Scaredy-Cats

Last night our old cat jumped onto the couch next to the four-year-old as he sat with Maggie, listening as she read his bedtime story. This cat, the epitome of scaredy-cat, has never done this before. In the dozen or so years that we’ve had her, she has spent about 90% of her time in hiding: under beds, buried under blankets, disappeared into the darkest corner of a closet. For a while we owned one of those oversized recliners and she figured out how to crawl inside one of its wide – and, we came to learn – mostly hollow arms. It was only when one of us dropped into that chair and leaned back that we’d discover her there, the frantic wiggling and clawing the unmistakable signal that we’d again disturbed her peace.

fullsizeoutput_29fb It took a few years before Gabby the cat would venture onto the couch with us on an evening when we sat quietly, reading or watching TV. When we adopted our first son she seemed to revert and for his first few years E must have wondered about this imaginary animal his parents mentioned occasionally. Most of our guests over the years couldn’t be faulted for thinking the same; occasionally someone will do a double-take while sitting at our dining room table, “I didn’t know you had a cat,” they’ll exclaim with that certain tone that indicates whether or not they’re a cat person.

Anyway, as E learned to be quiet around our sensitive cat she slowly warmed to him, eventually even seeking him out to be scratched behind her ears. The four-year-old has always been a bit more rambunctious. Frankly, I thought it’d be a few more years before she’d let him get close. But tonight, to the surprise of both Maggie and W, she hopped right up.

I only mention our cat and her skittish ways because I sometimes think I’ve learned as much about being a pastor from her as I have from most of the books I’ve read and classes I’ve taken on the subject.

When we adopted the cat who’d become Gabby – the shelter had named her Fleur which is a good French word for flower but, in our opinions, not so good for a cat – the woman who had cared for her warned us that she was pretty shy. An understatement! At six months old she’d been found near death, shivering under a pile of frozen leaves. It took a few months to revive her to the point where she was strong enough to be adopted. On top of being so easily frightened, she’s always remained skinny. No matter what we feed her she still carries evidence of those first cruel days in her body.

It’s been close to fifteen years that we’ve lived with this cat. She is the same animal now as she was when we first drove her home. But she’s also different, braver. She’ll never be one of those cuddly, social cats but almost every morning now, before everyone else gets up, she’ll jump into my lap while I read. Instead of burying herself in our furniture, she perches on one of the couch’s armrests, hoping to be pet while we watch reruns of The West Wing or The Simpsons.

People can change and heal is what I’m getting at I guess. But we can’t be forced. And if you want to be there when it starts to happen, you’ve got to stick around long enough so that when they’re finally ready to be seen you’ll be around to see.

Ordination Testimony

This summer I’ll be ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Covenant Church. On Friday I gave the following testimony about my call to ministry to a regional gathering of Covenant pastors.

The best thing about the call to vocational ministry is also what makes this call so hard. In Ephesians 4:11 Paul writes, “Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers.” It’s not the work of ministry that is the best and the hardest part of the call- it’s the One who calls who makes it so personally, comprehensively complex. Christ himself.

The idea of vocational ministry in a general sense was always an appealing possibility. There are pastors and missionaries in previous generations of my extended family. My parents experienced their own, individual calls to missionary service when they were teenagers. Our family life in Venezuela and Ecuador was good and reinforced for me the significance of lives dedicated to equipping to church for works of service.

It was only when I began wrestling with the particular call to plant a multi-ethnic church that I began to understand just how hard this call can be. Again, I don’t mean the different tasks and rhythms of planting and pastoring; rather it’s the One who calls – Christ himself – who has made it hard. As we began planning this new church in 2008, I had no idea that I would eventually be its pastor. As a relatively well-read person, I just knew that a multi-ethnic church planted in predominately Black neighborhood would require a Black pastor. But as the day to launch weekly services approached, and as we exhausted our list of candidates, our sending church decided that if God wasn’t going to provide the ideal church planter, then I would have to do.

As I took my first wobbly steps into this call I began to experience something disturbing: For the first time in my life, my white male-ness was not an asset. Week after week I wondered – with varying degrees of despair – why God hadn’t called a woman or man of color to serve and lead this church. Surely this diverse congregation would benefit far more from a pastor who was from the neighborhood, someone who instinctively knew the joy and pain of being Black or Brown within the context of our racially segregated city.

I’ll never forget sitting in my spiritual director’s office as I expressed my growing conviction that I was the wrong person for this call. This older, African American woman listened as I described my worry, the near-constant sense of being out of place, of wondering whether I’d ever be seen and accepted. She listened and then, when I finally stopped talking, she smiled and said, “This is good. You’re describing how I feel much of the time as a Black woman in a white world.”

I’m sure it sounds ridiculously remedial to you, but it was as though the heavens parted when she said this to me. I realized that my race and gender had conditioned me to expect God’s faithfulness to feel a certain way- like acceptance and affirmation. Yet, as my spiritual director was pointing out, because it is Christ who was calling me, my expectations would need to change dramatically. The call to ministry – if it is modeled after Jesus – must require me to be emptied of power and privilege; it must come to embrace my weakness and foolishness as the locations of God’s display of faithfulness and salvation.

