A Church for Starving Artists

Summer = Church Conference Time for many of us.  It’s been a feast of possibilities this summer in the year of our Lord 2013:

• Big Tent just ended in Louisville.
• UNCO 2013 East Coast was held in June and a West Coast event is planned for the fall.
• Wild Goose begins this week in Hot Springs, NC

And then there have been/will be an array of Liturgical Arts Conferences, Preaching Conferences, Bible Conferences.  And of course the Mother of all conference centers –   Chautauqua   – offers dozens of interesting events all summer long.

How do you decide how to spend your precious time and money when it comes to enriching your soul?

• Do you choose a denominational event hoping to make connections and attend practical workshops?
• Do you seek enrichment in a specific area of spiritual or professional development?
• Do you look for theologians and artists you admire?

HH and I chose Wild Goose this summer – not just for the amazing line-up – but also for the creative interactions with people beyond our tradition and perspective.  We’ll report on how it goes.

But I’d like to hear from you.  Have you attended a church/spiritual conference this summer or do you plan to attend a conference?  And why did you choose this event over all others?

Image is art from Wild Goose.  The Indigo Girls will be singing to our heart’s delight.  

I am a middle-aged white woman with a college education living in a nice house with a good job.  I am a person of privilege.

When we talk about The Privileged in the United States of America, some of us get defensive.  We explain that we’ve earned what we have.  We’ve built the lives we lead.  We have worked hard to get where we are.

But the truth is that most of what we have is a result of winning the genetic lottery, being born into certain families, and having a leg up in terms of wealth, health, and opportunities.  Show me a person with an excellent education living in a great neighborhood and I’ll show you a person blessed with advantages that most likely gave him/her a head start.

I am especially aware of our privilege on my vacation – from where I write this today. Last night, I was feasting my eyes on 11 healthy kids (with two more healthy kids at home) from the porch of a lovely ocean-side “cottage” that sleeps 23 people, enjoying daily meals that –  for most people in the world – would be once-in-a-lifetime feasts.  Taking it all in, our enormous privilege was tangible.

All of our kids have the opportunity to go to college.  All of them have gone to excellent high schools because of where we are able to live.  All of us have passports marked with interesting stamps.  We drive cars that work.  We get paid vacations.  We have health insurance.

We are privileged.  But how do we respond to this privilege?  That question begs many others:

• Can we live privileged lives and truly follow Jesus?
• How much of our wealth are we willing to share so that others can  live in safety and comfort?
• Do we believe in a zero sum game when it comes to our way of life? (i.e. There is a limited amount of wealth, so if others have more, we will have less?)
• Do we want as many as possible to have what we have?

Some of us believe our stuff will save us.  And some of us say we believe that Jesus saves us, but we still depend on our stuff.  And a very few of us trust Jesus with all we have and are.

What I believe is that everybody should have the kind of vacation we are having this week,  with plenty of rest and food, surrounded by people who love us.

Driving from Chicago to Brooklyn today with a dog wearing a Thunder Shirt.  (The dog’s wearing the Thunder Shirt, not me.)

Occasional vacation posts to follow.

[Note:  It’s a privilege to write reference letters for colleagues and friends.  Occasionally we in the church are invited to offer “charges” to new pastors or their congregations with advice and reminders.  Nobody has asked me to offer charges to sorority girls, retired pastors, or pastor search committees, but that’s my plan before leaving for vacation.]

Dear Pastor Search Committee,

The truth is that you are the most important committee in the church.  Your choices will impact the future of your congregation for the rest of that congregation’s life.

No pressure or anything.  But here’s the good news:  God wants to direct you. Your job is to discern and listen and then act in faith, not in fear.

