A Church for Starving Artists

I earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in 2001.  I didn’t plan to call myself Dr. Edmiston although several of my parishioners at the time insisted that both the worship bulletin and church stationery reflect the fact that the church had a pastor who was a “Doctor.”

All three of my pastor predecessors were “Rev. Dr.” but I learned that each of them actually had honorary doctorates from a Christian college that the church supported financially.  Yet they were each called Dr. ___ until they died.

Mostly people have called me “Jan” or “Pastor Jan” and this is okay with me because as an educated White Woman, I grew up with the expectation that I belonged in most any professional context you might find me.  I didn’t need the “Dr.” in front of my name to convince people I was smart.

Again – I am White.

My Black colleagues with Master and Doctoral degrees always use the “Rev. Dr.” in front of their names because it reflects their achievements in a world that doesn’t assume that Black and Brown people are professional, well-educated, brilliant human beings.  And it’s about respect in a culture that has not respected their ancestors.

Dr. Yolanda Pierce, Dean of the School of Divinity at Howard University wrote this article in The Christian Century recently in which she talked about this need for respect.  She shared the story of civil rights activist Mary Hamilton who was arrested during a peaceful protest in Alabama in 1963 and  was held in contempt of court after refusing to answer questions until she was addressed as “Miss Hamilton.”  The laws in Alabama were changed because of her demand for respect.

We live in rather casual culture now where children call their pastors by their first names  – at least in some churches.  I call all my colleagues by their first names when I am talking with them, but they are Dr. __ or Rev. __ when I’m referring to them among their parishioners, especially when I’m referring to Black and Brown colleagues.  This is an essential teaching tool.  I work among some of the most gifted pastors in the country and I know that my Black colleagues are still not respected in the same way my White colleages are.  To remind church people that their leaders are graduate school-educated pastors is important, especially when some church folks disrespect their leaders.

Joseph Epstein’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal here sparked controversy when he suggested that Dr. Jill Biden wasn’t a real doctor because her degree was a Doctor of Education.  He was challenged in social media to put it mildly.

It’s important for the First Lady to be known as Dr. Biden to remind us that she, too, is a well-educated leader with expertise beyond the honorific of FLOTUS.

I can be called “Jan” without dismissing myself because of my White Privilege.  And yet sometimes I use Rev. Dr. Edmiston because it’s a helpful reminder to some that women can be pastors and holders of doctorate degrees.

My point is that I imagine a world in which we stop assuming that just because people not in the dominant demographic, it doesn’t mean they aren’t gifted and worthy of respect.  God sees us as we were created to be.  This alone should be enough to see each other in new ways.

Image showing the three stripes of a doctoral robe.  I don’t know why Juris Doctor recipients aren’t called “Dr.”

I keep a file with all the angry emails I’ve received over my years of professional ministry  and re-reading them is strangely comforting.  (Note: The most devastating comments I’ve received were shared without a paper trail.)

As for the ones who put their grievances in writing, they fall into several categories:

• Angry Emails from People Who are Not Well.  There’s the email from the Baptist minister I’ve never met who accused me of apostasy because I won’t let him serve a Presbyterian Church because if he served he would prove that only he is the real Christian.  There’s the email  sent in the middle of the night from a person who was under the influence of something powerful and took out his life frustrations on me.  (Note: I contacted that person to review some of his colorful accusations and he had no memory of sending it.)
• Angry Emails from People Who Don’t Like Presbyterian Polity. There’s the one from several elders accusing me of ruining their church because we/I would not let them call a high school graduate who was somebody’s cousin to be their new pastor.  (“We all love him.  What is wrong with you?“)  There’s the one from the congregation who wanted to call the guy from another denomination who had been their supply preacher for a few months.  The problem was that he had a history of sexual assault accusations against him and had been defrocked from that other denomination. 
• Angry Emails from People Who Are Not Dealing with Reality.  I have an email from an elder who was angry with me because I wouldn’t “let them they sing the Doxology anymore.”  I reminded them that I have no authority over whether or not they sing the Doxology but they left the denomination anyway.
• Angry People Who Are Not As Angry After We Talk.  After praying one Sunday for Saddam Hussein (something about asking that the hate in his heart melt and all our hearts melt after preaching a sermon about loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us)  Angry Member and I had a good talk about Jesus really meaning what he says even if it makes us uncomfortable.

I have given people plenty of good reasons to be angry with me over the years, and my point is this: professional ministry is not for the fainthearted.  If we are doing our jobs, if we are faithfully interpretting God’s Word, we will make people angry.  If we are trying to steer congregations towards healthy choices, we will make people angry.  If we are loving the unlovable and standing up to bullies, we will make people angry.

