The Challenge of Permeability

 

It was a slow summer Wednesday, and I was in the midst of office hours at the church.  I'd worked on the sermon, chatted with some church folks, and done a bunch of prep work for the Adult Ed classes I'll soon be leading in the Fall.

At a certain point, I needed to move around again, so I circulated through the rooms of our nearly 200 year old utility building.  The "manse" currently houses my office, the copy-room, a nice little sitting parlor, two functioning bathrooms, and a number of rooms that are perhaps most generously described as "storage and utility."  In the hotter months, it does get a little warm, lacking AC as it does.  But the structure--state of the art 1827 construction--rests not on a concrete foundation, but on a bed of huge cedar logs, which just set there on the earth below.  That means that in the summer the building "breathes," as the rising hot air draws cool air from below, and I find it...with a ceiling fan...perfectly tolerable well into the upper 90s.

It's blessed with being a permeable space, sometimes a little more permeable than one might expect.

As I wandered into one room on the first floor, my eye was caught by a decoration I'd not seen before.  Did someone put up an artificial vine, one of those greenery decorations one might find in a restaurant of a certain type or a dorm room?  

Nope.

It was wild grape, alive and well and snaking across the ceiling from where it had shoved its way past one of the baseboards.  For a moment, I had a flashback to back when I was writing my first novel.  There'd be mornings where I'd go down into my basement, fire up my PS3, and listen to the music that Gustavo Santaolalla composed for The Last of Us.  The OG 2013 video game is one of the most remarkable and emotionally authentic gaming experiences I'd ever had, and the soundtrack is haunting and lovely.  I'd just leave the opening menu running, and the sorrowful strains of end times music would waft over me as I wrote.  

The menu looked like this:

This is what ruin looks like.  It's more than a little beautiful, in its own way.  But it's cold in the winter, and too hot in the summer, and zombies are everywhere.

My mind being what it is, that got me to thinking about permeability, and what we include and do not include in the life of the church.  Yes, we need to be open, and we need to be able to speak the language of our culture.  Yes, we need to show grace and hospitality, and to be amenable to the growth of the new.  Healthy churches aren't closed off to those things, or to the community around them.  They are places of grace and welcome.

But we also need to take care.

Because some things, let in, will tear our common spaces apart, will open holes through which other decay and rending growth will come, and then what had been a place of Christ's sanctuary and shelter will crumble and become consumed by the world.

It's a question of discernment, I suppose.

Our Many Ulterior Motives

I'm doing a whole bunch more thinking, writing, and reading around small church vitality these days, as my publishing Magic Eight Ball goes from "Reply hazy, try again" to a consistent "Signs Point to Yes."

Having served tiny fellowships for the entirety of my ministry, of the most strikingly consistent features of small congregations is that they aren't organizations, not really.  Some of the structure of institutional life filters through, but they're networks of human relationship first and foremost, with all of the idiosyncrasy and organic complexity that this entails.  Those relationships are...if healthy...a great source of congregational strength, as members of a community share life together in all of its joys and sorrows.

The character of those relationships is shaped by the core purpose of the community, which is...church being church and all...following Jesus and living as he would have us live.  That shared purpose is the common goal around which any church forms, and the closeness of fellowship in an intimate community is one of the collateral benefits of journeying along that Way with others.

Meditating on this recently while puttering about in my garden, I found myself thinking about what happens when we make the category error of seeking one of those collateral benefits instead of the thing itself.  

Like, say if your stated motive is "growth."  Growth is a collateral benefit of faithful labor and mutual discipleship, some of the time.  When and if it arrives, it is a blessing, albeit one orders of magnitude less important than deep and sustained human relationship.  But if growth becomes the emphasis rather than viewed as a side benefit, that focus skews how we view our purpose, and tends to become something less than Good News.  We all know what that looks like.  It looks like business models, marketing, and manipulation.  It looks like you've confused Mammon with Jesus, and I'm talkin' to you, Kenneth Max Copeland.

But focusing on numerical growth isn't the only way we can wander astray, because big churches and churches that strive for the gold ring aren't the only ones that wander astray.  What about relationships, then, that great strength of intimate community?  Can that become a blight?

Of course.

Let's talk about a soul we've all known (or been) who had "being in a relationship" as their goal.  Whether from the clawing void of loneliness, fitting in, hungering for intimacy both physical and personal, or any one of the many reptiles of our minds that whisper our inadequacy to us in our isolation, all that matters is being with someone.  Anyone.  The actual person doesn't matter, and Lord, does that never, ever, end well.  It's something that fails over and over again, as that benighted soul makes terrible choice after terrible choice, just so they won't have to be alone.

What about relationships that give a sense of power?  Where you enter a relationship because it can satisfy your need for dominance and control, where you can be in charge, where those around you are dependent on and submissive to your every whim?  Where everyone loves you and despairs?  I've seen what that looks like in large churches and small.  The little congregations with a patriarch or matriarch who has discovered the sweet taste of power, reigning unchallenged and unquestioned?  These are the farthest thing from a blessing. 

Pursued for its own sake or as an ulterior motive, then, "relationship" is theologically and morally meaningless.  So is "growth."  And "community."  And "political power."  All manner of things.  All of them are not why church is church.

When we gather as disciples, there is a greater purpose that defines us.

A Fierce and Joyous Voluntarism

Last year, my butternut squash really struggled.

Voracious chipmunks devoured the seedlings, necessitating multiple replantings.  Deer savaged the spreading vines.  It was a horticultural debacle.  I got a quarter of my usual yield.

This year, things are different.  I moved our bird feeder out of the front lawn, reducing the attraction for rodents.  I've been more diligent about applying deer spray.  

Out front, it's a riot of sprawling fan leaves and questing vines.  The most vigorous of my butternuts this season is, as it happens, not one that I planted at all.  It's a volunteer, one that came up early in a four by four raised bed where I'd intended to grow okra.  I didn't, at first, even know it was a butternut.  I could tell it was a squash of some sort, but that thumb-high sprout could have been zucchini, or perhaps a cuke.  Cucurbits...that's the common name for that family of plant...all kinda sorta look the same early in their development, at least to my amateur eye.

I thought about rooting it up, as I often will with volunteers.  I Had A Plan, after all, one that involved okra and not butternut.  But I had okra growing elsewhere.  Given the failure of my squash crop last year, I was inclined to give it a chance.  That, and if it turned out to be a butternut, it would have room to run, and butternut does the best when you let it sprawl out wild and free.

It was a butternut, and Lord, has it run.

It quickly leapt out of the bounds of the raised bed, as every single day the tendrils extended their reach.

  Its goal, best I could tell, was the sun, as it pressed due East towards the dawn.  The plant is now about thirteen feet long, the striving vines and sprawling leaves inscribing the shape of a beleafed comet onto the green of my yard.  Along those abundant vines, the glorious yellow blossoms have drawn a host of bumblebees, who will often fall asleep deep inside of the flowers, cozily cupped and pollen-drunk.  

