Maybe because it’s a holiday weekend and I’m giddily headed to a birthday party in New England, but it feels like time to focus on lighter topics. Like hair.

(A lighter topic but nevertheless an essential one.)

Hair is everything.  We wish it wasn’t so we can actually think about something else occasionally but it is.  It’s the difference between a good day and a bad day.  Some think it’s a symbol of power, that it’s a symbol of fertility.  Some people are exploited for it.  And it pays your  (@%&#) bills . . . Anthony.

I love this speech about hair in Season 2 of Fleabag.  I’ve had my share of Mamie Eisenhower haircuts and cheetah-esque highlight jobs.  And it’s true: bad hair can ruin your day.

Show me a confident person and I’ll show you a person with good hair.  It doesn’t matter about the texture or the length or the color.  Short or long.  Braided or spiky. Good hair inspires courage and assurance.

Hair signifies life transitions: Breakup Hair. Wedding Hair. Post-Baby Hair. Protest Hair.  Like Fleabag says, “It’s a symbol of power.”

Frankly, I find bald men and women very attractive, so good hair doesn’t necessarily require lots of it.

I share these things in hopes that your hair (or your head) feels the last of the summer breezes this weekend.  The world is drenched in anxiety and sometimes we need to take a deep breath and run our fingers through our hair (or over our lovely bald heads) and relish the end of August.  Have a lovely weekend.

Image of Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Fleabag on Amazon Prime.

The Happy Staff of NEXT Church in Washington, DC

A Happy Staff = A Happy Organization.

There have been times when I have dreaded going into the office because of staff tensions.  And I’m talking about The Church Office.

If your place of employment is at a toxic waste facility or a kill shelter, I can understand why you would dread going into the office. But some assume that a Church Office always feels  like Thomas Merton’s Prayer Garden every day.  Calm. Relaxing. Holy.

I have a close friend who works for a nationally recognized non-profit that the outside world holds up as Effective and Creative.  But behind the scenes, they are a hot mess.  Leadership is weak.  Gossip is the prevailing culture.  And saddest of all (my friend tearfully shared) is that one young staff member in another division died suddenly last week and, upon asking his immediate co-workers about him, it became clear that nobody knew him.  They had all worked side by side in that office eight hours a day, five days a week for four years and no one knew if their colleague had a partner, a pet or a favorite ice cream. Did he live alone?  Did he have hobbies?  Nobody knew.

This single reality has made my friend know for sure that she needs to get out of there.  No one values community.  No one holds each other accountable.  No one challenges bad behavior.

A healthy staff is different.

I saw the above photo of the NEXT Church staff recently posted as one of their foursome was leaving for a new call and this is what I see – both in this photo and from my experiences with that organization:

• They like each other.  They respect each other’s gifts and contributions
• They each have gifts that add to the effectiveness of the organization.  If you pulled any one of these leaders from the staff, it would be a loss but the organization would (and will) continue to thrive.
• They are not afraid to try new things, hold each other accountable, or continue to learn.
• They are all curious about the world and each other.

If a church staff is happy/effective/mutually respectful, then the congregation will be too.  Every church needs and deserves a great staff because God Deserves Our Very Best. (This also goes for volunteer staffers but that’s for another post.)

[Note: there are so many small churches out there without any staff, so consider yourselves fortunate if you have colleagues down the hall.]

Occasionally church members will share concerns about their pastors’ effectiveness and leadership skills.  And then I ask if they have shared their concerns directly with their pastors.  What I commonly hear is that they could never tell their pastors to consider making healthy changes.  “I’m just a layperson.” “The pastor is our friend.”

And so, are you saying that you would sacrifice your church’s future for the sake of avoiding conflict?  (That would be a big yes for many congregations.)

I see too many congregations lose energy over the decades under poor leadership.  It doesn’t have to be this way.

Is your staff happy or unhappy with what’s going on in your Church, Non-Profit Office, Mid-Council, etc.)  Happier, healthier staff members gently change the DNA of even the most dysfunctional organizations.

Image of the extraordinary staff of NEXT Church.  Thanks J, P, L, and J.

One of my favorite church staffs call their congregation “a healthy dinosaur.”

I take that to mean that they recognize that the way they do church is somewhat dated but they are healthy enough to keep going for a while.  They might be headed towards extinction, but they can probably last several more decades and maybe even a century.

Scientists believe that about 66 million years ago a meteor with the power of a billion Hiroshima bombs hit where the Yucatan Peninsula lies today.  Hello Cancun.

“Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere” according to this article from The New Yorker. This jolt would have killed every dinosaur on the planet except perhaps for the ones that could fly (i.e. birds.)

I’m hoping that nothing resembling an atomic bomb (or a billion of them) ever hits the Earth but if that should happen, it’s obvious that life as we know it would immediately A) vaporize, B) be covered in molten goo, C) become crushed under massive amounts of radioactive debris, D) All the above plus several other unimaginable consequences.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

BBC Future pondered in 2017 the question: What if dinosaurs hadn’t died out?

• What if the asteroid missed the earth?
• What if the asteroid hit minutes earlier or later and hit the Pacific Ocean instead of what is now southeastern Mexico?

Some scientists believe that the dinosaurs would have become extinct even if there’d been no asteroid for several reasons:

• The temperatures had become too cool.
• Dinosaurs were generally not good at community-building. They took care of their own without much regard for other nests or neighbors.
• Some dinosaurs ate other dinosaurs instead of plants (which was the healthier choice.)

Maybe all of our congregations are dinosaurs headed for extinctions.  Or maybe the ones able to fly above it all will evolve and live on.  But clearly something totally different is emerging, and not only is this okay; it will be a blessing because God is all about blessing us when we at least try to follow the way of Jesus.

The First Century Church looked very different from what we know today.  No pews, stained glass, or Sunday School.  The people were the Church everyday.  There were prayers every day.  There was healing every day.  There were acts of mercy every day.  There was worship every day. There were holy experiences every day by the water, on the highway, in the field, throughout the marketplace.  Every Day.

I believe that the Church will never be extinct if we follow the lead of our First Century ancestors.  But if we are cold, if we fail to connect with our neighbors and love others as we love us and ours, if we make unhealthy choices and eat our own, we will indeed be extinguished from the Earth.

If we are unhealthy dinosaurs and we’ve forgotten our Early Church roots, we will die out faster.  If we are healthy dinosaurs, we can last longer but we too will die without evolving.

We can be the ones with ancient DNA flying above the world but living in the world to share what we have.  We might be dinosaurs now, but we can emerge into new species.  And emerging doesn’t have to feel like an atomic bomb landed on top of us, unless it’s the only way God can get our attention.  (Sometimes we just won’t make the changes unless a catastrophe happens.)

Image is the cover of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (Prehistoric Field Guides) by Matthew Rake.

There have always been church bullies.  I don’t know whether some people are simply inclined to act out in despotic ways (e.g. the bossy personality gone awry) or if circumstances (our church is falling apart!) move ordinarily collaborative humans to act out.

But Bullying Pastors and Bullying Parishioners are real.  (I won’t get into Bullying Mid-Council Leaders here but maybe you’ve met them too.)

This article by David Brubaker spells out the four participants necessary for bullies to thrive:

• There is The Bully who humiliates and gaslights.  Like Brubaker, I appreciate this 2015 article about the characteristics of bullies by Thom Rainer.  The Rainer article would be a good discussion piece for church elders to consider asking leaders, “Do we have a bully problem in this congregation?”  This would be a brave conversation important to establishing norms and transparency.
• There is The Victim whom The Bully targets.  The Victim could be a vulnerable person or someone who questions The Bully.
• There is The Enabler who sides with The Bully.  Brubaker says that enablers are either “true believers” who follow the bully’s lead or “craven opportunists” who believe that backing up the bully with help them gain their own power.  Good points. But I have found that enablers simply believe life will be easier if they stand with the most powerful person in the room – even if that person is a bully.
• There is The Bystander who’s afraid to step in and speak up.  Sometimes bystanders are simply conflict-averse.  And sometimes they are terrified that the bully’s wrath will be turned on them next.  Bystander Training is a good idea for church councils because according to this 2018 article in the HBR, trained bystanders help in “leveraging the people in the environment to set the tone for what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable behavior.”

Imagine a staff meeting or a board meeting or even a congregational meeting in which The Bully antagonizes The Victim will The Enablers looking on while The Bystanders speak up and call The Bully on their misbehavior.  This just might stop the bullying – at least for a moment.  And squelching it over and over again day after day, week after week could change the DNA of the organization and therefore alter the system.

Yay.

Especially in church settings when we are expected to be “nice” it’s tricky to know how to act when someone is not being nice.  Nice People who witness bullying behavior don’t know what to do with it.  If we who are Nice People challenge the bully, will we lose our Niceness Status?

