A Church for Starving Artists

I wrote last month about our little churches and the paradigm shift needed for those congregations to have a thriving future.  My denomination is not governed by a single bishop who makes decisions – as our sisters and brothers in Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, and United Methodist have.   My denomination is governed by “corporate bishops” sort of like the U.S. Senate, which begs the popular retort:  “For God so loved the world, God did not send a committee.”

Decisions are made s-l-o-w-l-y. 

Sometimes – honestly –  I’d like to be the bishop, solely because I could move things along a bit faster.

I feel an urgency about ministry.  The world is craving hospitality, healing, forgiveness, and spiritual peace.  We don’t have time to waste.

So here we are with many tiny churches – under 50 members – and some (all?) of these churches need to close.  But we in the Presbyterian tradition do not close churches in a vacuum.  We might advise churches, coach them, and try to equip them for redevelopment.  But we are unlikely to close a church without that church’s members agreeing that this is the healthiest choice.

Nevertheless, I’m being asked more and more to come up with A Check List for Pulling the Plug.  In other words, there is a movement towards pushing our very small congregations to take a hard look at their ministry together and discern if their ministry is about God and expanding God’s kingdom – or something else.

If you were creating such a check list, what would you put on it?  I have some ideas but would love to hear from you too.

Jan’s Check List for Congregation Viability and Effectiveness:

(Please check all that apply to your church community.)

___  Our congregation meets regularly for worship, the celebration of the sacraments, study, and fellowship together.

___  We have at least four different leaders who serve as the worship/music leader, the treasurer/financial secretary, the clerk/secretary, and the pastor.

___  We have the capacity to cover all monthly financial expenses including utilities, insurance, salaries and benefits, supplies, etc.

___  We make a difference in our neighborhood by: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

___  We make a difference in the lives of our members by: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

___  At least ten members can articulate why our church exists.

___  Our neighborhood would notice if we were gone.

I would hope that a viable church could check off at least six of these items.

Again, what would you add to the list?  

After the moment of silence at Wednesday night’s Bruins’ game, after Rene Rancourt started singing The National Anthem, this happened:

The other day, L & I were talking about the post-Boston Marathon media coverage.  By now we all know that:

• ordinary people ran towards the explosion to help
• marathoners kept running to hospitals to donate blood
• Bostonians offered their homes for people who needed accommodations
• people are continuing to live their lives as best they can

Reporters and locals have occasionally responded by saying things like:

• “This is what makes us Americans.”
• “This is what we do in the United States.”
• “We are unlike any other country.”

L. and I wondered if, after people in other countries keep going after tragedies, they say things like:

• “This is what makes us Indonesians.”
• “This is what we do in Afghanistan.“
• “We are unlike any other country.”

What makes the moment in the video beautiful is not that it is uniquely American to be patriotic or compassionate or generous.  These are the things that make us human.  This is what human beings do.  We are unlike any other species.  We were created in the image of God

We live in a great country, filled with amazing human beings, who live alongside other people who are so broken that they would bomb innocent people.   Just like the rest of the world.

The world is truly beautiful, thanks be to God.

I heard someone say this about the unknown terrorist who set off the two bombs near the end of the Boston Marathon Monday:  “Please let it be a lone white guy.”

Why?  Probably because . . .

• If this was the act of a Middle Eastern terrorist group, ignorant Americans might take it out of innocent people like the Sikhs.
• Most immigrants from the Middle East are not terrorists – although, according to a 2011 study, 1 in 3 Americans think that Muslim Americans are more sympathetic to terrorists than other Americans.  A Middle Eastern Boston Marathon bomber would not help correct this misconception.
• If a lone white guy – or a group of white guys – are responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, vigilantes are unlikely to take it out on random other white guys.
• Women are unlikely to initiate terrorism in the U.S. – although women are increasingly “carrying out suicide bombings, hijacking air­planes, and taking hostages in such places as in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, and Chechnya” according to this study.

