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It occurred to me yesterday that I haven’t baptized a baby in seven and a half months.  I haven’t baptized an adult either but yesterday, I became strangely overwhelmed with the reality that I may never baptize a baby again.  While I am still in ministry, I am no longer serving a specific congregation as their pastor.

One of the things I did as a parish pastor after I baptized a child was give the  parents a letter to save for the child to open on his/her 10th birthday.  The letter was about the baptism day and how I hoped that – now that he/she was much older now and able to make some of her/his own decisions,  that one of those decisions would be about trusting God.

Over the weekend, I received an excellent surprise:  a letter written to me by a child I baptized about nine years ago.  It was penned in perfect cursive on lined notebook paper from a ten year old.   “I am in the fourth grade and I am happy,”  she wrote.  I will treasure this letter forever.

Let’s be clear:  pastors might hold the babies and speak the words of baptism and splash the water, but it’s the church that baptizes people.  But I have to admit that I loved being that person who held the babies and introduced them to the community of people who would minister to them.

I now serve many congregations and most of them have pastors.  Many of these congregations – the small ones with older members – have not celebrated a baptism in years.  These congregations bemoan the fact that they “don’t have any young families.”  But baptizing babies is not the only – or even the most meaningful –  initiation into the faith.

Growing congregations have a growing number of adult baptisms. Yes, they also baptize babies, but the sign that a church is thriving is when people who have not known God come to know God for the first time as adults.  They find an authentic circle of spiritual friends and they realize that following Jesus is the best way to live.

Most of our churches trade members as people move from one neighborhood to another, from one state to another.  But the sign that a church is making new disciples is that adults are choosing to be baptized.  I crave this for the church.

Many of our congregations offer stirring music in worship or excellent children’s programs or impressive local and global mission projects.  There are congregations that do not offer any of those things.  But it doesn’t matter.

We are called first and foremost to follow Jesus.  Those communities which are inspiring this kind of discipleship are truly Being the Church for the 21st Century.

Again, I crave this even more than I miss looking into a baby’s eyes and saying, “Welcome to this ministry.”

You cannot just believe part way,                       
You have to believe in it all.
My problem was doubting the Lord’s will
Instead of standing tall.
Elder Price in The Book of Mormon

HH and I saw The Book of Mormon over the weekend – and it’s fabulous, of course – in terms of entertainment.  But the play also sparked some interesting theological conversation.   Is it true that to be a faithful Christian (much less a faithful Mormon) we have to “believe it all“?  And what does “believing it all” mean?

Our Roman Catholic friends are often accused of being Cafeteria Christians  – picking the parts of RC theology they like and ignoring the parts they don’t like.  All of us do this actually.

Maybe we rationalize our picking and choosing based on interpretation of scripture.  Or maybe we fundamentally reject the plain words of Jesus because they rub us the wrong way.

From a recent conversation during a church coffee hour:

Parishioner from Belize:  What I like about the United States is that you execute criminals.  We no longer execute criminals in my home country.  This is what I like about being a Presbyterian in America.

Me: (?!)

PFB: In my country, you cannot even kill your enemies.

Me:  But what about what Jesus said about turning the other cheek and loving our enemies?

PFB:  I prefer to believe what the Old Testament said.

The truth is that we don’t all believe the same things, even within the same Christian traditions.  In my tradition, we speak of agreeing on the essential tenets of our faith, but nobody has spelled out exactly what those are.  I could take a crack at it:

We Presbyterians, for example, all basically believe that

• we are saved by grace through faith
• God is known to us in Three Persons
• there is a priesthood of all believers
• Holy Scripture is the unique and authoritative Word of God

And there are others, but then again, there are still other tenets that some call essential and some call non-essential (like who God calls to serve, for example.) And honestly, even among The Essentials We All Agree On, there are faithful followers of Jesus who have some doubts about those.  If I hypnotized a roomful of church leaders, they might admit that they don’t quite get The Trinity.  Or they don’t exactly believe that the whole Bible is equally authoritative (e.g. Is Leviticus 11:5 as important as John 3:16?)

But back to Mormons.  Maybe our next President will be a Mormon.  In fact, Mr. Romney became a bishop and stake president serving approximately 4000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Boston when he was still a young adult.   He was and still is a prominent leader in his church.  What bothers me about this is not the incredible beliefs (e.g. Jesus will rule from Missouri in the Second Coming) because my own beliefs are fairly strange (e.g. Jesus turned water into wine.)  Spiritual faith involves mystical pieces that don’t make sense.  Not a problem for me.