As I’ve personally witnessed institutional bullying through the years, what makes me saddest is noticing that many leaders (or people who are supposed to be leaders) seem indifferent to church bullying.  They don’t seem to care enough to be willing to change the system.

“It’s just the way things are around here.”  “That’s just the way she is.”  “He’s always been like that.”  

I don’t accept this as a church leader.

A thriving organization and especially a thriving church organization depends upon participants who hold each other accountable out of love for God and each other.  It’s deadly to have bullies in church systems. I’ve observed it more often than I’d like to admit.

Image source.

I was reading my Twitter feed last night and saw that a young mom in Colorado had died in a car accident.  Her children start first and third grade this week and her husband is a pastor.

After writing last week’s post about remembering the holy days of loss, several of you let me know your own special dates.  Today is the death anniversary for a friend’s sister.  My friend’s not old enough to have lost a sister but she did and that’s horrible.

There’s the writer whose husband died in a freak accident at the beach.  There’s the Nobel Prize-winning hero who survived capture and torture by ISIS. There are countless survivors of school shootings and other life-changing traumas.

These are the special ones.  They know something about life that most people don’t know and don’t want to know.

If they get through the worst horror of their loss and reach the place when they can put their shoes on again, they become The Ones Who Know.  They are no longer burdened by routine issues like not finding a good parking space or losing a favorite pen.  They don’t really care when they burn dinner because their hearts have been seared and they survived.

Survival means that we lived.  We lived to tell about it and work towards it never happening again – and the “it” is everything from the cancer to the stupid comments made to help us feel better.  Survival means that we understand the shallow concerns of those who haven’t been there.  It’s okay.  We love them.  They are innocents to trauma.

Today my heart holds those in the beginning stages of deep grief.  It’s horrible.  But they will find – eventually, if they make it – that they will become The Ones Who Know.  And they will become unspeakably wise.

I have a lot of friends whose mothers have died of breast cancer.  In my last parish there were about 10 of us.

One of them dropped by my study on a random morning and told me that I looked sad.  “I feel sad,” I said, “And I don’t know why.”

“Is this a mom day?” she asked me.  (In other words: “Did anything happen on this date regarding your mother?)  And – actually – it was my mother’s death day.  Mentally I had forgotten but emotionally my body hadn’t.

I don’t love numbers unless they have something to do with relationships.  It helps me to remember certain numbers:

• I was 32 years and 187 days old on the day my mom died.
• I was 55 years and 19 days on the day I outlived my mother.
• In a year and 25 days, I will have spent more time on this earth without my mother than I spent with my mother.*

As a parish pastor, I used to keep a calendar of special relational days for our members:

• Death Anniversaries
• Birthdays and Wedding Anniversaries for widows
• Birthdays for those who lost children or parents

I don’t have the capacity to do this for everybody now, but I remember a few.  [Pro Tip for pastors and other compassionate people: contact people on their special days just to check in.  You won’t be reminding them of anything they aren’t already remembering on some level.  All you have to say is, “I’m thinking of you today.”]

When I was a pastor for a single congregation, I used to write newlyweds a note on their first wedding anniversary to check in.  “Thinking of you today. How’s it going?”  [Pro Tip:  this is why we do premarital counseling.  If we have established a relationship with a couple, then they have someone to talk with after the wedding if they need support. This first anniversary note often sparked a phone call to chat about marriage things.]

I remember when HH and I were figuring out what date to get married, I looked at all those summer Saturdays on the calendar and realized that – once we picked our wedding date – that date would never be an ordinary day again.

I remember when I looked over the calendar as a pregnant lady, checking out the day of the week my due date fell upon that I remembered that – no matter what happened on the day my baby was born – it would be a special date forever.

The numbers and dates are important relational tools.  And today, I’m feeling a little sad.  And I know why.

*Yes, I see a therapist.

I recently drove around with a colleague who is a young pastor – just over a year out of seminary and as we drove around his church’s neighborhood, it was clear that he saw things.  And then he responded.  And then there was obvious impact.

• He noticed a couple who owns the independent coffee shop and he introduced himself and now he has a relationship with them as local business owners.
• He noticed the school down the street and he met the principal and now he volunteers there and he has a relationship with teachers, staff, and parents.  And probably some kids.
• He noticed the new real estate developments, the For Sale signs, the road construction, the other church buildings, the homes literally on the other side of the tracks.  And then . . .