In 1978 Zenos Hawkinson preached a sermon to a people he feared had forgotten God’s faithfulness to them during their times of weakness and need. He said,

If you have come out of the pilgrim tradition of the children of Israel, from Egypt to the promised Land, and have used that magnificent opportunity only to become a Philistine, then take heed. Do you live comfortably behind high walls and bronzed gates, and worship regularly at the altar of Baal? Are you pleased with the prospects of Social Security and a special pension plan, or the apparent security of America’s nuclear deterrent and the overwhelming power of its society and technology? If that provides comfort, then live in fear and trembling, because it will all be taken away from you as surely as the security of our forebears. I proclaim it.

He’s preaching to me. This Philistine culture has formed me to desire its high walls and bronzed gates, to worship at its altars of safe privilege and divisive power. But Christ himself is calling me to something different- to the way of weakness and foolishness.

This is so hard. But it has also been so very good. My wife and I find ourselves woven into a community of people who we never could have hoped to know and love outside of our diverse congregation. Our two sons – both adopted, neither of them white – are growing up in a community that reflects the gifts of their ethnicities. I know friendship with neighborhood colleagues whose acceptance and loyalty still surprises me. And best of all, every impossibly hard thing about this call has always been surpassed by the impossibly good Gospel of Jesus.

The Strangeness of Being a Pastor

Being a pastor isn’t the hardest job – not by a long shot. I can think of many, many jobs that seem far more demanding. Even so, it is a strange vocation without much cultural equivalency. It’s only after ten years in the ministry (as we pastors call it) that I don’t dread the What do you do? question. I’ve come to expect the awkward silences and unpredictable follow-up questions. (But what do you actually do? So, that’s a real job?) I kind of like the questions now; telling people what I do seems to give people who don’t often get to talk about such things permission to share their opinions and questions about spiritual things.

IMG_0015_2 So being a pastor isn’t the hardest job but there is a strangeness to it that is hard for people outside vocational ministry to relate to. And that’s OK, but it does mean many pastors feel lonely and isolated. A quick internet search of “lonely pastor” makes it plain how widespread this is. There are a few reasons I don’t typically feel this: a supportive family, friends who don’t care all that much what I do and remain interested in me for other reasons, and a kind and gracious church.

There is another reason I don’t experience the isolating effects so common to this work: other pastors. This might seem obvious but I’ve come to appreciate the camaraderie of other women and men in the pastoral guild only recently. In my earlier years in ministry I found it difficult to relate to most other pastors. And to some extent I still do: rooms full of pastors can be strange places filled with high-sounding jargon and not-so-subtle comparisons; many pastors seem unable to talk about anything other than their churches. But in more recent years I’ve noticed that people I highly respect share this pastoral work: my dad, my aunt, and my great friend and neighbor, Michael, for a start. These are all good, admirable, and normal people- normal in the sort of way close friends must be.

In his memoirs Eugene Peterson devotes a chapter to his friendship with a group of clergy in the Baltimore area. The Company of Pastors, as they called themselves, were diverse in many ways: age, theology, and the locations of their many different churches.

This diversity did not divide us. This is a rare thing among pastors, maybe a rare thing in general. But it came from our common assumptions of our common vocation – not temperaments, not politics, not theology, not reputation. We were pastors, a Company of Pastors. And we were pastors in a culture that “did not know Joseph.” Our identity out of which we lived was unrecognized by virtually everybody, in and out of church.

This group of pastors proved indispensable as Peterson worked to be a pastor in culture with little memory of what such a vocation looks like or why it might be important. Such a cultural location “meant that we were lonely, and sometimes angry that we were lonely.” If that collection of pastors felt that way so many decades ago, how much deeper are those emotional shadows today?

But Peterson found his companions and thus not only lessened the loneliness – some of it is probably unavoidable and also good – but also found a living compass that pointed him toward a vocation that had become fuzzy and open to endless interpretations. Peterson was beginning to pastor at the time when churches were adopting the language of business and markets in order to grow congregations. The pressure was strong to set aside older assumptions about pastoring and to pick up new, more legitimate-seeming personas: entrepreneur, CEO, specialist. The Company worked as an anchor that kept them against the constantly changing tides of new methods, strategies, and programs. (Any of Peterson’s readers will know this didn’t mean isolation from the world of ideas or cultural engagement.)

The three men in the picture above are pastors and we have become a version of Peterson’s Company. Last year we gathered from around the country – Minnesota, Washington, Chicago – for a retreat. I knew one of the men well and the others not at all. We spent our days describing our churches and our neighborhoods and, to the best of our abilities, our sense of the Spirit’s work among the people to whom we’ve been called. We talked about what was good and what was hard. We asked one another many, many questions. Some about tactical concerns. Others about the shape of our spiritual life. We went on some walks, told stories, and ate well. I took notes of the many new and fresh thoughts that came to me during those days. When the retreat ended we committed to stay in touch and we have- quarterly conference calls lessen the distances and allow the good questions to continue.