What is a problem is the All Or Nothing requirements of any faith.  It’s not that I’m in favor of picking and choosing the doctrines we like best.  It’s that – if we believe that God is God and we are not (another one of those essential tenets:  only God is sovereign) then we also have to believe that none of us has cornered the market on Truth.  For any of us to say we know the mind of God is idolatry.  And while I believe that I understand many things about God, I could be wrong about a few of them.  Because I am not God.

What would it be like to have a President who is so certain that he is right about theology that he has participated in excluding people who questioned or ventured from that “right theology”?  What would it be like to have a President who believes he can become a god?  (Note:  we have had many Presidents who acted like they were gods, or at least they believed that they were God’s gift to the nation.)  An interesting read, albeit from a culture magazine, is this.

I would love to hear your thoughts – not necessarily on Mormons – but on this notion that – if we are part of the same faith – we all must embrace the same value judgments, live within the same social parameters, and believe the same thing about women’s leadership, marriage, and what we can eat and drink.

What do you believe?

I believe that there are many different ways to follow Jesus.  I believe that there are many different ways to worship God.  I believe that the Spirit speaks to us in a variety of ways.  Again, what do you believe?

PS  I do not believe that MLK was either a god or a perfect man.  But I believe he tried to live out some of the more difficult ways of Jesus.

Churches can do very basic things to shift their paradigms – which should be a priority in this New Year.  I have suggestions.

#1 on our 2012 Ecclesiastical To Do List:  Improve Our Social Media Skills

This is not about being cool.  This is not about generational church politics.  This is about functioning in the 21st Century.

Social media already benefits pastoral care, community-building, record-keeping, file-sharing, and worship creating.  We have a responsibility to our congregations to be skilled in these tools.

I have long said that every congregation needs someone under the age of 30 on staff or on call to offer tech work days to other staff members.  I will be always be grateful to MP for being that person for me for two years.

You can also send yourself, along with staff and volunteers to a Social Media Boot Camp.  Whether you consider yourself savvy technologically or a beginner who wonders about this thing called Facebook, this is an excellent use of $125 and seven hours of your time.

Doug Pagitt shared in yesterday’s Boot Camp in NYC that in the near future we will have our own apps.  I look forward to the Jan Edmiston app – whatever that might be, and I will want to check out your apps as well.

Do yourself and your church a favor and make this a priority in 2012.

Two new marriage books written by popular male pastors and their wives are getting a lot of attention in Christian circles:  Tim and Kathy Keller have written The Meaning of Marriage.  Mark and Grace Driscoll have written Real Marriage.  I haven’t read either book but here are two reviews:  Driscoll review here.  Keller review here.

My favorite part – from the reviews – is Driscoll’s description of wives as crystal goblets and husbands as thermoses.  I don’t really have a comment on that.

But it got me wondering:  if we – ordinary married folks or formerly married folks –  were writing a book about marriage with advice for people considering marriage or wanting help with their marriage, what would we say?

I honestly can’t come up with anything comparable for the goblet/thermos analogy.  I’ve been married for almost 25 years and I have no wisdom except for all the wisdom you’ve heard before:

• Marriage is not about satisfying our own personal needs and goals.  It’s about partnering with a person to build a life and putting that person’s needs first – if we can possibly do this.  We are selfish human beings.
• We will never be able to read each other’s minds.  Yes, we might finish each other’s sentences, but we will never fully know this other person.
• Marriage involves seasons because life involves seasons.
• It’s really fun to grow old with somebody wonderful.
• We have no idea what the future holds.  It makes me nervous with an engaged couple tells me their “plan” which sometimes goes like this:  “In 2.5 years we will have a daughter.  And then we’ll have a son 3 years later.  We plan to move from our condo into a larger home in the burbs in 4.2 years. And then . . .”  In the first five years of marriage, my parents both died, I gave birth three times and also had two miscarriages, we moved twice, and between the two of us we  changed jobs three times.  In five years.  So good luck with The Plan.
• A sense of humor is really helpful.
• Enjoying each other’s company is even more helpful.
• Working on communication is a lifelong responsibility.
• Be faithful to each other.
• Acknowledge that a happy marriage for life is an underrated miracle.  And thank God if you have been blessed with this miracle.

So, what would you say if you wrote a book on marriage?  Everybody’s doing it.

I think I get it now.  I’ve been seduced by a church building.