You get the idea.

The future of the Church is in leaders who see things. 

They see who is in the room and who is not in the room.  They notice who speaks up and who doesn’t.  They notice the signs – both the physical signs and the figurative ones.

Look at the photo above.  What do you see?  (What you see tells me a lot about what kind of leader you are.)

We need more pastors who know how to read the room, how to exegete the community, how to notice who’s not there.  My colleague who is the newish pastor totally gets this.  As he was driving me around, I asked him, “Who taught you how to do this?” and he said, “Hmm.  I think I’ve always known.”

We also need leaders with this kind of emotional intelligence.  And emotional intelligence – like reading a room and exegeting a community – can be taught.  Please reach out to someone if you need to learn this.  It will make your ministry so much more fun and life-changing.

Unknown image source.

(If you need a refresher on reparations, here‘s your best resource.)

I’m not sure where to begin.

We had a Presbytery Meeting (a gathering of representatives from all the congregations in our geographic area) over the weekend and it was a worshipful celebration of what God is doing in our churches.  The preaching was excellent.  The music was stirring.  The reports were informative. We joyfully welcomed new pastors into the Presbytery – seven in all, which is a lot for one meeting.

Each of these pastors is gifted and we are happy they’ve been called to their respective congregations.  And yet, this was also a stark reminder of the differences between our predominantly white churches and our predominantly black churches.  (Sadly we have too few congregations which look like a rainbow.)

Each of the newly called pastors going to full-time called and installed positions was a white male.  (I, for one, like white males.  My husband is a white male.  So are my brothers.  And I gave birth to two white males.)

Two women counted among the seven new pastors as well but they are not in “permanent” positions.  One will be ordained to serve as a pastoral resident and one will be “commissioned” to serve a small African American congregation as a Ruling Elder.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s good to have the resources to call a new full time pastor who will be relatively well-paid with job security and benefits.  But the truth is that most of our African American congregations cannot afford to call a full time pastor.  There is a divide between the larger “white churches” and the smaller “black churches.”  And this brings me to reparations.

The wealth divide between white folks and people of color is best explained by a not-so-deep dive into the history of this country and the 400th Anniversary of the first enslaved people to be brought to what is now the United States.  It will take the rest of our lives (white people) to study the cultural, political, and sociological realities of white supremacy and we need to get started, if we haven’t already.

I’m aware of wealthy white congregations who currently “support” poor black congregations throughout my denomination.  It happens in a variety of ways from white churches including black churches in their mission budget to partnering together for worship services.  But are these efforts more like reparations or patronization?

I’ve been in meetings with representatives from multiple white congregations sitting with representatives from a single black congregations in which the wealthier ones call the not-so-wealthy ones “their mission project” and it feels humiliating.

How can wealthier congregations – which tend to be white – truly partner with our neighbors who, for a long list of cultural reasons based on white privilege, struggle to call a full-time pastor?  How can the Church continue to honor historically significant black congregations in our fold while keeping their heritage alive.

In the Presbytery I serve, we have a number of treasured historically African American congregations dating back to the end of the Civil War.  What do reparations look like for those churches who started out of slavery, survived through Jim Crow, and now experience the ongoing realities of white privilege?

This is something I continue to ponder as a church leader and I covet your insights.

Image source. Please support this artist on Etsy.

What makes some congregations thrive and some congregations falter?

I work with 96 congregations of different sizes and contexts that stretch across seven counties.  Every day I spend time thinking about the churches that seem to be dying and the churches that seem to be alive with possibility.  And the divide between them is obvious and not-so-obvious.

The obvious:

• Congregations in growing neighborhoods have the capacity to swell in numbers, as opposed to rural and urban areas where the population is decreasing steadily, usually because of a lack of jobs.
• Congregations with a large endowment have the ability to keep a full-time pastor, even if their regular weekly donations are stagnant. They can and do tap into their savings.
• Congregations with larger memberships (and “larger” is relative) still appear to fill the pews on Sunday mornings, especially if their sanctuary seats between 100 – 200 people.

The not-so-obvious:

1. Congregations who do make decisions based on “saving money” are going to die within the next ten years.  I’m looking at you Pastor Search Committee hoping to hire a retired pastor to avoid paying pension and health benefits.  
2. Congregations who plan their ministries around “getting people to join” are going to die within the next ten years. You are not fooling anyone.  We know you started a preschool “to bring in the young families” instead of starting a preschool to serve the children in your neighborhood for their own sake.  We know that the only reason you are offering community dinners is “to attract the neighbors” rather than offering hospitality with no strings attached.
3. Congregations who consider strategic plans without prayerful discernment are going to die within the next ten years.  So many times church programs happen because they are the pet projects of particular members when – maybe – those programs are no longer relevant or effective.

