A Church for Starving Artists

I know someone who is recovering from surgery and she’s blessed with a wide assortment of generous friends who brought food, drove her to follow-ups, spent the night, bought her groceries, and entertained her cats.  One person lives half way across the country and dropped everything to come be with her.  Although she is part of a church community, nobody in her support network is in her church.  No Venn Diagram necessary.  They are completely separate entities.

I have another friend whose closest friends are exactly the same as her church friends.  When she moved, the church friends moved her.  When she was sick, the church friends brought soup.  When she was pregnant, the church friends threw a shower.  One of her first tasks as a new DC person was to find her tribe and she immediately went the church route.  Her best friends are her church friends.

The difference is clearly about relationship.  If you are part of a church in which people truly know each other, hang out together apart from Sundays, and can express their ugliest frustrations and doubts as well as their generic “prayer concerns” without being cast out or judged, then real friendship will ensue.

I remember a new church member – a while back – who, on the day she joined the congregation – said, “I have friends already.  I joined a church to figure out what I believe.”  It sounded strange to me.  Why wouldn’t you figure out what you believe with your friends?

Jesus modeled being friends with “the other” which implies that it’s not only okay, but it’s actually Christlike to have friends who don’t do church.  The hope is that people who don’t follow Jesus notice in our behavior what it looks like to follow Jesus.  Or something like that.

So what about your experience?  Are your closest friends part of your spiritual community?

We noticed last weekend in Williamsburg, that pineapples figure prominently in decorating.  We saw pineapples on fountains, door knockers, statuary, and paintings.  Pineapples are, of course, symbols of hospitality, but we did some research to figure out if Colonial Williamsburg “invented” the pineapple as a hospitality symbol.

Nope.

According to Wiki – Answers (which is not like researching it in Swem Library, but time was limited), Christopher Columbus was presented with a pineapple by the locals on the island of Guadelupe in 1493 as a Welcome to Our Island gift.  And then Columbus killed them.

Actually, the story is more complicated than that, but what is indeed true is that Columbus named the island Santa María de Guadalupe de Extremadura even though the island was already called “Karukera” (The island of beautiful waters) by the Arawak people who had lived there for almost 1200 years.  And never mind that Columbus is credited by some historians  as “inventing the pineapple.”

And so, now the truth has somewhat spoiled pineapples for me – at least as symbols of welcome.  They remain delicious but I can’t forget that there is a dark back story.

This is one of my problems as someone trying to shift the Institutional Church into the 21st Century.

As I visit congregations with all the accoutrements  of The Traditional Church, hearing from them how important it is for their pastors to wear robes, stoles, and collars, for their children to attend Sunday School, and for their sanctuary to have pews, I find myself being – if not an ecclesiastical Debbie Downer, then at least an ecclesiastical Howard Zinn.

The origins of clergy attire can be traced to the late Roman Empire. The first Christian leaders dressed like everybody else.

Sunday School was “invented”  – if you will – in the late 18th Century.  This means, of course, that there was no Sunday School as we know it for the first 1800 years of Christianity, and so if someone says, “We can’t be a church unless we have traditional Sunday School,” please remind them that Sunday School is a fairly new thing.

Pews were introduced into church sanctuaries in the 14th Century.  Check out this post by Dan Kimball on the subject.  When I visited cave churches in Goreme, Turkey a few years ago, it was clear that people sat in a circle around the room/cave.  Imagine a house church at the Flintstones’ house and you get the picture.

The beautiful part of being the church is that it is fluid and free and all about becoming/being a community of faith.  Even if our priests are bedecked in perfect clergy tabs, and our Sunday School program is stellar, and our pews are carved by artisans, we aren’t the church unless we are a community of faith seeking to make disciples of all nations and loving God and each other.  My heaviest burdens come from meeting with wonderful people who don’t yet realize that being the church has nothing to do with stained glass windows, especially if they don’t love their neighbors.