Having said this, I get that you don’t want denominational staffers to tell you what to do, but there might be some insights that we can contribute as entities who do this All The Time.  You don’t have to take this guidance, but honestly, we want you to have the best pastor possible and these tips will help.  You can find this out now or you can find this out later.  So please consider the following:

• For the love of God, please don’t judge a pastor by his/her gender, hair style, skin color, accent, age, or (even) education.  Maybe she went to the local community college for a really good reason.  Maybe he studied at Harvard but he’s a jerk.  Perhaps he has fabulous hair, but he has the pastoral skills of a carrot.  Maybe she won preaching awards but she’ll stab you in the back.  Maybe he’s quirky and yet there is a holy aura about him.  I’ve written about pulpit candy before in this blog.  Don’t choose pulpit candy.
• If you consider yourselves to An Amazing Church, congratulations.  But do not assume that all candidates believe you are all that.  If you come off as arrogant (“If we should deign to call you . . .“), if you believe that everyone will be clamoring to be your pastor, if you believe great candidates will come to you – beware.  The candidate you really want is not that shallow.
• If you consider yourself to be a church with little to offer, stop it.  You deserve a strong pastor.  Keep in mind that your community needs a shepherd who will teach you how to make disciples and love people.  Don’t settle for someone without the energy to serve you well.
• If several candidates have turned you down, stir up the courage to have someone contact the former candidates and ask what you could have done better.  Make it clear that you truly want to learn how you could be more hospitable, transparent, authentic.  And listen to those comments.
• Give people space and yet keep them informed.  Don’t interview somebody and then fail to be in touch for a month.  Acknowledge receiving their resumes.  And when they come into town, do not insist they look at certain neighborhoods while simultaneously offering a salary package that makes that neighborhood out of their financial reach.
• Tell the truth.  Don’t hide skeletons.  Don’t forget to mention the misconduct of your former pastor or the full financial picture of the congregation.  It will not be pretty – or fair – when your new pastor finds out the truth the week after her/his installation.
• Don’t rush.  It’s better to have no pastor than have a pastor who’s a terrible match.

Your congregation deserves a pastor who will understand you, love you, lead you, admonish you, and challenge you.  Pray for her/him.  Your next pastor is out there but it might take a while for you to find each other.

Grace and peace, Jan

[Note:  It’s a privilege to write reference letters for colleagues and friends.  Occasionally we in the church are invited to offer “charges” to new pastors or their congregations with advice and reminders.  Nobody has asked me to offer charges to sorority girls, retired pastors, or pastor search committees, but that’s my plan before leaving for vacation.]

Dear Retired Clergy Colleagues,

I imagine it feels discombobulating to move from a rhythm of weekly preaching and liturgical seasons to a schedule comprised primarily of personal errands, etc.  To shift from being The Pastor to a wholly new identity (“Retired Person” or “Former Pastor”) would be disconcerting, especially if you were a pastor for 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years.

Although I’m not retired, I have an idea of what you are going through in that I made the move from being a parish pastor for 27 years to being a middle judicatory staff member.  I still get to preach and I still attend church meetings, but nobody calls me Pastor Jan anymore.  I haven’t baptized a baby since May 1, 2011 and maybe never will again.

I know what it’s like to grieve the loss of leaving a congregation.  I do.  I know what it’s like to end  a pastoral relationship and try to maintain friendships while not interfering with your former congregation’s future.  It’s painfully difficult.  At least for a while, we cannot even maintain those friendships.

Now that you’ve retired, please remember that when you to pop into worship or show up at church gatherings in your former congregation – uninvited by the current pastor –  it’s not good for the church you say you love and miss.   You put the current pastor(s) and frankly, you put me as a member of the Presbytery Staff, in a difficult situation.  You are forcing me to contact you and remind you about skills you should have learned in elementary school.

If you have been specifically invited by the current pastor to return for an event, whether it’s a wedding, a funeral, or a worship service, that’s great.  But to show up uninvited is a boundary violation.

At best, you are breaking your Covenant of Closure (which in my tradition is what the retiring pastor signs on his/her last Sunday.)  At worst, you are in violation of your ordination vows – the one about being a good colleague (“Will you be a friend among your colleagues in ministry, working with them, subject to the ordering of God’s Word and Spirit?“)

It would be healthy and helpful if you would stop.