From the female blossoms, with the help of the bees, a half-dozen squash have begun to form and fatten.  More than my entire harvest last year.

From just one plant, that showed up unexpected and was given the freedom to use its gifts.  This feels, as so much gardening does, flagrantly metaphorical.

There's a tendency amongst Professional Jesus People to assume that our task is to set agendas and establish plans and be all Leadershippy and stuff.  We are the prophets and the vision-casters!  We dream the dreams!  We know the knowledge!  Without the byzantine complexities known only to us professionals, poor hapless amateur Christians would wander around like little lost lambs in the great deep darkness.  

This is a spiritually dangerous assumption.  It's why we pastors overfunction.  It's why we're so prone to getting anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed, as we take the entire weight of our local universe onto our shoulders.  It's why we can become megalomaniacs in microcosm, and get prone to doing things we oughtn't.  

Our pastoral task, instead, is mostly to encourage, inspire, and occasionally give some gentle redirection.  The vital and creative energies that keep our communities healthy extend far beyond our egos.  They rest within the souls who choose to give their time freely and joyously to music and mission, to service and care, to teaching and reaching out.

The best measure of a healthy church, as some of my choir folk so perfectly put it while chatting before the service this last Sunday, is that people want to be there together, pursuing a commonly held joy.

The heart of a vital and free society, as Alex of Tocqueville famously put it, is "..the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires."

Without our fierce and joyous voluntarism, nothing good can stand.

Stewardship in a Time of Collapse

As it so happened, the Sunday immediately following the election was a Sunday I was preaching on stewardship.

Meaning, I was talking dollars and cents, and what lies ahead on that front for my little congregation. Poolesville Presbyterian is a church in a company town.  Meaning, it's a town with one major employer, upon which the edifice of the entire economy rests.

That "company town" isn't Poolesville itself, which is a good-hearted little Mayberry-esque place in the heart of an exurban agricultural reserve.  The company town is the entire region, and the heart of the regional economy is the Federal government.   The ten-fold growth in the population of Poolesville since 1960?  That's an artifact of the post-WW2 growth of the Federal government.  There's still growth. As I pulled into town today for my office hours, I saw they'd finally broken ground on a new development, one that's been in the works for years.  New homes, starting in the low $800s!  Because we've been fat and happy here, for quite a while.

Folks who work for the Fed are everywhere, as are contractors and subcons and the various businesses that have sprung up to support and sustain the government.  Every plumber, grocer, electrician and general contractor in the area derives their business from that income.  As does every restaurant, every private school, and the tax base for the regional governments.  

When I asked those gathered, "on what employer does the entire regional economy rely," there was a nodding Quaker-esque consensus.  Every single soul knew the answer to that question.

This was my sermon illustration, when talking about the future financial health of our church on the Sunday after the election.

Meaning, while I wasn't bellowing, (I am Presbyterian, after all) it was a five-alarm-fire air-raid-klaxon Nostromo-self-destruct-activated sort of sermon.  I didn't need to shout.  Not being fools or idiots, we know what that means.

The fat part of the probability distribution curve points to hardship in the region.  If these next four years track the way this administration wants them to track, we're not talking 2006 downturn hardship.  We're talking Flint, Michigan levels of hardship.  

There'll be a mad scramble to make it work.  Then bankruptcies. Then worthless and unsellable homes left to rot by owners who can no longer afford their Mariana-trench-underwater mortgages.  Banks, collapsing.  Local government coffers gutted.  Strip malls and businesses and office towers looking like sets from The Last of Us, only without quite so many zombies.  

Fun times.

As a church that cares for those who are food insecure, it means more hungry and anxious people...at the same time many of us suddenly find our livelihoods torn out from under us.  This is a probable future for my flock, and for every other congregation in the region.  It is easy to talk of stewardship when you are fat and happy.  But the seven fat years, as in the dream Joseph interpreted for Pharaoh, may well be over. 

The heart of the sermon was this: our obligation to those who hunger isn't diminished, simply because the cost of discipleship will soon be proportionally far higher.  Our duty to be a beacon of hope and grace can't be furloughed, or put on leave, or let go.  We must do as we are able, and we must interpret our ability through the lenses of our actual need.  Our "daily bread," so to speak.

If we are disciples, no matter what happens, in good times or ill, our commitment to the Way remains the same.  

Fear not, little flock.

The Most Effective Church Youth Program In the World

There's a common refrain among oldline congregations and evangelical nondenominational types, and it runs like this:

We just can't hold on to our kids.  This is hardest among the oldliners, where college is pretty consistently the place where our progeny go off to vanish forever from the church.  But it's a challenge for the Jesus MegaCenter brand of Christianity, too.

The answer, as we tend to pitch it, is to make ourselves ever more "relevant."  We bring in screens and apps and software.  We hire young hipster youth pastors.  We awkwardly attempt to rap in worship, or do hippity hop, or whatever it is the whippersnappers are listening to these days.  We're extreeeemee, or we were, until that wasn't part of the lingo.  We make ourselves as much like pop culture as we can, scrambling to drop references that keep pace with the choking cornucopia of consumer-culture mythmaking.  And for all of the lipstick we slap on that pig, we still bleed out.

The kids look at the permeable, seemingly irrelevant boundaries of the oldline, or the synthetic corporate falseness of market-driven faith, and they wander away.

I've wondered, of the forms of Christian faith, what church does this the best?  Who holds on to their pups?  Who sustains commitment?  Where do they stick around and remain part of the community?

Lord help us, I think I may have found it. 

I was doing due-diligence research for my novel (postapocalyptic Amish literary fiction, as it happens), and there it was.  It was a little stat, buried in Donald Kraybill's excellent, thorough sociological study of the Old Order Amish in Lancaster County, PA.  The willfully irrelevant Amish, with their beards and bonnets, buggies and barnraisings? 

Their retention rate is around 94%.

Ninety four percent.  Register that.  Only six percent of Amish young folk choose to leave the church.  This, in a community that actually encourages its young folks to get out there and sample the world as part of their process of choosing to remain, a peculiar "unconfirmation" process.  There is no less culturally connected, less cutting-edge faith group in the US, and they win the retention race.

The why of this is complex, but seems to revolve around several factors.

First, the Amish live out a radically wholistic, unprogrammed faith.  Their practice bears absolutely no resemblance to the big stadium corporate approach of AmeriChrist, Inc.  They don't divvy folks up into demographics, carefully dividing out their worship and church life by age and preference.  It's just all one thing.  But they also integrate their faith completely into every last aspect of their lives.  Why are we living this way?  Because of what we believe.  Clothing.  Housing.  Work.  All of it, manifest in the dynamics of their every day existence.  It is, as they say, "authentic."  What it is not is corporate, or driven by marketing sparkle.  The Amish are not a business.  They couldn't care less about growth.  And yet they are growing, slowly, surely, in the way that compound interest grows.

