A Church for Starving Artists

I remember hearing years ago that the Ayatollah Khomeini – Iran’s supreme religious leader at the time – had never heard of the Beatles or Shakespeare.  “What an idiot,” I thought.

Actually,  it’s quite possible that during his time in exile outside Paris, he had indeed heard of those and other Western icons.  And more to the point, I am the idiot.

The BBC reported yesterday that The Largest Religious Gathering on Earth recently ended.  And fellow Westerners, can we identify this event?

• No, it wasn’t  Joel Osteen’s most recent worship service.
• No, it wasn’t a rally cheering on the conclave in Vatican City.
• It definitely wasn’t a gathering of any Christian denomination.

It was Kumbh Mela in India – attracting was turned out to be 12 million pilgrims to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in Allahabad. India.  I had never heard of this event until yesterday.  So who’s the idiot now?

We Christians have got to get out more, especially as the world is getting smaller and smaller.  And didn’t Jesus say something about this?  Yet we still act as if  this is a Christian nation (in some way beyond self-identification, not discipleship.)  We continue to be Christians with a 1950s mentality.  We continue to make assumptions about What Everyone Wants (i.e. to join a church) which are erroneous if not foolish.

How can we “get out more“?  Opening our eyes is a start.

A dear parishioner once told me that everybody in her apartment building was a Christian.  She had no contact with non-Christians, she said.  But I remembered being in the elevator in her building with women wearing chadors.  “What about those women who wear head scarves in your building?  I think their Muslim.”  She had never even considered that.

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We can also get out more by having conversations with people who don’t do church. If we simply know and try to love these folks without attempting to snare them into church membership or “save them,” we might find that they have no desire to join a church and they couldn’t care less if we wear pinned or adhesive name tags on Sundays.  Imagine showing people – all people – simply what love looks like.

I’m guesting again at Ecclesio on Churches Starting Churches.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Does anyone remember a time when this conversation could have happened?

Personnel Chairperson to Church Board:  After considerable conversations with her and others, we have voted to let go of our Youth Minister.  We hope you’ll trust this decision.  Her last day will be Friday.

Church Board:  Thanks for letting us know.  How can we support you in this transition?

There are many reasons – often very private reasons – for firing someone:

• secret addictions
• not playing well with others behind the scenes
• mental illness
• physical illness
• financial misconduct
• sexual misconduct
• random boundary issues
• terrible fit

Maybe because information is so accessible and we demand it, and because choices are countless (and we like to make our own choices.  Can you say, “Half caf, double shot, extra hot skinny mocha?”)

We do not trust People In the Know to make decisions for People Not In the Know.

I’ll admit that it makes me wonder in a “Have-they-screwed-this-person?” kind of way when I hear that someone has been fired or asked to resign, and I personally don’t know why.

• But what if the reason why would embarrass the person?
• What if releasing information could bring about a lawsuit?
• What if not releasing information could bring about a lawsuit? (e.g. we assume someone is fired for utterly nefarious reasons, but it was just a bad fit?)

Trust issues are huge in the church right now.  It used to be true that we trusted our leaders simply because They Were Our Leaders.  We were dutiful followers.

Today we must increasingly rely on authentic relationships.  If I thoroughly trust ___, I don’t need to know why he fired _____.  I might be curious, but I don’t really need to know.  And I probably won’t trust _____ unless I have a solid relationship with him.

I work for a Presbytery which – perhaps by definition – means I am not trustworthy.  I work for The Man in The Mother Ship which some might even call The Death Star.  We ostensibly are the entity that says, “No.”  We keep people from doing what they want to do.  We make them follow meaningless procedures.

But I find that I am trusted by congregations who know me.  I’ve spoken at their meetings.  I’ve presented my 21st Century Church road show.  I’ve preached in their pulpits.  I’ve listened to them over coffee.

Can we agree to try to 1) deepen relationships in the institutional church and then 2) trust those people to do the work of the church necessary to transform congregations?

Or will we continue to assume that our leaders are trying to pull a fast one on us?

I’m guesting at Ecclesio this week, writing about Churches Starting Churches.  Come visit Cynthia Holder Rich’s blog.  There will be three posts this week on the subject.

Image is Crossing Boundaries.

Leaving  NEXTChurch2013 yesterday, I happened to be reading Peter Rollins new book which I love for thoroughly selfish and idolatrous reasons.  Part of the NEXT2013 conversation was about what we love more than Jesus.  What is our (real) chief concern? Old question.  And fresher than ever.

Idolatry is everybody’s favorite sin, if you ask me, and the church is – of course – a daily offender.

