What you are hearing out there in Church World? And where you are hopeful about the future of the Church leadership?

Image of an insulated pastor mug you can order here. (Is the pastor insulated? Or is the mug insulated?)

On this All Saints Day, I give special thanks to the saints who have given sacrificially so that the Church could do its work in the world sharing hope in Christ, providing for those in need, and making the world a bit more on earth as it is in heaven. You know who you are. Thank you.

Suze Orman tells a story of her father’s business being – literally – on fire and yet he ran into the office to retrieve the metal cash register in the thick of the flames. Message: we risk our lives for the sake of finances.

All of us grew up with money stories:

We’ll always be in debt because Uncle Bud lost the farm.

Everybody who’s anybody carries credit card debt.

Your grandmother will bail you out.

People with money work harder than people without money.

Honest disclosure: my wonderful Dad told me many times in my life that the day he and Mom learned they were expecting me they had a nickel in their pockets. The message I grew up with was that I better show the world that I was worth having. The message I carry now is that we have all come a long way and thanks be to God.

Consider the money messages we hear in our houses of faith:

We don’t have the funds to give our staff a raise (when there are millions in the endowment.)

We can either patch the roof or hire a nursery worker (when it’s possible to do both if we really want to. Sadly the roof usually wins.)

We can save money by hiring Ms. Jones’ son to replace our windows (even though Ms. Jones’ son is a barber by trade.)

We can only afford a part-time pastor (forgetting we could share a pastor with another church and bolster the ministry of two congregations.)

We have to keep The _____ Family happy or they’ll leave the church and take all their money with them.

That last message is a classic and chances are that the family who threatens to leave and take their money with them is 1) not contributing as much as everyone imagines and 2) less interested in glorifying God than maintaining power.

We have enough. We have enough to fulfill our calling to serve God and others if we are willing to consider new stories:

Maybe the congregation that “can’t give any more” can actually a little dig deeper when they have relationships with those they are able to serve.

Maybe the church that never participates in community mission find itself regenerated by new relationships with their local school or fire department.

Maybe there are neighbors who are not interested in joining your congregation but they admire what you do in Haiti every spring, and they want to contribute too.

The Bible is filled with stories about having enough and being enough to make a difference. On this day when we remember the saints, consider who has made a difference in your congregation, in your personal life, in your town. They are often not the ones we expected.

Every neighborhood seems to have at least one: Neighbors who are serious Halloween people.

In the neighborhood where our kids grew up, the adult sons of a widowed mother came home to decorate every Halloween, delighting in creating “the scary house” where spiders dropped out of the trees and one of the brothers sat on the front porch dressed as a monster handing out candy.

Pictured above is just a corner of the Halloween House in our current neighborhood. It’s a Zombie Carnival theme replete with a ferris wheel of creepy dolls and a 12 foot tall skeleton in front of a red-striped circus tent. The man who lives there has been working on his masterpiece for over a week now.

Historically Halloween has had Christian connections but we often forget.

Good neighbors are more necessary than ever in these days. Let’s be the neighbors who make an effort, who create connections, who learn about each other’s histories. Happy Halloween!

I can’t find it now, but someone tweeted recently that – in working with some church kids – they thought she was saying that we “horrify” God when she was saying we “glorify” God. Prophetic children are the best.

I pray we glorify God in our service, our gratitude, our sacrifices, our love. And yet, it’s likely we humans spend quite a bit of our lives horrifying God. I’m reading William Yoo’s excellent new book and it’s horrifying. And brilliant.

Dr. Yoo is Associate Professor of American Religious and Cultural History and Director of the Master of Divinity Program at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. His most recent book is a must-read especially for my Presbyterian siblings. I serve congregations in North Carolina which have both benefitted from slavery and been traumatized by slavery. The oldest congregations (circa pre-Revolutionary War) were all established by slaveholders. There are church balconies in the sanctuaries of some of our church buildings that still have evidence of chaining enslaved people.

May God have mercy..

Among the most horrifying of insights from Dr. Yoo’s book is this:

In subtle yet perverse forms, white Presbyterians have expressed that the most tragic result from the age of Black enslavement is the division of their church.

