Looking Back and Looking Up

I notice that it is almost exactly two years since the end of my sabbatical. I also notice that I never really blogged much about what I learned or how it affected ministry once I got back. Well, it hasn't been a very smooth ride since then, and I haven't had the ... desire or fortitude or whatever to write about it. Having written a little bit earlier tonight, I might have opened the gate.

One thing I discerned on my sabbatical was that folks at Catoctin were working hard at their respective ministry tasks, but the efforts were not bearing a lot of fruit. People were frustrated after putting a lot of effort into a thing and then no one or just a few people would show up. There was at the same time an expectation in the church that everyone had to attend everything. So some people either came to things and resented it or didn't come and felt guilty about it. Neither of those is really healthy. We were also doing ministry in lots of different directions without any single goal or purpose in mind. Some great programs were being offered, but our intentionality was low. That made it seem like we were very busy going in 100 directions at one, or as Scotty once said on Star Trek (when the Enterprise was being forced into a circling maneuver by an alien, with the engines set for Warp 10), "we're goin' nowhere mighty fast."

Another thing I discerned on my sabbatical was that the session needed to shrink and refocus its attention on finding the spiritual center for the ministry of the church. We were a collection of committee chairs doing good work, as noted above, but without a sense of the larger whole. We also had enough elders to have a quorum for a congregational meeting. My thinking was that if we reduced the size and freed the elders from the necessity of chairing a committee, we would be better equipped to deal with spiritual leadership. This turned out to be on other people's minds when I got back, but for different reasons. The nominating committee had failed to fill any of five positions in the incoming class. Not one. Zero. For a long time I have said that God provides the resources for the ministry God wants to have done. If they aren't there, then either someone isn't listening or you don't need that ministry. That's the positive spin on it, any way.

In an earlier post ("Matheology") I mentioned reading Simple Church, a book about simplifying and focusing the ministry of a congregation around the single task of making disciples. This has since become the center post of our work as a session in the last two years. We did in fact cut the size of the session from 14 to 8, removed the requirement for elders to chair committees, and in fact did away with our committee structure as it stood. We have endeavored to develop a simple process for growing disciples, although the work is far from finished. You will see that this is fitting in with my last post, too ("Wrestling with Angels"), about the new way of being the church. Since being back, I have found that this is a very difficult task, for which I feel pretty inadequate. But we keep at it. And God bless the elders on session for their determination.

I discerned on my sabbatical that it is a wonderful thing to take a sabbatical, and everyone ought to do it. I learned when I got back that not everyone thought it was wonderful that I got a sabbatical when they assuredly did not. That, along with some junk that went on in staff and personnel matters while I was away that didn't sit well with a lot of people, led to a very uncomfortable spirit in the congregation. It was like everyone felt like a bear with a sore butt. This lasted almost exactly a year after I got back, and then it seemed to dissipate, at least for a time. It may also have been that folks were expecting me to leave once I got back. It had happened a couple times before, so even if they weren't consciously aware of it, the family system remembered and was anxious. Maybe.

While on sabbatical, I imagined a ministry at CPC where we became less about program and more about worship and peace. This seemed to be a way that people could experience a little of what sabbatical is like even if they don't get the full 3-month package. We would focus on prayer and praying together, on ministries of contemplation and healing, on quiet and awe in the midst of NoVA's crushing demands. To be honest, in the hubbub and bruhaha of the last two years, I had pretty much forgotten that I had even mentioned this, until one of the elders mentioned it at a recent meeting as something we should go back and explore. In light of my earlier post tonight, I think she is right.

So here's the confessional bit. When I left for my sabbatical, I was entirely spent. I was crushed in body, mind, and spirit. Not because things were awful, but because I had been at the work of ministry without a significant break for 20 years. When I got back from my sabbatical, I was full of hope and dreams again. But there have been a lot of days in the two years since when I have felt like a whipped puppy and a lot of days when I have felt like most people just don't care that much about church and faith and whatnot - you know, the things I've devoted my life to. So, contrary to all that I know to be healthy and falling back to some old patterns of thinking from my youth, I have let myself become guarded and withdrawn. I have let fears and resentments take root. I have often felt stuck in ministry rather than planted. These behaviors do not promote a healthy self, healthy relationships, healthy ministry, or a healthy congregation. To some extent, Percival's answer to the riddle of King Arthur's decline in the movie Excalibur, "The King and the land are one," applies to the pastor-parish relationship. It is hard to have a healthy church if the pastor isn't healthy, and it's hard to have a healthy pastor if the church isn't healthy. The pastor withdraws because people aren't engaged in church, people withdraw from church because the pastor isn't engaged. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. May God forgive me, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But nothing happens outside the time and providence of God. Not that it is necessarily God's will that we have gotten into a spiral of disengagement, but certainly God can work in and through it and redeem it. We are, or at least I am in a situation where faith is possible, as Bonhoeffer called it. I don't think I'm misusing that line too badly. Here...

“If we would follow Jesus we must take certain definite steps. The first step, which follows the call, cuts the disciple off from his previous existence. … The first step places the disciple in the situation where faith is possible. If he refuses to follow and stays behind, he does not learn how to believe.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

May God do that transformation thang on me and on CPC, to move us from where we are to where we need to be. May we have the courage to follow where He leads. Then perhaps the good lessons of this pastor's sabbatical may grow to bear fruit for the kingdom of heaven.

Wrestling with Angels

I am recently back from the Bicentennial Reunion at Princeton Theological Seminary, a four-day event with various lectures, workshops, panels, and worship. And lots of good food! I very much enjoyed being back on campus, seeing some dear old friends and meeting some new ones. The lectures were challenging, the worship was mostly excellent, and as I mentioned to some, I haven't had to think so much in a long time.

The keynote lecturer was N.T. Wright, a popular professor, theologian, writer, and former Anglican Bishop of Durham, UK. He spoke, mostly from his recent book, on the topic "How God Became King." Over three days he made the point that since the Enlightenment of the 18th century the church has pretty much misinterpreted the Gospels by ignoring the claims Jesus makes about the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He made a good case and offered several correctives for how we should then read the Gospels, emphasizing some things more than usual and others less so. At the root of it all, I took away the sense that for several generations Western Christians have failed to take God's sovereignty seriously and it is now time to do so.

Among the workshops and such, the last was a panel discussion with six of the presenters from the week, including PTS's retiring president Iain Torrance, an African-American pastor and social activist, a Korean pastor who had escaped from N. Korea to the U.S. as a teenager and returned to S. Korea as a missionary, an Hispanic pastor and teacher, Kenda Creasy Dean who specializes in youth ministry, and one of the brass from the Gallop Poll. All of them addressed the question of the church's current and future relevance through their various lenses and demographics of interest. The recurring theme was that the church as it exists in the U.S. now is not equipped to reach the changing population and culture in which we live and must change dramatically in both theology and practice of ministry. Kenda's assessment was particularly grim, that the theology that Christian youth come away with is nothing like the Gospel we know from Jesus, that they get their theology from parents and church, and that by the time they reach their 20s their religious affiliation is, in 9 out of 10 cases, insignificant.

All of this served to focus for me the struggles we have been having at CPC. While much of what we have been going through is a product of our particular system, it reflects many of the themes I heard at PTS last week. Our ministry has not worked to connect people with an authentic experience of the life-giving Gospel of Jesus. Our young families are choosing cultural imperatives over fulfillment of their baptismal vows. Our leaders are overwhelmed, standing between their own cultural and church commitments while trying to chart a path to a new model of ministry; but like Abraham and Sarah, it is a journey to an unknown land leading to an unlikely future of promise.

As pastor, I feel that I am as much in the dark about where we are going and how we are to get there as anyone else in the church. I am a product of the same dynamics described by Wright and the panelists. Plus, I suffer from a neurotic conflict avoidance that has made it remarkably difficult for me to confront people, issues, my self, to try to keep things on the rails. Even if I were to push some of these families to get back to church, what would I have to offer that would be relevant, meaningful, transforming? At the moment, not much. And yet, everything. We have the Gospel of Christ! We just don't seem to have a good delivery system. There are certainly times when I look at what the church offers and what the culture both offers and demands, and my sympathies lie with those who choose, if not for the culture, against the church.

So, we need to find a new way of doing things and of telling the Good News. Something radically new, yet grounded in the Scriptures. Maybe it starts with worship. And prayer. And relationships. We can't force a "Holy Spirit moment" of course, but we can plow the ground for it. Prayer opens the way. Our relationships need to be deep enough that we trust each other in front of God and everybody. Then our worship can be a true work of the people, a community experience of the Holy Presence of God in Christ. Everyone can bring something to offer in worship, as in 1 Corinthians 14:26. Worship would be much less liturgical, moving away from the printed word to multisensory experiences of the Word. More open prayer. More silence. Less sermon, more guided meditation. More art, music, drama, and texture. Less of the preacher, more interaction among worshipers and between them and Christ.

This sort of thing would take a lot of getting used to. It will not appeal to everyone, especially many who have grown up with the old system of clergy providing "church" for people to receive. That's pretty much anyone who grew up in church in the last 300 years. But it could create the sort of worshiping community that will connect with (if not attract) a new generation of believers. Might even transform the current generation, or at least some of them.

Isn't that what we're supposed to be about?