Whoever did this is clearly evil and sociopathic – whatever race or ethnicity he/she might be.  But I understand the person who hopes it’s a lone white guy, just as I used to hope that people who make stupid racist comments don’t have Southern accents.   (Enough people already believe that Southern accents = ignorance.)

I pray this person is identified and caught soon.  And maybe that he’s a lone white guy.

Note: Few things feel as important today as our neighbors in Boston today.  Prayers of peace lifted for them and the world.

In life and in death, we belong to God.  Romans 14:8

Who owns our genes?  The Supreme Court heard arguments between The Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics yesterday, which will result later this summer in a legal decision about whether or not a private company can patent human genes.  The genes in question are BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 — associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.  Myriad says they created synthetic genes which should be patented.  The US government says that some of Myriad’s “creations” are actually made from nature.  Some of us might say that God made them.

In the Bible, the Levites were priestly people, descended from the third son of Jacob and Leah.  One of their roles, among the Hebrew people, was to guard what is holy.  The Supremes now have some semblance of this role in their Court.

My grandmother used to say “It’s amazing what the LORD has let us learn.”  Just because we have figured something out doesn’t mean that God didn’t do it.  I find it hard to imagine that a company can lay claim to certain genes that may or may not be in our bodies.

Culturally, we are thoroughly in need of a clearer understanding of whose we are.  Our libertarian friends believe that each of us essentially owns ourselves and have the right to live any way we wish while respecting the rights of others.  We all know women whose bodies are treated like the property of men.

But imagine if we truly believed that our bodies actually belonged to God.  What if  women and men shared their bodies knowing that all those parts we find tantalizing and pleasurable ultimately belong to God?  What if we looked upon each other as God’s property?  What if we claimed the priestly charge to protect what is holy in each other?

What if we considered even BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 to be something like Levi’s genes?

Image is an anonymous artist’s rendering of DNA.

For as many new members classes as I can remember, the following interaction  – or something like it – has been shared:

Pastor (to people in Church New Member Class):  Tell us about your personal faith story.

New Member 1:  I was baptized a Methodist, but my family joined the Presbyterian Church when I was six.  We went to First Presbyterian Church and then we went to Second Presbyterian Church and now I’m here.

New Member 2:  There was a split in the church I grew up in, so my family left.  I had friends at the Lutheran Church so I joined their youth group.  But I’ve been looking for a church since moving here and I like this church.

New Member 3:  I was baptized Catholic but I don’t believe some of their policies anymore.  I like what the UCC stands for and this is a good church for my kids.

I don’t know if this is the kind of faith-sharing that happens only in formerly mainline churches or if people consider congregational resume-sharing to be the same as faith sharing or if we just aren’t asking the right questions in new member classes.

The faith-stories I’d like to hear are more about where we’ve seen God working in our lives, moments when God has spoken to us in some way, experiences when we’ve felt especially close to Jesus.

But many of us and the people we serve have no idea how to articulate our spiritual journeys in this way.

Our faith is not about transactional relationships with institutions.  Our faith is about our relationship with The Holy.  Where is the mystery in our lives?  What is God calling us to be and do?  How are we using our gifts to make earth as it is in heaven?

When my preaching group met last week, we spent time with friends at the Interfaith Youth Core – a great organization that encourages young adults to be able to articulate their faith in hopes of creating an environment of tolerance and understanding in the world.  They regularly participate in speed-faithing – an  opportunity to hear a member of their staff share his/her own faith story.

Think about speed dating – hosted events when singles can meet other singles in hopes of  possibly getting together later to get to know each other better.  Speed faithing is also about knowing each other better.  If our congregations are going to be authentic communities of faith, we need to be willing to articulate where we’ve been spiritually and where we are going – not in terms of our church membership history, but in terms of our relationships with God and each other.

One of the reasons our churches have failed is because we have failed to be true communities.  I’m not sure some  of our churches know how.  But we have a great opportunity in the 21st Century Church to change this.

