Megachurches and Authoritarianism

So here's a completely non-controversial take:

Megachurches have primed Christian America for authoritarian rule, and have contributed to the collapse of republican virtues.

My church is very much not a megachurch.  We're a little community church, and thriving as a small church pastor requires letting go of the idea that you have more authority than your lay leadership.  Formal authority is meaningless in the little church.  What matters is care, relationship, and a willingness to be discipled by the Christians around you...and that includes pastors actually listening to and learning from the gifts and witnesses of their co-workers in Christ.

My church is also Presbyterian.  Being Presbyterian means a bunch of different things, but on a practical and functional level, it means that the beating heart of the church is lay leadership.  The Elders who are elected into leadership of a Presbyterian congregation make that church what it is.  My task, as a pastor and Presbyterian Teaching Elder, is to proclaim the Word, administer sacraments, and support my fellow Elders as they guide the church.  I am, to use the small "c" catholic ideal for the soul in the leadership, a servus servorum dei -- a servant of the servants of God.

I ain't the one in charge. That's not to say my role isn't important to the well-being of the congregation.  But I am not the "unitary executive" of my congregation.   

That has always been the Presbyterian vision.  It was so fiercely a part of Presbyterian identity that was a potent source of radically antimonarchist sentiment.  Presbyterians, back when we were a significant force in American life, were always the foes of kings and tyrants, those who would deny power to the people and claim it all for themselves.

There's a reason the American Revolution was called "The Presbyterian Rebellion" by the supporters of King George.  For Presbyterian pastors who forget this truth, and imagine they can rule their churches like a king or CEO, well, you're gonna get reminded of that real danged quick. 

But the Presbyterian age is waning.  

Our numbers are in decline, and not just in my withering branch of the tradition.  Taken as a whole, the Presbyterian tide has ebbed in America.  Taken all together, liberal and conservative flavors combined, we are less than half of the four million total souls who considered themselves Presbyterian at the midpoint of the last century.  

In our place have risen nondenominational corporate churches, ones where the pastor is conceptualized a a CEO.  Those leaders are explicitly entrepreneurial, and they quickly become the central focus of the life and the mission of their churches.

Many of these churches do the good work that their scale enables, and many of those pastors work hard to maintain a humble servant heart.

But.

But many do not, and following the Face on the Jumbotron can become profoundly dangerous to the soul of the church.  Driven by the More is More ethic, Pastors devolve into celebrity influencers, chasing more and more followers and more and more influence.  They become the sole authority, the whole power, and the source of all truth.  They choose their staff and their board.  Congregants in such gatherings become pastor-focused, not Christ focused, trapped in a parasocial relationship with a single charismatic authority.

This cultic enthrallment is dangerous for personal discipleship, and is just as dangerous for the spiritual integrity of the Pastor in the High Pulpit.  As Karl Vaters put it in his excellent DESIZING THE CHURCH,

You cannot build your brand and develop your spiritual maturity at the same time.  They are heading in different directions.  That doesn't mean you can't promote your church, an event, or a ministry.  But promoting ministry for the betterment of others is very different from promoting your identity for the glorification of self.  (DESIZING, p. 84)

From that, it's not hard to see how this now dominant model of church life has impacted the political predilections of American Christians.  We have been trained to see authority as vested in a single figure, one who is centered as the source of all authority.   

And just as the power of bishops and cardinals once affirmed the divine right of kings, so now the power of the CEO pastor and the Christian celebrity influencer "blesses" a new breed of authoritarian. 

With that expectation reinforced from the heart of a politically compromised faith, the people cry for a king, and AmeriChrist, Inc. is all too happy to oblige.

Principles of Representation

The Two Hundred and Twenty Sixth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) is under way now, as my oldline denomination gathers to go about the business of revising protocols, making policy statements, and updating procedures.  

The whole thing is quasi-virtual now, a process that begin as a pandemic era adaptation and has continued.   The event itself is also less than half the size it was a decade ago, perhaps because we as a denomination are less than half the size we were a decade ago.

That does not prevent us from making motions and declarations of significance, however.  At this assembly, we're calling for the Constitution of the United States of America to be amended.  We're calling for an end to gun violence.  We're calling for an end to solitary confinement.  We're condemning Christian Zionism.  There are many bold statements.  We're being prophetic, after all.

But not a soul is listening.  Outside media once did, but now?  Now we are too small to matter, and our conflicts, such as they exist, are mostly inside baseball.  Our policy proclamations have no more impact than me pacing around in my kitchen and ranting to myself about the latest step towards the collapse of the republic.

The challenge, I think, is that we have reimagined the word "representation."

That was, as it happens, one of the few things that we've been arguing about this cycle.  As we work to be more inclusive, we've come to understand representation as meaning the centering of marginalized voices and persons.  To translate that into Common: representation means favoring or prioritizing queer, black, female, and indigenous perspectives and persons.

As we've talked about removing bias and anti-queer bigotry from our ordination process, this became a point of contention.  The challenge, as laid out in an amendment to our Book of Order, is a rather simple one.  We want queer folk to no longer experience bias.  And we want "principles of representation" to govern our call discernment process.   

But what does that mean now?  What are Presbyterian "principles of representation?"  We Presbyterians were, back in the Enlightenment and at our Reformed roots, at the vanguard of republicanism and democratic rule.  We understood that a representative system of church governance...meaning, leadership is freely and fairly chosen and representative of the people...was a blessing.  The voice, conscience and freedom of those on the margins was respected, but not given precedence.  What mattered was being representative.

If "principles of representation" are understood as meaning "prioritizing the centering of marginalized voices," then that understanding has been radically and fundamentally subverted.  