Years ago, I visited a church sanctuary in suburban New York with several large Chagall windows as well as a small Matisse window – which honestly did nothing for me.  But those Chagall windows.  If I regularly worshiped in that space I would never need beautiful music or even the most stirring of sermons.  Sitting in total quiet and staring into the handiwork of Marc Chagall would be enough to move me.  And if I intentionally reflected on God as I stared into the windows, my spiritual life would also be nourished.  What kind of God do we have who could gift an artist with such unspeakable, glorious talent?  It would take that intentionality – at least for me – to remember that this was about God and not about me (and what I like) or Marc Chagall or the wealthy patrons who commissioned the windows.  It was all about God.

How easy it is to worship beautiful things rather than the God who sparked the creativity to make them, the generosity to pay for them, and the devotion to care for them.  How easy it is to make our buildings idols.  I get it.  There are some extraordinary houses of worship that take our breath away.

The artistic value of such worship spaces can bring us closer to God or they can seduce us in a way that takes us away from God.  I was talking to a woman just today who attended a memorial service in one such gorgeous sanctuary and she admitted to distraction: “I listened to about half the service.  I couldn’t take my eyes off of the building.”

I know what she means.  But – whether our worship space is an eye-popping feast of sculptures and paintings or somebody’s  living room – we must be intentional about what or who we are worshiping.   Glorious windows or icons or statues can be tools for focusing on God especially when we enter a time of worship with our brains full of distractions.  Or they can be objects of worship themselves.  They can be so very seductive.

My denomination calls itself A Connectional Church.  This means we share in ministry and governance.  We – as a collection of churches in regional groups called Presbyteries and as a national group called General Assembly – are connected in terms of money, property, mission, and relationship.

But – honestly – we aren’t all that connected.  Many of our congregations live as individual communities, maybe even seeing ourselves in competition with other individual communities that happen to be across town or in the next neighborhood.

Imagine what might happen if we were actually A Community of Communities that supported each other?  Examples:

• Very few congregations will say that they have extra money but actually many of our congregations do have assets.  We just choose to spend it on ourselves with a survival mentality (e.g. “What if we need that money to replace our roof?) But imagine if Little Church on The Corner gave a chunk of their endowment to help Little Church on The Hill hire a part-time educator.  Imagine if two medium-sized congregations pooled their resources to send a group of kids from a third congregation on a mission trip.
• Few congregational leaders know the congregational leaders from neighboring churches.  Imagine if a team of teachers who have figured out a new way to teach kids trains the teachers in another church who are looking for a new way to teach kids.  What if the local mission coordinator from Church A hangs out with the local mission coordinator from Church B and they share what they’ve learned?  Imagine people trading leaders who specialize in a specific ministry to equip others.  (e.g. We have a stellar Financial Giving Ministry.  You have an amazing Middle School Small Group Ministry.  Let’s share what we know.  And make some new friends.)

Our church culture has become so individualistic that shared ministry feels counter intuitive but it’s an ancient church practice.  We can do more together.

What if we were truly a connectional church in the New Year – not just in terms of sharing resources but also in terms of connecting relationally?  How would that change your congregation?

One of the funniest people I know – even when she has cancer – begins 2012 cancer-free.  Check out her blog here.  D’s Christmas letter was an inspiration and she sums up her life’s philosophy by quoting the label of her favorite shower gel.  It’s indeed a good quote to live by.

Products from coffee to  shoes sometimes try to do more than serve our basic caffeine and foot needs:  they attempt to move us spiritually and emotionally.

Church is also – sometimes – a product.  Many have written about the consumerism around spiritual communities.  If a congregation fails to serve our needs, we go elsewhere.  I believe this is the biggest misconception of what church is all about.  It’s not about coming into a sanctuary on a Sunday morning, hearing an inspiration sermon, going out to brunch, and then being done for the week.  It’s about what happens next in our offices and classrooms and shopping trips and carpools.

This is old news, obviously.  But I am struck by the many people who loved and cared for D in lavish ways through her cancer year who would not call themselves church people.  They weren’t just around for the fun parts of loving a friend (bringing milkshakes,  watching movies, getting their own attention for Being Good Friends.)  They were inconvenienced and they made sacrifices.  This looks more like following Jesus than perfect attendance in Sunday School.

The shower gel label is inspiring.  But it was more inspiring watching people rally around a person who needed them.  So here’s my simple inspiring ditty for today:  notice someone who needs you and then serve them.   It’s not as easy as you might think.

Not only is it my favorite Epiphany song, but it’s my basic theology as well.  Home by Another Way.

When the family was “home for the holidays” they also referred to other places as home.  “Home” in our family could be one of three towns in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a college town in North Carolina, a small town in Pennsylvania, or our new residence in Illinois.  Is it possible to have multiple spiritual homes?