They wept not for the abuse that enslaved women . . . endured. Rather, they shed tears of anguish over their worries about ecclesial schism.

The fact that human beings with more melanin in their pigmentation were being raped, whipped, starved, and chained was considered less an issue than the possibility that the Presbyterian Church might split is horrifying.

We horrify God.

As our siblings in faith – the United Methodist Church and others – grapple with theological notions like whether or not the Creator might call queer people to serve in ordainable roles, we might continue to horrify God if we consider denominational division to be a bigger problem than the casting out of people for whom Jesus died and God calls. I believe we horrify God when we tell trans people that God rejects them. I believe we glorify God when we love as Jesus loves.

What’s unspeakably amazing to me is that the Mysterious One who created us doesn’t zap us into oblivion for missing the point of life in such outrageous ways. I would say that our ways are unforgiveable except for the fact that God’s grace abounds even when we don’t deserve it – which is the definition of grace in the first place.

What a beautiful thing to glorify God in our singing, in our praying, in our financial spending, in our daily practices, in our eating, in our sleeping, in our working, in our playing, in our child-raising, in our love-making, in our decision-making, in our breathing. Thanks be to God.

Literally – for the love of God – might we consider what we do that actually horrifies our Creator and then stop it.

Please read William Yoo’s book and commit – like me – to at the very least try to do better.

My chosen vocation as an eight year old was Explorer.

I had already found an antique diamond ring while playing treasure hunt in my backyard. And I also “discovered” a log cabin in the deep woods behind my house which I regularly visited with a book all by myself for hours and hours. (Note to 21st Century Parents: yes, this is shaky. Imagine now if your eight year old announced she’s heading out into the woods by herself to sit in mysterious cabin and she’ll be back by dinner.)

A wise colleague recently suggested the idea of teaching Transitional Ministry (formerly known as Interim Ministry) with an emphasis on anti-colonization. Imagine all ministry leadership emphasizing a culture of anti-colonization.

This is a steep learning curve for me who – as a straight white privileged person with a beloved family heritage of Scots-Irish colonizers – is still learning from people like Kaitlin Curtice and Edgar Villanueva. And you might be thinking right now – who has time to ponder this kind of thing? I have a bulletin to finish.

But I wonder if this might be the perfect time to consider analyzing if we – unknowingly – lead like a colonizer (and it’s not helpful to God’s people.) Some basic questions to ask if we are church leaders – and particularly if we are new transitional leaders:

• Do we enter a situation assuming a) there’s something wrong and b) we can fix it?
• Do we come in with an agenda without first learning who’s already there? What have they been doing before I got there?
• Do we assume everything needs to be broken down/deconstructed? (Thank God we’re here now!)
• Do we believe we and our plans are their future?

I know a transitional leader who swept into church with impressive leadership skills declared that she was going to save them. (Actually the word wasn’t “saved” but that’s what it probably felt like.) She alone knew how to do this.

And so she required the officers read a book with her not paying attention when one of them shared that they’d read the same book a year before. She re-distributed all the volunteer tasks “to shake things up” without taking time to form relationships and talk with volunteers about what they love and what they don’t love about their roles. She wasn’t a good listener. She castigated those who questioned her. She accused leaders of not being “creative” or “fun.” She brought people into leadership who agreed with everything she said whether they had the right gifts or not. She was a little sneaky – orchestrating shifts in power without transparency.

It didn’t go well.

What I’m not saying:

I’m not saying ministry isn’t creative or fun. I’m not saying that we don’t need new people to refresh the energy of the congregation in terms of roles and expectations. I’m not saying that we don’t have serious de-construction needs.

But leadership – particularly in a church context – is about humility and collaboration and letting go of sacred assumptions about our own culture and history. Were things great in the 1950s Church? The 1960s Church? The 1970s Church? Not if we consider how some people were subjected to demeaning roles or if they were cast out in general.

I’m wondering about all this. Colonization causes problems from the start and far into the future. How can we be a different kind of leader who notices this and serves to stop it? What’s the Holy Spirit telling us about what’s working and what’s not working in our leadership efforts?

I don’t want the future Church to be like an abandoned cabin in the woods.