On some levels, I get this.  Call, after all, has not a damn thing to do with gender, sexual orientation, or race.  God works through whomever God calls.  God is no respecter of our socially mediated personhoods, and for too long, we've allowed ancient categorical bigotries to fence our tables and delimit those we consider worthy to lead.

Just because you happen to inhabit a particular set of Venn Diagram circles of privilege means nothing.  

White? Male? Comfortably Bourgeois?  God couldn't care less, and when for generations that was the only way Presbyterians looked and spoke, that was a problem.  Thing is, that principle doesn't stop at categories of privilege.

Queer?  Female?  BIPOC?  In and of themselves, those categories also don't mean a thing to the Creator of the Universe.

Privilege means nothing to God.  But neither does marginalization.  

Within the Biblical narrative, the God of Amos is the God of Isaiah, eh?  Rural proletarian/agrarian and urban power elite could both feel that fire in their bones, could both call for justice and grace with the same divine authority.  No Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no man or woman, as dear ol' Uncle Paul put it.

Justice...God's justice...means eliminating our human favoring of one human category over the other.  Wealth and influence and physical power cease to matter.  Just that reality is liberation, a setting right, a word of good news and jubilee.

When the structures of our social power fail to reflect that, or when our organizational structures fetishize or valorize the categories we've socially constructed, we've lost sight of the heart of our faith.

The Fundamentals of Polity

Polity.

It's the kind of word that gets bandied about a bunch in oldline denominational circles, to describe the way we approach our lives together.  These are the systems and structures of our organizational life, the sinews and tendons of our decision-making.

As a Presbyterian, I've been doing the Presbyterian thing my whole life, and the professional Presbyterian thing for almost 17 years, if you count time preparing for ministry.  I'll often see Presbyterians discussing Presbyterian identity as woven up on our processes, procedures, and protocols, in the patterns of exchange that are part of our strange dances and secret codes.

It is, on the one level.  The language of our tribe is Robert's Rules of Order, and our conversations and conflict revolve around a peculiar alphanumeric shorthand.  G.14.  Fourteen F.  27B/6.  These are part of what makes us so...special.

But is it really what we're about?  It is the heart of why we do what we do?  I found myself wondering this recently, as I watched from social-media-afar as a gathering of hep young denominational types gathered to reflect on the future of "church."  There was much talk amongst the whippersnappers about cutting edge stuff, but also a bunch of chatter around the importance of our...um..."unique"...way of doing church.

I found myself wondering that again, as my Presbytery worked our way through some difficult stuff this last week.  We did pretty well, as these conversations go, but every once in a while we sorta trucked through some procedural things I'd come to expect.  Motions were not made.  Seconds were not asked for.  The steps of the dance were blurred, and we rolled and tumbled along together.

And yet it made little difference.  Decisions were made, and no-one went storming off into the night or howled gloating victory at their vanquished foes.  It worked.  By "worked," I mean: it seemed not to impede our sharing grace with one another, even in significant disagreement.

How much does "polity" matter?

It does, of course, because it helps us get stuff done.  And it doesn't, not at all, because it's not fundamental to our being "church."

The question, of course, has to do with essentials.  Where is that relation that matters, that is most vital to spiritually healthy interaction?  What is the fundamental unit of analysis, if we're trying to live into the Kingdom of God that Jesus was so on about?

It is not our organizational chart.  It is not, agony though this may be, our meticulously overthought process.

As familiar as our pattern of being is, and as comfortingly as that structure might be, I just can't bring myself to see it as central.  It is not the thing I hold to most fiercely.  The organizational frameworks and structures that overarch our lives together are meaningful only in so far as they help us do that heart of our faith.  That's true no matter what our structure might be.

Congregational? Presbyterian? Episcopal?  Oldline? Nondenom?  Giant corporate church with twenty pastors and an IT department?  Tiny family church with twenty in the pews of their little country church?

It matters not, as St. Yoda would have put it.

What matters most is how the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth shape our integrity as persons, and then...from that foundation...how we relate to every other person we encounter, whoever they may be.  Do we understand ourselves as radically, essentially committed to doing what Jesus taught all of his disciples to do and live?   Does our "polity" help us be disciples together?

Does it shape how I relate to you?  Does it help me love you, as Jesus requires?

That, it seems, is the fundamental thing, the most basic reality.

The Sweet New Year

Last year, at around this time, I was celebrating the Jewish High Holy Days with my family.

It was a remarkable Yom Kippur, as I sat up there on the bimah with my wife on the holiest day in Judaism, and had the honor of removing the Torah from the ark.  It felt more than a little bit magical.  I'm sure others of my Presbyterian pastor colleagues must have had that privilege at some point, but I think it's safe to say this ain't a typical occurrence. This generally doesn't happen when you're not just a random one a' tha goyim, but a professional gentile.

This week, as the new year began, I was up on the bimah again with my wife for Rosh Hashanah.  Again, I took the Torah from the ark and gave it to her, and again watched her circle the synagogue, the congregants kissing their prayerbooks and touching them to the covered scroll.

It was the Head of the Year, the point where those days of repentance and change begin.  It's the point where we both celebrate the promise of a year to come, but also look to the year that has passed, thinking of the ways we might change for the better in the coming year.  It's a time for intentional reconciliation, for seeking ways to heal those things that were broken.

What I reflected on, in this new year, was the challenging year it was for relationships between Judaism and my denomination.  The choice of our General Assembly to selectively divest from three American companies providing security/military resources to Israel was a choice to push a particularly large red button.  Though I know people of good conscience who disagree, it wasn't a hateful choice, or an anti-semitic choice, or even a choice that was meaningfully anti-Israel.  It couldn't be, any more than choosing not to invest in Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, or the Corrections Corporation of America is bad and anti-American.  If you have a socially responsible investment policy based on your faith principles that prevents you from profiting from war or incarceration, that's just where you end up.