Like Peterson’s group we come with our diversities: three have planted churches; three are pastoring larger churches; two of us lean to the city, two toward the country; personalities and perspectives are as different as could be expected. We belong to the same denomination which provides a nice starting point and the familiarity of history.

A few months ago we agreed that it was time for another retreat. Frequent flyer miles and a borrowed vacation home made it possible to spend another four days together. As before our conversation topics ranged widely – ministry dilemmas, questions about the future, preaching challenges, family – but circled back to our shared vocation. For those few days we got to be pastors with other normal pastors. My temptation to justify the vocation faded; the loneliness around the fringes dissipated. I have pastor friends – good friends – in my neighborhood, but schedules are hard to coordinate and time unhinged from tasks is almost impossible to find. So these times away take on added meaning, special in part because of their rarity.

It’s a strange thing, being a pastor. I thank God for the friends who have been called to this strange vocation and who so willing share themselves with me.

Dangerous Calling

My review of Dangerous Calling by Paul David Trip in the January print edition of Christianity Today has now been posted on their website.

There is a disheartening rite of passage every young pastor faces. And though it was almost 10 years ago, I remember my own moment clearly. “Have you heard?” asked my senior pastor when I arrived at the church office that morning. I hadn’t. So he proceeded to tell me about the well-known pastor whose moral failure had made the morning headlines. I remember two things about that moment: my pastor’s grief and my inability to focus the remainder of the day. Though neither of us had met the man or been greatly influenced by his ministry, this pastor’s public shame still felt deeply personal.

“Have you heard?” As the years have passed I’ve come to dread that question, yet it—and the sad stories behind it—is frustratingly common. The hushed conversations between pastors at these moments reflect an unsettling worry: that in our discredited colleagues, we see possible reflections of ourselves. We too have known temptation. We too inhabit a church culture that can seem to hinder our own discipleship by elevating ministry production over spiritual fruit.

Read the rest on the Christianity Today site.

“Crowds are a worse danger, far worse, than drink or sex.”

I’m finishing up Eugene Peterson’s wonderful memoir, The Pastor, a book I’ve anticipated eagerly since I first learned of it last year. About halfway into the book, in a chapter titled “Company of Pastors,” Peterson includes a letter he wrote to a colleague who was leaving his church for one “three times the size of where he was.” He writes,

I certainly understand the appeal and feel it myself frequently. But I am also suspicious of the appeal and believe that gratifying it is destructive both to the gospel and the pastoral vocation. It is the kind of thing America specialize in, and one of the consequences is that American religion and the pastoral vocation are in a shabby state.

It is also the kind of thing for which we have abundant documentation through twenty centuries now, of debilitating both congregation and pastor. In general terms it is the devil’s temptation to Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple. Every time the church’s leaders depersonalize, even a little, the worshipping/loving community, the gospel is weakened. And size is the great depersonalizer. Kierkegaard’s criticism is still cogent: “the more people, the less truth.”

This is strong language and it’s a theme that runs throughout the book. Peterson sees the pastoral vocation opposed, in most cases, to the trajectory of the American Dream. In the letter he goes on to show why “largeness is an impediment” to Christian maturity.

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence- religious meaning, God meaning -apart from God as revealed in the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds. Probably because they get so much ego benefit from the crowds.

Most of my experience as a pastor has been in medium-sized congregations of a few hundred people. As these congregations grew it was hard not to notice how much time needed to be given towards administration, organization and strategy. While the growth in size was welcomed, it also required more pastoral effort to mitigate the effects of the increasing size. But increased time and attention to these details at the expense of more traditional pastoral responsibilities is not Peterson’s primary complaint. His is a theological concern.

But a crowd destroys the spirit as thoroughly as excessive drink and depersonalized sex. It takes us out of ourselves, but not to God, only away from him. The religious hunger is rooted in the unsatisfactory nature of the self. We hunger to escape the dullness, the boredom, the tiresome of me. We can escape upward or downward. Drugs and depersonalized sex are a false transcendence downward. A crowd is an exercise in false transcendence upward, which is why all crowds are spiritually pretty much the same, whether at football games, political rallies, or church.

Peterson closes the letter by stating his belief that “crowds are a worse danger, far worse, than drink or sex.”

In the past year, for the first time, I’ve pastored a church of fewer than one hundred people. While we have seen an increase in the size of our young congregation, we are- using American church standards- nowhere near being a large church. I have enjoyed this. The extra administrative and strategic efforts required by a larger congregation simply aren’t needed in our church. To be clear, I’m working harder than ever but the work has more of a pastoral edge to it: listening, praying, questioning, studying, leading.

But again, Peterson’s gripe is more theological than what I’ve been observing in my own experience. A church, if I read him correctly, that feels and behaves like a crowd is an impediment to the ways the Gospel transforms people in community.

How do you see this? Does Peterson overstate his case, or is he on to something important that is difficult to hear within the American way of measuring growth and success?

My pastor once told me that a church of 300 people seemed like an ideal size to him. Anything greater than this was evidence of God’s sending nature, pushing a portion of the congregation out to begin a new community of faith. His words resonated with me and Peterson, as he has done many times, now gives me new language to think about old dilemmas.

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I’ve written previously about Eugene Peterson.