Pulpits, Platforms, and Publishing

There, on the concrete slab of my carport, was a box.  It had arrived in the dark of mid-evening, as packages so often do.  I picked it up, a little uncertain as to what it might contain.  Was it a belated Christmas gift?  An early Christmas present?  I was, for a moment, genuinely fuddled.

When I got inside, I peered at the box, but my reading glasses weren't on me, and the label was just the sort of blur that most things are when you're well into middle-age.   "Hey honey," I yelled.  "Were you expecting anything?"  She wasn't, so I figured I may as well just open the thing up.  I popped my knife out of my pocket, and did so.

Inside...books.  My books, as it happened, fresh off the press from my publisher.  Oops.  Guess I wasn't going to make the now-obligatory Author Unboxing Video.  

The Prayer of Unwanting is my first swing at a devotional, a tart, playful little read that recenters the Lord's Prayer as the heart of the Christian prayer life.  The book pushes back against the dominant prayer ethos of American Prosperity religion, which pushes prayer as a means by which we get what we want.  We pray for material attainment, we pray for success, we pray to get and to have and to manifest, for shine and for fame and for glory.

This paradoxically carnal spirituality has nothing at all to do with Jesus, and everything to do with consumer culture.   What Jesus wants us to do is set all of that aside.  

This is why the prayer he taught has not a danged thing to do with having anything more than what we absolutely need.  It's not about getting what we want.  It's about changing what we want, conforming us to God's grace rather than feeding our bottomless hunger for [stuff] and fame and power.

The challenge, now, is that I'm expected to market the book, to leverage my platforms to maximize the reach of the book.   So...how do I do that?  

Firstly, it ain't like I'm oblivious to the irony of marketing a book about not desiring material success.  I'd like people to read the blessed thing, of course.  But the moment I'm grasping about it, the moment my pride and my desire for recognition and lucre become the impetus for my efforts, I'm in a difficult place.   

It's a tricky wicket.

And secondly, I'm fiercely aware that desiring the "platform" that is such a prerequisite for success for Christian authors these days is the enemy of my calling as a pastor.  Celebrity pastors and Jesus-influencers are in a dangerous place spiritually, as the siren song of growing follower counts and maintaining influence can easily supplant the dual demands of humility and servanthood.  To stay relevant, you need to get into every theological fight, you need to court controversy, you need to pitch out hot-take after hot-take...and wisdom and grace slip from your fingers.

As a committed servant of small congregations, I think this is doubly true.  Small church ministry demands that you set aside the trappings of platform and get your hands in the dirt, honoring and supporting the spiritual gifts of your sisters and brothers.  Again, you're not to desire a platform.  You may have a pulpit, sure, but it's more for the convenience of your congregation's sightlines than a marker of your exalted status as the Most High Jesusy One.  

As small church guru Karl Vaters put it in his fierce little volume De-Sizing the Church:  

"..when we elevate leaders through their ability to become celebrities, giving them power over our feelings and decisions while having no genuine proximity in our lives, that celebrity culture always elevates, alienates, then devastates its prey.  When you have power but no proximity, you have little to no accountability.  And power without accountability always--absolutely always--leads to an us/them, have/have-not, rich/poor dynamic that ruins everything it touches."  (p.83)

But celebrities and influencers actually sell books.  In an era when the publishing industry struggles to survive, it's hard not to walk their path, because it does kinda sorta work.

So it's a balancing act, as one treads upon that high wire strung between idea and actualization, wobbling between a failure to use one's gifts and the failure to stay in the Spirit.

All the more reason to keep oneself centered in prayer, eh?

The Helicopter Pastor

I am not, or at least I try not to be, a helicopter parent.   You know the sort, the ones who schedule every last moment of their child's lives, and whose rotor-wash manages to blow every last particle of fairy-dust whimsy out of childhood.

I do not wish to be that sort of parent, because that approach to children has very little to do with loving them, and a whole bunch more to do with our own anxieties about ourselves.

It can, as the latest in a series of fretful articles highlighted this week, cripple the development of our children...so protected, they become vulnerable, so carefully managed, they have no idea how to live for themselves.

Aaaah!  We're so anxious, we're anxious that we're anxious!   We're meta-anxious!

They're everywhere in DC.  I see them as I walk.  I like to walk.   Walking is so much better than driving.  It allows me to go slow, to take time to really observe the world around me.