But rationally explicable though it was, it was a button nonetheless, the sort of thing that tends to cause a binary reaction.

That was early summer, and the heat and light of debate and missives and editorials burned bright and fierce.  "This is the thing we are fighting about right now!"  But now months have passed, and the chatter and hum has disappeared, its afterglow as difficult to detect in the collective subconscious as the cosmic background radiation from the dawn of our sliver of the multiverse.

Though it had been a hard year, now it is a new one.  And at the dawn of that year, there I was, a Presbyterian pastor, up again on the bimah.  Still in relationship, just as I'd been the year before.  My wife and I sat close, and shared her prayerbook.  We read and chanted the prayers together, her Hebrew solid and confident, mine mostly there most of the time.  We sang the shema, and all the sacred songs which I know by heart after 23 years of High Holy Days, 23 years and change since we stood under a canopy on that very bimah.  I stood by the opened ark, and listened to the shofar.  I heard the rabbi's voice mingle with the sound of my older son's baritone ringing from the choir.  I stood around at the reading of the Torah, and watched as my younger son held the microphone for the rabbi's wife as she chanted.

It was as sweet as honey on my soul.

I'm hoping, in this year 5775, that things are a little sweeter for all of us.

Having a Conversation about Israel

Midway through last week, I sat at the kitchen table with my boys.

That very day, my denomination was in the throes of some really tough decision-making about disengaging from businesses profiting from the peculiar military/correctional mess in Gaza and the West Bank.  I'd pitched in my two cents here on the blog, and I felt the need to sound my perspective off my boys.  It was just the three of us, as my wife had gone with my mother-in-law to sit shiva that evening with the family of the rabbi of our synagogue, who'd lost his father.

So that night it was Presbyterian pastor dad at table, having a dinner meal with his Jewish sons.

There are plenty of calls to have conversations to rebuild relationships between the Jewish community following the General Assembly, and I'm obviously in an unusual position to have such a conversation.  Judaism isn't just an abstract community for me, folks I know from meetings and gatherings.  It's not just that I "have Jewish friends."

It's the woman that I love.  It's the flesh and the blood of our children.

We chose, early on, not to do the half-and-half thing.  They would be raised Jewish.  Period.  And so, having made that nontrivial decision, I've had a nontrivial hand in their Jewish upbringing.  I found the mohel and made the arrangements for their brises.  I schlepped them for years to synagogue for Hebrew School, through the worst traffic in the United States.  I stood with them on the bema, and watched proudly as they were mitzvahed.

So I started in, asking them for their perspective.

Here's what we might be doing and why, I told them, laying it out as objectively as I could.  Here are the three American corporations we would no longer be investing church resources in, here are the specific products and services they are providing, and here is why we feel we can't be part of that.

What do you think?  Are we being unfair?  Is my church picking on Israel, or being anti-Semitic?

At sixteen and thirteen, neither of my sons are particularly shy about telling their father when they think he's being an idiot.  Believe me.  Not. Shy. At. All.   God help me.

My thirteen year old piped up first.  "Not even close," he said.  "Not everything that Israel does is right.  Why would you have to agree with everything they do?  Why would I?"  And then, because he is every once in a while prone to *cough* vigorously expressing his opinion, he went into a schpiel about how weird he thought it was that a Jewish state should have a large ethnic community within its borders that are unwillingly walled in.

"You know what that is," he opined after describing the West Bank and Gaza, gesticulating and raising his voice.  "You know what you call that?  You call that a ghetto.  It's a freakin' ghetto.  It's like Israel is turning into the freakin' Nazis.  If anyone should know better than that, it's we Jews.  Why is Israel acting like a bunch of freakin' Nazis?"

My older son, more inward, more measured, was a little more circumspect.  "That's not really a fair description.  What Israel is doing is not good, sure.  But it's not like the Holocaust.  They aren't being systematically slaughtered.  Israel's not like the Nazis.  It's just not the same."  He thought for a moment.

"It's more like what America did to the Native Americans.  It's like they've been kicked off their land and forced to live on reservations.  Israel isn't getting all Nazi with the Palestinians.  They're getting American on them."

There was more back and forth, with some of the heat and debate that always comes when my sons get into something, but after surprisingly little bickering, both agreed:

Israel is just being like America in one of her less proud moments, and it does not look good, and it was not anti-Israel or anti-Jewish to both point that out and to choose not to validate it.

And then they were off, disappearing into their rooms and their screens.

It was an interesting talk.

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.  

Who You Gonna Call?

With my forty-fourth birthday past, I found myself awaiting the arrival of a requested gift.   The order was out, to an Amazon seller going by the moniker "General Electromagnetics," and yesterday, that box arrived.

You see, I've got this plan.

When I arrived at my wee kirk just a tick over a year ago, one of the first things I encountered was an interesting attitude towards the manse.  The manse...meaning the building where a pastor might live...predates the 1847 sanctuary by half a generation.  My office is there, as are classrooms for kids and the copy room.  It's a peculiar space.

It was built in 1827, and feels every one of those years.   A little research has shown that slaves lived in that house, which is a peculiar echo.  Depending on the stories you hear, soldiers may have lost their lives and/or had limbs amputated in that building following the nearby Battle of Ball's Bluff.  It's a building with a long memory, the echoes of war and human suffering woven deep into that old wood.

And buildings with memory are...interesting.

During the day, it's fine, if a bit on the ramshackle side.  But people aren't comfortable there after the sun sets.  Our part-time admin assistant would rather not step foot in it alone at night, not after that time she was sure she heard footsteps upstairs when no-one was in the building.  My Buildings and Grounds elder swears that the light to that old locked hidden room...the slave quarters above the kitchen...was turned off that one evening, but was back on again by morning.  Door was locked.  Light was off.  Most odd.  Soldiers who've done tours in Afghanistan have marveled at my willingness to be in the building by myself after dark.