Second, the Amish create a powerful community culture. There's a clear, bright, and evident character of Amish faith.  It requires and maintains a deep level of commitment, with boundaries around the dynamics of group culture that are potent.  Their folkways present an entirely different story than the story of the world outside.  The demands on members are intense, sustained, complete.  It is, in the most profound sense of the word, countercultural.  In that sense, the Amish present a clear deliniation between participation and nonparticipation.   There is none of the oldline waffling about other ways being just as good.  This is who we are, they say.  This is not who we are.

Third, the Amish teach their young to be adult members of the community.  That is all they teach them.  If you are raised Amish, that's what you know. Kids learn, early, that they're expected to be a part of it.   Not just expected.  They are a part it.  Amish life, which revolves around faith, assumes that the young participate in every facet of youth life as soon as they are able.   Work, worship, community and home life, all engage the young.  Oh, they have youth groups, sure.  They call them "gangs."  There is no adult in charge, no youth pastor who oversees them.  They're free-ranging, organic subcommunities, self-organizing informal teen fraternities and sororities.  But even in that, they are preparing for their free-will engagement in a small, relational community.

It ain't perfect.  The Amish are quite painfully human.  The expectations they set for community participation, and around the patterns of their lives?  They'd feel oppressive to many of us, like the radical disciplines of a demanding pre-modern monastic order.  And it meshes badly with modernity, the demands of modern life, and pluralistic values.

But it works.

God help us, does it ever work.

Tribes and Tribal Gods

It's peculiar, of late, the degree to which the idea of tribalism has been surfacing in the world.  With every act of brutality on the part of ISIS, every act of monstrousness from Boko Haram, every dark and unpleasant bit of nastiness out there, it seems tribalism is to blame.

"It's these backwards monsters and their tribal God," or so goes the refrain.

"Tribal" becomes shorthand for insular, stunted, and ignorant, snarling clans of highlanders ever butchering one another, the Hatfields and the McCoys firing potshots.  It is juxtaposed with the deep virtues of modern and "postmodern" thinking.  We are, after all, the ones who make decisions based on reason and enlightened self-interest.

We're not tribal.

Perhaps that's true.  But as much as the concept of the tribe has been getting bad press lately, I think it's not entirely deserved.  I think that, mostly, because of my recent doctoral research into the dynamics of small faith communities.  Sure, little gatherings can be bitter, unpleasant, and toxic.  Tribal relations can be messy.  But not every church-tribe is Westboro Baptist.

Small communities can also be healthy and warm and gracious.  They can be places of learning and mutual support. They are places of belonging, of the interrelationship of persons on a profound level.

Tribes are the intimate communities--by affinity or by kin--that constitute one of the most elemental forms of human relationship.  They're missing, to large degree, in our broader society, where we are fragmented off into demographic silos, or regimented into systems and structures that are resemble industrial production.

These are certainly effective and efficient and convenient.  But they are not organically human.

As Carol Howard Merritt pointed out in her book  (can I call it her "classic book" yet?  hmmm) those alternate systems of organization tend to leave us hungry for ways of being together that resonate more with our essential humanity.  In this shattered, diffuse, scattered age, that's a major problem.

So when I hear "tribal" described as functionally synonymous with "ignorant" or "violent," I rankle a wee bit.

Sure, a "tribal god" is a problem.  But only if the tribe is the god.

It is equally a problem if a nation is the god.  Or an ideology is the god.  Or if we ourselves are the focus of our worship.

Six of one, half dozen of the other.

The Headless Churchman

It's...John Wesley!  Aieee!

It's almost Halloween, and over the last few days, I've been delving into the deepest nightmare of every paid church professional.  No, not the one where you discover you're not only in the wrong church and have forgotten your sermon text, but you're also not wearing any pants.  That one just replaces the "I didn't study for the test" anxiety dream.

This is a more profoundly existential nightmare, one that isn't just a fabrication of your subconscious.  This terror lives in the real world:

Churches with no pastors.  None.  For pastors, we folk called to a serving and helping profession, here is a physical manifestation of the heart of our most gnawing fear:  You are irrelevant.  You are not needed.

Yet as I work my way through the research phase of my doctoral project, that's where I've gone.  I've been talking with small church pastors, folks who are in the same position as myself.  But I've also been contacting Christians living in other forms of authentic and intimate faith community.  I've talked with longstanding participants in egalitarian house churches, and gatherings of Jesus-followers that are intentionally without formal hierarchical leadership.

Yesterday morning on my way to church, for example, I rode down the dirt roads of the Dayspring community.  It's one of the gatherings that sprang out of the Church of the Saviour, a borderline-legendary community formed by Gordon Cosby.  Dayspring rests on a little over 200 acres of woodland and fields, most of which I got a chance to see as I nosed my motorcycle along gravel roads.

It was strikingly beautiful, as the wind cast leaves down like rain.  A good soul responsible for the facility walked me around and showed me each of the three spaces used for worship.  A spare, clean room with neatly stacked wooden chairs.  A pavilion open on three sides, at one end of which rested a huge stone hearth.  And an amphitheater, set into the woods, the boughs arcing overhead like the balustrades of a cathedral.

And all the worship, in all those spaces, is conducted by members of the community.

No pastors.  No formally trained and vetted professionals, no charismatic and hard-charging evange-epreneur driving the growth.  No One CEO/Manager/Counselor/Leader/Teacher to rule them all.  Just mutual labor, mutual accountability, and mutual teaching.  Is it perfect?  No.  But if the conditions are right, it can work.  It can be a beautiful thing.

On the one hand, this is intimidating, vocationally challenging for those of us in the "organizational" church in the most radical of ways.  On the other, it's strangely, wildly heartening.

It feels, if anything, like the goal.

Church as Theatre

As I drift about the web, it tracks me, as algorithms and data accrue to my browsing patterns.  The net knows me, and knows my interests, and so works feverishly to show me things I might want to buy.

Here!  Look at this car you just read about!  Here!  A self-publishing shop that'll charge you money to produce books you can produce for free!  Buy!  Shiny!  Ooo!  Ooooh!

Because I'm a pastor who writes, reads and blogs about faith, the daily pitch includes faith-products.  I'm routinely encouraged to click through to the products and services pitched out there by AmeriChrist, Inc. and its corporate partners.  Yesterday, I clicked through on one of them, as I encountered an faith-focused-ad from Regal theaters.

Movie theaters are increasingly the place to go when you're starting up a church, or when your gathering grows large enough to justify renting a space.  They're also struggling a bit, as the giant screens and surround sound systems that stream video into our homes take a big bite out of their margins.

So it makes sense, it does, for theater chains to actively market to church folks.

Convenient!  Centrally located!  Optimal for your purposes!  So chirruped the landing page, which then asked me to pony up more personal contact information in exchange for permission to proceed.  Hah.  You know enough about me already, I think.