God said via the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am doing a new thing.”  People will get angry when we remind our congregations about this. Or they’ll say, “God can do a new thing but our congregation doesn’t have to.”  (Well, how do you think God does it if not through our congregation?)

Healthy ministry involves loving God’s people and sometimes they will be angry anyway.  It’s okay.  We are still called to love even the angry ones.

HH and I received a stimulus check last week and frankly I was surprised. I didn’t think we qualified. We have been among the privileged during this pandemic.

We’ve experienced minimal pain. We still have steady paychecks and can work from home. We have excellent health care. 

We don’t need this stimulus check for daily expenses.

Of course we could use this money for future purchases or to add to our retirement accounts. But we have neighbors in food lines and neighbors living in tents by the highway because the winter shelters are closed.

Here’s the challenge: if you don’t need your stimulus check for your own daily needs, please consider giving it away to those who have more daily needs than we can imagine. 

• Keep it local..
• Don’t tell anyone.

Being poor is not a sin. Ignoring the poor is.  And those of us who can live without a stimulus check have been given the opportunity to stop being ignorant.

Happy February.

Being inclusive – as a society, as a church, as a community –  is one of those things we are all supposed to do and be.  From playgrounds to boardrooms, we’ve all witnessed situations when somebody isn’t included and it’s painful.  What’s even more concerning is when we live our lives never noticing who’s not at the table and whose voice is not being heard.

And yet, in organizations like the Church, sometimes our mission is sabotaged when “everybody” is included.  For example:

• A congregation elects a Pastor Nominating Committee and there’s a desire to include a member who is a reliable naysayer.  He has strong opinions and many believe it would be a good thing to include him so that he feels like he’s a part of important decision-making in the life of the congregation.  A Pastor Nominating Committee needs to be on the same page in terms of what the congregation wants in the next pastor.  And this particular guy has announced that under no circumstances will he allow the church to call a clergywoman, even though their denomination ordains and supports women in professional ministry.  This not only frustrates the work of the PNC; it also blocks the movement of the Spirit.
• After a year of study, St. Thomas Church on the Hill votes to build affordable housing on their property for homeless veterans.  They have prayed about this for a long time and they feel that God is calling them to do this.  The vote was 89% in favor of this project during the congregational meeting, so it’s going to happen.  When putting together the six person team to work with the builders, the pastor includes two of the members who voted against the project.  Unfortunately, those two are doing their best to sabotage the construction process even though the congregation is overwhelmingly in favor.  They are asking questions and making demands that have already been settled.  They should never have been added to the committee, but – for the sake of inclusion – they were.

See what I mean?  A healthy governing board indeed includes a diverse group of people who are representative of the congregation, and yet the board needs to be able to debate an issue and come out of it as a united body.  Healthy elders and deacons might disagree with what the others approved, but they leave the meeting backing up the the majority vote.

In a healthy church, there are not “winners” and “losers” in terms of congregational decisions.  If our focus is on pleasing God, and we have prayerfully discerned the situation, we have to agree to agree with each other and show a united front.

I hope this makes sense.  What I’m not saying is that we forego inclusion of different ages, heritages, and perspectives on our church leadership teams.  What I am saying is that we must be committed exclusively to following the Spirit’s lead.  Otherwise, we are wasting everybody’s time.

It’s best to exclude those who don’t play well with others.  Love them.  And love your church by electing those who are most excited to expand the congregation’s mission.

HH and I live in a neighborhood within walking distance of four coffeeshops, three breweries, and about fifteen restaurants. We have a lot of choices about where we will spend our time and money.

We like the brewery closest to our home, not just because it’s convenient, but also because they have a culture of hospitality and especially a culture of service to the community that makes us want to be with them.  The photos above were taken in one of their clean and modern bathrooms.  Note the accomodations to parents.  Note the organizations they partner with for the good of the community.

We also live within walking distance of nine houses of worship.  Although my ministry involves working with 93 Presbyterian congregations – including three within walking distance to my home – I often ponder, “What church would I join, if I could join just one?“

I would connect with a church that has a strong culture of hospitality and an especially strong culture of service to the community.

Even and especially in this season of social distancing and face masks, we can offer hospitality and outreach into the neighborhood.  Congregations who continue to offer those things are thriving during this pandemic.

As followers of Jesus, we have the added opportunity to partner with people in faith.  What does that look like during a pandemic?

• Include both prayer and relational time in Zoom meetings. Open each Bible Study, Book Study, or meeting with a relational question: Share what you know about your own baptism. Who has had the greatest impact on your spiritual life besides Jesus? Share the first time you remember observing racism.  Make the question fit your context. Yes, this will make the meeting Zoom run longer but it might be the most important part of the meeting.  And pray specifically for people by name. 
• Call those going through both good and not-so-good things and pray with them on the phone.  (Your pastors can teach you how to do this if you don’t know how/feel too nervous to pray out loud.)
• Invite people to participate in activities that serve others during this pandemic.  Write letters to strangers in retirement communities or nursing homes. (Look up the ones closest to you and find out where to send the letters for distribution.)  Start a drive to share stimulus checks (if you do not need the check for your own day to day needs) with a local food pantry or shelter.  Collect gift cards so that each family in the hotel for evicted families gets at least one.  

How sad is it when a brewery builds a better sense of community than many of our churches?  It can be really fun to change this.

Images from Pilot Brewing in Charlotte, NC

Hey Church: It feels like a good time to make plans for 2021 if we haven’t done it yet. The attacks at the Capitol and the changes in national leadership delayed looking past mid-January, but now’s the time to assess where we are and where we are going this year.

I hope we are moving forward. I hope we are creating new paths for ministry not inspite of the pandemic but because of the pandemic.

Do we need to open a door and let the light shine into our meetings and mission plans?  Over the past several months as COVID-19 has weighed us down, I’ve heard these comments from Church People I love:

• We can’t use our unused property to build a shelter.  I’ve always imagined kids playing soccer on that field. (NOTE: The church building has been there for over 50 years and there has never been a soccer game – or any game – played on that lot.)
• We can’t use our Education Wing for transitional housing.  What if we get an influx of children who need Sunday School space? (NOTE: There are five children in the congregation and they are thriving without traditional Sunday School.)
• We can’t close our church.  Sure, we have only eight people participating, but once the pandemic is over everyone will come back!  (NOTE: There were only twelve participants pre-COVID and so “everyone” will not give us the capacity to thrive without some death and resurrection.)
• We are hoping to call a pastor who will bring us back to our glory years after this pandemic is finally over.  (NOTE: The glory years are long gone.  They are never coming back in the way we remember them. The right pastor can lead your congregation towards looking more like the Reign of God, but you have to want that.)

At 9:21 last night, we lived through the 21st minute of the 21st hour of the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century.  It’s time to get moving into the next days and years and centuries.  Or we can stop here and close our church buildings.

It’s easy to say, “Yes, we want to move forward” with our lips but we don’t really want it in our deepest souls.  I’m praying every day that our faithful Church People ask God to make us crave this desire to move forward with more than our words.

Image source and the article is pretty good too.

I drove a car much of Inauguration Day so, although I listened to the ceremonies, I didn’t see the faces, the jewel-toned suits, the wind blowing through everyone’s hair.

Not everyone voted for the new President and Vice President. Some who voted for them might not have considered them their first choice. Some were very excited today.

I’m home now, and as I watch some of the coverage of the day, I realize that I find comfort in quieter voices and healing words. I’m grateful for friends with whom I can share my hopes and my dreams of what A More Perfect Union looks like. It looks like Republicans and Democrats sitting together. It looks like the excellence of Amanda Gorman. It looks like a Latina Justice swearing in a Baptist Woman of Color with a Jewish husband.

This looks like The Reign of God to me. It’s less about politics and more about my faith in a God who has put on human skin and crossed boundaries to include those who hadn’t been included before.

Exhausted tonight and grateful to be an American. 🇺🇸

Flags are placed on the National Mall, looking towards the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial, ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Monday, Jan. 18, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

After walking around in our socially distanced world for many months, our Presbytery was led in prayer yesterday in three parts by three leaders for those impacted by the COVID-19 virus, for our divided nation, and for the new President and Vice-President.  That last part was mine.  Here is part of that prayer:

Just as we ask for peace for the outgoing President and Vice-President, we ask that you protect President-elect Biden and Vice-President-elect Harris.

• Protect their bodies from physical danger.
• Protect their vision from serving their party to serving their country.
• Protect their minds from cynicism and their souls from hopelessness.

Grant them that deep peace that passes all understand when they are carrying the heaviest of burdens and the most difficult of duties.

• Grant them wisdom and honesty.
• Grant them a circle of people who will tell them the truth.
•  Grant them – we dare to pray as Presbyterian Christians – energy, intelligence, imagination and love.

We have been praying for our nation for many months and we continue today. God have mercy upon us.

I agree with my colleagues who say that this pandemic has jolted us five years into the future. In early 2019, small struggling congregations still had time to discern missional ministry shifts to keep them going beyond their historical purpose. In early 2019, healthy dinosaurs had time to figure out what was keeping people away and what was welcoming new believers into the fold.

COVID-19 changed all this. Suddenly with the requirement that worship happen online and The Work of the Church involved serving our local neighbors who lost their jobs, homes, and basic lifestyle (hello homeschooling) it became clear that the institutional Church has been forced to make decisions before they expected.

• Congregations on the cusp of closing made that decision earlier than expected since they didn’t have the capacity to thrive on YouTube.
• Congregations wringing their hands over the decision to build affordable housing realized that This Was The Time to provide for those in need.
• Congregations debating the whole “let’s do things the way we’ve always done it” versus “let’s take the leap to be God’s hands and feet in our community” were forced to resolve the debate sooner than they expected.

As I’ve written before, congregations who were thriving before the pandemic continued to thrive after the pandemic and congregations who were struggling before the pandemic were practically dying after the pandemic started.

Time travel.  We have projected into the future at least five years.

I share this comment with all love and respect:

This is the time to consider (now) what God is calling us to do and be.

Some tell me that “this is not the time” to invest church endowment money into affordable housing.  This is exactly the time to invest in affordable housing.

Some tell me that “this is not the time” to start new mission ventures.  Actually this is precisely the time to start new mission ventures.

Time travel helps us to realize what we should have done and what we could still do with the benefit of a cosmic opportunity.  Let’s not waste this opportunity of having a pandemic and being forced to quarantine and make some pivots.

God is good.  God has offered us this opportunity to do a new thing.  Let’s do that.

Image source.

 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  Jesus in Matthew 5:43-44

I was in seminary when a would-be assassin severely wounded President Reagan. One of my classmates – a second-career student with a young child – was not a fan of Reagan, but she was staggered by a conversation with her daughter that night. At the dinner table, the daughter said with all seriousness, “Mommy, we’re glad that Reagan got shot, right?“

My friend dropped her fork and said, “Oh honey, no. We don’t agree with him, but we never want him to be hurt.” My friend was mortified and it was a good reminder for her to be clear in teaching her child that even when we disagree with people, we don’t wish them harm.

I fear that this sensibility has changed especially in the 21st Century Church.

From David Brooks’ opinion piece in The New York Times yesterday:

“Over the last 72 hours, I have received multiple death threats and thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard toward my family and ministry. I have been labeled a coward, sellout, a traitor to the Holy Spirit, and cussed out at least 500 times.”

This was written on social media by Charlotte Pastor Jeremiah Johnson after he shared this letter with his congregation in which he criticized the President.  Among other things, Pastor Johnson wrote that there is “potential great danger and trouble ahead for America if he is re-elected.”  It clearly didn’t go well with his followers.

Jeremiah Johnson got death threats. Death. Threats.

It’s not enough to disagree politically with someone these days.  Now Christians are threatening other Christians with death threats.  Or better stated, some Christians who do not consider others to be Christian enough are threatening each other.

Our nation is consumed with this kind of enmity.  Not only are we not praying for our enemies.  Some of us are threatening to kill them.

Political speeches past: “The President was my opponent and not my enemy.” Bob Dole (1996)

Political speeches present: “He’s going to do things you wouldn’t think are even possible because he’s following the radical left agenda.  Take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment. No religion.  No anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God.  He’s against guns.  He’s against energy, our kind of energy.” Donald Trump (2020)

So, here’s my question, Christians:

• What are we doing to give our children and our neighbors the idea that physically hurting people with whom we disagree politically, theologically, culturally is okay?  Do we casually blurt out things like, “Nancy Pelosi should be strung up” or “Somebody should punch Ivanka Trump in the face.“?  If you feel that way, try the decaf.  If you say such things, watch your tongue.
• What are we doing to curb the meanness in the world?  Do we laugh off friends and family who make violent statements?  Do we claim to have “no enemies” but we make it clear that we “hate” everyone on the other side of the political divide?

We are supposed to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth.  We are called to pray for our enemies and those who persecute us.  This never means that Jesus wants us to wield a weapon while wearing a John 3:16 shirt.

It’s up to us to speak the truth in love. 

Nothing looked like love on January 6th, 2021 in Our Nation’s Capitol but it’s not enough to point fingers and be shocked.  We need to clean up our own acts and our own words.  We need to open our Bibles and get on our knees.

Happy Friday.

Image source.