We are All Unprepared

Best I can tell, I will be able to retire eventually.  This was once the general assumption of most Americans, the expectation that when you reached the end of middle age, you'd set down your labors and spend your dotage travelling or puttering around in a golf cart through some sprawling community in Florida.

That is no longer the case.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union back at the end of the last century, American businesses no longer had any impetus to provide cradle to grave care for their workers.  "Hey, wait, there's no longer a competing ideology that forces us to do more for our workers or risk having them rise up?  Guess we can find some more profit this next quarter."  Health care?  Heh.  Sort of, barely.  Retirement benefits?  Sure...but the risk is all on you, and the rewards mostly accrue to those who "handle" the trillions that pour into the markets.  

That, coupled with a culture that celebrates the debt-financing of life, immediate gratification over long term planning, and fetishizes youth and adolescence?  We are, as a people, catastrophically unprepared for aging.  We just ain't ready.  Not even faintly.

And we are aging, all at once, thanks to the great pulse of Baby Boomers who have defined our culture for a generation.  They are, all together, getting older.

A recent study by the Urban Institute  lays out some pretty challenging statistics about this grey wave.  By 2040, the percentage of the population that is over 65 will have nearly doubled from where it was in 1980.  The number of individuals in the oldest category, those who require the most care and are least able to fend for themselves?  It'll be quadruple what it was in 2000.

Life expectancy has continued to rise, so those who are old will be old longer, living a decade or more deeper into age than they did a generation ago.

With that shift, Social Security...which we've very much not prioritized...will come under significant pressure.  With fewer working age folks supporting more older folks, that financial safety net will fray under the strain.  We've pushed off doing anything about it for forty years, and the bill is coming due, no matter how much magical thinking we apply to the subject.

Our failure to prepare as a nation is mirrored by our failure to prepare as individuals.  It's one of the peculiarities of a republic, as the ethics of debt play out both in the halls of Congress and our own ever-expanding credit card balances.  

Right now, as of this writing, the average Social Security benefit stands at just over fifteen hundred dollars a month.  Nearly half of Americans have no retirement savings at all, which means the average American household has about twenty one thousand dollars socked away for retirement.  If you retire at 67, and live until you're in your eighties, twenty one thousand dollars doesn't quite cut it, and fifteen hundred a month runs through your fingers real quick lately.

Having enough financial reserve to make it more than ten months into an American retirement means you need to be, relatively speaking, rich.

My wife and I don't seem rich, at least not on the surface.  We live in a 1,300 square foot rambler on a quarter acre suburban lot.  This is about half the size of the average new American home.  It's where we raised our kids, and while it was snug when there were four of us, its plenty of room for two.  Our cars are functional and reliable Hondas, utterly unsexy and leaning towards efficiency and practicality.  I ride to work and run errands on a Yamaha scooter, which gets over 80 to the gallon.  As a small church pastor and author, my annual income over the last decade has averaged $35,000 a year, which...isn't much.  

But scratch the surface, and we're almost painfully privileged.  Rich, even.  My wife's consulting business has done quite well over the last few years, in a King Lemuel's Wife sort of way.  Rache and I own our home outright, so we have no mortgage.  We own our cars outright.  We have no debt.  None at all.  We live small, and live lean, and have consistently over a lifetime spent less than we made.

Our savings, for retirement and otherwise?  Over One Million Dollars.  That's not what it used to be, in an Austin Powers Doctor Evil sort of way, but it's nearly fifty times higher than the typical American retirement reserve.  This isn't cause for bragging or pride, for peering over the high walls of my family wealth-fortress at the helpless rabble beneath me.  I feel almost embarrassed that I even have the option of stepping away from work later in life, because so many others do not.  

Taken as a whole, we're just not ready.  The morning has come, and we're sitting in class on the day of the final, and we're staring blankly at questions for which we don't have answers.

Three Ways to Adapt to the Pastoral "Vow of Poverty"

The article's been making the rounds in my social media feeds, which I suppose shouldn't be a surprise.

It's a piece in The Atlantic, laying out the reality that being a pastor in the 21st century means taking what amounts to an unintentional vow to leave the middle class.  The old system of the old-line, in which entering the pastorate meant chugging along in the middle of the middle class?  That's fallen apart, or so the article suggests.

Now, pastors are falling behind financially.   Oh, sure, there are a tiny minority who are filthy rich.  The Chief Executive Officer of your local AmeriChrist, Inc. JesusPlex makes out like a bandit.  But most pastors--meaning not just a plurality, but a vast majority--do not.  And within that group, there are many folks who struggle.

In that, the church is a microcosm of that reality.  The deindustrialization of America and the absorption of capital by a tiny minority has torn the heart out of our formerly thriving middle class.  The megachurch has done to the small church what Walmart has done to small business, and small American congregations are simply too strapped now to pay enough to sustain a family.

That's certainly my reality.  My little church is a blessing in so many ways, and its members are generous to a fault.  But there aren't enough of us to meet my denomination's minimum salary requirements for a full timer, not without critically impacting mission and our efforts to maintain our humble facility as a welcoming place for community.  And so I'm a half-timer, one of that huge cadre of folks who don't--and won't--make enough as a pastor to sustain a family.

I could live on what my church pays me, were it just me.  It would be a spare life, just me and one rented room.  Or perhaps I could live in the slave quarters in the old manse, that one tiny room up that little flight of stairs from the kitchen.  I've lived in smaller spaces in my life, and been content.  That's the stuff of my monastic daydreams.

With a family, though, that's just not my reality.  "Hey honey, let's the four of us go live in the old slave quarters" is not a sentence any sane husband says to his wife.  And so my wife's work is absolutely necessary to sustain our modest suburban household.  Oh, she'd work anyway.  It's who she is.  But I've had to accept the reality that my income was unlikely to be enough.

Thing is, I've known this the whole time.

It's always been my expectation.  From day one, the folks responsible for preparing me for this task were dead on clear about that reality.  "It's going to be next to impossible for you to find full-time work as a pastor in this Presbytery," they said.

They were wise, and they were right.  Though I didn't want to hear what they were saying, I knew it to be a hard truth.  Where things get messy, in my experience, is where those charged with preparing folks to walk the path of ministry don't make that as bright and clear as crystal.  You want to be encouraging and supportive of the gifts of your charges, sure.  But you also want to avoid being so insulatingly overprotective of the tender sensibilities of fledgling pastors that you leave folks with the expectation that this isn't going to be a wilderness experience.

'Cause it is.

So here, three things that you should know, entering the ministry in this more challenging age.

1) Know that You're Not the Exception.  Oh, we all think we are.  We know, in our hearts, that we're the most talented, most interesting, most extraordinary person in the universe.  We are the Special, dagflabbit, just like Emmett told us in the Lego Movie.  We think this.  I certainly did, ten years ago.  God had a plan for me, and sure, things were hard out there.  Everyone was telling me this.  But I was just so magical, so called and gifted and Spirit-blessed and innovative!  How could I not be the exception to the rule?  Surely, a church would see the wonder that was me.

Heh.

It didn't take long for reality to disabuse me of that delusion.  My applications to churches with full-time calls vanished into a yawning chaos of other applications.  It was like the experience of trying to get my manuscripts published, only instead of form letters, there was only silence, as overtaxed committees of lay volunteers never quite got around to "wishing me well in my future endeavors."

If you like closure, this part is going to make you crazy.  It also lasts a very long while.

Oh, God was working.  No question.  And as I listened, and opened myself to other options, I was able to follow that calling.  But it was hard.  Expect it to be harder than you've imagined, because it will be.

It is, for most of us.  And, to use the Southern American colloquial emphatic double negative, you ain't no different.

2) Don't Go Into Debt:  This is absolutely central, and should be told to every single earnest soul with a calling on their heart.  Don't debt-finance seminary.  Do not do it.  Yeah, yeah, I know, forgive your debts as you forgive your debtors, but that ain't how student loans work.

You are entering a field of endeavor that can no longer pay you enough to service that debt.

It won't. Will. Not. That must be your operating assumption.

What that debt will do is add stress to your life, layering in mammon's anxiety on top of the challenges of ministry.  Worse still, what it will do is corrupt your calling.  I say that with all seriousness.  Seminary is important, and profoundly helpful in the reality of ministry.  It's worth the time, and the investment. But if you use loans to pay for seminary, those loans can become an impediment to God's work in your life.

