Author Archives: jledmiston

There have always been church bullies.  I don’t know whether some people are simply inclined to act out in despotic ways (e.g. the bossy personality gone awry) or if circumstances (our church is falling apart!) move ordinarily collaborative humans to act out.

But Bullying Pastors and Bullying Parishioners are real.  (I won’t get into Bullying Mid-Council Leaders here but maybe you’ve met them too.)

This article by David Brubaker spells out the four participants necessary for bullies to thrive:

• There is The Bully who humiliates and gaslights.  Like Brubaker, I appreciate this 2015 article about the characteristics of bullies by Thom Rainer.  The Rainer article would be a good discussion piece for church elders to consider asking leaders, “Do we have a bully problem in this congregation?”  This would be a brave conversation important to establishing norms and transparency.
• There is The Victim whom The Bully targets.  The Victim could be a vulnerable person or someone who questions The Bully.
• There is The Enabler who sides with The Bully.  Brubaker says that enablers are either “true believers” who follow the bully’s lead or “craven opportunists” who believe that backing up the bully with help them gain their own power.  Good points. But I have found that enablers simply believe life will be easier if they stand with the most powerful person in the room – even if that person is a bully.
• There is The Bystander who’s afraid to step in and speak up.  Sometimes bystanders are simply conflict-averse.  And sometimes they are terrified that the bully’s wrath will be turned on them next.  Bystander Training is a good idea for church councils because according to this 2018 article in the HBR, trained bystanders help in “leveraging the people in the environment to set the tone for what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable behavior.”

Imagine a staff meeting or a board meeting or even a congregational meeting in which The Bully antagonizes The Victim will The Enablers looking on while The Bystanders speak up and call The Bully on their misbehavior.  This just might stop the bullying – at least for a moment.  And squelching it over and over again day after day, week after week could change the DNA of the organization and therefore alter the system.

Yay.

Especially in church settings when we are expected to be “nice” it’s tricky to know how to act when someone is not being nice.  Nice People who witness bullying behavior don’t know what to do with it.  If we who are Nice People challenge the bully, will we lose our Niceness Status?

As I’ve personally witnessed institutional bullying through the years, what makes me saddest is noticing that many leaders (or people who are supposed to be leaders) seem indifferent to church bullying.  They don’t seem to care enough to be willing to change the system.

“It’s just the way things are around here.”  “That’s just the way she is.”  “He’s always been like that.”  

I don’t accept this as a church leader.

A thriving organization and especially a thriving church organization depends upon participants who hold each other accountable out of love for God and each other.  It’s deadly to have bullies in church systems. I’ve observed it more often than I’d like to admit.

Image source.

I was reading my Twitter feed last night and saw that a young mom in Colorado had died in a car accident.  Her children start first and third grade this week and her husband is a pastor.

After writing last week’s post about remembering the holy days of loss, several of you let me know your own special dates.  Today is the death anniversary for a friend’s sister.  My friend’s not old enough to have lost a sister but she did and that’s horrible.

There’s the writer whose husband died in a freak accident at the beach.  There’s the Nobel Prize-winning hero who survived capture and torture by ISIS. There are countless survivors of school shootings and other life-changing traumas.

These are the special ones.  They know something about life that most people don’t know and don’t want to know.

If they get through the worst horror of their loss and reach the place when they can put their shoes on again, they become The Ones Who Know.  They are no longer burdened by routine issues like not finding a good parking space or losing a favorite pen.  They don’t really care when they burn dinner because their hearts have been seared and they survived.

Survival means that we lived.  We lived to tell about it and work towards it never happening again – and the “it” is everything from the cancer to the stupid comments made to help us feel better.  Survival means that we understand the shallow concerns of those who haven’t been there.  It’s okay.  We love them.  They are innocents to trauma.

Today my heart holds those in the beginning stages of deep grief.  It’s horrible.  But they will find – eventually, if they make it – that they will become The Ones Who Know.  And they will become unspeakably wise.

I have a lot of friends whose mothers have died of breast cancer.  In my last parish there were about 10 of us.

One of them dropped by my study on a random morning and told me that I looked sad.  “I feel sad,” I said, “And I don’t know why.”

“Is this a mom day?” she asked me.  (In other words: “Did anything happen on this date regarding your mother?)  And – actually – it was my mother’s death day.  Mentally I had forgotten but emotionally my body hadn’t.