So, I really don’t mean to ruin it for everyone, but I long for all of us to know the truth and let the truth set us free.

I’ll be spending Mothers’ Day with my kids at the college graduation of SBC.  My mother-in-law will also be there.  But my own mom will not be there.  She passed away from breast cancer about the time I became a mother myself, and it broke me in a very real way.  Mothers’ Day has been a day of mourning for about 23 years.

The best moms are teachers, cheerleaders, healers, spiritual guides, and much more.  The worst moms are destroyers and much more.

Parents make such a difference.  We can really  screw up kids’ lives and it’s an underrated miracle when we don’t.

“Just love ’em,” my Dad used to say, but figuring out the most loving thing to do is an ongoing and arduous task.  When people say that “Motherhood is the toughest job in the world,” I shiver a bit.  It sounds too self-righteous or defensive to me.  Being a human being is the toughest job in the world.  It’s also the most glorious.

Being human means taking in this amazing life God has given us.  Learning and growing and being the people God created us to be.  On the way to Williamsburg for this graduation, driving east through the hollows and notches of West Virginia, I said to HH that it would have been fun to major in geography or geology and learn how those hollows and notches were formed.  What’s so wonderful about attending our children’s college graduations is that – by grace – they have connected with people whose ponderings match their own.  They’ve worked under professors with unique expertise and curious minds who have mentored them.  It has been one of my greatest joys to witness this in my children’s lives.

And so, instead of missing my own Mom on Mothers’ Day this year, I will try to celebrate being a mom.  I’ll try.  It’s not been about me – all these Mothers’ Days Past.  But as we celebrate another graduation, I’m so, so grateful I’ve been able to be the mother of some extraordinary human beings.  Thanks be to God.

I once preached in an historic church sanctuary and – in the middle of my sermon –  I noticed a small tour group in the balcony.  The tour guide was wearing a baseball cap and carrying one of those red pointer lights so that she could point out the architectural highlights of the space.  I am not kidding.  To her credit, she did not have a megaphone.

What they don’t teach in seminary is how to deal with a tour group in worship.  And increasingly we have spiritual tourists in our worship gatherings. 

It used to be true that everybody in the pews self-identified as Christian.  They ascribed to The Apostles’ Creed and “believed the same thing.”  Of course, I think if we had hypnotized those people, we would have found out that their theology was more diverse.  I remember one nonegenarian – a life long Christian – disclosing before she died that she “never believed in the resurrection of the dead.”  She also had a hard time with the Trinity.  And yet she stood and recited the creed each week like a new confirmand.

In my previous congregation, a small group of Turkish Muslims from the Rumi Forum regularly sat in the pews on Sunday mornings to meet Christians and make interfaith connections.  Although they didn’t sing the hymns or receive communion, they occasionally brought Turkish treats for coffee hour.  On Ashura they brought Noah’s pudding for everybody.   Nice. 

This is not to say we were or wanted to be an interfaith spiritual community, but the truth is that – on any given Sunday – many of our worshipping congregations include people who would not consider themselves Christian.  There might be a Jewish spouse sitting there to support the family.  There are definitely seekers and spiritual anthropologists in the pews in many of our congregations. 

Our job as preachers is to proclaim the Word as we always have, but recognizing that some (many?) in our pews are not believers.  For more information on this shift from a Believe-Behave-Belong culture to a Belong-Behave-Believe culture, re-read the appropriate chapters in Phyllis Tickle or Diana Butler Bass’ books.

People want, first and foremost, in our disjointed culture to belong to a community.  I love what Rob Bell said in Velvet Elvis about our 21st Century duty to be Tour Guides, interpretting where God is in daily life.  This happens best in a community, I believe, and we start by welcoming people into our community, even if they seem to be Hindu or agnostic or Muslim.  We teach them what Jesus said and did.  We show the love of God. 