I bailed, routed around, and hit the corporate site of Regal Entertainment Group.  Among other things, the main page touted the tenth anniversary re-release of the first Saw movie, along with the rollout of new extra-large King-sized recliner-chairs.  Kick back in the lap of luxurious comfort, whilst you watch a graphic portrayal of human beings being creatively tortured to death for your amusement!

And the next day, you can show up to praise Jesus from the very same comfy chair!  With cupholders!

I did a search on the site, and hopped URLs, going from "theatres backslash recliners" to "theatres backslash theatre-church," and there it was.

The marketing was all about magnifying your message, convenience, and being a comfortable and familiar environment.  It's culturally relevant!  And there's a huuuuuuuuge screen.  Huge.  So big.

But what caught my eye was the quote from a satisfied customer/pastor.

"The medieval church told the gospel story in pictures via stained glass.  Today, we tell our story on the big screen.  It's the perfect postmodern stained glass--a memorable and exciting medium that demonstrates the gospel story."

Now, I love cinema, and film as a medium.

But to call it "stained glass?"  That stuck with me, because as much as I also love the look of stained glass, I remember the purpose of it in the dark ages of pre-Enlightenment Europe.  It was pretty, of course, a splash of beauty and light in an often grim and difficult world.  It's art in its own right.

But the primary use of stained glass, when Christianity was passing through that period, was to give the most rudimentary grasp of Bible stories to a completely illiterate populace.  As a medium for narrative, stained glass told stories in a time when Christians were incapable of processing primary information for themselves.

What they were fed, instead, was just enough to keep them complacent to the powers that used the message of Jesus to reinforce their own authority.

It seemed, as an analogy, perhaps more nuanced than had been intended.

But at least the chairs are more comfy now, right?

The Church that Doesn't Need You

It's been quite the week at my little congregation.

This Monday morning, a multigenerational group of teens, young adults, and adults took off in two rental vans, headed for a youth service mission trip to West Virginia, something that's been a regular staple of the life of the church for years.

There, my congregation is helping rebuild and repair homes during the day, and spends time in worship and fellowship at night.  It's a wonderful blend of direct, hands-on and material care for others and Christian faith-expression.

In preparation for this trip, I've spent the last few months in a flurry of doing... nothing.

Not a thing.  I don't organize it. I don't schedule it.  I don't go pick up the vans, or carefully plan the evening worship and prayer events.  I don't gather the materials, or insure that we've got enough participation.  I don't coordinate with the parachurch organization that sponsors it, or send planny emails back and forth with the pastors of the two other congregations that will be participating.

It is not even the expectation that I go, and so I don't.

Because in my little church, that's not been the pastor's job, not during the time I've been there.  Nor was it the expectation of the pastor before me.

And no, I haven't handed this off to an associate, or a youth pastor.  We're a little church, meaning I'm a half-time pastor in a community that has been served by part-timers since 1847.  So church members do their own thing.  It's gotten woven into the congregational DNA.

The mission trip is a fine example, something that is entirely the work of some passionate, committed souls in the congregation.  They and the youth organize and prepare for it, handling the whole thing, from incept to implementation, completion to the worship experience that celebrates and reports back on the event.

Why?  Because it's good, and a joy to do in the way that hard work to a good end is a joy.

It's tempting to get all Robespierre-leadershippy on such a thing.  You know the semi-apocryphal classic "leadership" story, right?  What?  You don't? Well, gosh, I guess it's share time.

As the tale goes, Robespierre, the psychotically self-absorbed and self-righteous Jacobin who helped turn the French Revolution into the bloody Reign of Terror, is sitting in a restaurant.  A mob comes storming by, shouting and waving banners.  "Look!  There go my people," shouts Robespierre, leaping up and rushing to get to the head of the mob.  "I must lead them!"

The absurdity, of course, is that all that mattered to Robby was that he be up in front, that he take the energy of the group and use it for his own glory.  It's leadership as ego-fodder, and that's a real danger for pastors--and anyone in leadership, frankly.

Because when the pastor must be in charge of everything, must guide everything, must control everything?  They create dependent and spiritually stunted communities.

That's not to say there's no role for a pastor.  You should add life and health, sure.  Your presence there should deepen and strengthen the life and gifts of others, and your teaching should manifest the best calling of the congregation.  An essentially healthy church lets you know you're fulfilling that role, and encourages you on the Way.  I've been blessed with that encouragement from my little fellowship over the last few years, and it's been profoundly affirming.

But when our need to be needed gets in the way of the gifts and graces that others have to offer, we have become an active impediment to the movement of the Spirit in a fellowship.

Gatherings of mature Christians should not function that way.  In a healthy congregation, there are folks whose energies, vision, and creativity will operate in parallel with those of a pastor.  It's the role of the formal leader to support, sustain, pray for, and celebrate those gifts.  It's my role to teach and preach and model the Way in my own existence, and to support every soul I see helping others towards that gracious path.

Because that's the Spirit at work, right there, and we get in the way of the Spirit to the peril of our
communities.  Oh, sure, there'll be times when you do have to step in.  If a church is completely lost, consumed by conflict, or frittering away its energy on anxiety, you need to be there.  If a community exists only for itself and its own needs, you need to be there to guide them back to the path.

But those moments are fewer and farther between than our egos want us to believe.

So this week, I watch my little fellowship do great things that they don't need me there to help them accomplish, and it's awesome.

Loving Your Facility

It's right there in the heart of my hometown, if you can call the clumsy mess of stripmalls and tarmac that comprises Annandale a "hometown."  It's a modestly-sized Baptist church, one that is both gracious and clearly working just a tiny bit to maintain its facility.  Things are neatly kept, but as with all buildings that date from fifty or sixty years ago, it feels a little worn around the edges here and there.

As I wandered in through the side door to pick up the meals I deliver on Thursdays for Meals on Wheels, I was struck by one of the good-spirited signs that someone at the church puts up everywhere.

"Welcome to a Facility," it began, and that wording stuck with me.  Not "a church."  Not "a community."  Not "a congregation."

A "facility."

Because generally speaking, when the churchy people I know think of the word facility, we associate that word with bad things.

The facility is the thing that drains our energy and our resources.  The facility is the thing that becomes the albatross around our neck, the reason we don't do mission or evangelism, the drain on our budgets and our energies.  It drains our creative energies.  It makes us frustrated.  We start to think of it as something that exists as a distraction.  A facility can be a serious pain in the [tushie.]

Yet the root of the word has to do with abilities and gifts.  It "facilitates."  It makes things possible, in the way that a servant makes things possible.  As the dictionary puts it, it "affords a convenience or service."  Or it "permits the easier performance of an action."  Better yet, it describes competence, in that it is "readiness or ease due to skill, aptitude, or practice."