I’m not talking about multiple homes as in John McCain has multiple residences.  I’m talking about multiple spiritual homes as in places we feel nourished and at peace.

My life’s work involves helping people find spiritual homes.  I want churches – spiritual communities –  to be thriving and healthy and Christ-like.  Nothing says “home” like being loved unconditionally.  Nothing says “home” like  a community where people live together, pray together, share together, reach out into the neighborhood together.  Karl Rahner once said something like this: “Every time a  new family is created, a new church is created too.”  Spiritually healthy families worship together, serve together, share life together.  This goes for blood-related families as well as spiritually-related families.

While it used to be true that people were members of One Church to which they pledged their allegiance as well as their money, time, and talent, today people seem to have multiple churches.  In other words we have a variety of spiritual communities that feed us, inspire us to serve, know us.  We may or may not be official members of these communities. My friend M identifies a variety of spiritual communities as his assorted “homes.”

It’s sort of like my own family.  We have many spiritual homes.  We don’t “own” them.  But we belong to them in a very real way.

I’ve heard people say that one thing The 21st Century Church can offer to the world is space for silence.  We can not only offer space for silence in our sanctuaries and retreat centers, but we can teach people how to be silent.  Clearly, the bells and whistles of multi-media worship will not be helpful in this endeavor.

Pico Iyer wrote recently in the NY Times that the next generation is going to need (wait for it) . . .

stillness.

He, Malcolm Gladwell, Marc Ecko, and assorted other creative thinkers met with advertising people about a year ago to consider “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.”  What the next generation will need are black hole moments when they can escape from mass communication devices and find freedom from noise.  Iyer concedes that many (most?) people will seek this stillness for selfish reasons.  They will simply need and want to be calm for their own sakes – to rest deeply, process fully, and focus more clearly on life.  It’s the same reason why so many people who don’t self-identify as religious or spiritual people turn to yoga and meditation.  They want space to stop and take in the moment – or ponder many moments – without distraction.

We have always been prone to wander in our thoughts and practices, but – having just come from lunch at a lovely Thai Restaurant with a huge television mounted on the wall – we live in a world with constant distraction from The Moment.

On the same day the Times published the Pico Iyer article on the joy of stillness, there was a front page article on the news that U.S. pharmacies have a shortage of ADHD meds.  There more people seeking pharmaceuticals to keep them focused and calm than there are pills to fill those prescriptions.  ADHD is obviously a medical/chemical problem for some.  But the article notes that distracted college students turn to the same meds to help them fix their attention on their work.

It’s not enough for us to play Taize music and light candles.  One of the challenges for the church is to teach people how to pray, how to meditate, how to focus on God.    Remember that even the first twelve disciples – all ostensibly faithful Jews who would have prayed in the temple and with their families as boys – asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.

Lifelong church people – much less those who have never crossed the threshold of a church building – need space for,  lessons about and practice engaging with God in prayer.  God’s children of tomorrow will need it more than ever.  For that matter, God’s children of today need this too.

Some people pray to God by focusing on icons.  Source for the icon above is here.

Happy New Year Everyone.

When I was a small town pastor, the  town funeral director perennially tried to convince me to join him in a wager regarding  who would die in the new year.

Funeral Director:  Come on, Jan.  Who’s going to kick it first this year?  Charlie?  Wilma?  Horace isn’t look too good, is he?

Me: I’m not doing this.

FD:  Ten bucks that Horace is dead by February.

The joys of a small town.

I think about my friend the funeral director each January 1st as I ponder what I most look forward to in the new year.  Here are my top anticipations:

1. SBC will graduate from college.  Two down.  One to go.
2. Assorted nibs will also graduate from high school and college.
3. The magnificent MaryAnn McKibben Dana’s book on Sabbath in the suburbs will be published by Chalice Press.  Trust me, you will want to read this book.
4. The extraordinary Katherine Willis Pershey’s book Any Day a Beautiful Change: A Story of Faith and Family will be published by Chalice Press.  Again, you must trust me.  Pre-order.
5. The 220th General Assembly of the PCUSA will gather in Pittsburgh.  What I don’t look forward to: Administrivia and overtures passed that a) don’t matter and b) don’t matter.  What I look forward to: more people getting it that a) the Constantinian Church is gone forever and b) this is a good thing.
6. Adam Walker Cleaveland and Sarah Walker Cleaveland get to experience the first year of their son’s life.
7. There will be glorious and heart-tugging surprises:  babies born, new love expressed, vows made, death bed words spoken.

I love the future.