Two last things:

Almost every church sanctuary uses the standard stage/audience architectural arrangement.  (We usually call “the stage” a chancel and the “audience” a congregation.)  Outsiders come in and it looks, to them, like an auditorium or a theatre, and so – accordingly – they expect the person up front to perform.  A sermon and worship leadership is not a performance.  In the PCUSA we are called Teaching Elders for a reason.  We teach and we lead, but we give our people the wrong idea if they come to assume that it’s a one way experience.  We teach them to be observers, an audience.  In my opinion, responsive litanies don’t make the point clear enough.  Being part of the worshipping community involves participation.  If you are present, you belong.  And you are expected to do more than sit there and applaud stirring music.  We want you to engage, reflect, speak, sing, pray – in whatever way you choose.

Secondly, too many of our churches today are indeed museums of what once was.  Tourists come in to see the extraordinary art crafted in carvings, fixtures, windows, and murals.  But there is no connection to God’s glory or the profound spiritual meaning of those details.  They tell a story, and we pray that the story is about more than a 20th Century industrialist wanting to build a monument to himself.  It’s our job to tell a different story.  To be Spiritual Tour Guides – and not only in sanctuaries. 

Where is God in all this?  What’s the meaning of all this?  I believe people are wondering.

The wise and insightful MaryAnn McKibben Dana rightly teaches that the church is not dying; it’s pregnant.  Read this and share generously.  I won’t go into all the points MA makes but, as she says, pregnancy is not always comfortable or easy.

Of course, a baby will eventually be born and we all want a healthy baby.  But if we don’t follow healthy practices, we could end up with something less than a healthy church.  What we don’t want is the church equivalent of a crack baby – the result of trying to satisfy our most addictive impulses without considering the consequences.

 Let’s also keep in mind that the average age that someone gives birth in the US these days is 27.5 years old.    The “parents” of this future church, I believe,  are between the ages of 20 and 40, more or less.

I write this post in hopes that those of us who are too old to be new parents will recognize our role in the 21st Century Church:  We are the grandparents.

Our fertility diminishes as we age.  This doesn’t mean that people over 40 – or even over 80 – have no creativity and energy.  We just have less of it.

Although I am not a grandparent, I’m in the right age demographic.  [To be perfectly honest, I’ve already started pondering what my future Grandmother Name will be if I ever get to be a grandmother.  I like “Grand Jan” but my kids have vetoed it.]

Although I have no grandchildren, HH and I  have a grand-dog and we  noticed  that – the last time the grand-dog visited – we unintentionally made things difficult for the dog’s parents.  We ruined the dog’s schedule.  We fed him too many treats.  I don’t want to be a problem grandmother.  And I don’t want to be a problem grandmother for the church we are all anxiously expecting.

It occurs to me that those in my and older generations need to keep something in the forefront of our minds as the church we love is pregnant:

The Next Church Will Not Be Our Baby.

We will have great ideas for how to care for it and treasure it.  We might even be able to help pay for its nurture and its future.  But it’s not our baby.

 This is not to say we will not be ideal grandparents.  But it’s possible that we could overstep our bounds.  We could chuckle at the disciplines the younger generations have chosen to follow. We might want to talk incessantly about the way we did it.  But let’s not.

 There is enormous wisdom grandparents can share.  We are seasoned leaders and we definitely see that some things never seem to change.  But our role is shifting.

It’s not our baby, and – in terms of cosmic stewardship – the baby doesn’t belong to the younger generations either, any more than young parents “own” their sons and daughters.  The future church is God’s baby and our job is to be excellent stewards.  And prepare for a healthy birth.

Note: I looked everywhere for an image with darker skin for this post.  I have a feeling our baby will be a darker shade of humanity.

Dear N.C. Family,

When we were kids going out with friends, Henry used to say, “You’re taking a good name with you.  Make sure you bring it back.”  

I won the genetic lottery when two fine families from Prospect Presbyterian Church united in marriage in 1954.  Two families with two good names. I stopped counting at 60 how many Edmiston-Linker-Miller-Overcash-Johnston relatives I have who still live in North Carolina.  

