A Church for Starving Artists

Everybody needs one.

In my previous life, I called it my “Why I Do What I Do” file. It’s the collection of emails and letters I read when I need to remember my purpose in life.

Now that my life includes an expanded glimpse into Church World, I renamed the file “When Life is Sucky” in 2011. (Church World is occasionally often difficult.) The file includes no “You are the greatest!” messages. Mostly the notes say something like “You probably don’t realize that you helped me, but you helped me” messages. I’d rather receive one of these emails than a dozen of the “You are the best pastor ever” messages. Some of my favorites include

• A thank you from the parents of a twenty-something church member who was grateful that our church had been there for their daughter after college.
• An appreciation for saying in a pastoral prayer on Mothers’ Day that some mothers are terrible.
• A note from Session members that our Presbytery had helped them navigate a critical situation.

Notes like these are basically not about personalities or happiness or individual achievement. They are more about being and doing what we were created to be and do.

So, faithful readers, my hope on this 2nd day of June in the year of our LORD 2014 is that we would consider:

• Asking ourselves who has made life meaningful for us?  Who helped something click for us?  Who unwittingly said or did the perfect thing at just the right moment for us?
• Sending that person a thank you.

And maybe someone will send a similar note of thanks to you, and then we can add it to our “Life Is Not Sucky” file. We not only need one of these files; we need to add to the files of others.  Because – actually – life is pretty great.  We just need reminders.

Image is from a precious letter in my files that removes random suckiness from any given day.

Maybe I’m drained from a series of losses that I didn’t think were going to impact my soul, but they totally have.  In the past two weeks

• TBC graduated from college and has been launched into Adult Working World,
• A gifted friend has blessedly passed away after a cruel 7-8 years with dementia,
• Maya Angelou died and I’m grieving the loss of That Voice.  I though it would help to re-read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings but it hasn’t.

I’ve had little to write in these posts.

Occasionally part of my work involves hanging out with pastors through the thick of it and occasionally they say variations of these things:

• I am toast.
• I can’t seem to pray.
• I got nuthin’.

So, on this perfect day that the Creator has made, what have you got for the bleary?  (This is a real question.)

Image from The New Nothing, a collection of images from the Hubble Space Telescope “of star clusters, stripped of the empirical data that renders them remarkable.”

Only a few people can be identified as regal if you ask me.  Queen Elizabeth II – by definition – is regal, even as an 88 year old horsewoman, although I’m not sure she carries herself as regally as Maya Angelou did in her 86 years on the earth.

What makes a person elegant or resplendent or majestic? It’s a quality that cannot be faked.  It doesn’t happen automatically because someone has a title.

We can learn a lot about what Regal looks like by observing the life of Maya Angelou.

• She carried herself with self-respect whether she was in The Store or the streets or the stage.
• She was curious all her life, learning to speak multiple languages and living in a variety of places.  It’s impossible to carry ourselves with elegance if we think we know everything.
• She chose every word carefully.  She famously didn’t speak for about six years after a childhood trauma, and like all good poets, she picked her words thoughtfully and precisely when she spoke again.
• She was gentle in spite of the brutality she’d witnessed.
• She knew the difference between bitterness and anger:  Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.  (We sometimes forget that Jesus was never bitter, but he was occasionally angry over injustice.)
• She picked herself up after loss and missteps.  It’s a positive person who considers her life charmed even after growing up in the Jim Crow South and enduring childhood abuse.
• She was a beautiful older lady.  People wanted to be near her because she made them feel wonderful.

This is what I’d love to be if I live into my 80s.  Regal like Maya Angelou.

Two things:

1. If you haven’t yet read Bruce Reyes-Chow’s book But I Don’t See You As Asian, please do so today. This would be an excellent summer study for your book group.
2. Stop what you are doing Right Now and watch Mellody Hobson’s TED Talk on race here.