I don’t love numbers unless they have something to do with relationships.  It helps me to remember certain numbers:

• I was 32 years and 187 days old on the day my mom died.
• I was 55 years and 19 days on the day I outlived my mother.
• In a year and 25 days, I will have spent more time on this earth without my mother than I spent with my mother.*

As a parish pastor, I used to keep a calendar of special relational days for our members:

• Death Anniversaries
• Birthdays and Wedding Anniversaries for widows
• Birthdays for those who lost children or parents

I don’t have the capacity to do this for everybody now, but I remember a few.  [Pro Tip for pastors and other compassionate people: contact people on their special days just to check in.  You won’t be reminding them of anything they aren’t already remembering on some level.  All you have to say is, “I’m thinking of you today.”]

When I was a pastor for a single congregation, I used to write newlyweds a note on their first wedding anniversary to check in.  “Thinking of you today. How’s it going?”  [Pro Tip:  this is why we do premarital counseling.  If we have established a relationship with a couple, then they have someone to talk with after the wedding if they need support. This first anniversary note often sparked a phone call to chat about marriage things.]

I remember when HH and I were figuring out what date to get married, I looked at all those summer Saturdays on the calendar and realized that – once we picked our wedding date – that date would never be an ordinary day again.

I remember when I looked over the calendar as a pregnant lady, checking out the day of the week my due date fell upon that I remembered that – no matter what happened on the day my baby was born – it would be a special date forever.

The numbers and dates are important relational tools.  And today, I’m feeling a little sad.  And I know why.

*Yes, I see a therapist.

I recently drove around with a colleague who is a young pastor – just over a year out of seminary and as we drove around his church’s neighborhood, it was clear that he saw things.  And then he responded.  And then there was obvious impact.

• He noticed a couple who owns the independent coffee shop and he introduced himself and now he has a relationship with them as local business owners.
• He noticed the school down the street and he met the principal and now he volunteers there and he has a relationship with teachers, staff, and parents.  And probably some kids.
• He noticed the new real estate developments, the For Sale signs, the road construction, the other church buildings, the homes literally on the other side of the tracks.  And then . . .

You get the idea.

The future of the Church is in leaders who see things. 

They see who is in the room and who is not in the room.  They notice who speaks up and who doesn’t.  They notice the signs – both the physical signs and the figurative ones.

Look at the photo above.  What do you see?  (What you see tells me a lot about what kind of leader you are.)

We need more pastors who know how to read the room, how to exegete the community, how to notice who’s not there.  My colleague who is the newish pastor totally gets this.  As he was driving me around, I asked him, “Who taught you how to do this?” and he said, “Hmm.  I think I’ve always known.”

We also need leaders with this kind of emotional intelligence.  And emotional intelligence – like reading a room and exegeting a community – can be taught.  Please reach out to someone if you need to learn this.  It will make your ministry so much more fun and life-changing.

Unknown image source.

(If you need a refresher on reparations, here‘s your best resource.)

I’m not sure where to begin.

We had a Presbytery Meeting (a gathering of representatives from all the congregations in our geographic area) over the weekend and it was a worshipful celebration of what God is doing in our churches.  The preaching was excellent.  The music was stirring.  The reports were informative. We joyfully welcomed new pastors into the Presbytery – seven in all, which is a lot for one meeting.

Each of these pastors is gifted and we are happy they’ve been called to their respective congregations.  And yet, this was also a stark reminder of the differences between our predominantly white churches and our predominantly black churches.  (Sadly we have too few congregations which look like a rainbow.)

Each of the newly called pastors going to full-time called and installed positions was a white male.  (I, for one, like white males.  My husband is a white male.  So are my brothers.  And I gave birth to two white males.)

Two women counted among the seven new pastors as well but they are not in “permanent” positions.  One will be ordained to serve as a pastoral resident and one will be “commissioned” to serve a small African American congregation as a Ruling Elder.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s good to have the resources to call a new full time pastor who will be relatively well-paid with job security and benefits.  But the truth is that most of our African American congregations cannot afford to call a full time pastor.  There is a divide between the larger “white churches” and the smaller “black churches.”  And this brings me to reparations.

The wealth divide between white folks and people of color is best explained by a not-so-deep dive into the history of this country and the 400th Anniversary of the first enslaved people to be brought to what is now the United States.  It will take the rest of our lives (white people) to study the cultural, political, and sociological realities of white supremacy and we need to get started, if we haven’t already.