The Edmiston side still meets here every June and I am profoundly humbled when asked to offer thanks before the meal – especially because I know that many members of my extended family do not believe that scripture affirms the leadership of women in ministry.  And yet everyone is gracious and welcoming of me.  I am so thankful to be in our family.

It is in this family that I came to follow Christ.  In this family, I learned how to study scripture and pray, and so did you.  And yet one of the reasons we don’t talk politics at family gatherings is because we disagree.  We vote differently in elections.  We interpret scripture differently in terms of what we believe God is calling us to do and be.

With this in mind – and at the risk of offending people I love in North Carolina – I am prayerfully asking you to take the name of Jesus into the voting booth this Tuesday.  Because it is already illegal for same-sex couples to marry, my prayer is that – no matter what you believe about gay people – you will, please, vote against Amendment 1.  It is unnecessarily mean-spirited and it will hurt people we love.

My authority comes from Scripture, but – again – we interpret Scripture differently.  Jesus consistently sided with the weak, the disenfranchised, the other.  We’re  talking Samaritans, the bleeding woman, the Syro-Phoenician woman, lepers, and tax collectors.  In other words, Jesus loved and reached out to foreigners, unclean people who were not allowed in the temple, and sinners.

Again, no matter what you believe about homosexuality, marriage is already defined in N.C. as between one man and one woman.  Gay couples can’t be married to each other.  And men and women can’t be married to more than one person at a time.  It’s already in the law.

As a pastor, I’ve dealt with many pastoral situations that would be negatively impacted by this amendment if it passes.  For example, there were two 90-something women in my church in Virginia who had come to DC to serve the government during WWII, never married, and retired together in a single-bedroom apartment, because they were extremely frugal.  Or so I thought.  When E. went into the hospital, I drove M. to visit her each day and we asked the nurse to please phone M. if E. took a turn for the worse.  We put a lime green post-it in E’s medical file so they couldn’t miss it.

One morning, M. phoned me at 7 am and told me that E. had died in the night and they had not called her because she was “not related” to E.  Instead they had called a great-niece in S.C. whom E. had not seen in decades.  I drove M. to the hospital and they had already taken E’s body away.  To make a long story a little shorter, M. told me that she and E. were actually a couple.  They had been together for over 60 years.  “Do you know what I’m telling you?” this pillar of our church said to me.  “I’ve just lost half of my body.”

M. and E. were never connected via civil union or any other official status.  It’s not legal in Virginia.  And yet, in the name of freedom and compassion, don’t we believe that we should be allowed to share our lives with anyone we wish – and let  God sort it out, if we ourselves find it wrong?

I see that Billy Graham has asked people to vote FOR Amendment 1 and I have enormous respect for this man.   But I also know, from Montreat friends, how frail he is and I wonder if he really made that statement or if someone made it for him.  The photograph is clearly from his younger, healthier days and the truth is that Amendment 1 is not about the definition of marriage.    Again, N.C. has already defined it.

At a San Francisco Crusade in 1997 Billy Graham stated: “There are other sins. Why do we jump on that sin  [homosexuality] as though it’s the greatest sin?…What I want to preach about in San Francisco is the love of God. People need to know that God loves them no matter what their ethnic background or sexual orientation. I have so many gay friends, and we remain friends” (“Graham Welcomes Gays at San Francisco,” Christian News, Oct. 20, 1997, p. 7).   This is also a wonderful piece done in 2005.

The God I trust in wants all children to have health care,  all people – even those with whom we differ – to have secure home lives, and all people to be able to make faithful choices.

You are taking the name of Jesus into the voting booth with you Tuesday.  And I respectfully and prayerfully ask that you consider making the same choices Jesus made when he came in contact with  the maligned of his time.

Nobody has ever come to Christ because of exclusion or mean-spiritedness.   People come to Jesus because of grace.