And for extra credit, read through these facts about white privilege.  [Maybe you don’t already know this, but – in most cities in this country –  if your name is ‘Yolanda’ you are less likely to get a job interview than if your name is ‘Bianca’ (or Katherine, Anna, or Stephanie. Or John.)  White Privilege is a real thing.]

As Mellody Hobson has said, we don’t need to be color blind; we need to be color brave.  This is not about being politically correct or hipster or “open-minded.”

This is about being God’s people.  And this is about being The 21st Century Church.

We are called to be color brave, not because it’s cool, but because it is faithful.

Jesus always noticed people.  He noticed the short person in the tree.  He noticed the woman who came to the well at noon.  He noticed the person in the crowd who was tugging on his clothes. If we follow Jesus, we -too – need to notice people.

As Mellody Hobson points out, maybe we notice when we walk into a board room full of black people.  But how many of us notice when we walk into a board room full of white people?

What if we not only noticed but sought out more color and more diversity?

My sister once told me that she painted her living room salmon, and I couldn’t imagine it.  Frankly, it sounded a bit too adventurous for me.  But it was gorgeous.  She has an eye for this kind of thing, and her life is more interesting and beautiful for it.

Imagine how interesting and beautiful (and more faithful) we would be if we were color brave every day.

There was a couple I vaguely knew in college. They got married shortly after graduation – young, beautiful, headed for glory.  After just a year or two, the young wife suffered a terrible accident leaving her brain damaged.  And shortly after that, the young husband divorced her and went on his way.

Passionate debate ensued among us twenty-somethings, especially among those of us who barely knew them.

Pro-Divorce:  This is not what he’d bargained for.  Who wouldn’t divorce someone in his situation?  He was only 25 years old.  He had his whole life in front of him.

Anti-Divorce:  What about “in sickness and in health as long as we both shall live”?  How could he leave her when she needed him the most? 

The truth is that we have no idea what we would do in such circumstances.  We might think we know exactly what we’d do, but we don’t.  We honestly don’t.

[I remember the Pro-Life-Parade-Marching Mom in my first church who phoned me late one night and begged me to take her 15 year old daughter to get an abortion.]

As my brilliant 20-something TBC recently reminded me upon discussing the most valuable things she learned in college:  We Cannot Take Things At Face Value.  We cannot know what someone is going through.  We cannot know all the factors involved in their making very personal life decisions.  We cannot possibly know every back story, every consideration, every secret circumstance.

Perhaps we’ve even had to make a similar decision, and yet the details of our particular decisions are never the same as the next person’s decision.

Only God knows.  And God loves us.

And so next time we see someone whose toddler is throwing a fit in the shopping mall, or we hear about parents who send their child to a boarding school, or we have a neighbor who sends her mother to a mental institution, or our sibling moves to the other side of the country from his ex, or a church friend makes a choice “we would never make” – consider the fact that we may not know exactly what we would do.

We pray for grace and ask for cosmic guidance.  And when our friends make choices we say we would not make, we offer grace to them as well.  Jesus died for this.

Image source.

In loving memory of DES (1967-2014)

There are many things I don’t want to do in life:  weed the garden, wash windows, paint the trim, floss.  But I have to do these things, and life is sweeter when I do.

This statement from a post by Aaron Earls jolted me last week:

Why aren’t Millennials at your church? You don’t want them there.

Honestly, our faith communities want many things:

• “To grow”
• “To attract young families”
• “To serve”
• “To make a difference”

But we don’t want to do what it will take for those things to happen.

I often ask engaged couples, “What are you willing to do to keep your marriage healthy and alive?”  It’s a better question to ask before marriage because it’s easier to secure a commitment before the wedding than after.

• Are you willing to go to counseling with your spouse?
• Are you willing to leave your job for her/him?
• Are you willing to live a distance from your family?
• Are you willing to stop _____ for the sake of your relationship?

Sometimes we don’t want to do these kinds of things.