Our facility should contribute to our facility, which enables us to do and to be.  It is what allows to you to have a space that is welcoming, or to engage in acts of hospitality.  It is not something we cling to, or that drains us, or that stands as a fortress in which we hide away from the Other.

Seems simple enough.  Those Baptists in Annandale certainly seem to have it down.

Chrome OS Church

The last few weeks, I've been playing with a necessary acquisition.  Our home, always cross-platform between Mac and PC, has now added in a Chromebook.  Meaning, it runs neither a MacOs or any flavor of Windows, instead opting for a Google-created operating system that's little more than a dandified version of their browser.  We're tri-platform now, I guess.

I needed a laptop that was mine and mine alone, as the family Macbook Air is now my wife's primary computer for her consulting work.  When I thought about price, and thought about what I actually use mobile computing to do, going with one of the waaay-cheap Chromebooks seemed a no-brainer.  Here was a robust, virus-free, and remarkably simple operating system, one that does every single thing I ever do when I'm out and about.

Plus, it was priced well for our budget, the kind of thing that you can purchase with amassed bonus points from a credit card.

And so the little Acer arrived on our doorstep from Amazon.  It fires right up, battery life exceeds a full workday, as advertised, and it seems completely able to do all of the writing and social media tasks I ask of it.

The machine itself is remarkably bare-bones.  Marginal RAM.  Only 32 gigs worth of solid state drive space, barely more than a modest flash drive.

Most of what it does is access the cloud, and that it seems to do perfectly well.  When I have to work offline, I can write in GoogleDocs, and access an archived version of my stuff.  Not much, but it worked just fine for all my needs on an 11 hour train ride.

As I've played around with the Chromebook, I got to thinking about it in terms of church metaphor. I do this more than is healthy.  It's some sort of pathology, I think.

What I like about this OS is just how uncluttered it is.  Oh, there's a whole bunch it can't do.  You can't install huge programs and play graphics-intensive games on it.  Neither can you edit a professional-quality motion picture.  But I don't do those things with a laptop.  I work.  I write.  Period.

And so far, this little device accomplishes the most necessary tasks, and does so well.

In the lives of congregations as organizations, it's really easy to mess up the easy things.  We get lost in the weeds or the aether, creating more and more layers of complexity to meet expectations that then require more layers of complexity, until the basic and most necessary things get lost in the mess of it all.

There's something to be said for keeping our expectations of things simple, straightforward, and easy.

The Destroyers of Gardens

Last year at around this time, the little strawberry patch in front of our kitchen window was just starting to bloom up.  I'd put it in a year previous, and it had become a riot of plants.  I'd not mowed them under as some recommended, but instead let them rest under a thick blanket of insulating leaves as they overwintered.  

After I cleared the leaves and they got to berrying in early summer, the results were better than I'd expected.  More berries than we knew what to do with, so many that I found myself making jars of delicious homemade strawberry jam.  It was amazing, so amazing that I even found myself doing the church-metaphor thing.  

Wouldn't it be awesome if churches were as vigorous, sweet and simple as strawberry patches, I thought, and I wrote a little bit of whimsy to express that thought.

But then the varmints came.  

Not the chipmunks, who'd been there all along, sneaking berries, slipping like furry ninjas under the fencing.  Not the birds, who couldn't get in through the netting.  Not the ants, who'd take a few of the berries here and there.

The varmints were woodland voles.  Cute little beggars, they are, but they are death for a garden.  Voles don't go for the berries.  They're burrowing nibblers of all green and living things, and what they go after is the life of the plant itself.  They devour the whole thing, leaves and stems and all.  After they're done, the plant is dead, and they move on to the next one.  I noticed that some of the strawberries had been eaten down to the nub, out on the periphery of the patch.  Then more.  Then more still.  Within two weeks, they had burned across the patch like a fire.  

The patch was obliterated, and they moved on to the second patch I'd put in. I found their holes, and filled them in, but they returned.  I had a few traps, purchased to clear the winter-nesting mice out of our house, and I deployed them, but they caught nothing.  It was too late.

Our harvest was destroyed, two dozen everbearing plants reduced to stumps, like Oncelers set loose on a forest of Truffula trees.

This season, about a half-dozen survivors had struggled back to life in our primary strawberry patch.  To bring the patch back up to speed, I repopulated it with extra plants that I'd put in a couple of overly shaded planters in our back yard.  

Within a day, two had been devoured, an old vole burrow hole now freshly cleared right next to them.

They were back, and I was ready.  By the entrance of the hole, I lined up two small nonlethal mousetraps like two barrels of a shotgun.  They were sheltered under some bricks to feel "safe" for the voles.

Within a day, I'd caught one, which I took a half-mile down to a patch of woods and released.  It's a woodland creature, after all.  It is welcome to be there.  I reset the traps.  Overnight, I caught another, which had up and died in the nonlethal trap.  Panic?  A heart attack?  Starvation, perhaps, as that tiny little body consumed itself with its own hungers?  Hard to tell.  I dumped the tiny carcass in the back yard, cleared the trap of the stench of tiny death, and reset it.

And again, I found myself thinking metaphorically about church.  

This Wednesday, I go to a mandated Presbytery training, one that I've already been to twice before.  I know, ugh, you think, but this one is both necessary and valuable.

It's required for all Presbyterian pastors every three years, and its purpose is straightforward.  It refreshes us in our commitment to maintain a healthy care for the garden of our own bodies and souls, so that we won't fall prey to the soul-devouring hungers that lead to sexual malfeasance.  

If we are anxious, isolated and unbalanced, inattentive to our physical and spiritual disciplines, bad things happen.  We can yield to the temptation to cross boundaries, in ways that destroy our covenant commitments to loved ones and our communities.

It also reminds us to be attentive, to be watchful for the signs of the selfish devourers, the ones who would come into the garden and destroy the new life we are so carefully tending.

The Church and the Homeless Wanderer

I saw him from my office, right as I was suiting up in my robe and stole.  He was loping into the fellowship hall, long and lean and thickly dreadlocked, tagging along with a couple of church folks who'd put him up the last time he came through town.

He's homeless, and a wanderer, more or less by choice, drifting around the country on a heavily laden bicycle.  He's not entirely coherent all of the time, but also not negative or aggressive, and rather good company in a shamanic sort of way.  Ah, thought I, recalling the last time I'd chatted with him, when we shared soup and a conversation together. That conversation had been spiritual, wild and rambly, but spiritual.   I anticipated--with some pleasure--an interesting and free-ranging conversation at fellowship hour.

By the time I got into the sanctuary, he was there, sitting with the church family that was hosting him for a few days during a spring of snows and icy slop from the sky, a family that included my liturgist for the day.

I wandered over to say hello to him, as the minutes ticked by before the service was to begin.  He remembered me, and we chatted for a bit.  Then the liturgist asked if I would mind, if it would be OK, if it would be alright with me if their guest read the scriptures in worship.