If we are honest and try to discern what we truly worship, we might find that:

• We worship what others think of us.
• We worship money and what it can buy.
• We worship not God, but the idea and promises of God.
• We worship church.
• We worship family.
• We worship our children specifically (which is a variation of worshiping what others think of us:  if our kids do well, people think it’s because we are awesome parents.)
• We worship our parents specifically (another variation of worshiping what others think of us: if our parents were amazing, we must be too.)
• We worship love – or the idea of it.

I could go on and on, but you see what I’m saying.

As we talk about what’s next for the people who gather together to follow Jesus, here is some wisdom I randomly picked up at NEXT2013:

• From Ed Brenegar (my Young Life Leader 40 years ago and now my colleague in ministry):  if everything in the church falls apart and it might/will, what will be left will be our relationships and all will be well.
• From Bill Golderer and Aisha Brooks Lytle:  all churches (all of them) need Administrative Commissions these days to hold us accountable and deal with the junk, freeing the congregations to simply pray and discern God’s next call for the church.

There’s more, but I need to get going this morning.  It’s a snow day in Chicago but I like to work in the snow.  Makes everything feel a little cleaner.

Have a good day everybody.

Church people sometimes say, “Our church is like a family.”  Maybe.  Maybe not.

Bruce Feiler  – whom you might know for his books on Abraham and The Five Books of Moses – has written a good book about families that challenges some of common expectations of what makes a good family.

For example, most sociologists laud the benefits of “family dinner” but Feiler says that eating dinner together every night isn’t nearly as important as what we talk about when we eat dinner or drive the kids to school or fold laundry.  He’s all about family rituals.  He encourages sharing family stories (“Do you know where your grandparents grew up?”)  He claims – and I agree – that sharing an “oscillating family narrative” makes for a resilient, healthy family.

And so it is with church – whether we consider our church family as a “real family” or not.  Feiler’s suggestions for happy families also work for churches:

Institutionalized rituals can feed souls and make good memories.  There’s a difference between:

• Annualizing church events for the sake of adding programs or promoting a specific ministry or church group (“Let’s do the Deacons’ Chili Dinner every year!”) and
• Cherishing practices that connect people spiritually.  There’s a men’s group in one church that carves individual Christmas ornaments every year for the children of the church (one year a camel, another year a donkey.)  The children receive them at the Christmas Eve service.  Another church pairs teenagers and older members together for projects, creating memorable intergenerational relationships that don’t usually happen in the secular world.

Meaningful rituals are neither a burden nor a chore.  If family rituals – in either a nuclear or a church context – don’t bring comfort and wholeness, why are we doing them?

The church’s story highlights both the highs and lows of life together.  Think about the stories of a nuclear family.

• Some  family stories are primarily ascending:  We came to this country with nothing. We worked hard. It paid off.  
• Some family stories are primarily descending: We had it all but we lost it.  
• The healthiest narrative expresses the reality of ups and downs: Grandma and Grandpa eloped during the war. They lived for a while at the beach. Grandpa got sick.  Aunt Kathy had a baby.  Dad lost his job.  But then he started his own company.  

Imagine a church story in which the basic narrative is ascending:  We started the church with 20 people and now we have 2000.  

Imagine if the story is descending:  We used to be THE church in town, but now our roof is leaking and the people are gone and we’ve depleted the endowment.  

Imagine a church that’s able to note both the ups and downs of a normal life cycle: We built this sanctuary.  There was a fire in the 1970s.  We rebuilt and added a kitchen to feed the homeless.  The pastor left abruptly.  But we called a great new pastor. 

Whether we consider our faith communities to be like a nuclear family or not, Feiler’s book is informative for churches.  It has a Sabbath in the Suburbs feel that inspires us to do better in terms of loving each other in community, whether that community lives under the same roof every day or the community gathers in the same sanctuary every week.

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Hebrews 13:2

I’m no angel.  I can be snarky, bossy, judgmental, and clueless.  I’m hard of hearing and sometimes when people speak to me, I don’t hear them.  I cannot see well without my glasses, and so if I’m standing in a room and you wave and I don’t wave back, it could be that I can’t see you.

So, when others are less than hospitable, I understand.  Maybe they are shy, and shy people often appear to be aloof.  Maybe they are hard of hearing or they can’t see very well.  Or maybe they are distracted by worry or busy-ness.

For most Sundays of my life, I am the stranger in church.  I’m a guest in worship an average of six times a month in six different congregations.