Thing is, we need that dear old wreck.  It's going to take a sustained multi-year effort to get 'er painted and restored and repaired and insulated, but without those rooms, the church can't yet be what it needs to be.  So we're having a church auction on February 9th, of goods and services, to help with the restoration of this historic part of Poolesville.

To that auction, I'm already contributing Sunday afternoon motorcycle rides around the Ag Reserve, which are certainly worth something come the Spring.  Seriously.  There are few roads in America more beautiful than those around Poolesville for a bit of two-wheeled motoring on a day when the air is warm and sweet.  I've got an extra helmet and gloves, and that is priceless, my friends, priceless.

But I'm also planning on offering one particular service, for the discerning sponsor who sees value in it.  That service?  A bit of ghostbusting.  So for my birthday, I asked for and got some bona fide parapsychological kit.

I now own two electromagnetic field sensors, each targeted to a particular spectrum, for quantifying those moments the hairs on the back of your neck suddenly stand on end.  I now possess motion detectors, for the shades and flutterings of shadow on the periphery of your vision.  I've got an ambient temperature sensor, for those pesky free roaming vapors and their cold spots.

Real stuff, so far as that stuff is real.  And as a U.VA. graduate, well, one never knows what kind of training Mr. Jefferson's University might have provided to the discerning and the curious.

So come Spring, if the funds are raised at auction to...err...finance this expedition, I'll commit to spending a whole night in the manse.  I'll be there from sundown to sunrise, my array of sensors at the ready.  My sons...12 and 14...have sniffed the sweet smell of adventure, and volunteered to assist.

I'll liveblog it.  I'll tweet it.  I'll get the word out about it.

But wait!  If you act now, there's more!  I'll video it.  I'll prep an creepy and authentically amateurish Blair Witch Project-esque video for distribution on YouTube, laying out the history behind the building and chronicling the night's activities.

For the right donor, the right benefactor, the one who bids highest on this vital...VITAL...service to our church, I'll make sure you're mentioned at the very beginning of said YouTube video, in classic Public Television style.

And if we do pick up anything in the manse, well, then it'll be good having the Pastor deal with it.  We'll see if we can't clean it out a bit.  Assuming the liveblogs don't suddenly stop at midnight, that is.

"We had this crazy pastor one time.  Tried to stay in the manse all night, with his kids, see what was really goin' on.  All we found the next day was a shoe.  Don't even know whose, but Lord, it didn't even smell human anymore."

One advantage to having part time supply pastors, I guess.  Easier to replace 'em.

Previous Tenants

The old church "manse" where my office can be found is a rickety, porous structure.  Unlike the carefully custom-designed bewindowed ministerial study at my last congregation, my nicely redone current office is the most well-maintained room in a very, very...um..."historic" structure.

In the winter, the building feels every one of its one hundred and eighty five years, with white siding and a metal roof that has seen better days and rooms that get real cold real quick if those baseboard heaters aren't clacking and humming away.  That's history, real history.

Back during the Civil War, or rather, what in these here parts would have been called the War of Northern Aggression, the manse was used as an emergency hospital for troops wounded during the nearby Battle of Ball's Bluff.

Those old floorboards really were once stained with the blood of the dying, which is one of the many reasons some church folk are reluctant to come into the manse after dark.  There are some odd creaks and thumps here on occasion, or so the stories go.

But the suffering of those who likely died in this house was not the only difficult memory that may hang around here.   At the back of the house, there's a kitchen, now used as a storage room.  In the kitchen, there are stairs that lead up to a small room with two small windows.  Though next to the house, the room can only be accessed from the kitchen.  It feels like a secret room, and it's typically kept locked up to keep kids in the church from...well...doing what kids do.

As church lore would have it, that room was the living quarters for the slaves owned by the family that lived in the manse.  Poolesville was a strongly Southern-sympathizing town back then, one of the reasons why there were 11,000 troops stationed here during the War.  It would make sense that there might have been slaves in this house, and it adds a peculiar resonance to the building.

The room itself?  It's a little space, maybe twelve by twelve, with sloping ceilings, and I have on occasion gone up into that room to pray and meditate.  What would it have been like to live there, I've wondered.  In my mind's eye, I visualized a woman living alone in that room, separated from the family for whom she would have been property.  What might she have thought or prayed in the dark of that small room?  I've sat in silence, and shared the space with the possibility of that soul's existence.

After a recent conversation with one of the elders of my church about that possible history, that elder showed up having done a bit of research.  The name of the owner had been found, and cross-referencing that with other historical records, it appeared that yes, that family did own slaves.  In 1840, the Census revealed one slave woman in the household, aged between 24 and 35.

But she wasn't alone.  As of the 1840 Census, also in the household were three slave children, two girls and a boy, all under the age of ten.  All of them would have been crammed into that one twelve by twelve room, which now suddenly seems a whole bunch smaller.

Were they a mother and her children?  It seems likely.  What was the fate of the father?  What were their names?   It's not clear.

But it is worth remembering that they were here, sharing this very same space.   They weren't just abstractions.  They were people, no matter what the misbegotten laws of the time may have assumed.  It's important not to forget that they lived, and that they were human beings as worthy of the love of the Creator as any of us.

I Wuv Meetings

This last Wednesday night, I cranked out a nice solid eleven hours of work for my wee kirk, culminating in the monthly meeting of my Session.   Here's the thing, though.  I must confess it.

I like meetings.  I do.  I...I almost wuv them.

Being Presbyterian, I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise.   But here, I think it's important to insert a couple of important caveats.

I love short meetings.  I'm getting something of a reputation on that front at my congregation.  I do not like long meetings.   I do not like them, Sam I Am, though I'm perfectly comfortable with Green Eggs and Ham.

The fact of the matter is that I find long, convoluted meetings to be a waste of the precious time God's given us on this beautiful little planet.  Meetings are not, as I see it, the place to hash things out.  That's what conversations are for, between two or three or four souls.  You do that FTF or virtually with the folks you're working with.   Need to really hash it out?  Long conversations are great.  They're awesome.   Can't reach resolution?  Well, table it, and work it out in the interstitial spaces between meetings.  But if you're gathered to make a final decision or get feedback, it's not the time for exhaustive deconstructing.  It's not time to explore all possibilities.  If you get that done on the front end, then all rolls smoothly later.

I love efficient meetings.  That means that meetings don't try to be worship.  They don't try to be bible study, or leadership training.   There are other places to do that.  Meetings are business.  A faith community just has to get that work done.  I always and without fail begin and end with prayer, because church meetings serve the purposes of the Body.   But I ditched the long meditation at the beginning of a meeting many a moon ago in my first call.   After a year or so of it, I realized: I don't really want to do this.  My session really doesn't want to do this.  God will shed no tears if I stop doing this.  So I just plain stopped.

The whole thing is God's work, if it's church, right?  So why not just get right to it?

The two rules of thumb, for a working meeting, is that it shouldn't:

1) Ever run more than two hours.  Ever.   After two hours of focus, our brains are jello.   We lose productivity.  We stop gettin' 'er done.  And so I make that a clear goal.  Don't pack an agenda so it runs past two hours.  That makes folks sad.  So I keep an air horn in my bag, and when the meeting hits two hours, I sound it, and I keep sounding it until everyone leaves the room.

Well, that, and I try to moderate effectively.  As of yet, I've not used my air horn.  Don't believe I have it?  Sigh.  Ye of little faith.   By that, I mean letting folks run a little bit if they want to, but calling it back after it's rambled a little bit.   Here, it helps to have a small church with a right-sized leadership cadre.   I also try...not always with success...not to yammer on too much myself.   Outside of a sermon, I prefer not to get caught monologuing.

2) Ever run past nine o'clock at night.  Every minute you go past Nineteen hunnred hours, you lose one percent of processing capacity.  So at ten, you're at forty percent.  By eleven, you're operating at a deficit.

OK, I totally made that up.  But when you're running meetings of volunteers with jobs and kids and spouses that they haven't seen all day, cranking into the late evening just isn't respectful of the lives they're leading.  How can I preach about living a life in balance if I don't model that value in my expectations of my Session?

It also doesn't help with decision making.  I get sloppy at the end of a full day.  So does everyone else.  Sloppy is bad.

But efficiency is satisfying.  It feels good.  It feels right.  Making that an operating norm for leadership teams takes some the dread out of being a part of such a team.

I love being around empowered teams.   If a leadership team is operating well, every member of the group has a clearly delineated role, and respects and supports the roles of others.  If a leadership group is big into second guessing and wordsmithing and trying to take control of the work of others, well, that's not so much fun.  Things bog down, and meetings become endless slogs.

But if everyone basically trusts and empowers each other, the meeting hums along.  Everyone reports in.  People notice stuff, sure, and ask for clarification.  But it's the clarification that comes from mutual accountability and support.

And it's not just the meeting that hums along.  It's the organization.  Being part of something like that is actually...fun.

Few things are more satisfying...even wuvable...than a good meeting.

Dreams of a Snow Church

I miss winter.  I do.

This Sunday, as I motored down beautiful country roads on my way to P-ville, I could tell that winter had tried.  She'd sprinkled a dusting of powdered-sugar snow on the fields, some of which still drifted down to spatter against the faceshield of my helmet.   Some of those wet spots in the hollows seemed dark and hungry as a shark's eye with the sheen of black ice.  I tiptoed the motorcycle over them, and hummed on.

But it's been a warm one here on the East coast of the United States, barely a winter at all.

Perhaps that's why these pictures of that church in Bavaria made almost entirely of snow appeal to me.  The idea of it delights, and on so many levels.

What better place for the Frozen Chosen to gather to meta-snicker at our reputation?

And it's so simple.  So essential.  So gentle and elegant in the soft blue of shadows and moonlight.  So devoid of frippery and folderol, pricey paraments or their 21st century projection-screen equivalents.

John Calvin's heart would go pit-a-pat at the sight of it, or at least stir enough to either write a scholarly treatise or organize a task force, which is what typically passes for arousal in the Reformed world.

And best of all, in the snow church there would be no struggling for funds to maintain the aging HVAC system, no anxiety about the condition of the roof.  Come spring, when the eidelweiss blooms, the physical church will simply melt away, to rise again when the season is right.

There's just no point in fighting, fretting or getting too anxious about something that will only be here for a season.

Defending Marriage

A letter came acros't me pastoral desk the other day, one from a group of well-meaning local Presbyterian folk who are deeply struggling with the transitions in our culture.  They are eager to set themselves as a bulwark against the gradual unravelling of the social bonds that keep our life together from descending into total gnawing entropic madness.

They are doing so by affirming what they view as the central tenets of our faith, and are making a point of highlighting one of the central teachings of our ancient tradition: marriage between one man and one woman.   This is just as Jesus taught it, and Paul taught it.  Right?

I think, rather obviously, that both their diagnosis and methodology are a wee bit off, but I am willing to agree on one significant point.  Those social bonds are increasingly frayed, and that's not a good thing.  In particular, the bonds of sustained, committed, lifelong relationships...marriage...are reaching the tipping point.   

A recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that marriage is right on the cusp of being a minority position among American adults.   It's a growing and deepening trend, and one that is entirely comprehensible from a sociological/psychological standpoint.  

Psychologically, it's understandable that the last several generations, who have watched divorce rend apart marriage after marriage, might not view it as quite the bedrock foundation of our culture.