You may well be called to a small, beautiful, intimate gathering.  You could be called to revitalize a struggling, tiny, broken-hearted church.  You may be called to start a cell church, or to be a pastor-member of an intentional house community.

But if you've got student loan debt worries gnawing at your soul, you will be less likely to consider those options.  You will be less likely to take joyous leaps, or Godly risks.  You will be more likely to use mammon's measure to select your "call," and that's setting you down the wrong path.

If you can't afford seminary, and you can't cobble together scholarships and grants, take it more slowly.  Work your way through it.  If the calling is there and real, God will give you the patience.  It will also be, in a way, your first experience of bi-vocational ministry, as you learn to balance the demands of your calling and work.

Should seminaries and denominations have a better approach to training their leaders, one that reflects this new reality?  Sure.  Absolutely they should. But right now, they don't.

No point in racking up the debt and then complaining about the injustice, 'cause what's real is real.  If someone tells you a car has no brakes, kvetching about it as you're careening down a mountain road does you no good at all.  As for praying about it?  Well, here I remind you of that overused story about the guy, the flood, the rowboat and the helicopter.  Your way out of that mess is to know the reality you inhabit.

The car has no brakes.  The system is broken.  There.  You know it.

Pay attention, and adapt to what you're facing as you pursue your call.

3)  See the Blessing this Represents.  That the full-time pastorate is no longer a safe, comfortable, middle-class career track is a good thing.  It should never have been that, because the career-ladder expectations that came with that way of viewing it do not reflect how the Holy Spirit works in our lives.

Funny, how that approach to the ministry always involved God calling human beings on to a slightly bigger church that paid slightly more.

What the pastorate is becoming is a vocation that is rare in the secular working world: an intellectually and spiritually rewarding labor that both shapes your identity as a person and allows for work-life balance.  It cannot be the only income for a family, sure.  But it can be a meaningful part of the income for a family.  It can be the labor of a part-time stay-at-homer, who mixes their call to the Gospel with the call to care for children.  It can be the labor of the dual-class pastor, who yearns for space to write and be creative, or to work in another area of vocation.

It can be the work--once congregations realize that the pastor is not the one "professional" Christian responsible for doing everything in the church--that allows you to have a sane existence with a working spouse.

There are very, very few jobs in the private or public sector that permit this.  And yeah, I realize that it's not the cultural norm to live creatively and in balance.  That's particularly true in my inside-the-Beltway neck of the woods, where dishing about overwork is a competitive sport, even among pastors.

But if you're going to provide gracious and centered spiritual leadership, you can't be shimmering with stress.  If you want to maintain a healthy relationship with your spouse, accepting that you are the half-income of a one point five income household can make the difference.

Embrace your call, but be realistic.  Don't let our debt culture leaven God's call on your life.  And see the blessing this new reality can offer.

Because the new reality of pastoring in America is where we are now.

The Great Triumph of Global Capitalism

In addition to taking advanced coursework on pastoral counseling, I'm also rounding out my D.Min. electives with a class on the sociocultural context of the Apostle Paul's letters.   Meaning, what was the world like, really, when he fired off those annoyed letters to the endlessly fractious Corinthians?

I've been reading one book for the last few days, the one I've got to complete a paper on by the end of the month.  It's by a professor of religion at Baylor, and delves deep into Paul's attitude towards the poor and disenfranchised.  Some of it is…um…"academic."  Two entire chapters parsing out scholarly responses to one…ONE…verse in Galatians?  Lord have mercy.

But some of it is really kinda fascinating.  

Like, say, the exploration of the way income and wealth worked out in Rome.  Using the best available historical data of the economy of Rome in the first and second centuries CE, historians have come up with a scale measuring the income structure of the world at the time Paul was writing.  

Several scales are proposed, but one seven point scale has significant data behind it.  It goes like this:

1) Imperial Elites  (members of the dynasty, senatorial families, royalty):  0.04% of population

2) Regional/Provincial Elites (equestrian families, provincial officials, military elites): 1.0 % of population

3) Municipal Elites (decurial families, some merchants and freed persons): 1.76% of population

4) Moderate Surplus (merchants, artisans, military veterans, traders): 7% of population

5) Stable/Near Subsistence Level (merchants/traders, wage earners, shop owners, some farmers): 22%

6) Borderline Subsistence-Unstable (small farms, laborers, most merchants, small shop owners): 40%

7) Poverty/Below Subsistence (small farms, beggars, disabled, unskilled labor, widows, slaves): 28%

Meaning, if you translate that into where humanity stood two thousand years ago, about nine point eight percent of humanity living under the rule of the Roman Empire were economically secure.  They could reasonably expect that they would experience no significant hardship.  A tiny fraction--just under two percent--controlled most of the wealth.  An additional seven percent were functionally secure, consistently receiving enough income to maintain a surplus.

Twenty two percent were just above subsistence, meaning hunger was at bay and shelter was consistently present, but they were vulnerable.  And sixty-eight percent were either in poverty or scrambling day to day just to keep afloat, one accident or illness away from real privation.

That was two thousand years ago, before industrialization, before science and technology, before the global economy and the dynamism of capital markets.

Now, according to the magazine Business Insider, our world looks like this.  Give a click on the image below:

That bottom number hasn't budged.  Sixty eight percent remain poor.  Two thousand years, and for all intents and purposes, not a thing has changed economically.  The wealth profile of our world looks no different than the world ruled by Rome.  

On the bright side, I suppose, that makes everything the Bible has to say about justice, wealth and poverty still completely relevant.  

Yay.

The Parable of the Bad Job Creators

Once upon a time, there was a couple who ran a mid-sized business in a small town.   They just couldn't get along, and spent their days arguing about anything and everything.  Business was not good, as their workforce was dispirited and their clients were drifting away.

One day, after a particularly heated argument, one of their managers came to them and let them know that the morale had gotten so bad that most of the employees were likely going to quit.  "Our salaries have been stagnant for five years," said the manager.  "And we all hate working here.  The whole town knows how crappy it is to work here.  If you don't do something, we'll walk."

The couple went back into their office, realizing that if they didn't act, they'd lose all of their employees, and would have trouble finding new ones.  They argued quietly but productively, and then came up with a solution.

They needed to give their employees a raise.   But how?   They didn't have enough liquidity in their bank accounts, and their credit was nearly tapped out.   Suddenly, each of them had a solution.

We could take money they've contributed into the company-managed retirement fund, said she.  It's struggling anyway.

Sure, said he!

And we could also take money they've put into the charitable fund, the one we use to do giving to those two local nonprofits that provide care to the indigent elderly and the disabled and the orphans.

So long as people were getting a raise, what did it matter where it came from?  The employees would be happy.  The couple agreed.

Then, of course, they began to argue about how large the "raise" should be.  Their voices grew louder.

When the employees heard the arguing, they were angrier, and argued among themselves.

How dare they argue about the size of the raise!  It should be as big as possible!

And the couple heard them, and smiled.

Blessed Are The Poor in Transport

Yesterday, I took my ratbike motorcycle to a nearby shop for a new drivechain and a new set of sprockets. It's a funky little shop, a far cry from the shiny shiny megadealer nearby. The mechanics there are cheery, heavily tattooed, and can do the work on time and for about half the price.

The challenge is getting back home after I've left them the bike, and then getting there again. It's about four miles from my house. I can't have my sons pick me up or drop me off. The 12 year old couldn't care less about driving, and while the nine year old would salivate at the opportunity to get the keys, I'm not sure that little jaunt would end well.

So when I go there, I take the Metrobus.

And We Hate Buses. Americans are carefully programmed to hate taking the bus, a process that begins in high school. It's cemented when that senior with their jacked up fire-engine red '71 Chevelle reminds sad little sophomores that they aren't ever, not never, going to get a girlfriend if they don't get themselves a sweet ride first. We don't like the bus. The popular, successful kids don't ride the bus. And we have to sit there, waiting, waiting, waiting, never sure when it will arrive. It's frustrating, particularly for thems of us who want it right now. It's the American way, baby.

That waiting impatiently part is no longer true. In DC, as I discovered yesterday, the buses are all outfitted with GPS transponders. Those transponders rely data about real-time location to a Metro computer, which then relays data to the Metro website. Information about when the bus will show up at any given stop can be accessed your mobile phone. It's accurate to within 30 seconds. Meaning, you don't have to wait around at the bus stop. It changes the whole equation.

But the popular kids part is still true. I rode the bus twice yesterday. Once the bus was half full. Once it was nearly completely full. Both times, I was the only Caucasian on the bus. Everyone else was Latino, or African American, or Asian, or of Middle Eastern descent. None had about them the trappings of affluence. There were no suits, or expensive shoes. I saw no-one else dickering about on their smartphone, whipping off e-mails to assistants. No-one was manically thumbtyping texts. These were folks who are not on the upper rungs of the economic ladder, or even on the middle rungs. They were working class.

The upper and middle classes were in their cars, zooming around us, talking on their cell phones. Many were driving SUVs. Others were driving hybrids. What struck me, sitting there on my honkey behind, was just how much better at caring for creation my fellow bus riders were.

Our bus was powered by natural gas, meaning essentially no emissions, and no reliance on oil from nations that hate us. With a third-full load of passengers, it gets the same mileage per passenger as my motorcycle. With a full load, that bus gets the equivalent of 165 miles per gallon, which even the best promises of plug-in hybrid technology can't offer.

As I looked around at America's working class, America's bus riders, I realized something. For all of the talk on the right about America' energy independence, and all the talk on the left about environmental stewardship and carbon neutrality, the people who are doing the most they can to make us more efficient are the folks who need to be efficient. As human beings, those who aren't growing temporarily rich on the fleeting abundance of our carbon economy are the ones who are doing the most to care for creation. The folks who cry Drill Baby Drill and the folks who buy thirty-five thousand dollar hybrids loaded with electronic gimcrackery aren't even coming close to the folks who ride the bus, day in, and day out.

Yeah, they may not be the cool kids. Or the "successful" ones. But those things don't really matter, now, do they?

Better a poor man whose walk is blameless than a rich man whose ways are perverse. (Proverbs 28:3)

Let Them Eat Mud

As one of the four people who still read print media, I was going through the WaPo yesterday, and stumbled across an article on Haiti.

Haiti is and has seemingly always been a total mess. As a kid, my church maintained a partnership with Haiti, sending relief supplies and other support. A good friend recently came back from a medical mission there, and the delightful pictures of suppurating wounds and skin ailments he put up confirmed that things are pretty intensely unpleasant there still. It's a little slice of intractably abject poverty, right there in our own backyard.

What particularly struck me in the article were two things. First, that Haitians have been so impacted by the recent economic downturn that they can no longer afford "mud cookies." Those are a delightful baked confection in which the most significant ingredient is clay. People increasingly can't even buy baked dirt in Haiti.

The second item was a little snippet of "hope" being offered up by our Secretary of State as she toured a garment factory in Port au Prince, the capital.

She marveled at the factory, and hailed it as a model for progress in Haiti. Workers there were making between two and three times the average Haitian's daily salary...which means they were making between $4 and $6 a day. Marvelous! Wonderful! They're being given the opportunity to pull themselves out of poverty!

So here we have jobs that used to pay American garment industry workers $6 an hour...and Haitian workers are being paid almost a factor of 10 less to do the same work. Unless you own the factories, how is this a triumph? Six bucks a day isn't going to turn things around. Sure, you can have all the mud cookies you can eat. Haitians can continue to struggle, and be only very slightly better fed, until they get sick and can't do it any more.

What I marvel at as I look at this sort of thing is how perfectly it mirrors the worst elements of late 19th and early 20th century capitalism. Back then, it was Americans who labored for negligible pay and for backbreaking hours. They mostly came from rural backgrounds, and were lured to urban industrial centers with the promise of consistent work. Within most democratic nations, though, the fact that folks could vote and freely organize and associate (more or less) ultimately counterbalanced the worst practices of profit-driven enterprise.

But I struggle to see how this works with globalized capitalism. If those who...ahem...control the means of production are able to circumvent democratic counterbalances, I'm just not sure how the intense imbalances in wealth that the market generates are ever going to be resolved. All one has to do is move industry to places where government is either weak or does not represent it's people.

For some reason, this sort of thing always makes me think of the prophet Amos:

This is what the LORD says:
"For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not turn back {my wrath}.
They sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.

They trample on the heads of the poor
as upon the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.
Father and son use the same girl
and so profane my holy name.

They lie down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge.
In the house of their god
they drink wine taken as fines.