At best, I’m invisible:  a middle-aged woman seated by myself. At worst, I am suspect.  Occasionally people don’t just fail to smile at me; they actually frown at me.  I’m not sure they even realize they’re doing it.

Last Sunday, I arrived late to worship and although there were four people in the lobby, no one looked up when I entered.  No one handed me a bulletin, so I entered worship without knowing the number of the hymn the congregation had begun to sing.  Sometimes a friendly soul will hand me their open song book to help me jump right in and sing.  Last Sunday, the person singing closest to me literally took a step away from me and pulled his hymnal closer so I couldn’t see which hymn number they were singing.  Or maybe it was my imagination.

It’s the exception rather than the rule when people speak to me as a guest in their church.  I once asked the person sitting beside me a question about something in the bulletin and she literally shrugged and turned away.  Although the liturgist often invites “everyone” to coffee after worship, I have never – in a year and a half at this job visiting churches – been invited personally as in “Can I take you to coffee hour?”  Most churches serve their after-worship coffee in a room that is “down the hall” or “upstairs” or “in the basement” and if you don’t know where you are going, you may not find it.

I don’t expect people to fall all over me.  I don’t expect people to know that I’m “from the Presbytery” and subsequently treat me especially well.  But I do expect people to practice the basics of hospitality.

How do we tell our churches that they are not very friendly – in spite of what they believe about themselves?  As I shared over the weekend via Facebook, I visited a church Sunday to assist with a congregational meeting and during heated comments about GBLTQ ordination in the PCUSA, two of the speakers concurrently shared that “they love everyone” and “they even love homosexuals” and “they are very friendly” and – I pray with a spirit of compassion and gentleness – I responded by sharing my own experiences in that particular congregation.  I had visited them for three different worship services on three different occasions, and in those three visits, not one person had ever approached me to say “hi” much less “welcome!”  I had approached people myself and then they spoke to me.  But no one initiated, “Good Morning.”  No one said, “Are you new here?  Would you like to join me for coffee after worship?“

If you Google, “Why are Christians so . . .”  you’ll find that it might look like this:

(This image comes from here.)

A lot of people consider us mean, ignorant, judgmental, hypocritical.  Most of those folks probably don’t regularly cross the thresholds of church buildings.  But if they do join us, it’s possible we don’t even notice them.

I like the concept of Ship of Fool’s Mystery Worshippers who visit churches around the world to observe everything from the comfort of the seats to the genuine friendliness of the people.  My favorite observance:  “Did the service make you glad to be a Christian?”

It is my privilege to visit a variety of congregations for regular worship, installations, ordinations, congregational meetings, and retreats.  But what’s the most faithful response when we observe congregations doing exactly the thing they don’t think they do?  The thing that keeps us from being glad Christians?

I’m no angel myself, but there are other angels who might try to connect with our faith communities this week.  I wonder if we’ll even notice them.

Note from Jan:  Robert O’Donnell taught high school English in Arlington, VA until June 2012.  He died yesterday after an illness that weakened his body but not his spirit.  SBC is a writer, editor, scholar, and my Second Born Child. 

Did you know that “tortilla” and “torture” have the same etymology (“tort” meaning “twist”)? I didn’t, until I took Mr. O’Donnell’s class.

I feel sort of bad saying he was my favorite teacher in the history of teachers, in part because I had many terrific teachers, and in part because he would have none of it. He is whatever the opposite of a sociopath is. Or rather, as of recently, he was.

O’Donnell was wise. O’Donnell was hilarious. O’Donnell loved stories and words and trivia and jokes and baseball and his wife and history and pancakes and us. He was literally, but never figuratively, a sick man. By the time I met him he was in his early fifties, but resembled a particularly spry grandfather. His heart, feeling the need to define irony, never worked very well.

It might not be entirely kosher to talk about this, because folks tend not to like thinking about times of sickness. But for me, O’Donnell was always various degrees of sick. And while this in and of itself did nothing to define him, I think his reaction to it certainly did. He never moped or showed anger, at least not to us: rather, in a fit of himselfness, he allowed himself to be dubbed “Mr. OldDonnell” and made it a point of wry pride.

He never treated us like kids, which is the hackneyed standard of a good teacher. But he didn’t treat us like adults either, which is what made him a great one. He treated us like teenagers, who still didn’t know much of anything but hated to be reminded of it. He granted us the perfect balance of guidance and independence in his class; and, because it was the last advanced English course before APs had us training for one big test, said class essentially consisted of him doing whatever the hell he wanted. We covered Williams both Golding and Shakespeare, discussing how Lord of the Flies might have been had girls been allowed on the trip, and whether or not the Bard hated Jews; he taught us literary terms using examples in anecdotes rather than pure definitions (the tale used to explain “understatement”, for instance, was one of his uncle’s war stories, and in telling it O’Donnell accidentally taught us “harrowing” as well); he somehow, somehow made grade-level sentence treeing interesting, through puns and mnemonics and doodles; and, in all scenarios, he always held a soft spot for a good word.