Well, hum.  

I processed for half a second, my cortex running risk assessment and probability subroutines.  It's a Presbyterian compulsion, I suppose.  Likelihood of an awkward fifteen minute pulpit excursus into Rastafarianism and the influence of the Global Illuminati?  Fourteen point two percent.  Nonzero, but also unlikely.

Then I said, "Sure."  I mean, really.  Why not?  Live a little.  If you have a worship in your home, and a guest is willing to participate, why wouldn't you invite them to be a part of it?  Seemed like a no-brainer.  We Presbyterians struggle with no-brainers, but we're working on it.

And so with a minute to go before worship, he and I went up to the pulpit.  I asked if he wanted to use his bible, and he said he'd rather use the big one in the pulpit.  Good thinking, I said.

So I showed him the texts, and where they were.  I explained how we do responsive readings.  He listened intently, and asked questions, and seemed eager to participate in the worship.

So when the time came for the first reading, up came the wanderer, long and lean and thickly dreadlocked.  He took us through the responsive reading of Psalm 23, and then read through the first seventeen verses of John 9.

Then he went back to the pew, and sat.  I gave him a thumbs up, and he smiled.  And that was that.

When I preached on John and the blind beggar and the Pharisees, on the importance of not assuming that any condition of life should be judgmentally attributed to sinfulness or spiritual flaw?  When I said that it was important that we really see and be in encounter with the souls around us?  

It felt like it bore more weight, somehow.

You know, because it was something real.  

God Does Not Care Where We Go Potty

Most every week, I check the messages on the answering machine at my little church.  It's not the best way to be in touch with us, honestly, but it'd be hard to have a church without a phone.  Usually, it's just folks trying to sell us things, and I'll hit delete. Sometimes--rarely, now--it's folks looking for information on the church.  Them I call back.  Then there was the message I listened to today, which I'd somehow missed last week.

It was a recorded message from Maryland Delegate Neil Parrish, or Kneel Parrot, or something like that.  Sound fidelity isn't always that great on our low-budget answering machine.   The message, which I don't doubt was being blasted out to every church in Maryland, had to do with something he was calling "The Bathroom Bill."  He sounded very earnest, as he told me that this bill was just like one they passed in California.  He went on, and I'll quote verbatim:

It would allow men to use the women's bathroom and women to use the men's bathroom based on what sex they happened to feel like at the moment.

Unless the Lord intervenes, he continued, this bill will pass. Pray!

Huh.  I looked it up, and discovered that there had in fact been a bill that cleared the State Senate to protect transgendered folks from discrimination in the state of Maryland this month.  Being a Virginian, I'd not much been paying attention.  Among some circles, it's called "The Bathroom Bill," because among other things it would allow individuals who are genetically male but surgically modified to use the women's room, and vice versa.

Not that the robocall said this.  It also didn't represent what it is to be transgender in anything but the crudest and most insulting of ways.  Neither did it deal with issues of potential misrepresentation in locker rooms, or issues of potential abuse of any legal protections by predators.  Strangely enough for propaganda, it didn't try to push those stranger-danger buttons.

As the bill was described, it was just about where we go wee wee.  Because you know, we Christians are such simple folk.

I had two reactions to the call.  First, well, I was a little put out, and personally offended.  Here, I have a confession to make about myself, one that might come as a shock:

I have--on more than one occasion-- used the women's room.

It doesn't happen often.  But sometimes, the only men's room is occupied for waaay longer than it should be.  Or there's significant urgency, like on a road trip when you pull into a Chipotle with your bladder about to explode, and just as you get to the bathroom a dad and his two toddler sons wander in.   In those times of biological krisis, signage means nothing.  Decisions must be made. What do I "happen to feel like at the moment?"  I happen to feel like I need to go to the bathroom. That's just a guy in a kilt on that sign, as far as I'm concerned.

More often, I've seen that happen for women at sporting events or concerts, as a bold sister in need will just line up with the always-faster-moving man-line. I do not, at such moments, mutter the word "abomination" under my breath. A stall is a stall is a stall, and if you've got the ovaries to buck convention, more power to you.

So that bugged the libertarian part of me that prefers pragmatism to social niceties.

But second, and more significantly:  You think I'm going to take this to the Creator of the Universe in prayer?

I have a strong sense of the reality of my Maker, one that has involved potent and life-transforming moments of presence.  We're talking the I Am That I Am here, the God who is a Consuming Fire, the source and ground of all being, the Numinous One who rides the whirlwind and stands above all time and space.

Human beings out there are suffering and starving, oppressed and struggling, hopeless and alone.

And I'm supposed to pray to my Awesome God about where people go to the bathroom?

Lord have mercy.

"Good Servants, Not Good Bosses"

I'm almost done with my doctoral program, which I tend to jokingly describe as an Advanced Degree in Churchiness.

There's a kernel of truth to that, though, as for the last three years I've been engaged in a program on Leadership Excellence in congregations.  Over that time, I've increasingly come to view church leadership as something of a paradox.  Our culture loves leadership.  We're big into leadership, and building leaders, and creating leaders.  

Because being the leader is a power position, and it's the place we all want to be.

But in a community of folks following Jesus?  There are no power positions, at least not as our CEO-fetishizing culture conceptualizes them.  Wealth and glory and power...oh, and more wealth...are the fruits of leadership in the for-profit sector.  In the church?  They cannot be.  In fact, it's exactly the inverse.  You can lead, and you can have influence and the capacity to create change, but the sole purpose of that influence is to teach folks to be better disciples.

Meaning, it's not about being in charge.  It's not about climbing the ladder.  There is no ladder, people.  All there is out there are children of God who need a little bit of encouragement and support finding their way to faith and grace.

Our ethic, our raison d'etre?  It's radically different than the business world. Our bottom line ain't the same, kids. 

That is super extra double plus true for leadership.

This Christian leadership reality was part of a sharply loving little speech recently given by Pope Francis, who may run a somewhat large congregation, but still seems to get the ethic that needs to define it.   

First, he challenged his new batch of cardinals to remember that they're not part of a royal court, and to be wary of the temptation to get into politicking.  And second, he offered the reminder that no matter how far you get up into the church, how "important" you become, the task of Christians is to be "good servants, not good bosses."

This wasn't just a whack o' the pastoral staff on the behinds of guys in fancy robes and towering hats.  It also messes with we homo sapiens sapiens a little.  We like the other way of thinking.  We like aspiring to power, to control, to being Charles in Charge.  That status feels worth pressing towards, worth striving for, a gold ring worth seizing after we clamber over the corpses of the weaker ones.  We want celebrity, acclaim, to have fameandfortuneandeverythingthatgoeswithit.  That's our yearning, and our hunger.

Being a servant?  Being there just to help out, to try to strengthen and support others?  Meh.  

Our egos recoil, particularly if that's the destination.

But it is, whether we like it or not.