Sociologically, there are several factors driving the fading of marriage as an institution.  First, there's the unwillingness to shun those who have experienced divorce, or to belittle and devalue those who aren't married.   This, quite frankly, is a Good Thing.  Yeah, sure, there are plenty of Pastor Mark Q. JudgeyPants out there still, willing to tell you how pathetic you are if you're not married or if you're struggling with challenges in relationships.  But there've always been Pharisees with well-weighted stones in hand, and diminishing the power of their voices in culture is welcome.

Second, and this is Not A Good Thing, there are powerful social pressures coming from our culture that tend to break apart relationships.  There's increasing social isolation and fragmentation, which makes commitment more and more challenging.  There's the radical cult of the self, driven by consumerism, which makes life about the Me and the lizard-brain-immediate, and not about the Us and grace-filled relationship.  We're taught to believe that our value as persons can be measured independently of the way we relate to others, to Creation, and to our Maker.  This is not true.  It leads us to very unpleasant places, personally, socially, and spiritually.

Ultimately, the faithful response is to counterculturally resist those powers.  Where folks of a more progressive bent can find commonality with our more conservative brethren and sistren is in affirming that there is, in fact, value in sustained, committed human relationships.  

Loving relationships and caring, connected communities are blessings from our Creator, and they are well worth encouraging, supporting, and defending.

Door To Door

I've never been comfortable with door-to-door sales.   Years and years ago, back when my hair was long and my belly was concave, I spent a couple of days doing the door-knockin' thing as a canvasser for Greenpeace.  It was one in a series of attempts to get a job that summer, and it was profoundly disappointing.  Instead of rallying interest in environmentalism, or stirring the passions of a movement, we were taught a sales pitch.  The goal: money for the organization, from which we could take a wee percentage.   That lasted not long at all.  Nothing sucks idealism out of the young like working on commission.

Perhaps even lower on the karmic totem pole are the folks who show up at your door seeking to convert you.  Despite what Ray Comfort pitches out there, fewer things are less welcome than someone coming at you with a prepackaged conversion script.

I've never minded, of course.  Most days, I'm perfectly happy to chat with the pairs of earnest fresh-faced young Mormons who arrive with books and name tags.  I don't mind the Jehovah's Witnesses either, though if they push too hard, they'll get themselves a theological whuppin'.  Nothing like referencing the Cappadocian Fathers to make a Witness flee in terror.  Then again, referencing the Cappadocian Fathers has the same effect on most people.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself yesterday walking about the neighborhoods of the little town in which my little church is located, church-literature in hand.  This is, quite frankly, not something that Presbyterians tend to do.  The arrival of Presbyterians at your doorstep bearing tracts is, some scholars argue, one of the sure signs of the end times.

That's the key to the Sixth Seal, I think, the one right before the Final Seal, the one that can only be unlocked by the words:  "I, Newt Gingrich, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States..."

What surprised me even more was how pleasant it was.  That the afternoon was clear and crisp and gorgeous was a plus.  I and the congregation's evangelism elder spent most of the time walking and chatting about anything and everything, which was actually kind of fun.  I'm not sure how many Jehovah's Witnesses get into sub-conversations about whether or not droids are connected to the Force as they walk.

As for the door-to-door part, well, it was fine.  Surprisingly fine.  This is, in part, because we rolled it Presbyterian style.

Our entire "pitch," such as it was, was to tell people that we were from the little historic country church up the road.  We then shared our names, handed over a postcard telling folks where we were and what's up for our Advent Season, and welcomed them to join us if they'd like...and that was that.  Oh, and we'd wish them a good afternoon.

For most, that was as far as it went.  Sunday afternoon is loaf-around-in-comfypants time for most Americans, and we don't want to mess with that.

At about a half-dozen houses, conversation went a bit further.   Like, say, at the house where the resident opened the door quickly, a wad of bills in her hand, thinking we were the pizza guy.  This, we all found amusing.   Or the houses where we knew someone, or where the person clearly wanted to have a conversation.  There, we chatted, for as long as the other person felt like it.  In at least one instance, we were invited in, and things did get theological, which was cool.  I'm always up for that.

As we walked, there were a few things we made a point of doing.  Governing principle number one of our reaching out was to respect the integrity of the person we were speaking with, while letting them know that we were there.  Getting all up into folks bidness?   That's actively counterproductive.  Way I figure it, this isn't the first century.  Ain't nobody in the You Ess of Ay not heard tell of this guy named Jesus.  As the Apostle Paul put it, you got to be cool, bro.

Governing principle number two was related.  For the folks we encountered who let us know they already had an affiliation with a faith community, our response was, "Well, great!  Good for you!   Say hi to [insert name of pastor/spiritual leader here] for me."  This seemed somewhat surprising to folks, but again, our task is not to wrest Catholics and Methodists from their congregations so that they can be Presbyterian just the way the Good Lord wants them to be.  We're just letting y'all know we're here.

The other governing principle was, of course, that communities of Jesus folk are and will always be responsible for letting people know they exist.  We can't be hunkered down, hidden away behind the walls of our buildings and meetings and polity and the tightly-knit circles of the Us.  A healthy church exists outwardly, connected to and engaged with the community full of human beings around it.  That needs to be particularly and especially true for congregations that are open-minded and open-hearted.

So, amazement of amazement, I actually find myself looking forward to the next time I get to go door to door.  Particularly if it's a sweet spring day.

Church Growth, Presbyterian Style

The goal of every pastor, pretty much without exception these days, is to "grow your congregation."  We train and attend seminars and pray earnestly that the Good Lord will see to bless our efforts with an abundant harvest of eager new pledge uni...I mean, disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.   We talk about new buildings, and salivate over that great plump bunch of unchurched bipeds that seems to dangle ever beyond our reach, like we're Tantalus in Church Planting Hell.