I’m aware of wealthy white congregations who currently “support” poor black congregations throughout my denomination.  It happens in a variety of ways from white churches including black churches in their mission budget to partnering together for worship services.  But are these efforts more like reparations or patronization?

I’ve been in meetings with representatives from multiple white congregations sitting with representatives from a single black congregations in which the wealthier ones call the not-so-wealthy ones “their mission project” and it feels humiliating.

How can wealthier congregations – which tend to be white – truly partner with our neighbors who, for a long list of cultural reasons based on white privilege, struggle to call a full-time pastor?  How can the Church continue to honor historically significant black congregations in our fold while keeping their heritage alive.

In the Presbytery I serve, we have a number of treasured historically African American congregations dating back to the end of the Civil War.  What do reparations look like for those churches who started out of slavery, survived through Jim Crow, and now experience the ongoing realities of white privilege?

This is something I continue to ponder as a church leader and I covet your insights.

Image source. Please support this artist on Etsy.

What makes some congregations thrive and some congregations falter?

I work with 96 congregations of different sizes and contexts that stretch across seven counties.  Every day I spend time thinking about the churches that seem to be dying and the churches that seem to be alive with possibility.  And the divide between them is obvious and not-so-obvious.

The obvious:

• Congregations in growing neighborhoods have the capacity to swell in numbers, as opposed to rural and urban areas where the population is decreasing steadily, usually because of a lack of jobs.
• Congregations with a large endowment have the ability to keep a full-time pastor, even if their regular weekly donations are stagnant. They can and do tap into their savings.
• Congregations with larger memberships (and “larger” is relative) still appear to fill the pews on Sunday mornings, especially if their sanctuary seats between 100 – 200 people.

The not-so-obvious:

1. Congregations who do make decisions based on “saving money” are going to die within the next ten years.  I’m looking at you Pastor Search Committee hoping to hire a retired pastor to avoid paying pension and health benefits.  
2. Congregations who plan their ministries around “getting people to join” are going to die within the next ten years. You are not fooling anyone.  We know you started a preschool “to bring in the young families” instead of starting a preschool to serve the children in your neighborhood for their own sake.  We know that the only reason you are offering community dinners is “to attract the neighbors” rather than offering hospitality with no strings attached.
3. Congregations who consider strategic plans without prayerful discernment are going to die within the next ten years.  So many times church programs happen because they are the pet projects of particular members when – maybe – those programs are no longer relevant or effective.

Thriving congregations make decisions this way:

• They invest their money in the best possible leadership trusting that effective ministry funds itself when the community is impacted for good.  And this not only includes the paid leadership.  They also invest in leadership training for unpaid volunteers.
• They offer ministry that’s informed by the needs of the community.  It’s about serving the neighbors, not bringing in new members for the sake of survival.
• They pray together.  They seriously pray that God will guide them in their planning, that God will open their eyes to the needs around them, that God will empower them to take on audacious goals for the sake of the Kingdom.  They take the time to discern what God is calling them to be and do in this time and place.

Children born today will be 25 years old on August 14, 2044.  Will there be a church for them?  (Thank you HH.)

Thriving congregations are more fearless than not.  They especially do not fear failure.  Let’s try it and see what happens.  Maybe it will work and maybe it won’t but God will use it either way.

If we are too tired or too comfortable or too fearful, our congregations will never thrive.  And we might look back 25 years from now and wonder where we went wrong.  (Re-read #1-3 above.)

And if you need another reason to embrace a new way of being the Church: Thriving congregations are more fun.

Image of the Perseid Meteor Shower on August 12, 2019 over Macedonia where the apostle Paul encouraged believers.  Source.

I was a Young Life kid in high school and during my senior year, I shared my testimony about Jesus being my Lord and Savior.  All the cool kids went to Young Life on Wednesday nights and I remember my small group leader – the one who asked me to share my testimony – telling me that it was important for “the popular kids” to be spiritual leaders:  the captain of the basketball team, the student body president, the children of important townspeople. (I was head cheerleader.)

I get it.  But it felt icky.

I felt the same discomfort as I was watching The Family on Netflix over the weekend.  I’d read Jeff Sharlet’s book years ago and it had effected me for many reasons.  It effects even more so now as a docu-drama.

The Family – also known as The Fellowship – is the organization that makes The National Prayer Breakfast happen in Washington, DC every year.

