Taking Care of Your Fornicatin' Self

I stood in the grungy little office of the motorcycle shop, as the proprietor went over what they'd done to get my bike back up and running.

The owner and chief wrench at that shop mostly builds bare-knuckled Harley and Triumph custom ratbikes, but he used to race Gixxers, so he knows my Suzuki like the back of his dirty, tatted hand.  He was sharing the diagnosis with the eagerness of a boy describing a favorite game.  It was a complex issue, involving water, ethanol-based fuel, and the degradation of plastic components in multi-stage valves in the fuel injection system.   I followed along, sort of, nodding assent and dropping comments that I hoped didn't make me seem too blitheringly incompetent.

The prognosis wasn't great.  It'd run like a top, unless I rode it hard again through a major rainstorm.  Then, I'd be looking at the same problem again.  Drat.  Guess I'll have to change my habit of riding through huge thunderstorms and blizzards.  Rule of thumb: if the ride looks to be so epic and technical as to be worthy of a subsequent blog post, wait it out.  Sigh.

We kept chatting for a while, and as we walked to the back lot to snag my bike, he began playfully chatting about his neighbor, a pastor.

He knows I'm a pastor, and grew up in the area around my church.

He also has a vocabulary that is entirely in keeping with a hole-in-the-wall motorcycle shop that's sited between a "smoking and vaping accessories" store and an adult novelties emporium.   Hey, a good, honest mechanic is a good, honest mechanic.

So on he went, about this pastor he knew.

"Yeah, like, I've got this neighbor who's a pastor.  Nice guy, but man, his house is a [fornicating] [excrement] hole. A total [fornicating] embarrassment.  He never mows.  Never cleans.  Leaves his [stuff] all over the [fornicating] yard.  Works so much, it's like he doesn't even [fornicating] live there.   I see the light of his TV on late at night, but he ain't never around."

I nodded at the concept conveyed through the thicket of reflexive profanity.  Yeah, pastors are often terrible at taking care of themselves, I said.  They get so caught up in their churches, they forget to do the basics for themselves.  Health gets neglected.  Spouses are neglected.  Homes are a shambles.

"You got that right," he continued, as he wheeled the Suzuki over to me.  "Only time that [fornicating] house gets cleaned up is when his whole church shows up to clean it.  Grass up to here, total mess, and then, bam, there's like fifty of the [fornicators] all over the [fornicating] place.  I'm, like, [fornicate], dude, take care of your own [stuff].  How can you be a [lovemaking] pastor and be telling people how to live better [lovemaking] lives if you can't even handle your own basic [stuff]?"

Generally, I'd pose that truth with slightly less pungent language, but it's a truth nonetheless.  That peculiar pattern of mutual dependency between a congregation that demands every waking moment of a pastor and a pastor whose ego enables it?  It's unhealthy.

And it's not just unhealthy for both parties involved.

It's the enemy of evangelism.  If you're so consumed by the busyness of professional ministratalia that you can't attend to family, can't manage your life and health, can't keep your [stuff] together?  Other people will notice this, meaning, the human beings who aren't part of that codependent dyad of your ego and the unrealistic expectations of your community.

They will look at how the fruits of your faith are made manifest in your life, and say, huh.  I guess there's no point in being part of that.  I guess that makes no difference at all.

And that, brothers and sisters, would be a [fornicating] terrible thing.

Pastoring and Comedy

It's a sustained meme, a thread of thought that keeps popping up in the conversations pastors have about themselves.

You'd think we'd be psyched to be in ministry, filled with joy at the prospect of proclaiming the Good News, about sharing both the Spirit and the ethical teachings of that kwazy Nazarene.  But instead, many of us are struggling.

Why are we so exhausted?   Why are so many of us burned out and miserable and so sick of it all that we're seriously thinking about going into retail?  Or just walking the earth. 

There's been some interesting conversation about this lately, but one sustained theme I've seen reposted I find myself having some trouble processing.   In a post on the need for wholeheartedness in ministry, Todd Bolsinger suggests that part of the reason pastors burn out on ministry is this:

People now demand that their pastors be part shrewd cultural commentator and part comic.  We must entertain, inspire and instruct a little, all the while never really challenging the worldview or tribal instincts that make us Christians seem little different than anyone else.  