[Gentle Readers who do not happen to be Retired Clergy:  just as sorority girls don’t read my blog, retired pastors probably don’t read my blog either.  But if you are friends with a retired pastor – especially if he/she continues to consider that last church to be forever his/hers – please have a loving conversation with our retired colleague.]

Retired Colleagues, please consider this:

• If your grown children and/or grandchildren are still members of your former church, please talk with the current pastor about how you will deal with those events when your family members play the flute on Christmas Eve or serve as liturgist on Palm Sunday.
• When the church staff has a celebration or they go on retreat, don’t assume you are invited.
• If you are “Pastor Emeritus” it doesn’t mean you are still part of the church staff.  It means the congregation gave you an honorary designation to show that they love you.  It doesn’t mean you are entitled to be their pastor forever and ever.
• Although we believe that everyone is called to ministry, you are still called to ministry, but not ministry in your previous parish.  You are called to serve in a new way, in a different context.  Prayerfully consider what that new ministry will be and remember that it could be in a museum or homeless shelter or high school.  But it’s not in your former church.  Ever.
• Please respect the person who followed you in your former church.  And realize it’s not respectful when you turn every opportunity to return as your showcase moment.
• It’s your job – your job – to say no.  “No, I can’t officiate at your wedding.”  “No, I cannot return to do your funeral.”

Please let’s talk about how you can make disciples in new ways.  I would love to dream with you about how you might serve in this next season of your life. And thank you for your service.  It has been a blessing, but now it’s someone else’s turn to be a blessing with the church you no longer serve.

Respectfully, Jan

[Note:  It’s a privilege to write reference letters for colleagues and friends.  Occasionally we in the church are invited to offer “charges” to new pastors or their congregations with advice and reminders.  Nobody has asked me to offer charges to sorority girls, retired pastors, or pastor search committees, but that’s my plan before leaving for vacation.]

Dear Southern Sisters,

Last week I wrote a reference letter for a young woman who will be going through sorority rush this fall as a college freshman.  She is great!

Very bright. Effervescent, Gifted in music and sports.  So kind.

But as I wrote her letter, my stomach started to churn a little bit.  My young friend is from the Midwest and she’s going to a college in the Southeast where the young female students have the reputation of being thin, blonde, and “from there.”  My friend is cute and even blonde, but she’s not from there – geographically or culturally.

Her last name might sound “foreign”  because her father hails from the Middle East. His first name is Arabic.  And in fact, I think he’s Muslim.  My friend is Christian, but she knows and loves a lot of people who are not.

I went to college with you and was one of you – sort of.  I never had a wasp-like waistline but I was a WASP.  I never had a trust fund or the money to use Laszlo skin care products, but I had enough to cover the annual dues.  I didn’t go to private school but was blessed to graduate from an excellent public high school.

So, after I sent off the reference letter, I shot a quick note to her, wearing both my mother hat and my Southerner hat,  letting her know  that

1. People can be mean, so don’t let the mean ones ever make you believe you are not amazing,
2. Southern people can be parochial and some still don’t understand why waving the Confederate flag is a problem, and
3. Southern college kids can be clueless, especially in fraternities and sororities, and especially when drinking adult beverages.

As I write this letter, I totally realize that college girls do not read this blog, and so I am depending on my friends and colleagues who are the mothers and grandmothers and friends of teen-aged and college-aged young Southern women.  Maybe you could have a conversation with the young Southerners in your lives.

Please ask those young people to be kind to those who are Not Like Them.  There is a pack mentality in college, especially in sororities and fraternities, and those packs are often exclusive.  And mean.

I am one of those Southerners who prays – every time a White supremacist kills a Sikh or  young straight men kill young gay men – that the perpetrators don’t have Southern accents.  Please God. And I doubly pray that the perpetrators don’t self-identify as Christian.

But the truth is that my young friend from the Midwest will almost certainly experience something less than Southern hospitality when she goes to college in the Southeast because she will be perceived to be different, culturally.