Thriving congregations make decisions this way:

• They invest their money in the best possible leadership trusting that effective ministry funds itself when the community is impacted for good.  And this not only includes the paid leadership.  They also invest in leadership training for unpaid volunteers.
• They offer ministry that’s informed by the needs of the community.  It’s about serving the neighbors, not bringing in new members for the sake of survival.
• They pray together.  They seriously pray that God will guide them in their planning, that God will open their eyes to the needs around them, that God will empower them to take on audacious goals for the sake of the Kingdom.  They take the time to discern what God is calling them to be and do in this time and place.

Children born today will be 25 years old on August 14, 2044.  Will there be a church for them?  (Thank you HH.)

Thriving congregations are more fearless than not.  They especially do not fear failure.  Let’s try it and see what happens.  Maybe it will work and maybe it won’t but God will use it either way.

If we are too tired or too comfortable or too fearful, our congregations will never thrive.  And we might look back 25 years from now and wonder where we went wrong.  (Re-read #1-3 above.)

And if you need another reason to embrace a new way of being the Church: Thriving congregations are more fun.

Image of the Perseid Meteor Shower on August 12, 2019 over Macedonia where the apostle Paul encouraged believers.  Source.

I was a Young Life kid in high school and during my senior year, I shared my testimony about Jesus being my Lord and Savior.  All the cool kids went to Young Life on Wednesday nights and I remember my small group leader – the one who asked me to share my testimony – telling me that it was important for “the popular kids” to be spiritual leaders:  the captain of the basketball team, the student body president, the children of important townspeople. (I was head cheerleader.)

I get it.  But it felt icky.

I felt the same discomfort as I was watching The Family on Netflix over the weekend.  I’d read Jeff Sharlet’s book years ago and it had effected me for many reasons.  It effects even more so now as a docu-drama.

The Family – also known as The Fellowship – is the organization that makes The National Prayer Breakfast happen in Washington, DC every year.

I know people who have been a part of that organization and most of them have left or been asked to leave over the past 20-30 years.  At the invitation of Doug Coe they became part of The Family/The Fellowship essentially because they were The Cool Kids in evangelical Christian circles.  They were the influencers, the former team captains and children of the powerful.  Although they have included members of both political parties, they lean conservative.

Their ministry is  a behind-the-scenes quest to build relationships with powerful people – focused on Jesus – in order to influence governments.   And – in spite of espousing wholesome family values, several of their associates struggled with adultery through the years. At least one went to prison for conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent. And National Prayer Breakfast attendee Maria Butina is currently in prison for the same thing on behalf of the Russians.

Again, it all feels icky.

When The Cool Kids become the spiritual leaders, the temptations to follow something besides Jesus are enormous.  The power, the entitlement, the wealth, the notion that we are “chosen” and can do anything we want because Jesus has picked us to influence others – all this is toxic.  And the theology is shaky.

Yes –  King David from the Hebrew scriptures was was used by God even though he was an adulterer and a murderer. But he was also held accountable for his crimes.

Few seem to be held accountable in The Fellowship, most especially the dictators and kings to whom The Fellowship has reached out.

Although the teachings of The Fellowship declare that Jesus met with kings, King Herod was not Jesus’ target audience.  Although the teachings of The Fellowship declare that the apostle Paul was a influencer in the Empire, Paul found few people willing to listen to him in the towers of power and – in fact – they tried to destroy him.

Weak is the new strong in Jesus’ actual message.  Yes, Jesus could be fierce (you brood of vipers! ) But Jesus always sided with the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned.  The rich have received their reward.

I love the end of The Family because we meet a small group of men who push back on the notion that powerful. wealthy white men are the key to spreading the message of Jesus.  The truth is that God uses all of us: black, brown, white, golden, poor, rich, sick, well, old, young.

When I’ve had the opportunity to meet people in that organization, I’ve felt sized up and cast off when it was clear that I was not going to be a tool for their power.  That, my friends, is not true relational ministry.  That’s transactional ministry.  And eventually it self-destructs.

Image from Netflix.  I highly recommend watching The Family directed by Jesse Moss, based on the book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet.