A Church for Starving Artists

I was driving to the office one morning a few years ago listening to the local radio show “Charlotte Talks” and the topic was clergy misconduct – sexual misconduct to be exact. The guest was an attorney for the Roman Catholic Church.

Misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church had resulted in the closing of many parishes and the attorney was talking about the Church’s responses to these tragedies. And then he said something that made me pull over into a parking lot.

“Actually all churches – including the Protestant ones are guilty of covering up clergy sexual misconduct.”

I immediately phoned the radio station. “My name is Jan Edmiston,” I said, “And I’m the General Presbyter in Charlotte Presbytery, and I can tell you right now that our congregations are consistently protected from clergy misconduct. We have processes for holding clergy responsible if found guilty. And we do not move misconduct pastors from church to church.” I was irked.

Every day in social media, I see the hashtag #NotADragQueen attached to stories about pastors, youth workers, and other church leaders who have been arrested for an array of sexual crimes. Many non-denominational and independent churches have no solid policy on misconduct and so the professional futures of those offenders could be bright. Who knows?

Many of our church leaders give Christianity a bad name. But not most. Definitely not all.

My point is that not all churches ignore serious boundary issues. Not even most churches.

Most pastors are honorable if imperfect servants who are currently exhausted and insecure about their professional futures. Many pastors serve congregations that cannot pay them a living wage. Many pastors make financial sacrifices to provide spiritual nourishment to God’s people. Most of the pastors I know love their parishioners – and strangers – every day.

I have enormous hope for the Church of Jesus Christ. This is a rich and blessed time to be spiritual havens for people who feel hopeless and desperate.

The future is brightest for spiritual communities that have clear policies for protecting clergy, church staff members, church members, and strangers who enter their doors/parking lots/social spaces. Policies are our friends. They keep us safe and secure so that we can be serve our neighbors and each other.

Although the opposite is widely believed, most of our churches exist to bring hope and meaning to this difficult and beautiful life. How would you rate the congregations you know to provide this hope and meaning?

Perhaps you’ve seen Jordan Harrell’s beautiful piece about Biblical Interpretation. It’s been posted on multiple social media sites. And it’s quite brilliant, especially in these days when it feels like the Bible is being weaponized more than ever.

I am an ordained, seminary-educated pastor in the PCUSA denomination. Many people do not recognize my ordination or authority based on their interpretation of the Bible. Many of us pick and choose verses to support what we already believe about everything from divorce to abortion to to spanking children.

I take the Bible seriously. Ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek were requirements for my ordination, with the expectation that I would use those languages to study specific words and phrases and contexts in the Bible from the oldest available sources.

(NOTE: No “original scrolls” of the Bible exist so when people say, “Let’s just look at the original scripture” perhaps they haven’t heard that the oldest scripture we have was discovered in 1947 in Qumran near the Dead Sea Scrolls and those scrolls were written sometime between 150 BCE to 70 CE.)

Also, those scrolls do not include the whole “Old Testament.” The oldest complete set of scrolls for the whole Hebrew scriptures found so far are The Leningrad Codex which was written in either 1008 or 1009 C.E.

There are many Christian traditions of believers who say they take the Bible seriously (Exhibit A: Congregations that call themselves “Bible Churches.”) and yet most of us use only one translation of scripture which – can we all admit – will be biased according to the theology of the translators. For example, a word in Hebrew or Greek might have multiple meanings in English but the translator has to pick one.

This makes a huge difference when the Hebrew word used to foresee the birth of the Messiah in Isaiah 7:14 is almah (עַלְמָה). This word can mean “young woman” or just “woman” or “virgin.” The person who jotted down the Gospels of Matthew and Luke translated Isaiah 7:14 to be “virgin.” Therefore we have centuries of veneration for the Blessed Virgin Mary when her virginity is based on the translation of a single word in Hebrew that could also be translated “woman.”

(Another Note: I happen to believe Mary was a virgin because God can do anything, but my faith is not dependent on Mary’s virginity.)

Okay – back to earth and taking the Bible seriously. I am a big fan of Jordan Harrell, a writer in Texas who also wrote The Deconstruction Diaries which you can read here. In her search for a deconstructed faith in Jesus, she tells this story.

In a nutshell, she had left a Church of Christ congregation and had joined a Southern Baptist congregation where they used the Awana Curriculum for teaching children. In the course of volunteering for Awana, Jordan includes this quote from one of the other Awana leaders:

“You have to be really careful about translations. I mean, some versions just totally disgust me with how many liberties they take with the Bible. It’s not even the Word of God by the time they get done with it. KJV is really the only one I trust.”

When people ask me what translation I use, I tell them that it depends. If I want an easy-to-understand version, I go with The Message which is actually not a translation although Eugene Peterson studied the Hebrew and Greek as he wrote it in conversational English. If I’m writing a sermon, I use my New Revised Version Study Bible and a Hebrew/Greek Interlinear Bible.

If I’m suggesting a translation for someone else, I suggest reading all of them. Don’t be afraid of the King James Version or the New Jerusalem Bible or the New Revised Version or the New American Standard Bible. Read them all. Look under and around and beneath all those translations and compare and contrast. And if you really want to do your research, you can learn how to read Hebrew and Greek words online.

This is a long way to get to my point: the Bible is not a weapon. I’m convinced that people who use it as a weapon don’t actually read it. They don’t take it seriously.

Someone I hope you will all check out and take seriously is Jordan Harrell. She speaks the Truth in love and she is still searching which I hope is true for each of us.

HH and I were co-pastors of a wonderful congregation in Northern Virginia for a while and I have many memories – especially from our first month there. The church had experienced an ugly split and members were feeling a whole spectrum of emotions from bitterness to anger to embarrassment to grief. At one of the first meetings, a sweet man turned to me and made this suggestion: “Let’s pretend like that never happened.”

Sometimes this approach borders on the absurd. Cindy Bolbach and I went to a worship service years ago to support a congregation after the sudden death of their 40-something pastor. His memorial service had been just the day before and – to our amazement – there was absolutely no mention of their deceased minister except during the announcements when someone said, “If you are interested in serving on a search committee for a new pastor, please see Joe.” Actually, I don’t know if it was Joe or Jane, but what I do remember is how utterly weird it was that not a single person referred to the fact that their pastor had died.

A different congregation I love recently experienced a terrible shock that left them feeling that whole spectrum of emotions again from bitterness to anger to embarrassment to grief. But instead of avoiding the truth, instead of pretending it never happened, they gathered for worship yesterday and addressed lament and heartbreak and – most of all – the joyous fact that the love of God is stronger than any disappointment, any shock, any betrayal we could ever experience. The gamut of feelings are real. The grace of God is real. Redemption and resurrection are real.

I watched a host of gifted leaders lead as perfect a worship service as I’ve ever experienced. The Holy Spirit was all over it. And it was led by people of integrity and courage.

Brene Brown was interviewed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro recently for the NYT, and I’m reminded that effective leadership is about courage. The courage to face truth rather than avoid it. The courage to hold each other accountable. The courage to have uncomfortable conversations.

These are transitional times. Everything seems to be changing. But according to Brown, an effective leader “understands urgency but is working from productive urgency” so that we aren’t just looking busy; we are creating a positive impact for the good of the whole.

People who lead by avoiding conflict, who lead by terrorizing people, who lead without being curious or having self-awareness will never be effective leaders. Now more than ever, the world needs effective leaders. Now more than ever, the Church needs effective leaders.

One of the great things about being a healthy Church is that we can look back at difficult times and honestly say that the difficult experiences brought us closer to each other and to God. That’s pretty good news.

Exactly 193 days from today, I will retire from professional ministry. Having a countdown doesn’t mean I’m bored or sad or so-ready-I-want-to-know-exactly-how-much-time-I-have left. I like a countdown. It’s also approximately 107 days away from meeting grandchild #3 and 125 days from meeting grandchild #4.

I announced my retirement a year from the day so that our Presbytery could get a Nominating Committee going in the hope that there would be a smooth transition in 2026. Although I’m a strong believer in effective Transitional Ministry for congregations, the trend now for Mid-Council Leaders in my denomination is to forego calling someone to lead Transitionally between Executives because we are all leading Transitionally. Everything from the congregation down the street to organized religion in general are in transition.

Some parish pastors give 4 weeks notice before they leave. Some give over a year’s notice. Countless pastors of a certain age will say things like “I’ll retire in 3-4 years” or “I’d like to finish ____ before retiring” and then they stay another decade.

I will have served for 45 years by the time I retire, including three seminary years of field education. We thank Labor Unions for “inventing” the weekend. And since pastors work on weekends, the Presbytery/Conference/Association/Diocese is sometimes called our union.

In a just world, we wouldn’t have to set policies about minimum wage or paid leave or Sabbath. (Note: even God created a policy about Sabbath.) But this is not a just world. Some human beings have spent generations not paying other human beings who worked in their fields and factories. After learning that we had some pastors working for less than a Jimmy Johns sandwich maker, our Presbytery had to set up minimum hourly wages for part-time, temporary pastors – and not just for full-time “permanent” pastors.

One pastor was being paid $3000/year. (Yes, he had agreed to this because “the congregation didn’t have the money to pay more” but this was a de facto decision to close that congregation sooner than later. They would never again find a pastor willing to work 20+ hours/week for that salary.)

All pastors deserve and should have a Sabbatical at least every seven years but too few get one. Sometimes it’s because the congregation resents it for their Pastor (“I don’t get three paid months to take an extra vacation.”) or because the church cannot figure out how to live without their pastor for three months. (My Presbytery has grants for that. Also, elders are called to preach and pray with training.) Sometimes pastors, themselves, won’t take the required Sabbatical for fear the congregation can indeed live without them.

So, 193 days. Being a Pastor is baked into my identity but I also have other identities that will give so much joy and meaning in the coming years. Frankly, I never thought I’d live long enough to retire. (Mom died at 55. Dad died at 60.) But here we are.

Other identities I hope to embrace post-retirement: elderly spouse, mom of middle-aged kids, Grand Jan, rabble rouser, homemade ravioli maker. Mostly I am profoundly grateful that I can retire. March 13, 2026.

Image source.

The other day, one of my colleagues intended to say “Ministers of the Word and Sacrament” which is what we call ordained clergy in the Presbyterian Church USA. But what came out were the words “Ministers of the Word and Sacrifice.”

Please note that blood sacrifices are not required of any of us – clergy, teachers, toll takers, corporate bankers or any other profession or faith tradition, unless you are part of the Baka Tribe or any small number of religious sects or cults who adhere to ancient ways.

Nevertheless some of us have been known to have terrible boundaries in terms of our work lives to the point of martyrdom or unnecessary sacrifice. I missed Senior Night at my son’s last high school lacrosse game for a Session meeting. This was a mistake. I should have missed the Session meeting – or rescheduled it.

We are not called to schedule a wedding on the day of our child’s birthday. We are not called to leave the death bed of a beloved pet in order to attend a committee meeting. We are not called to sacrifice our families for the sake of the Church. Yes, Jesus said this. And also these situations are tough. What if the holier thing is to tend to relationships?

In my 42+ years of professional ministry, I have cancelled a desperately-needed vacation to bury a beloved pillar of the church. I have also left town the weekend of the organist’s daughter’s wedding because my Mom was dying in Chapel Hill. (But I sacrificed having my clergy husband join me to say good-bye to my Mom. He stayed behind to officiate at the wedding.)

Yes, we are Ministers of Word and Sacrifice. But mostly we are Ministers of Word and Sacrament. The tricky part is discerning which of our commitments are the most holy. My first thought is that it’s all about tending to relationships.

Image is Emile the goat from the Season 2 finale of Severance. Emile was spared but other sacrifices were made.

It’s hurricane season where I live and maybe where you live too, and maybe even where hurricanes hit once in a hundred years. (Prayers continue for Western North Carolina.) The impact of natural disasters is shown almost every day on television and other news sources.

And yet, it occurs to me that some natural disasters are a result of our own human choices: building homes too close to the ocean, campfire carelessness, refusal to use the scientific knowledge God has given us to monitor earthquakes and tornados, climate change caused by burning fossil fuels and farming livestock. (Note: I personally love my car and meat but there are consequences.)

Sometimes “natural disasters” are a consequence of the unnatural choices we make – e.g. decisions which don’t align with God’s intentions. To choose greed, betrayal, selfishness, and ignorance are just a few examples. God did not create us to be greedy, to betray each other, to be selfish, to be intentionally ignorant.

Such choices inflict unnatural disaster upon individuals and families and – in Church World – whole congregations. And at the risk of sounding sexist, consider the findings of Carol Gilligan in her classic study about how men and women differ in terms of decision-making.

“When Gilligan asked women, “How would you describe yourself?” she found that women define who they are by describing relationships. Men defined themselves by separation, or the use of “I” statements.“

I’m hoping this is changing, but if campaigns to bolster hegemonic masculinity continue to thrive, then male people might continue to think first in terms of “I” and “me.” I would hope, instead, that most men would consider others before they make big decisions. “Is this choice good for my kids?” “Is this option the best for my partner?” “Is this course of action going to benefit my neighbors?” “Is this business decision good for the earth?“

Basically – and I know this is a simplification of complicated situations – will my choice result in an unnatural disaster? We also call choices that result in disaster “sin.”

Sometimes in life, there are tough calls we have to make. But such decisions are easier when we consider their impact on other people. “This is going to be good for me. Is it going to be good for other people?“

Your creative future isn’t just about your individual brand. It’s about which communities you help build and belong to. Yancey Strickler

One of my favorite millennials asked me a few years ago, “How are you building your brand?” Yuck. It sounded like I was trying to sell something. Am I trying to sell something as a Church Leader? Are you?

I get that those of us who are trying to sell something we have created (like our books, our Etsy crafts, our start-up businesses, our consulting practices, our 10-day clergy tour of Scottish distilleries) need to promote ourselves and our products. Some Pastors are free-range without a regular income and there are bills to pay.

The Institutional Church’s brand has been diminished over the last fifty years. And I suppose we pastors lean into our own brand of ministry. But the Institutional Church will continue to be diminished if we continue to be so individualistic.

Yancey Strickler, whose work I greatly admire, is onto the something and while he is not a church person as far as I know, his ideas about our future will be the difference between a dying church and a thriving church in the next 1-3 years. Read his LinkedIn post here.

In yesterday’s era of individualism, how many followers you have was the key social indicator. In today’s post-individual era, what groups you’re a part of matters much more.

Amen. Amen. Amen.

If our spiritual lives or church participation are all about our own “brand” which could be anything from “My family’s been in this church for 5 generations” to “Nobody can be the church treasurer but me” to “It will hurt my feelings if my husband isn’t elected to the Deacons Board” then our churches deserve to close. It’s never about us. It’s about expanding the reign of God.

It doesn’t matter how many “followers” we have. It matters what partnerships we have. It matters what we are building and who we include.

Show me a congregation that partners with the local police department, the local homeless coalition, the NAACP, the local college soccer team, and the coffee shop on the corner and I’ll show you a growing, thriving church that understands that their existence is more about their neighbors than their individual selves.

As you know, Regular Readers, I often ask “what breaks God’s heart in your neighborhood?” I know I’m in a dying church when congregants respond with “I can tell you what breaks my heart!!” That was never the question.

We are all broken in some way. And the path to healing involves loving people, creating beauty, noticing the unnoticed. This is best done in community with unlikely partners. And that’s our future, Church.

Throughout the political landscape in the U.S. there are members of Congress and government officials whispering that they cannot talk about what’s actually happening behind the scenes in our nation “for fear of retribution.” I was hoping that one of my own Senators – who is not running for re-election – might use this opportunity to be bold and speak the truth when he sees tyranny and cruelty. Nope.

The Church of Jesus Christ has been diminished and broken by our history of Church Abuse which is often based on “the fear of retribution” and I’ve seen it in living color.

• Priests who don’t report child abusers for fear of financial, legal, and systemic consequences.
• Children who don’t disclose abuse for fear of disappointing someone/standing up to a powerful person their parents respected and/or God.
• Staff members who don’t report rampant bullying or corruption for fear of losing their jobs, especially when the bully controlls future employment as well as current employment.
• Church members who don’t stand up for what’s right and faithful for fear the congregation would split.

Imagine you are at a meeting and the leader declares something that is absolutely untrue. What do you do? Say nothing (but chat about it with others after the meeting)? Say nothing and go along with what the boss says. Stand up and correct the misinformation?

It takes faithful courage to speak the truth when retribution is a real threat. Especially in these days for our government officials, speaking the truth could not only get your fired; it could cost bodily harm.

Fear of retribution must never be part of any church’s culture, but sadly it is more prevalent than we’d like to admit. The cure for this – I believe – is trusting the power of God more than we fear the power of leaders/bullies/bosses/colleagues. It only takes one person to stand up to the bully. But it’s so much easier when several people stand together.

Image from the Liam Neeson movie “Retribution” (2023) which is not about employment issues.

Policies and Procedures are our friends. Yes, the Spirit moves in fresh and creative ways, and yet rules protect us. (I had a seminary friend who was literally fired after his first Easter sermon because there was no policy in his denomination/congregation that you couldn’t just fire the Pastor anytime you felt like it and his sermon was apparently underwhelming.)

I have some thoughts about rules – especially for these days of shattered norms drenched in disorienting misinformation and unrelenting turbulence.

• Thought 1 – Healthy congregations value relationships over rules. Yes, we have a No-Pet policy in the church office, but the administrative assistant’s pit bull is being put down at 4 this afternoon and she needs him to be here today.
• Thought 2 – Sometimes it’s okay to make exceptions for the sake of a congregation’s well-being. There’s a rule in my denomination about an Associate Pastor not being eligible to become the next Senior Pastor. But I know a church that was struggling financially to the point that they were considering going to a one-pastor staffing model. One day, their Pastor died suddenly on a handball court and the Presbytery decided that it was healthy and pastoral to make an exception. The Associate Pastor became the Pastor and it was a comfort to everybody.
• Thought 3 – Sometimes the rule must stand firm, again for the health of the congregation. We have a rule in my denomination that our churches can only call pastors who are members of our denomination or in good standing in denominations with whom we have a formal relationship. (On a regular basis, I have to tell church friends that, “No, the Baptist preacher who never went to seminary cannot be your Pastor.”) This rule ensures our leaders align with our theology. It’s possible that the ineligible but charismatic preacher you met at the funeral home might preach that “women are not called by God to be leaders” or that “God hates LGBTQAI+ people” or that the modern state of Israel is the same as the Israelites of the Hebrew Scriptures. None of those things are true according to the interpretation of Scripture in my denomination. Bad theology hurts people.
• Thought 4 – The fewer the rules, the better. Church policies and denominational constitutions should not be the size of the OED. Speaking of a no pet policy (Thought 1) I was once on a committee writing the personnel policy for a church and someone at the table wanted to spell out exactly which pets would be okay (fish) and which would not be okay (dogs, cats, ferrets, snakes, hamsters, Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs). No. Give people some credit. Nobody’s bringing their pony to church.

Flexibility can be a holy thing. When we consider the people more than the rules, we are allowing the Spirit to move for the situation at hand. Jesus was about loving the people. The rules were about protecting the people but exceptions were made. Here are some Biblical examples.

So God created humankind in God’s image,
   in the image of God he created them;
   male and female he created them. Genesis 1:27

It occurs to me this week that the most painful news stories have one thing in common: they are a result of somebody forgetting that all of us have been created in the Image of God. All people, including:

• The pretty teenager who landed a job in a fancy Palm Beach spa only to be “stolen” by a different Palm Beach employer for more nefarious purposes.
• The miraculous quints born into poverty in Canada whose parents essentially handed over to the circus.
• Every immigrant arrested by ICE including the 90 Venezuela immigrants imprisoned in a Salvadorean prison in April, most of whom had actually not entered the United States illegally nor were “criminals.”

The starving in Gaza, the crushed in Kyiv, the kidnapped in Mozambique, the bullied, the harrassed, the betrayed. Each of these people was created in the Image of God. Those who are starving them, killing them, kidnapping them, hurting them are also created in the Image of God.

This is the most universally ignored Truth in our world right now: All people were created in the Image of God. To wound them, much less destroy them is to wound and destroy The Creator of Life.

I honestly do not know how this works, but I believe that our Creator cannot be destroyed and justice will one day prevail. In the mean time, please indeed pay attention. Terrible things happen when we forget who we are.

Pictured above: Virginia Giuffre (1983–2025), the Dionne Quintuplets – Annette, Emilie, Marie, Yvonne, and Cecile (all born in 1934; Cecile died this week at the age of 91), incarcerated immigrants in the maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador. Like you and me, each was created in God’s Image.