Churches:  what are you honestly willing to do to grow/welcome “young people”/serve your community?

• Are you willing to relinquish norms that turn people off?
• Are you willing to fling open the doors to people who don’t look like/act like you?
• Are you willing to give up some of the things you like most about your church?
• Are you willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of someone else’s comfort?

If the answer is “no” then you actually don’t want to do what you say you want to do.

It’s healthier to acknowledge this truth and continue to decline than it is to say – falsely -that you want to grow and then blame it on the pastor/denomination when growth doesn’t happen.  The real story is that you just don’t want to.

Image is Man with Folded Arms by Roy Lichtenstein  (1962) 

As small congregations grow smaller, some of those churches hire pastors to work anywhere from ten to twenty-five hours a week.  Ten hours is considered 1/5 time in my denomination. Twenty-five hours is considered 1/2 time. But preaching takes the same amount of effort each week whether you have fifty hours to work or ten.  If you are a PT Pastor, how do you also fit in the pastoral care, the funerals, the meetings, the preparation, the planning, the recruiting, the training, the teaching? You can’t. I have long lived with the assumption that churches with a PT pastor cannot possibly grow.  The moment they shifted to PT paid professional leadership, they were spiraling toward death. I don’t believe that anymore.  What if . . .

• The weeks that the PT pastor is not preaching, she/he is using what would be sermon prep time to equip gifted members to ramp up their ministry.   Teach leaders how to pray out loud with parishioners, how to do a hospital visit, how to be an effective liturgist.
• The congregation welcomed new ways to hear God’s Word by inviting leaders to share their personal testimonies about a time that they felt disappointed by God and what they learned about God in that situation or to talk about a time they felt especially close to God because of something the church did right.
• Local community leaders (the school principal, the police chief, the county mental health worker) were invited to share how they spend an ordinary week, informing the congregation of the needs in the community and how they might address those needs.

Imagine the possible growth in equipping the saints, advancing adult faith formation and articulation, and expanding missional outreach.   This assumes that a church – even a small church with a PT pastor – really really wants to growth in depth and ministry.  I believe many of them do.  (And the rest will close soon enough.)

Maybe you saw this story Sunday about the Quinnipiac University student who was so afraid to tell her parents the truth (that she had dropped out of college the year before, pocketed their tuition money, and was not actually graduating with her class) that she phoned in a bomb threat in hopes of canceling graduation.

This is what one person was willing to do to hide a secret.  I can’t stop wondering why she didn’t simply tell her parents the truth, whatever it was that made her drop out of school.  Apparently, she hadn’t told her friends either.

• Are her parents savage bullies who would have kicked her out of the family after physically and emotionally pummeling her?
• Did she have a secret life (drugs? porn star job?) that required keeping up appearances?
• Was she worried about being ostracized by her friends and socially banished forever?
• Is disappointing her family A Worse Fate Than Death (or at least prison)?

How bad could it have been to say, “Mom, I’m having a hard time and need to drop out of school for a while“?

In her head, it must have been pretty bad.

So what happens in your spiritual community when someone shares a difficult truth?

• I have a friend who disclosed the crushing news to her church small group that her marriage was ending, and they asked her to leave the small group. 
• I know a church musician who achingly told the pastor that he was gay and HIV positive, and he was fired.
• I know a family who shared with their church friends that their teenage daughter was pregnant and the father was removed from the Board of Elders.

Are our sanctuaries truly safe?  Do we actually welcome sinners?  Have we any idea how to love those who disappoint us?

My neighbor is a behavioral psychologist with young children, and he is teaching them that – if they always tell the truth – they will never get into trouble.  He wants them to know that truth-telling is so highly valued in their family that they can even tell difficult truths.  It’s what healthy families do.

The truth is that our congregations are often the first to punish people for sharing what is really happening in their lives.  Imagine what it might look like if we trusted each other enough and loved each other enough to tell the truth?