Well, that's the case for pastors outside of the oldline churches, at least.  Y'all either have nice new buildings radiant with big screens and parking and a great honking mortgage, or you're renting and dreaming about it, or you're still flailing away with the same dozen folks in that Bible study/praise circle that was supposed to be a megachurch already, dagflabbit.  

In older churches, there is yearning for more folks, but less earnest entrepreneurial evangelism.  

And we Presbyterians, we're, well, older.  We've been around longer.  We move at our own pace, sonny.

Yesterday, I gave a group of local pastors a brief tour through my rumpled, comfortable, and well-worn church.  I showed them our warm little sanctuary, built in 1847, which is easily the smallest church building in our small town.  I walked them through the building containing my office and the classrooms.  That aging structure was built in 1827, and feels every one of those years. 

One of the pastors, the Baptist, noticed the glassed-in bookcase in my office.  "Wow," he said, perusing the ancient tomes.  "Look at this!  These are really, really old catechisms!"   I told him I'd been meaning to look at them, but the case appeared to be locked.

After they left, I decided to explore the case further.  I fiddled with the lock for a moment, then realized the bookshelf wasn't locked at all, but held closed with an interior clasp.  I gave it a bit of a tug, and the door opened.  The smell of dust and must was strong, but I began to peruse the objects within. 

They were, almost without exception, ancient.  There was a silver bell, undoubtedly used to bring a classroom or meeting to order, that still sounded a tone so bright and clear and sustained that I half expected to look around and find myself in Narnia.   Many were old hymnals from the first decade of the 20th century.  Many more were books that had once been part of a Sunday School, readers and stories and collections of lessons that little groups of children would have had to memorize and recite.

There was, as seen above, a neatly maintained roll book for the Poolesville Presbyterian Sunday School.  Lists showed the names of every child who'd attended school, and whether they'd completed their assignments, and whether or not they'd checked a book out of the library.  It covered the years 1883 through 1885.

At the top of the case, I found a book of Session minutes.  The Session, for if you're blissfully unaware of Presbyterianese, is the group of Elders who are charged with gettin' the work of the church done.   Our board, basically.  As I had a Session meeting coming up in the evening, what better time to peruse Session minutes?   I wiped the dust off off the cover, dust that had gathered over what had clearly been many years, and cracked open the book.

Inside, the minutes began with a record of a meeting of the Session of Poolesville Presbyterian Church on July 12, 1885.   It was written in ink, possibly with a quill, and was in a neatly angled handwritten cursive, precise and meticulous.  This clerk of session---that's the person charged with maintaining the records---really cared about his work.  

He chronicled the decisions of the church, the folks who were seeking to join, and the activities of the pastor, who barely missed a day, except when the weather was most severe or he was called to preach the Gospel elsewhere.   He noted, in a reflection section, that Poolesville Presbyterian Church was not prone to outbursts of the Spirit, as were so many others, or prone to manifesting charismatic gifts.  But they were nonetheless, he mused, doing just fine.  Sounds oddly familiar.

As I read, my curiosity was piqued.  If this was a Session book...of a Presbyterian Church...then it would have the statistical records and accounting.  It would tell me just how big my church was back then.  I flipped through to where that would be in a current book, and lo and behold, there it was.

Total membership of Poolesville Presbyterian Church, one hundred and twenty six years ago?  

Seventy One.

Our current membership lies at around eighty-four.

I guess that means we're growing, by, hmm, what is that, almost 20% every one hundred years.   

So we're on track to be a thousand member church by, hold on, let's do the extrapolation, the Year of Our Lord Thirty Four Hundred and Two.

All part of the plan, my friends.  All part of the plan.

Power Supply

Yesterday morning, I motored my way from my home in Annandale, Virginia out to the congregation I'll soon be serving part-time in Poolesville, Maryland.  I had an 11:00 AM meeting scheduled with the clerk of session of the wee kirk there, to sign my first contract and talk about how things at Poolesville Presbyterian work.

I left early, concerned that the ever unpredictable steel and asphalt maelstrom on the Capital Beltway might slow things down on a rainy morning.  There were storms all about, deep rumbling clouds fat with rain, which made my ride out there on the bike just a tiny bit on the damp side.  Only a tiny bit, though.  The 'Zook acquitted itself admirably protecting me from the elements, although I noticed an odd side effect of the aerodynamic bubble behind my extended GIVI screen.  In really heavy rain, the vacuum behind the windscreen creates swirling back pressure.  The water beading on my helmet visor leaps forward into that vacuum in bright shining droplets, like I'm casting diamonds and pearls at the road from my face as I ride.   Rather pretty, although a bit distracting.  Not nearly as distracting as it might be if it happened in meetings, but so it goes.

Whichever way, I made it to my meeting on time, and the contract was signed, and badda boom, badda bing, I'm the pastor at Poolesville.  And, well, that's an unusual thing for a Presbyterian.  In fact, it's a huge thing, or would be if folks in my denomination thought about it.

Understand this, O my Presbyterian Brothers and Sisters:  In June of the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, a PC(USA) congregation said a fond farewell to a long-term and well-liked pastor. 

Within three months, they had lined up a new pastor.  

July.  August.  September.  And lo and behold, that's their transition.  That's the total amount of limbo and liminal time they'll have to endure.  Three.  Months.  How does this compare to your last transition? 

This is not an unusual occurrence in smaller congregations, congregations that are used to having temporary supply pastors, which is what I'm going to become starting October 1.   That means, in PresbyParlance, that I'm not "called and installed."  I'm just under contract on an annual basis.  That means every year, I need to sign a new contract to reaffirm my relationship with the congregation.  If things are working, then we're copacetic.  If either party is ready to move on, well, then it's time to go.  Have robe, will travel, as they say.