Image source.

(Note:  It’s nice to be writing again after almost a week of no wireless  and/or a broken keyboard.  So much to say.)

The year was 1979.  I had just graduated from college and moved to London for an adventure, armed with a BUNAC work permit.  We were allowed to land “any job a British citizen couldn’t or wouldn’t do” which sounded a bit ridiculous and impossible.

And yet I was hired to be a social worker in Richmond with a desk overlooking the Thames.  Nice.

I was vastly underqualified and  – besides – why didn’t some British 20-something want this job?  Maybe because the job seemed ridiculous and impossible.

Margaret Thatcher had just become Prime Minister and suddenly there were jobs created for people like me to take social services away from people like Henry Burville.  Mrs. Thatcher was what we would call today “A Job Creator.” More about Henry Burville later.

What I was supposed to do:

• Visit elderly pensioners who received free telephones and televisions, courtesy of the sovereign state of the UK, and discern whether or not they really needed those benefits.
• Decide that they didn’t need those benefits.
• Take away those benefits.

What I really did:

• Visit elderly pensioners who received free telephones and televisions, courtesy of the sovereign state of the UK,  and hear their stories.
• Occasionally pray with them around cluttered kitchen tables.

Henry Burville had been a landscaper at Kew Gardens, but in his 90s he had become very confused to the point that he consistently forgot that his wife was dead.  I found myself reminding him that she was not in fact in the next room, and he would cry as if hearing it for the first time.

Mr. Burville thought I was a WWII nurse and once he wandered  to Hammersmith to visit me and The American Girls at our flat.  I came home from work to find him sitting in our living room being entertained by my housemates.

There was no way I was taking away that man’s phone and TV.

Actually in the months I worked at that job, I never took away anybody’s phone or TV.  I got yelled at a lot by my supervisor.

I remember telling one of my housemates that the issues I encountered with those folks were not about their televisions or telephones.  Their issues were spiritual.  I talked with all my clients about  hope and community and peace.  About betrayal and abandonment and isolation.  “You should definitely go to seminary,” my roommate said.  And so I did.  In fact, hers was the first wedding I officiated.

I’d been thinking about seminary for a while and –  pre-London – I had talked about it with professors and pastors.  But it was Margaret Thatcher who nudged me over the edge to the place of no return.

And so for that, I’m thankful.

Image source here.

Attention Clergy Friends:  to whom do you turn when you need support and enrichment?

This is what clergy support has looked like for me:

First call – Rural Congregation  

• Met with the two geographically close-by PCUSA male colleagues occasionally to plan joint youth events for our handful of youth and to pray for each other.
• Regular breakfasts with Fr. Richard  to talk about celibacy (his and mine).

Second call:  Clergy Group Bonanza in Our Nation’s Capital  (Now the groups have Names.)

• Lex Girls – About eight clergywomen in National Capital Presbytery, meeting monthly to share lectionary resources.  Some of the most creative women I know, whose preaching I continue to admire.  
• Preaching Roundtable – Created during/after finishing degrees at Columbia Theological Seminary in the days when Moveable Feast didn’t include women.  Wide range of ages and church sizes hailing from multiple states and Scotland  (Cindy Bolbach called this group International Lex Girls.)  We have been meeting for 10+ years in the cities where one of us lives, which means we’ve been all over: Richmond, DC, NY, Atlanta, San Antonio, Austin, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Montreat – and this year in Chicago.  We used to share lectionary sermons and resources and then we moved to themes.  We shared sermons preached on federal holidays in DC.  (i.e. sermons for Veterans’ Day, 4th of July, etc.) We shared life- milestone sermons one year (e.g. sermons about marriage, singleness, divorce, parenting, adoption, etc.)  This year the theme is Interfaith – sermons we might preach at an interfaith service or in one of our own churches on  interfaith marriage, etc.  We’ll be hanging out at Interfaith Youth Core this year.  We consistently eat very well.
• Writing Revs – 4-6 National Capital Clergywomen who write articles, books, blogs, poetry.  We still grieve the loss of KB.
• The Can’t-We-All-Just-Get-Along group (my personal name for this gathering), ostensibly made up of an equal number of “conservative” and “liberal” male and female pastors in the Presbytery, meeting in hopes of creating connections.  It’s harder to be snarky to someone on the other side if you’ve been praying for his kids.
• And then there were others:  Presbymergent, Emerging Church Cohort, digital communities.