I know people who have been a part of that organization and most of them have left or been asked to leave over the past 20-30 years.  At the invitation of Doug Coe they became part of The Family/The Fellowship essentially because they were The Cool Kids in evangelical Christian circles.  They were the influencers, the former team captains and children of the powerful.  Although they have included members of both political parties, they lean conservative.

Their ministry is  a behind-the-scenes quest to build relationships with powerful people – focused on Jesus – in order to influence governments.   And – in spite of espousing wholesome family values, several of their associates struggled with adultery through the years. At least one went to prison for conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent. And National Prayer Breakfast attendee Maria Butina is currently in prison for the same thing on behalf of the Russians.

Again, it all feels icky.

When The Cool Kids become the spiritual leaders, the temptations to follow something besides Jesus are enormous.  The power, the entitlement, the wealth, the notion that we are “chosen” and can do anything we want because Jesus has picked us to influence others – all this is toxic.  And the theology is shaky.

Yes –  King David from the Hebrew scriptures was was used by God even though he was an adulterer and a murderer. But he was also held accountable for his crimes.

Few seem to be held accountable in The Fellowship, most especially the dictators and kings to whom The Fellowship has reached out.

Although the teachings of The Fellowship declare that Jesus met with kings, King Herod was not Jesus’ target audience.  Although the teachings of The Fellowship declare that the apostle Paul was a influencer in the Empire, Paul found few people willing to listen to him in the towers of power and – in fact – they tried to destroy him.

Weak is the new strong in Jesus’ actual message.  Yes, Jesus could be fierce (you brood of vipers! ) But Jesus always sided with the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned.  The rich have received their reward.

I love the end of The Family because we meet a small group of men who push back on the notion that powerful. wealthy white men are the key to spreading the message of Jesus.  The truth is that God uses all of us: black, brown, white, golden, poor, rich, sick, well, old, young.

When I’ve had the opportunity to meet people in that organization, I’ve felt sized up and cast off when it was clear that I was not going to be a tool for their power.  That, my friends, is not true relational ministry.  That’s transactional ministry.  And eventually it self-destructs.

Image from Netflix.  I highly recommend watching The Family directed by Jesse Moss, based on the book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet.

People lie to me just as they lie to their own pastors and to their doctors (“I only drink one glass of wine a week“) and to their dentists (“I floss most days.”)  They tell me they are “fine” when they are not fine.  They tell me family stories that are either exaggerated or wholly false.

Sometimes they are also lying to themselves and they’ve told a story so many times, they believe it’s true.

[Just to be clear, I also lie to myself and others to spare me shame or to avoid difficult conversations.  Ask me about that time I told the truth about chopping up our neighbor’s rose bushes as a seven year old and – while I confessed the truth – my siblings who were partners in that crime – lied about it and I was the only one who got disciplined.  I learned that lying = getting off easy.]

Throughout my professional ministry I’ve been told some pathologically interesting stories:

• The parishioner who told me he grew up in a mansion with gardeners and chauffeurs when the truth was that his father was a prison warden and he grew up on the prison grounds.
• The parishioner who told me he went to Harvard when actually he signed his war registration documents on the campus of Harvard and never took a class there.
• The parishioner who told that her successful father was her hero, when actually he had sexually abused her throughout her childhood.

I remember sitting with a woman who was telling me for the umpteenth time that one of her relatives had won the Nobel Prize.  I don’t know whether this was true or not, but God put the following words into my mouth:

You know, I would love you even if what you’re telling me is not true. 

I wasn’t saying that I didn’t believe her.  But she had shared that comment with me so many times, it was clear that it meant a lot to her.  It made her feel important.

But she wasn’t important because of her proximity to the Nobel Prize. I didn’t love her or those others because of who their parents were or what they owned or where they went to college.  I loved them – or tried to – just because.

Loving people – or trying to – is the only way I can get through this life and I’m often not very good at it.  People can be so selfish/obnoxious/narcissistic/cruel and the only possible way I can love them is to remember that God loves them.  I don’t have to like them.  But I’m called to love them because of Jesus.

All of us say things and do things that we think will make others love us.

Sadly, it is true is that some will not love us if we behave a certain way or if we don’t behave a certain way or if we have debt or an addiction disorder or a criminal record or a home in a not-so-great neighborhood.  Some people won’t love us if we fail to live up to their expectations.