On a personal level, as I hinted at in the beginning, Mr. O’Donnell shaped my love of etymology. One of his many projects involved researching various word roots and seeing how many modern words we could find from them, deducting points for false leads (in the example given, the unrelated “tortoise” almost did me in) He taught me what the Oxford English Dictionary was. He taught me how to research. And for a second there, thanks to him, I wanted to be a teacher.

Fortunately for America’s youth this sentiment passed, but not before I started checking out which colleges had good teaching programs. One that stuck out was William and Mary, initially mentioned for its five year undergrad/masters program, and even when my desire to teach faded, the school itself had a stubborn grip. In that way, Mr. O’Donnell is very much the reason I went to the school I did, and had four wonderful years of education in linguistics (which, you recall, he also inspired), and made some of my best friends, and heard about the Denver Publishing Institute, and ended up in New York working at an amazing bookstore with an honest-to-god goal in life. If you met me after tenth grade, and like anything about me, chances are you should be thanking Bob O’Donnell.

But the true testament to OD’s greatness is that my story is one of hundreds, of many before me and too few after me. And all of us were crafted by a different aspect of the man; he could talk about anything, and make you feel like you knew more than you did through osmosis, and give you confidence and set you on your way like you were the only student that mattered. One day in my eleventh grade English class, the magnificent Linda Meer mentioned the term “renaissance man” in passing. By the time she was finished defining it for us, we all had the same thought. Oh. Like Mr. O’Donnell.

I love you. I miss you. And I still want to be you when I grow up.

After an excellent weekend spent with core leaders from four congregations, it occurs to me that every spiritual community could benefit from asking the following three essential questions:

• Why does our congregation exist?
• What breaks God’s heart in our community?
• Name one spiritually transformative moment you personally experienced in the last year.

Three simple questions.

Our responses  determine the future existence of our congregations – small or large, rich or poor, Protestant or Roman Catholic or Orthodox.  That is all.

I’ve long lost the source of the image above but would love the source if you know it.

Hospitality, relationships, and community are hot topics in spiritual communities these days.

John Vest recently wrote here about his hopes for rebooting our Presbytery by relationship building using the community organizing method of relational meetings.  Henry Brinton’s excellent book on hospitality offers interesting generational insights on how hospitality has been taught (and not taught) through recent history.

But here’s a universal issue I’ve noticed:  we who tout relationship-building and hospitality are – ourselves – often relationship averse with certain kinds of people.  It’s cool to be tolerant towards certain kinds of people, but are we intolerant towards the uncool?

I hear over and over again – across generations, genders, races, sexual orientations, theological beliefs and political parties:

Is there a place for me in your circle?

• A heavily pierced 30-something couple walked into a traditional 11 am church service to find themselves basically ignored –  even though this was a congregation of “progressive” and “welcoming” believers
• A 70-something retired man hoped to join a group of young leaders sipping coffee at a church function, only to have the group literally turn their backs on him so that he’d join another table
• A 90 year old lifelong church member, after suffering a stroke, sat alone on the sofa in her church fellowship hall while her healthier friends laughed together on the other side of the room
• A transgender woman wanted to meet with the Women’s Bible Study in her church but was gently told that “this is not really for you“
• A Black hospital patient who was served communion by the pastor of his White roommate during a pastoral care visit, later asked his roommate about his church saying he might like to visit, but was literally told that he would be uncomfortable at that church because “we don’t really have Black people in our congregation.”

These are all true stories I’m sorry to say.

This doesn’t mean that every person has to be a part of every group and every tribe.  But if we are serious about connecting with The Other, welcoming strangers, and building relationships, we need to realize that none of us is as tolerant and friendly as we’d like to think we are.

I especially notice this between generations in the church.  When younger generations announce that “everything has to change” older generations seem to hear “we are no longer welcome here.”  When older generations cling to familiar forms of faith, younger generations seem to think “there is no place for someone like me.”

We can’t simultaneously say we want to build relationships and then ignore some of the people with whom we are supposed to be building those relationships.  Either we welcome everyone  or we don’t.

Imagine how church would change if we welcomed even those who offended us, bored us, confused us, or angered us.  Imagine if we welcomed even those who are not among the cool kids.