Third (but interim) Call: Presbytery Staff

• Roundtable continues. We’ve gone through marriages, births, new calls, unemployment, major traumas, and basic life together for over a decade.  We turn to each other for professional and personal support.  An enormous blessing.
• Clergy Book Group – several male and female clergy from the Presbyteries of Chicago and Milwaukee, reading both fiction and nonfiction, and talking about our work.

How do we create these essential groups for ourselves?

• Be pro-active.  Contact a small group of people you’d like to get to know better, hang out with, study with, pray with and invite them to meet.  If they say “no” don’t worry about it.  If they say “yes” you can try it out.
• Be flexible.  Maybe you start as one thing and evolve into another.  It’s fine.
• If it’s not working out, allow individual people to leave the group with no hard feelings.  Some of us have too many home responsibilities.  Some of us are looking for something else.
• Try not to commodify each other – although this is hard.  Of course we want to meet with people for our own support and edification.  How fun would it be to meet in a clergy group with Rob Bell or Nadia Bolz Weber?  It’s fun to have cool friends.  But this is mostly about authentic selfless relationships.  We need this and others do too.  

Some of us consider it a boundary problem for clergy to have deep friendships with parishioners.  In fact, it is a boundary problem.  No matter what, we will always be The Pastor and this limits what we can say or do with people in our faith communities.

Do you have a clergy support group?  And how does it enhance your ministry? Please share.  And parishioners:  if you have a pastor, ask her/him, “Who is your pastor?”

I haven’t written a post in a couple days because I haven’t had much to say.  But here are my random thoughts for Friday. Please share if you have wise thoughts.

• How can we stop wedding guests from filming ceremonies with their phones and iPads?  The last time I went to a wedding, literally half the congregation raised hand-held cameras to film it. You’ve never seen so many iPads in the air.  Yuck.
• Most weddings now do not occur in church buildings.  Is this about money (cheaper to have wedding & reception in same location?) Or is this about church?
• Roger Ebert sounds like he was the Henri Nouwen of movies.
• I have got to eat more vegetables.
• My Roundtable Preaching Group is coming to Chicago next week!  Excellent sermons and interesting lives will be shared.

Have a great weekend everyone.

“Our church needs more members so that they can help pay the bills.”  Have you ever heard somebody say this at a church meeting?

Dear Jesus, have mercy.

I am struck by the commodification of our friendships, our spiritual communities, and – frankly – God.  It looks like this:

• What can this friend do for me?
• What can this church do for me?
• What can God do for me?

I cannot speak to this better than Scot McKnight did in his own blog yesterday, referring to Andrew Root’s new book:

“Root explores a proposed history of ministry:

In the hunter-gatherer framework the minister is the cosmic storyteller.

In the agricultural framework the minister is the manager and mediator of divine things.

In the steam and coal transition — industrial revolution — the minister perpetuated and protected a way of life. The pastor is a moral exemplar.

In the electric and managed oil transition — the second industrial revolution — the minister is involved in programmed intervention. The pastor becomes an entrepreneurial, entertaining, and a self-help therapeutician. The model of ministry here is influence.

Are we in a new day? Are we entering into a new day of relational ministries? He proposes the new pastor will be the “convener of empathic encounter of personhood” (44)

Yes, this is a lazy post today.  But I can’t say it better than Andrew Root.