You are my family no matter what, but I can’t live with myself without sharing what I believe Jesus would want us to do.  Please prayerfully consider voting against Amendment 1 on Tuesday.

Your sister/cousin/aunt/in-law in Christ,  Jan

I covet your comments here, especially if you are – or ever have been – an Associate Pastor and/or a Head of Staff/Senior Pastor.

What is your experience with salary disparity between Associate Pastors and Senior Pastors?  There is disparity, it seems, between male and female clergy.  Here‘s some research from The Episcopal Church about that.

There is disparity between pastors of small churches and pastors of large churches.  Check out this article.

But I’m very concerned about Senior Pastors who earn twice as much as their Associate Pastor colleagues.  Is a 50-something Head of Staff really that much more valuable or working that much harder than the 30-something Associate Pastor?  I get it that a pastor fresh out of seminary who has little or no experience preaching, teaching, offering pastoral care, or moderating meetings would earn less than a seasoned pastor at whose desk the buck stops.

But is it just and faithful to pay a Head of Staff $150,000/year while the Associate Pastor earns half that?  This is on my mind today.

What’s your experience?

I’m headed to a staff retreat here today and so this will be a lazy post with ideas wholly coming from a friend.

Steve Knight is someone you should know  because of  TransFORM,  Knightopia, and other projects.  While several exceptional pastors are meeting this week in Minneapolis, I’m pondering along with them from afar.  The subject is:  Funding the Missional Church.

It’s no secret that some of our congregations are barely surviving financially.  

I regularly get phone calls  from our denomination’s Board of Pensions reporting congregations that haven’t paid their pastors’ pension dues, and if someone doesn’t cover them soon, those pastors will lose their health insurance.  Often the churches simply can’t afford to pay.

Some of these struggling congregations are in the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago and their own people rely on social services and other churches to feed their families.  Nevertheless, there’s one particular church that can’t pay its pastor’s pension dues, but they offer a safe place for kids after school.  Another church can barely hire a pastor, and yet they feed hungry people breakfast every day.

Steve Knight writes about the future of church finances here after spending time with Charles LaFond  –  Canon for Congregational Life in the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.

Regarding Canon LaFond’s wisdom regarding  the future financial situation of the institutional church from Steve’s blog:

• The primary years that Episcopalians pledge and give to their church are between the ages of 50 and 70.
• Around 2015 (three years from now), the oldest Baby Boomers will begin moving out of the 50-70 age range, and the oldest Generation Xers  will begin moving into that age range.

Of course, there are two huge problems with this generational transition (which I believe will affect most aging mainline Protestant churches, not just Episcopal churches):

1. There are far fewer Gen Xers than there are Baby Boomers and older, so there’s no way we can “replace” those who will stop giving (based on the population numbers alone).
2. Generation X is the first generation that will no longer give to support anything based on affiliation (e.g., “I’m an Episcopalian/Disciple/Lutheran/Methodist/[fill in the blank], therefore I’ll give to my local [fill in the blank] church”).

Charles’ conclusion: Churches for the first time ever will need to really earn people’s participation and financial support, rather than simply expecting the “members” to remain engaged and cover all the costs.

According to Charles, “The average small church requires about $220,000 to exist with a clergy person, and I am not sure Generations X and Y are willing to pay the bills required for their wedding photos to be well-staged. I love our churches. … But I think the future of the church will be house-churches which use the church building as a meeting house.”

One of the great tweets from yesterday’s event in Minneapolis was a quote from speaker Brad Cecil:  “People stopped trusting the church to do something bigger than the church.”  

Yep.  What do you see for the future church based on these financial and generational shifts?

Once upon a time, college seniors with a call from God applied to seminary,
graduated in three years, and were ordained in their mid-twenties to serve as assistant or associate pastors in large institutional churches or as solo pastors in rural or small town institutional churches.  They were almost always male.  They usually married young. And they usually had children that they raised in the church.

