A Church for Starving Artists

Perhaps this will become a weekly column:  “Overheard in Church in the Last Week.”  

This is what random people have shared with me in the course of doing professional Christian ministry in the past week:

• “I just want to come to church, sit in a comfortable pew, hear a good sermon, and go home.”
• “I’m preaching on the high holy days of Associate Pastors.”  (The Sunday after Easter)
• “Could you ask our pastor not to cry during the sermons?“

My place of employment now has new digs.  And with a new office comes:

• Re-potted plants
• New neighbors
• New view
• Cleared out files
• New coffee shops/restaurants to check out

My plants now have a cool ledge on my exposed brick wall with huge windows and they are so happy.  I might get cataracts – there’s so much sun in there.   Considering wearing sunglasses all day long to compliment the loft-esque qualities of our cool new space, since I’m feeling kind of hipster now.

Instead of being the only folks in the building, we now share space with assorted secular entities.  Our neighbors include a University of Illinois-Chicago office, a computer software company, and a pizza restaurant.  There are others too, but I haven’t met them yet.  On move-in day, I had the following elevator conversation with a guy named Steve:

Me:  Hi.  We are the new neighbors.

Steve:  Hi.  I’m Steve.  I work for UIC.

Me:  Hi Steve. I’m Jan.  I work for The Presbytery of Chicago.

Steve:  Hi Jan.  What’s the Presbytery of Chicago?

Me:  We work for the Presbyterian Church.

Steve:  ?

Me:  It’s part of the church.  The whole church.  Like a diocese, only Protestant.  And we don’t have bishops.

Steve:  So you’re Catholic?

Me:  No.  We’re Protestant.  Presbyterians.  The ones who protested the practices of the Church back in the 16th Century.

(We have now left the elevator and are standing outside in the wind.)

Steve:  ? So, you’re like a non-profit?

Me:  Yes, we’re like a non-profit.

Really.  This was our exact conversation.  (Note to friends:  nobody cares that we are part of the church.)

We now have a new view which reminds us every day that there is a big world out there that  doesn’t care that we are part of the church.

We have shredded literally tons of paper.  I read many of those files before they were shredded and now I understand – even better than before – why the institutional church has issues.

I have even more new friends to meet in the Greek Town eating establishments.  The people at Artopolis and Meli are among my new pals.  This is one of the most fun parts of being in a new space.

Just as Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem, we have set our faces in a new direction.  We hope it results in resurrection.

Bette Midler sang about it.

During our recent Clergywomen’s Roundtable – the preaching group I’ve been a part of for over a decade – we talked about finding friends.  One clergy sister talked about trying to find a friend in her new position in a new town – someone with whom she can totally be herself.  She literally said to a fun person in town, “I need a friend.”  This worked, but it doesn’t always work.

(In the third grade PM awkwardly came up to me and announced that we would be Best Friends.  It was weird.)

Here’s what I’ve found about friends as a clergywoman:

– It’s hard to be friends with parishioners. Yes, I’ve had parishioners who were friends in a real way, but the truth is that I am always their pastor.  I’ve found that they really don’t want to hear about the pastor’s burdens.  I’ve also found that on my day off, I can’t hang out with parishioners with whom I am friendly because we always end up talking about church.

– It’s hard to be friends as The Pastor’s Wife.  With my real friends, I can share pretty much everything, but if I might be – in any way – disclosing information about my family (the pastor’s family) that feels private . . . well, I just can’t.  My spouse is still their pastor.

I can be friends with other clergy because we share a similar pastoral wavelength.  Someone can say, “angry elder” and the rest of us nod.  We’ve all been there.  Especially with clergywomen, we’ve had similar experiences in terms of comments on our hair and shoes, dating issues (when we were single), funeral directors who are Dirty Old Men, etc.

I can also be friends with non-church people who find the whole church thing to be an anthropological curiosity.  I treasure my friend LB with whom I’ve shared many clergy mistakes and stories I can’t tell anyone else.  Our commonality is our daughters rather than church.  It’s a tremendous blessing.

So, here I am in a new place and I miss the friends I knew after 22 years in DC.  The Divas.  The Lex Girls.  The Busboys Crowd.  I miss the HGers (okay – they were part of my church, but not in any traditional way.)  I miss yoga with S and S – followed by frozen yogurt in Georgetown.  I miss the soccer moms and dads.

New friends will be made here in The Prairie State.  But it takes time.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.

From “Stepping Backwards” by Adrienne Rich.

Thanks be to God for the poets of the world.

Image above is a photograph of Adrienne Rich reading her poems in Bryant Park,  NYC.

One of my favorite parts of Velvet Elvis is the story about people leaving the church parking lot feeling cranky because it was crowded and it took too long to exit.   Rob Bell announced the next week, “If you are here and you aren’t a Christian, we are thrilled to have you in our midst.  We want  you to feel right at home.  But if you are here and you’re a Christian and you can’t even be a Christian in the parking lot, please don’t go out into the world and tell people you’re a Christian. You’ll screw it up for the rest of us.”

Ask anybody who has left the institutional church and they will regale you with stories about:

• mean people
• stingy people
• abusive people 
• bullies
• people who miss the point

Hypocrites are the least of our problems.

Some of us – institutional church people –  find ourselves in the throes of church conflicts or divisions, or even churches leaving their denominations over theological differences.  It’s exhausting.  And it’s distracting from what we are supposed to be doing.

Christians disagree with each other and with others who are not Christians.  Nevertheless, Jesus said something about loving our enemies which includes people with whom we disagree and/or don’t like very much.   It’s rather outrageous to observe people who self-identity with the One who said, “Pray for those who persecute you” and yet they proceed to shred their their pastor behind their backs.    It’s rather stunning to hear people engage in ugly parking lot conversations about other members of their own faith community.  I have personally observed:

• church elders laughing during prayers for their pastor
• a church leader making fun of his pastor’s desire to take a day off
• one pastor denigrating another pastor on the same staff during a church meeting
• a church leader sabotaging another church leader’s reputation

It’s enough to make me wonder why we we stick with  such congregations.  And yet, we can be healthy churches.

Healthy churches hold each other accountable and seek reconciliation.  And my job involves trying to help congregations become or stay healthy.  Sometimes it’s tiring.

I read this article yesterday and can’t get it out of my mind.  

Really.  Abdellah Taïa has been on my mind in the same way that I was haunted by Hassan in The Kite Runner – only Abdellah’s story is not fiction.

This is how God’s call works.  When we can’t let something go that stirs us, troubles us – this is how God tells us to serve in a new way.

Abdellah Taïa grew up as a Muslim in Morocco – a child who was different.  He was gay in a culture where even your family would not protect you, where nobody would dare save you from violent, ignorant men who came to your house in the night.  As I read his article in the NY Times, all I could think about was that – if only Christians were there –  he would be saved.  This is what we believe as followers of Jesus.  Or at least this is what I believe Jesus taught us.

Sadly, 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers say that Christianity is “anti-homosexual” according to a 2007 Barna study.  Where do they get this perception?  They get it everywhere.

There are many of my brothers and sisters in Christ who would condemn Abdellah exactly like his Muslim community.   And this makes me crazy – that people who share the name of Jesus with me come to this conclusion either because of their interpretation of Scripture or “what they’ve heard” Jesus says about homosexuality.

So here is my new calling (and note that 1- calls change seasonally and 2- we can have more than one call at a time):  I want people like Abdellah and his family and friends in Salé, Morocco and all those who believe that God hates GBLTQ people to be saved from that heresy.  I have believed condemning GBLTQ people is a heresy for a while now – frankly after some wrestling with God.  But perhaps God is calling me to do more.

What situation is gnawing at you that God might be calling you to help make on earth as it is in heaven?

Image is the cover of Abdellah Taïa’s book Salvation Army.  When Abdellah left Morocco in 1998, he stayed at the Salvation Army hotel in Paris and found angels there.  Also, do yourself a favor and watch this.

Come, follow me
Matthew 4:19

I believe in The Call.  I believe God calls some to pick up and go serve far from the familiar, while others are called to serve the exact neighborhood where we happen to live.

In this economy, and perhaps even when the economy is strong, I watch professional ministers look for the best paying job rather than a “call.”  A friend once told me that following a true call is a luxury he can’t afford.  He needed to provide for his family and so he took the most financially lucrative job he could find.

I understand this, practically speaking, but there is nothing quite like serving a community where the call to be there is abundantly clear.  I don’t ever want to be in a place where I haven’t been called.  It’s too hard on my soul.

Several friends and I were talking recently about The Cost of Our Call.  What if we’ve clearly been called to a place where the whole family has to move to a new part of the world.  Kids are plucked out of schools they love.  Spouses have to leave their own jobs and leave pensions behind.  Maybe we can’t sell our homes or we must leave close friends and family.  There is often a great cost when we follow God’s calling.  To a person, this group had paid a high cost when they’d followed where God had led them.

Years ago when two missionaries  were kidnapped in Afghanistan, a friend commented that they were asking for trouble by going to a place like Afghanistan.  I remember thinking, “But what if they were called there?  What if that voice whispering in their ears or that deep urge they couldn’t shake made going there irresistible?”  Nobody with a Bible can dispute that God sometimes calls people to go to dangerous, unfriendly places.

Like Elder Price in The Book of Mormon, we might long to be called to Orlando, but sometimes God calls us to Uganda.  Or maybe we are truly called to go move to Orlando.

Are you finding that you and the professional clergy you know are following authentic calls or are we simply taking positions that we can live with?  Hope you’ll share.

I’ve shared before that I have a friend who is a kosher-keeping Jew but she doesn’t believe in God.  She is lovely.  She is raising her children in the Jewish faith in terms of traditions and cultural identification, but they also know that Mom doesn’t believe.  This article by Mira Sucharov speaks to some of this.

Over the weekend, I was asked about the faith of my own young adult kids.  “Do they practice their faith?” I was asked, and my answer was “yes” although they are still navigating the institutional church part.  I returned the question to the young man who asked, and he shared that he wasn’t sure what he believed, but he wanted to raise his kids in the Jewish faith if he one day was married with children.

I know people who self-identify as Muslims but do not practice their faith even during Ramadan.  I have many, many friends who self-identify as Christian but they never gather for worship with other Christians, nor do they read their Bibles or talk openly about their faith.  What they love about the faith is more about sentimentalism and family traditions.  They fondly remember relationships with older couples who were like their grandparents.  They loved their family tradition of attending worship together on Christmas Eve.  They have warm memories of their own Vacation Bible School experiences. 

But they do not practice spiritual disciplines.

It’s almost easier to make the shift from non-believer with no religious upbringing to devout believer than to make the shift from cultural believer to devout believer.  So many of us self-identify as something, but it’s in name only.

Do you agree?

It’s good to be home after a week of study leave and then a weekend of NCAA
basketball.  The basketball was a fun break replete with crushed seeds and broken brackets.  And study leave was a feast of spiritual and theological conversations and idea-sharing.

One great idea from B. for a preaching series:  Reality.  Or actually: Reality TV Shows.

Even if we don’t watch Reality TV, the sermon ideas are endless.  Just check this out and let your imagination go.

Big Brother (The Parable of The Prodigal Son)

Biggest Loser (Palm Sunday)

So You Think You Can Dance  (Miriam)

Wife Swap (David and Bathsheba)

The Voice (The Baptism of Jesus)

Many of us are excellent at distracting ourselves from those things we don’t want to think about or grapple with in the reality of our lives.  Maybe we watch basketball games.  Or maybe we watch Reality TV.  But we all reach a point when we crave something real that helps us make sense out of life.   The irresistible truth about Christianity is that we believe God entered  – and continues to enter – real life.  It makes me want to get back to work in the morning.

Image was seen in Indiana on the way home Monday.

My birthday celebrations this weekend have included seeing some extraordinary NCAA basketball.  We saw four regional games yesterday in Greensboro, N.C. that some have called the best series in NCAA history.  Upsets.  Buzzer beaters.  Stunning victories.  Heart-wrenching losses.  But, hey, it’s just basketball.

The March Madness that really matters involves Syria, Kony, Europe’s Debt Crisis, The Global Water Crisis, Sudan . . .

The list of world crises are endless.  And so in the throes of suffering, we in the Christian tradition, find ourselves in the middle of Lent.  The March Madness for church leaders involve expansive Lenten schedules – extra Bible studies, extra worship services, extra responsibilities with that voice in the back of our minds reminding us that Easter Is Coming and we are considering that all-important Holy Week schedule and a bang-up Easter sermon.

The best kind of Lenten observances involve the world around us.  Sometimes it feels like madness:  the distracting busy-ness, the eye-glazing videos from the most violent places on our planet, the compassion fatigue.

Our calling is about inserting glimpses of the kingdom of God into this madness which will continue past the month of March.  The NCAA finals will be played on Holy Monday – April 2.  Between now and then, and long afterwards,  there will be Upsets.  Buzzer beaters.  Stunning victories.  Heart-wrenching losses.  We have a lot of work to do.

Image is of the Notre Dame mascot.