I was listening to a replay of a Frank Langella interview last week about his role as Frank in Robot and Frank.  The screenwriter is in his 30s and both the actor and the main character are in their 70s.  Before Langella agreed to take the role, he wanted to spend time talking with the screenwriter – Christopher D. Ford – about what it was really like to be a 70 year old man.

It got me thinking about what it really feels like to be a 50-something woman.

Yesterday was the second annual “Jan’s Not Dead Yet” Day.  My mom died at 55 years and 19 days old, and I reached that age on April 1, 2011.  I’ve now lived exactly two years longer than my mother which makes me ponder things.

I often wish I could ask my mother questions like, “When can I expect to feel a little arthritis?” (because it seems like everybody does eventually) or “When can I expect these hot flashes to stop?”  My mom didn’t live long enough to deal with arthritis or menopause.

Actually the last eight years of her life were so chemo-fueled that the usual aging patterns did not apply.  How could she know if her hot flashes were about too much tamoxifen or too little estrogen?

I can’t speak for all Middle-Aged Women, of course, but this is what it’s like for me.  Not dead yet, but . . .

1. I’m invisible.  I was once only invisible to young adults when I’d go shopping with my daughter.  Now I’m invisible to everyone.  It’s not that I’ve ever been the kind of person who stopped time when I entered a room because of my breathtaking beauty.  But now I have a hard time getting the dry-cleaning lady to notice me.
2. I wear flats – always.  When I fell and broke my nose in January I  was wearing Birks which are not like wearing stilettos but it was just high enough a heel to trip and crash.  (Note to self: Most women who break their hips are wearing flats, so this will not guarantee anything.)
3. I wear glasses most of the time.  My vision was like an eagle’s until I was about 50, but I always thought wearing glasses was cool.  It’s occurs to me now that older people fall down a lot not necessarily because their hips go or their legs are weak.  They can’t see.  Wearing bifocals is really dangerous. Especially on stairs.
4. I can’t say words like “cool” anymore.  I hate it when people my age – or even twenty years younger – say words like “rad” or “def” or when people my age try to be something we are not (or we are not any more.)  This is really hard because I’ve actually always said “cool.”
5. I am not cool anymore. Oh, yes.  Once I was very cool.  But now it looks like I’m trying too hard.  And thermostatically speaking, I am usually freezing or burning up – never cool.
6. My sleeveless shirt days are almost over – maybe not this decade or even the next, but eventually.   I love sleeveless shirts on women.  I love sleeveless little black dresses.  I love sleeveless sundresses.  But women reach a point when we can’t do sleeveless anymore, even if our arms look like Michelle Obama’s.  Proper ladies wear sleeves.  Long sleeves.  Ugh.
7. I can’t hear.  No commentary here except that I actually need a hearing aid.
8. I’m increasingly unemployable.  While some churches and other religious organizations honestly want the best and brightest of any age, most of these organizations want a 30 or 40-something leader.  I get this and I was once this person – the thirty-something pastor, the forty-something pastor.  I was even the 20-something pastor for a few years. But now I encourage churches to give young pastors a chance.  I honestly love this and yet it also makes me feel a little wistful.
9. I just recently realized that I look old.  It’s really shocking to realize that I don’t actually look like I’m 40 anymore.   (Note: a man asked me in church recently how old he looked and I said “30” when actually he looked at least 50, but I could tell he thought he didn’t look middle-aged at all.  He did though.  So do I.)
10. I have an urgency about life because I could be dead any second.  My nonagenarian friends tell me this about themselves all the time, but since my parents died young, I’m slightly shocked that I’m still alive at 57.  To live to be 80 seems like a remote possibility even though it’s indeed possible. My point is that there’s a lot of work to do before it’s too late.  Most of this work involves Jesus and sharing the news that “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  In other words, how can we make our streets, our schools, our congregations, our neighborhoods more like heaven?  We need to get moving.

Today I begin my third year beyond Mom’s life span.  And while this post is more about me than I usually write, it’s on my mind this morning.