Please let’s teach our children that talking about Southern Hospitality and knowing the stories about hospitality in the Bible do not make us hospitable, even to our friends, much less to strangers.

And may God protect those who are different as they head off to college this fall.

Your sister, Jan

Image Source.

This is funny.

Occasionally someone tells me that I seem to have more strange things happen to me than most people.  I think that – actually – I just choose to find things to be funny.  Among the things I have found funny:  my parents’ cancer, cellulite, a broken nose, walking through a sliding glass door, betrayal, embezzlement, and bipolarity.  None of those things are inherently funny, but to make light of them gives us a power over the embarrassment or sadness or shame.  It’s a survival mechanism.

And the truth is that life is truly absurd.  Exhibit A:  Tig Notaro.

I first heard Tig Notaro on the radio a few months ago and decided she’s my kind of girl.  From an interview with Conan O’Brien last year:

“I got pneumonia and then I contracted this life-threatening, deadly illness called Clostridium difficile and it’s this bacteria that just eats your intestines. I was in the hospital for a week, lost 20 lbs…and then it was my birthday a couple days after the hospital…. A few days after that, my mother passed away unexpectedly…a freak accident…. I got off of a relationship shortly after that, and then I was diagnosed with cancer…. This was all in four months.”

Hilarious.  (Actually, not at all funny.)

But shortly after those four months of hell, she actually was able to make light of it all. Maybe she had to.

Things like this happen all the time in real life.  Maybe not all in a span of four months, but honestly, ask a pastor.  We do crazy/flaky/preposterous/horrible.

• I have literally experienced a single day when three different women each individually told me – confidentially – that they were in love with the same man.
• I’ve sat with a 90-something church member surrounded by all her earthly possessions waiting for her children to come pick her up and take her to a retirement home, only to have her fall into hysterical, Mary-Tyler-Moore-at-the-clown-funeral laughter over the absurdity of being able to fit all her things in a single bedroom after 90+ years of life
• I’ve laughed with family members over the ludicrousness of choosing between the burial vault for their mother with the 25 year guarantee or the 50 year old guarantee.

Especially when we turn on the television and see photos of grieving parents and angry young men and suffering babies and abused women and wastefulness and bigotry and injustice, we see nothing funny.  What we see is often unspeakable.

Making light too soon hurts people.  But with time it also heals to find the funny.

How much of your life is about resume-building?  

Or do you live with someone who expends extraordinary energy building up his/her vita?  We seem to be a culture obsessed with doing stuff that will make our or our loved ones’ futures easier or more successful.

[Note:  I speak here primarily about the privileged among us – those of us blessed with educational opportunities and the possibility to expect some semblance of “success.”]

We work and then we work some more,  hoping to achieve our grand purposes to the point of exhaustion.

• High school students –  and even middle school students –  are pressured to build noteworthy activities and honors lists for college applications.
• College students compete with each other for good grades and impressive internships.
• College graduates seek cool jobs that will look good on graduate school applications or they work to move up the proverbial ladder towards their dream jobs.

As I shared yesterday, many young adults don’t have time for anything but work at least according to this article.

Even some pastors have been known to use churches as stepping stones, moving into bigger and bigger congregations.  Or at least this used to be true.

We lead purposeful lives, spending most of our hours towards accomplishing something.  But what if we took a slice of each day accomplishing nothing?

Yesterday our staff visited the The Happy Show, an art exhibition by Stefan Sagmeister, now on display at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Go see it if you happen to be in Chicago.

One of the highlights is a piece (shown above) created out of white post-it notes that – when oscillating fans blow the post-its – spells out Uselessness is Gorgeous.

Since this exhibition is about happiness, Sagmeister’s point is – perhaps – that it makes us happy to accomplish things.  And it makes us happy to accomplish nothing.  Just as we long to create, there is also a deep longing to be able to rest.  We all need time when nobody is grading us, nobody is assessing us, nobody is asking anything of us.

Depending on the season of our lives, this can be either easy as pie or nearly impossible.  But Sagmeister is definitely onto something.  Uselessness is indeed gorgeous from time to time.