About the time I felt God’s nudge, things were changing a bit:

• More women were feeling called to serve the church as pastors.
• Those women often needed to attend seminaries near their working husbands (which means they were not always free to relocate to attend a denominational seminary.)
• Some of those women didn’t follow their call to seminary immediately after college because they were raising their children, or they were supporting their husband’s careers, or they were unaware that professional ministry was even an option for their gender.
• Some men were increasingly taking different paths to seminary as well.
• Culture was changing.
• Church was changing.

It used to be true that all future pastors followed essentially the same path to serve the church professionally, but today seminarians are more diverse – and not only in terms of age and ethnicity.  Life situations are wildly varied among today’s future pastors.

For starters, fewer people are preparing to be future pastors, but that post is for another day.

This post is about something else:  Our seminarians and candidates for professional ministry are increasingly exceptional – in every way.

Our local Commission for the Preparation for Ministry  (the entity that oversees the process towards ordination for Teaching Elders/Pastors/Ministers of the Word and Sacrament in the PCUSA) was discussing recently the fact that our students and seminary graduates are increasingly asking for exceptions to the requirements.  Many have very good reasons.  Maybe they need to take field education in a foreign country because of family responsibilities.  Or maybe they need to figure out an accelerated course of study.  Or maybe they can only take Clinical Pastoral Education in a setting on the other end of the country.

Life is more complicated these days and sometimes this means exceptions are necessary.  This doesn’t mean we toss requirements that are merely inconvenient or difficult.  It means we prepare people in the best possible way for professional ministry based on their personal needs and situations.

Again, this is about traditional preparation for ministry.  There is a valid conversation in spiritual communities today that seminary may not be possible, practical, or necessary for all professional church leaders.  While I believe that there are gaps in seminary curricula today (e.g. in teaching missional ecclesiology or how to start new churches) I still value seminary education as an important tool for preparing people to serve God in spiritual communities professionally.

Seminary education is shifting.  From financial struggles to fewer applicants to cultural tsunamis, the seminary of 20th Century  and the seminary of the 21st Century need to do things differently, if they are going to be effective.

And in the meantime, we’ll continue to make exceptions as needed.  There’s more than one way to equip the saints for professional ministry.  And permission-giving is often an act of grace.

Image source.

I hope you will check out these  books  by friends  who serve the church by day and write by night (or the other way around.)

Pastors of the future – we are told – will have day jobs that involve work beyond the institutional church.  Pastors of the future might be nurses or teachers or barristas or community organizers by day and pastors by night (evening worship?) or on the weekends.  None but the Biggest Steeple Churches will be able to hire professional pastors full time.  At least this is what we are told.

As a person whose salary is covered by multiple churches via their per capita payments, I realize that my position is not a sure thing in the years to come. Congregations may increasingly refuse to pay their portion for reasons ranging from 1) not being able to afford  to pay $30 or more per member to 2) not experiencing that “higher judicatories” (the Diocese or Presbytery or District) are all that helpful.  So, why should congregations support them/us?

I have had several writing projects on the burners for years now, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how people work full time jobs and also write books/screenplays, especially if they have spouses they would like to spend time with, children they want to raise, and houses to clean.  My current position involves a 45 minute commute each way, and I have tried writing on the train, but then I have to haul a laptop (albeit a 5 pound laptop) for the mile and half walk from the train to the office.  Yes, it sounds like I’m whining and I am.

Writing or exercise?  Writing or movie with HH?  Writing or baking cookies for my kids in college?  These are my daily choices and usually writing doesn’t win – except for the spiritual discipline of writing these posts.

We are all looking for creative ways to balance our lives.  And life varies as the seasons change.

I really thought I’d have lots of extra time when everybody went to college.  But now, my commute is much longer than when the kids were home and it starts at 6:45 am.  And I still have night meetings.

Not looking for any suggestions from you, but wondering about your day job.  

• Do you long to do something in addition to what you do most of the time?
• Are you hoping to ditch your day job after you get your big break in writing or music or acting or some other creative endeavor?