Love feels especially conditional these days.  And we could all use some unconditional love.

How can we nurture unconditional love?  Repeat after me:

• I will love you even if I disagree with your politics.
• I will love you even if you disappoint me.
• I will love you even if you don’t take my advice.
• I will love you.  No matter what.

There is someone in my life who made some poor life choices once upon a time, and now that those poor-choice-days are over, I sometimes remind him: “There’s nothing you could ever do that would make me stop loving you.”

The first time I whispered those words into his ear, it was just a pep talk comment.  But because he told me that it means a lot to him, I say it more often now.  I want it always to be true.

Only God can help us know the truth about ourselves.  And only God can help us love each other unconditionally.

Happy Monday.

I’ve spent time this week with several people who see no hope.  No hope for their personal financial situation.  No hope regarding our national divide.  No hope that we’ve seen the worst of the gun violence around us. No hope that their physical pain will subside.

And so – in spite of the hopelessness that deadens us – I’m asking you to share the hope you’ve noticed that enlivens us.  Here’s what I’ve got off the top of my head:

• All traffic stopped in a busy parking lot yesterday to allow an older man using a walker and the woman at his side to cross – very, very, very slowly.  There was no honking.  There was no shouting from car windows.  People waved and smiled.
• The farmer’s market nearby was open today and there were tomatoes that taste like heaven.
• Therapy dogs.

What about you?  What’s giving you hope as we move into the weekend?

Image of Jersey the therapy dog who is comforting an Army Veteran simulating a panic attack.  Good boy, Jersey.  Source.

It’s a serious question.

Since moving back to my home state of North Carolina in 2018, I’ve been delving into family history, both as a hobby and as a tool for understanding my own white privilege.

I already knew that my great great grandfather died wearing a Confederate uniform at Antietam in 1862.  But I didn’t know – until I moved back here – about the lynching of three (almost certainly innocent) black men in Rowan County near the birthplace of that great great grandfather in 1906.  This infamous lynching occurred just four years after the lynching of two black boys – one 11 and one 13 – who allegedly killed a young white woman working in a field.

The press reported that 3000 people gathered for that 1906 lynching after midnight on August 7th and it’s possible that my grandfather – who was almost 14 at the time – could have been present. There is no one alive to ask, and it’s not the kind of story that was written up in our family histories.

I’m going to assume that someone in my family tree or someone among their friends was there for the hanging and mutilation of Jack Dillingham, Nease Gillespie, and Gillespie’s son John (who was 14 or 15 years old.)  I need to claim this part of my heritage because it is true.

Everybody’s heritage includes ugly.

If we tell the truth about who we are – as individuals and as a nation – we must accept both the great moments and the shameful ones.  Yes, it’s true that courageous explorers landed at Jamestown 400 years ago and it’s also true that

The powerful American Indian chief, known as Powhatan, had refused the English settlers’ demands to return stolen guns and swords at Jamestown, Va., so the English retaliated. They killed 15 of the Indian men, burned their houses and stole their corn. Then they kidnapped the wife of an Indian leader and her children and marched them to the English boats. They put the children to death by throwing them overboard and “shooting out their brains in the water,” wrote George Percy, a prominent English settler in Jamestown. And their orders for the leader’s wife: Burn her. (Source)

Lord have mercy.  Christ have mercy.  Lord have mercy.

If you regularly read this blog, you know that I have an inclusive understanding of racism.  We are all racist by virtue of growing up in a country built by enslaved people.

And at the bottom of the application for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, it says in bold letters: We are not a racist organization.

So here’s the thing:  all our organizations are racist from the PTA to the neighborhood book club to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  I would consider being a part of the UDC’s gatherings if we were serious about talking about our heritage – all of it.

In the words of Rob Lee, we need to finish the sentences:

• When someone says that “the Confederacy was about states’ rights” the end of that sentence is “to enslave human chattel.”
• When a group declares that “the Confederate flag honors the Southern soldiers who died” the end of that sentence is “to defend the right to own people with black or brown skin.“
• When there’s a discussion about honoring confederate soldiers who fought for freedom, the end of that sentence is “and to remember that their fight for freedom kept other people from being free.”

I would appreciate being in a group that had these conversations.  I’m not sure that the UDC is that group but I’m willing to talk with those ladies.  Maybe I would learn something.  And maybe they would learn something.  We’ll see.

Photograph by Alexander Gardner from the Battle of Antietam. (1862)