This is a significant factor we are burned out, or so the argument is presented.  We're just so tired of entertaining people.  Laugh, pastor, laugh, and we weep.  I'm down with the wholeheartenedness thing he presents.  Bolsinger makes some other excellent points in the article, which is well worth the read.   But I struggle with his take on "comedy."  Being "part comic" is a source of exhaustion?  

Pastors get exhausted, in my experience, by the [bovine excrement] parts of ministry.  Dealing with the awkward political dynamics of institutions?   Making sure you've filed your old-line-mandated 27 B/6 in triplicate?   A church leader who thinks "Here I stand, I can do no other" was Martin Luther referring to the tile selection in the Wittenberg foyer?  These things can be draining, dispiriting, and exhausting.   

Gossip and whispering and powerplays within the local church and in our broader church are also tremendously draining, but again, this is an inescapable reality of human gatherings.

Churches should resist this, but in my experience, they often do not.  We are, after all, flawed beings.  And those flaws exhaust us.   So it goes.  The good fight is tiring.  It's our task to do battle against them...or, rather, to teach those around us about the Way that challenges the power dynamics of every human condition.   Honestly, that's not all that tiring, because I'm not the one doing the challenging.  You got a problem with the Gospel?  I'm just the errand boy.  Take it up with Jesus.  

Where I diverge here is in some of the assumptions about expectations.   Or expectations about assumptions.  Or maybe it's both.

A congregation has a right to expect that their pastor will be a shrewd cultural commentator.  There's not a single thing wrong with that expectation.  If you're going to be prophetic, you'd danged well better be aware of culture.

And being a comic?  If they're a comedian, well, all the better.   

Because comedy isn't treacle.  It's not fluff.  Not the comedy I enjoy, anyway.

Neither is it canned, culled from the pages of some "1001 Ways To Start that Lousy Sermon With A Laugh" book.  

Real comedians use humor to challenge and transform.  They subvert and undercut the garbage, the false assumptions and the self-righteousness and the illusions that tear apart our society.  They speak truth in a way that resonates deeply, and in a way that entertains, disarms, and forces us to think.

Laughter connects us.  It opens us up a little bit.  And then, if it's being used rightly, it teaches.

I'm thinking Jon Stewart, whose "comedy" is some of the best political commentary out there today.  I'm thinking George Carlin challenging the powers that be.  I'm thinking Flip Wilson subversively tearing a generation's hearts out at the injustice of segregation.  I'm thinking Patton Oswalt lately.  

I'm thinking of what it was like to read the Onion on September 12, 2001.

It's just a particularly potent way of talking about what matters.  That it makes us laugh is just a bonus.

Monetizing Your Jesus

Given that my blogging is more personal journaling than it is a public resource, I rarely even notice the repeated nudgings from Google, which suggest I consider "monetizing" my blog. That means google ads, targeted specifically to the interests of the dozen or so human beings who stop by here on a daily basis. There are two reasons I just don't want to do this.

First, the practical. I just don't have enough traffic to justify it. My technorati rating is functionally nonexistent. If I "monetized" my blogging, I'd be surprised if it generated enough income in a year to get me a cup of coffee. Seven Eleven coffee.

Second, I just don't want to go that route. I do not blog because I expect it to be an income stream. I blog because I want to blog. I enjoy the occasional dialogue it generates, and writing helps me frame my thoughts. Pastors are supposed to journal, and supposed to make their thinking and meditation public. That's the point of writing and preaching, after all. If you're serving a community as a pastor, my strong feeling is that you're already kinda sorta committing yourself to doing this...and getting paid to do it, too.

There are those that do run ads, of course, and I don't begrudge them their income. Going ad-based certainly does provide a significantly higher level of motivation. But at some level, I just can't quite accept putting advertising anywhere near writing that frequently takes the form and function of articulating or proclaiming the Word. It feels a bit like interspersing ads in the different slides in your sermon Powerpoint, or dropping a few egregious product placements in your worship service.

"And when the meal was finished, Jesus took the Glen Ellen Cabernet Sauvignon, and poured it out in their presence, saying 'This is my body, which is inexpensive and surprisingly rich and full flavored.'"

If I'm talking about God, I'd really rather not go there. Advertising inherently desacralizes (ooh, a new word) both physical space and human discourse. Nothing wrong with it in the secular world, but I chafe at it's presence in conversations about our Creator.

That, I guess, is the challenge of blogging with your pastor hat on.