Sex and commitment are on my mind because of two stories I heard yesterday:

1. My neighbor recently attended the funeral of a friend who’d died of ALS after three years of abject misery for him and his family.  The neighbor mentioned that his friend’s wife has been a rock.  “She exemplifies the kind of commitment that most of us don’t consider when we promise to share our lives with another person.”    (Note:  I also have a friend who could be described as a rock in that she “lost” her husband years ago to a brain disease.  He is still alive but is in no way is he the person she married.  I marvel at her sanity.)
2. Did you read this article about college hook-ups in Monday’s New York Times?  Both men and women – but increasingly women – have no time to commit emotionally what with all the resume-building, etc.  As one striving young woman at Penn explained, “We are very aware of cost-benefit issues and trading up and trading down, so no one wants to be too tied to someone that, you know, may not be the person they want to be with in a couple of months.”

Two very different perspectives on relationships.  Or are they?  It is really all about timing?  Some want to “settle down” later than others?

As churches wonder where the 20-30 somethings are, I’m wondering:

If people are going to connect with a spiritual community, are they most likely to do it after they’ve “settled down”?  So what happens if they don’t settle down, at least in the traditional way?

Over the past hundred years or so, both men and women have found gratification in partnering up in their early twenties.  Now the average age for marriage in the United States is 27 for women and 29 for men, according to this article by Stephanie Coontz.  But here’s a kicker:  “The average age for childbearing is now younger than the average age for marriage” Check this out. 

It’s not that nobody is getting married anymore.  It’s just that people are:

• delaying marriage (but not childbirth)
• cohabitating more than ever
• marrying after establishing themselves in their careers rather than marrying to launch their adult lives.

All this impacts spiritual communities too.  I wonder if 20-30 somethings who have spiritual longings – which would be most of them – stay away from institutional church because their very lifestyles (cohabitation, having children before marriage, etc.) has been frowned upon – if not condemned – by church people.

How many cohabitating-but-not-married people are part of your church?  

How many single parents or coupled but unwed parents?

Do they stay away from spiritual communities because they expect that we will basically condemn them, much less fail to welcome them?  Or are we flinging open the doors of our churches to welcome the ones we once accused (and perhaps still do) of “living in sin”?  Thoughts?

This post is written in thanksgiving for my friends A & J who got married last weekend.  They’ve been living together for 5+ years and have three daughters.

So, I went to church on a Sunday when I had no sermon to preach, no meeting to moderate, no ordination or installation to attend.  

It was a rare Sunday during which I could pick any church – of all the churches in our Presbytery and beyond – to be with the people of God.  And I really needed to be with the people of God, praying together and worshiping The God of All Things, especially after The Verdict of 7-13-13.

I am, admittedly, a judgmental person.  As a professional minister, I judge sermons harshly.  I look – intentionally – for moving liturgy, authentic community, and real people.  So – with the attitude of a judgmental editor – I experienced, yesterday, Good People, albeit people who welcomed me with “What are you doing here?”  (Really.)  The prayers were heartfelt and compassionate. But the sermon – honestly – could have been preached 20 years ago, 30 years ago, or even 50 years ago without any edits.

I showed up longing for someone to talk about the George Zimmerman acquittal. I needed to hear a Word of comfort in the midst of deep sadness.  And this is what the preacher shared with me after worship:

Pastor:  We live in a community that’s 52% black.  It’s scary.

Me:   (?)

Pastor:  My wife used to teach 7th grade science but she found that those kids were illiterate.  No wonder they don’t have jobs.  No wonder they shoot each other.  It’s a real problem.

Me: (!)

I am not quick on my feet.  I can think of all sorts of things to say about 30 minutes after a conversation.  The comments of this pastor horrified me but I couldn’t respond until after the fact.

This is a real story.  It was a real conversation.

Here’s the thing:  We need to have some honest conversations about reality and race.

Photo of a quiet place on Lake Sylvan in Sanford, Florida.