I walk past one parent, sitting outside of a kid's music lesson, car idling with the windows up on a beautiful late spring afternoon, fiercely texting and then arguing with their spouse about schedules over a cell.

There is another, the loudest of a cluster of parents shouting instructions on a sports field, running the carefully scheduled activity that now fills time that once would have been filled with childhood's blissful freedom.

"Watch me, all of you," she barks on the softball field to a gathering of ten year old girls, all helmeted and wearing complex black metal face guards.  Face guards?  Since when did softball require a mask for every single player?  There's a small fortune in orthodontia to protect, I suppose.

"This is how you call it," she says, motioning to one of the five other parents to knock a ball skyward.  "MINE MINE MINE MINE!"  And she catches it cleanly.

"Again!  Watch me, Tyler!  TYLER!  EYES UP!  NOW!  MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE!"

An ice cream truck rings its bell forlornly in the parking lot, but there are no takers.  Though the park is full of children after a long day of school on a warm May evening, these are not children at play.  They are on task.

I wonder just how many pastors approach their congregations the same way.  Every moment, carefully structured and controlled and directed.  Every meeting, carefully planned.   Task forces and subcommittees to review guidelines and protocols.

The image...heck, the BRAND...must be protected.

There can be no mess, no failure, no spiritual equivalent of a stubbed toe or a black eye or a skinned knee.  What if things don't go well?  What if things go downhill?  What if people don't believe exactly what we say in our carefully thought out set of theological positions?  What will my peers think?  Jesus will be mad at me!

The pastor frets and tightens their control, and the children of God find themselves pressed into activity after activity, every moment accounted for.

Planned. Safe.  Joyless.

Dual Career Households and the 21st Century Pastor

Ozzie and Harriet were, in reality, a Dual Career Couple.

As the months tick by, and the necessary preparations for my departing my congregation continue, I'm keeping my radar crankin' to see where the calling might lead next.  Reality has so far served up some clear signals.    There are wonderful churches looking for pastors, sure.  There are churches where I'd be able to serve effectively.   But with a glut of pastors seeking calls in the DC area, it's looking more and more like things are trending towards a void.

When a supportive, insightful and good hearted Presbyterian official suggests that...given my locational limitations and the competitive environment...it's time to be looking at being Lutheran, things aren't trending well for the continued union of calling and gainful employment.

My set answer to folks who ask what I'll be doing after October 30, 2011 now tends to be either 1) I'll be the Associate Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Nowhere, or if I'm feeling less whimsical, 2) I'll be working on my studies, taking time to write, and "spending time with my family" or, if I'm feeling blunter, 3) I'll be unemployed.

One never knows, of course.  The Lord doth work in ways motht inthcrutable.  Still, my shamanic reading of the dripping entrails of the Presbyterian call system points in a very challenging direction, at least in the short term.

Most of my challenge comes, I think, from being in a 21st century relationship.  Were this 1957, I'd be the sole breadwinner, the one with the career in the institutional church.  With things wrapping up at my church, my poor-as-church-mice family would be preparing to follow me from my little country church to a bigger church in a larger town, living the semi-itinerant life of the parson.

But this is not 1957.  I'm not the only one who works.

Ours is, as is the case in so many American households, a dual income household.  Well, for the moment.  My wife's career...which is flourishing...is here.  When I entered the ministry, her income became the primary income.  Following a recent job change, followed by a raise, followed by a major promotion and another raise, she now makes more than triple what I make in my part-time Presbytery minimum pastorate, and more than enough to sustain our household even in the complete absence of my income.

More importantly, she's good at what she does, and she likes what she does...most days.  It's her vocation.  Which leads to the challenge facing pastors of a moderate-to-progressive bent in this era.  How do we balance our vocation with the vocations of our wives/husbands/life partners?

Do we just assume that they'll be nice and submissive and follow us around from church to church to church, because we are Called By God (tm) and they "just have a job?"

"Yes, I know you like what you do, honey, but if you don't quit, you'll be impeding the will of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who has told me that I must now go serve a slightly larger church for slightly more salary three states away, just like He always does after I get into a fight with the Session."

I've got a Proverbs 31 problem with that, not to mention the fact that this way of thinking flies completely in the face of the Reformed and Protestant understanding of vocation.

Pastoring is not the only calling, eh?

Problem is, we've structured our church life under the assumption that it is, and that assumption prangs up against the reality of how most families look these days.