The Church Is Terrible

A couple of weeks back, I was in one of the elective classes for my doctoral program, an advanced seminar in pastoral counseling.  It was, for the most part, an engagement with an array of different professional techniques in psychotherapy, with both an extensive study component and a practicum.

One of the techniques we got into was called Narrative Therapy, which guides individuals and couples in a problem externalization technique designed to depersonalize conflict and help decouple self-identity from dysfunctional self-understandings.

Or to put that in English, you give your Capital-P-Problem a name, and then you throw rocks at it until it goes away.  Sorta like having power over a demon by knowing its true name, dontcha know.

In that conversation, the class wandered into discussions of the Emergent Movement, which when our primary text was written seemed like a going concern.  But I was there for that movement, at least as it was expressed as a hyphen-mergent in my old-line denomination, and I watched as it blossomed and then withered away.

As the class talked about why the Emergent Church sputtered away into nothing, the mix of psychotherapeutics and churchy talk surfaced this little oddment:

One possible reason Emergence punked out:  When it came time for the Emergent Church to name the "Problem?"  It named that Problem "Church."  The energies of that movement were rooted in the postmodern deconstructionist ethos of academe, and so conversations were about critiques and exploring the brokenness of existing structures.  And yes, those are there.

But when it came time to build, to create, to establish something new and shared?  Well, therein lay the problem.  Oh, sure, everyone shared a love for fair trade coffee, microbrewed beer, and iOS.  That's not quite enough to create a new articulation of the Way, though.

Because when you build a community with the rituals that are necessary to establish shared identity?  When you create a shared ethos that provides cohesion and mutual direction?  You're creating "Church."  And of course, "Church" is the problem, so right back into deconstruction you go.

That a movement which understood itself as primarily about critique couldn't quite move past that mindset to create sustained community shouldn't be surprising, I suppose.  You go where you pour your energies.

Which is why being intentional about naming and developing our graces is of even greater importance than naming and deconstructing our demons.

That's not just an emergent issue.  It's a sustained challenge for the old-line churches, which are waning in our culture.  If our self-understanding is not oriented towards the gracious and the possible, we're going to pour our energies into what amounts to institutional anxieties.  We can become driven by fear and self loathing, circling the wagons and continually picking at our wounds.

Which means that our language is all about us, and that our eyes are turned inwards as we ruminate over failures, and that our hearts are ever and always anxious.  We worry about the Church.  We argue about the Church. We stress about how we are together failing and inadequate, and as our energies pour into our failure, we neglect those ways in which we are living and blessed with gifts.

In a person or relationship, that tends to trap us in our darkness.  In a community, that tends to do exactly the same thing.

If we believe the Church is terrible and joyless, and make that our focus, we will bend it towards that reality.  And I'm not sure that's quite what Jesus had in mind.

The Sin of Being Small

An article made its way to me through my media feeds multiple times in the last week, so I bothered reading it today.   "Five Really Bad Reasons For Leaving Your Church," or somethin' like that.

It was a blog-missive from a church-plantin'-pastor type, admonishing Christians for some of the less-valid reasons they find to abandon a congregation, structured into one of those nice neat little lists that are a surefire way to drive web traffic.

It wasn't terrible, and I found myself agreeing with it, mostly, with one notable exception.

That exception came with bad-reason-number-two:  "The Church is Getting Too Big."   As a reason to leave, that tends to occur when a community is experiencing significant growth, and folks feel a sense of loss as the thing they valued disappears.

That, frankly, can be a major problem for some churches, as legitimate growth is sabotaged by human beings whose personal power within a community is threatened by newcomers.  On a more neutral front, it can be hard for others to find a way to let go of the sense of identity that a little fellowship provides.  There's real loss and mourning there, but that shouldn't prevent a community from being a place of welcome.

But the pesky thing with bloggery is that it tends to push us to make bolder statements.  Like, say, that: "Remaining small is a sad and unbiblical goal."  He then goes so far as to accuse those who like intimate communities of being "in need of repentance." As a small church pastor, that gets me dander up, it does.  But I took a few deep breaths, and tried to see it from his perspective.

Because even there, I can see where he's coming from.  We're not supposed to hide our light under a bucket, after all.  We are charged with going out into the world and spreading the Good News.

But organizational expansion and the Great Commission are very different things.  If I tell the Good News to another human being, and they are changed by it, that's the growth I seek.  I do not care if they choose to live that changed life out as a pledge unit in my community.  If I do, then the growth is about me and my desire, and not about the spread of the Spirit.

In point of fact, "remaining small" is paradoxically central to the growth of the Gospel.  This is why Big Parking Lot Churches so assiduously and carefully support small gatherings.  That's where relationship happens, and conversation happens, and sustained transformation happens.  It's where the Spirit moves most freely.  The big emotional hit of a perfectly choreographed crowd-worship?  That fades away as quickly as Psy's fame.  It is not growth.  The meat and life of the Way is in those places where you are connecting to other flawed, struggling, growing, beautiful souls, and walking the walk with them.

Those places are small.

"Growth is inevitable," he suggests.  It isn't, because it can't be.  Not every community is growing.  I recently spent a weekend in West Virginia, and as I wended my way down some lovely, twisty country roads, I passed dozens of small churches.  There is no sprawl there.  It's rural, and population is either stable or declining.

Churches there do not grow large, because they are not in the urban, suburban, or exurban places where growth in our culture is occurring.  Are these rural gatherings illegitimate?  Are they not places where the Gospel is needed and legitimately expressed?  I cannot believe either of those things to be so.  But it is easy, in our consumer culture, to equate numerical expansion with what is good.  This is not so.

"If you don't like big churches, you wouldn't have liked the first church, and you certainly won't like heaven," he suggests.

I'm not quite so sure on either of those points.  First, the "first church," assuming he's talking about the ones Paul and Apollos and Cephas and others planted?  Those were house churches.  Not large, not flashy, not hundreds and hundreds of souls.  By our standards, those were small gatherings.  So I'm not quite sure what that means.   And second: heaven?  I don't think it bears any resemblance to Big Stadium Worship.  Or anything we now understand.  I mean, seriously, dude.

Yes, I know American culture venerates expansion and growth.  Just look at our midsections.

But let's not cast aside the small without considering what we're throwing away.

The Voices of Children in the Church

This last Sunday, I performed a baptism.

As baptisms go, it wasn't the usual fare.  I've baptized babies and very little ones, and that's a delight, utterly different every time.  I've welcomed adults into the fellowship of the faith, and watched as the water that poured down their faces mingled with tears of joy.

But I've never baptized a kid before.  Meaning, not a baby, and not a teen, and not a grownup, but a kid.  It was a child of the church, loved by the whole community, who for various reasons just hadn't been baptized.

And he'd gotten old enough to ask whether it had happened, and old enough to ask...repeatedly...if he could please be baptized.  No one prompted him, or cajoled him.  It was his idea.  He was persistent enough and serious about it enough that grownups listened, and asked if he could talk with me.