Evidence of a healthy 21st Century Church:  people are safe to be authentic, people are held accountable, people are considered redeemable.

Imagine how scared you’d have to be to call 911 and report a bomb threat to cancel college graduation.  Ugh.

Image Source.

When FBC first visited the college where he would eventually matriculate, we were touring a dorm during his Junior-in-High-School visit and this happened:

Upper Classperson Tour Guide: The RAs are really cool. Your boyfriend or girlfriend can stay over and it’s no problem.

Me: Um. I’m the Mom & I’m standing right here.

On another occasion, TBC & I were shopping for jeans & this happened her senior year of high school:

Hollister Employee: Hi! Take a look at our low cut jeans! They look really good!

(After realizing I was invisible:)

Me: Um. Hi. I’m the Mom.

At some point, we became the Ever-Present-Yet-Unimportant Parent. Yes, we moms are often the ones who labor for hours and hours to give birth to our beloved children. Or we joyously adopt precious daughters and sons, making enormous financial and personal sacrifices to welcome them. Dads try to figure out how to be sensitive new age guys.

We endure sleeplessness, minivans, homework meltdowns, forgotten-until-bedtime assignments from science projects to tomorrow-we-wear-something-yellow. It’s not easy, ladies and gentlemen.

Yesterday, our last child graduated from college and the Dean of her College said that the journey of the child necessarily becomes the journey of the parent.

I know this to be true.

There is a difference between 1) usurping our children’s lives as our own and 2) experiencing a child’s journey as our own. Our children’s lives are not our lives but I can tell you – with everything that is in me- that I know parents whose children have endured leukemia, depression, addiction, ADHD, gender dysphoria, and a basic lack of ambition, and their journeys become our own. It’s not that we want to live our children’s lives. It’s that we love them so much that their pains become our own.

I write this as an immensely grateful parent.

I have been thanked by graduation speakers (“Please thank your parents”) and I’m here to say that nobody cares about the parents at college graduations – really – except that we have really been invested in this thing. And we cannot ignore the fact that many others have made our children extraordinary, if we are honest.

It’s hokey to say that our children are raised by a village, etc. And yet, it’s true. And so I thank you.

You know who you are. Our last child child graduated from college yesterday. And there is no way we can thank you. But thank you.

Image of the Best Parents Ever (& their FBC)

About 23 years ago, I was the mother of two boys under the age of three, and during their nap time, I was cleaning out a closet. Specifically, I was boxing up their infant wear.

An overwhelming feeling came over me that somebody was missing. And a year later, we were the parents of three kids under age four.

It had not occurred to us that this meant we would have three kids in college at the same time – at least for one year, just as there was a year when all three were all in high school at the same time. Whew.

A couple random thoughts on this momentous weekend when TBC graduates from college:

• We are unspeakably blessed. I did nothing to deserve the ability to get pregnant easily (when I wanted to) or give birth to healthy children who lived to adulthood.
• I won the genetic lottery, not to mention the privilege lottery, the citizenship lottery, and the romance lottery. Again, I did nothing to deserve this. We’re talking about lavish grace/good fortune.
• I’m a big fan of having kids close together, if that’s possible/you plan more than one child. If they are close in age, they all like the same books and the same games at the same time- easy. Yes, you have multiple car seats and lots of diapers. But you’re just as busy with three as with one.
• Just because they are about the same size, it doesn’t mean they will like the same things. We allowed each of our three to pick one sport and one arts activity at a time, and so – yes, this meant that there was a potential for six different activities per week, but they got to choose. I’m glad we did it that way.
• As Double PKs (Preachers’ Kids) they needed each other when exposed to every manner of human turpitude. My kids can handle things beyond their years.

The bottom line is that I’ve learned so and I’m immensely grateful. Happy Graduation to our last & TBC.

Image of Gildersleeve Hall – named for PK Basil Gildersleeve – where TBC lived that first year of college.