So for a few Sundays after church, I sat down with him and we talked.  We talked about God, as I do with the adults, and worked our way through ecclesiology and the doctrine of the Trinity.  I don't generally weave dinosaurs and Lego Star Wars and karate into those conversations, but in this case, it seemed to work.  He got it, grasping with his child's mind what the church is all about, and what God's love is all about.  It was clear he was serious about it.

We didn't get into the convoluted theology.  None of the fuddly stuff that tangles and snares us, and that we mistake for the real.  It was very simple...but it was the same thing I do with the very-slightly-older humans we call grownups.

And for the baptism itself, he had his sponsors, up there with him.  But he also answered questions, the very same Affirmations and Renunciations I place before the adults.  Those questions were straight out of our very decent and orderly Book of Common worship, but they...errr...needed a bit of tweaking.

Why?  Because those words themselves only point to what happens in baptism.  They are not of themselves magic.  It's why we have multiple versions open to us.  And the Big Words for Adults would have required too much unpacking.  Other words, simpler and stronger and bearing meaning to a child's spirit, those words can serve precisely the same purpose.

And so I asked, and he answered, renouncing sin, turning to Jesus, committing to the community of the Way.  And then, through water and the Spirit and with the Words of the Great Commission (those I left, of course), we welcomed him in.

Later, during the Lord's Prayer and during the final hymn, I was struck by something.

His friends had stayed to see him baptized.  When we prayed that great prayer together, I could hear them praying, raising their young voices so that they could be heard along with the adults.  And I could hear them singing, strong and confident, as we belted out What A Friend We Have in Jesus.

It felt good to hear the voices of children in church.

The Gerrymandered Church

As our nation continues to lurch and stumble its way through yet another sustained pointless political psychodrama, there are plenty of folks willing to pitch out reasons why.  We do seem, as a nation, increasingly unable to get along.  We posture, we bellow, we display, but what we don't really do is take one another seriously.

The reasons for this are many, but one that tends to come up a whole bunch is the new science of the gerrymander.  Political parties who find themselves in power use this arcane art to restructure the shape of a state's districts, carefully splitting and dividing and concentrating sections of their state so that opposing parties are weakened.  It's this dynamic that has lead us to a House of Representatives in which one party has a significant majority, even though its candidates received over a million fewer votes nationally.   If you know how to game the system, you can insure your power.

Candidates choose their voters, in other words.  And that gaming is a violation of the integrity of our republic, no matter which party does it.

In that concentration of power, you also insure that more extreme and combative positions aren't leavened by having to consider alternate perspectives.  It radicalizes and calcifies perspectives.  It makes things a mess.

Musing on this the other day, I found myself noting that in some peculiar ways, this is also a problem with Christianity in the United States.  The great, joyous, and glorious freedom to pursue exactly the faith community that speaks to you and your needs?  The tendency of folks with Strong Theology and Big Personality to draw in folks who agree with them?

It means that we divvy ourselves up, engaging in a peculiar autogerrymandering process that allows us to seek fellowship and engagement with those who are People Like Us.  And because we are free, we can also choose to leave a place rather than doing the hard work of loving those who aren't People Like Us.

I wouldn't have it any other way, of course.  We need to be able to both seek and create communities where we feel safe and empowered.  But there is a price to seeking those places of personal and theological comfort.

That price comes in the ease with which we attack and condemn the other, smug and comfortable in our selected place of sameness.

In its own way, that's as spiritually dangerous as being trapped in a community where you cannot freely speak.  Sometimes even more so.

It's hard to love your enemies if you've structured your whole life so that you never have to encounter them.

The Church, The Quick, and the Dead

On Sunday, as I nosed my way through the church mail, I found myself encountering the latest issue of Presbyterians Today.   It was the handy-dandy "Welcome to the PC(USA)" edition, one that Presbyterian churches can keep conveniently located near the entrance for distribution to visitors curious to learn more about the church.

But looking at the cover, I found myself going, "Huh."

I know the demographics of my denomination, know what it looks like, know what it feels like.  And what I saw on the cover just wasn't that.  You can see it yourself, a multiethnic klatch of smiling, pleasant, recently-graduated Hufflepuffs.  The crowd is young, almost without exception.  And there, I'm not even talking about the circle of folk in the foreground.

I'm talking about the whole room.  There's one slightly older guy, and maybe one blurry person who might conceivably have white hair in the far background.

This seems a nice enough gathering, one that was most likely Presbyterian through and through.  But if you encounter a Presbyterian church, is this what you are most likely to find?

Meaning: where are the old people?  You know who I'm talking about.  The geezers.  The codgers.  Old Man Jenkins.  Widow Prescott.

Because honeychild, we Presbyterians are not a young lot.  The 2011 Presbyterian Panel Study (Lord, how we loves us some data) found that the average age of a Presbyterian...that's median, kids...was sixty three.

Yes, Sixty Three.

I marveled at the unrepresentative cover, and wondered to myself...where's the church I know?  Where are the oldsters?  I flipped the magazine over, and...O Sweet Jesus.

On the back, an ad for columbariums.  

Which, in the event you've never encountered that term before, are places you stash human remains within a church.  Pretty much no twenty or thirty-somethings have a clue what that even is.  Lord knows I didn't at that age.

We're a young church, says the front.  Your Session may be interested in hearing a presentation about columbariums, whispers the back.  It was a peculiar tension, one that stirred several reflections.

I see columbariums as a peculiar thing.   What's wrong with a garden for ashes, or the foot of a beloved tree, or the sea, or a mountaintop?  Just remember to toss downwind, brothers and sisters.  

Then again, I also struggle even more deeply with the absence of age on the cover.  

Yes, we must be welcoming to the new generation of the church, and open to the new.  Period.  If not, all we are is a columbarium waiting to happen.  Our organizational survival strategy can't be to scare off property purchasers and potential developers by filling our sanctuaries with human remains.

But what our culture does to the old is both insane and a tiny bit monstrous.  Age is hidden away, ignored, useless.  And so we forget, and our forgetting leaves us weaker.

One of the things I've cherished about my time in the Presbyterian church, as I've gone from being a youngling into the comfortable roundness of middle age, is the encounters with the deeper spirituality of older souls.  Lifetimes of hard won experience, triumphs and losses, these things have a value that no amount of Googling can replace.  The wisdom of older pastors and Jesus folk who've walked in the Way for a lifetime have taught me as surely as Old Ben or Yoda.  

Some folks do lose themselves on that journey, I'll admit.  Their souls calcify as they age, and they hold on to the past with anxious hands.  But others remember, and delight in being where they are, and bear with them stories that are powerful and worth hearing.

Focusing on the young?  That's our culture.  Intermingling the generations and casting down the walls that have been erected around us?  That would be different.  Countercultural.