Called pastors, well, they're there as long as they want to be.  Of course, they renegotiate their "terms of call" on an annual basis.  And if either party wants to move on, well, then it's time to go.  

It's the same thing, kids.

Functionally, there is no difference between being a called and installed pastor and a temporary supply pastor.  You preach.  You teach.  You meet.  You greet.  You pray.  You care.   And honey child?  Both positions are temporary.   There ain't no such thing as a permanent pastor, unless you attend the First Presbyterian Church of Transylvania, and Pastor Edward has only been there 350 years.  Not like Pastor Vlad, who was there 735 years, and left only after that well intentioned but poorly thought out sunrise service.

And yet most congregations that aren't teeny tiny don't call supply pastors.  Supply pastors are for little bitty bucolic family churches out in rolling fields, or for struggling churches that can't afford competitive salaries.  To which I ask:  Why?  Is it just congregational ego? 

Why couldn't a 200+ member, thriving, successful Presbyterian congregation choose to sidestep our agonizingly slow and convoluted call process?  Don't complain about it.  Don't fret about it.  Just go supply, and simply write a position description, advertise for and locate a qualified pastor who would then pick up and carry on.  You'd have a trained, ordained, tested, and proven Presbyterian pastor.  As a "temporary supply."  With contracts to be signed on an annual basis. 

Not just why "couldn't."  Why "wouldn't?" 

Given the choice, why would you inflict the call process on yourself if you didn't have to?  The way we connect pastors with churches now is institutional quicksand, a source of frustration and anxiety for both pastors and pastor nominating committees alike.  If the results were demonstrably better than any other system, it might be justifiable.  But the results are not.   Instead, it means that those charged with calling pastors approach the task with fear and trembling, but for all the wrong reasons. 

Our process as it stands now is orderly, but indecent.  A congregation's energies would be better spent on outreach, or service ministry, or ministries of justice, or on just about anything so long as it got us out in our communities living and spreading the Good News.  Instead, we pour our energies inward, into processes that make us feel like we're doing something but that come perilously close to institutional onanism. 

So to you pastors contemplating a move?  Perhaps you should suggest going supply to your big steeple church.  You elders who have suddenly found yourselves chairing the PNC?  Maybe it's time to think outside the box a bit, and to make that known to your General Presbyter.

Why should little churches be the only ones getting it right?

Past Division and Towards Unity in Christ

5)  How do we move the church past division in theology, evangelism and mission to work towards unity in Christ?    


Here, the answer is flagrantly Jesus.   The issues that divide us and fragment our denomination are many.  We argue about homosexuality, and about how to approach people who are not Christian.  We squabble about what it means for the bible to have authority in our lives together.  We go at each other over pretty much everything and anything, because we're chasing after different priorities and different goals.

Absent a clear sense of shared and common purpose, any organization or group will tear itself to pieces.  Diversity of focus and emphasis can exist just fine within such a group, but if it's not absolutely clear that a community of human beings has a unifying purpose, that community will come apart at the seams.


Here, the oldline denominational churches face a much mightier challenge than the new mainstream nondenominational churches.  Nondenoms function pretty much the same way that a corporation functions, meaning they're organized around a single core product or service, with identity focused on a single board and a single iconic CEO...I mean, pastor.  Establishing identity is really straightforward.  Just listen to pastor-slash-brand.  That holds true right up until that pastor leaves/dies/resigns after canoodling.    


In the oldline, we function much more like a political system.  There's mess and disagreement and difference of opinion.  This comes naturally to democratic systems of governance, but it doesn't give univocal organizational certainty.


For that, well, we have Jesus.  The question arises, of course...which Jesus?  Is it the Jesus of the evangelical right, oozing plasma and corpuscles for our salvation, wrapped in Old Glory, and takin' down Satan with his FNH F2000 with a 4X ACOG sight?   Or the transgendered person of color Jesus of Queer Theology?  


Then again, there's also the Jesus whose ethos and teaching can be fairly easily established from a plain-text reading of the Gospels.  The Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain lay out an ethic of self-giving, transformative love that's radical and cohesive.  The nature of the Kingdom he proclaimed is pretty clear, particularly when you get into the implications of that Kingdom for how we are supposed to live together.


When we wander outside of the synoptics into the witness of John's Gospel, we have a distinct but harmonic vision of the relationship Jesus had with God, and the relationship he expected his disciples to have with one another.


This is the Jesus...formed by and speaking into the ethos of first century Jewish apocalyptic thought, while simultaneously subverting and transcending it...that pops up if you set aside your presuppositions and cultural biases.  The teachings of this Jesus, if we give them authority over our lives, have the power to unite us.


We resist that Jesus, of course.  He's not us.  He doesn't neatly fit into either side of our squabbles, and instead demands that we love those we disagree with, to the point of forgiving them even if they crucify us.


If we can follow that guy?  We'll still be different, of course.  We won't always agree.  But though different, we won't be divided.  Not in the way that causes pain and brokenness.

The Unique Presbyterian Voice Regarding Vital Ministry

4)  What unique voice to we, as Presbyterians in the Reformed tradition, bring regarding vital ministry in churches and society? 


Answer:  Jesus.  As Presbyterians in the Reformed tradition, let me deepen that a little bit.  I think what our unique voice has to offer is  יֵשׁוּעַ, with a side order of Ἰησοῦς . 


What that means, put a bit less coyly, is that what Presbyterians have to offer in this coming century goes well beyond seminars on how to run the most agonizingly complicated possible process for bringing a pastor to your church, or books entitled The Seven Ways Robert's Rules of Order Can Spice up Your Love Life.


Oh, wait.  That's still coy.  Let's take another swing at it.  


This is an era in which history has been forgotten.  In this age of the interwebs and the 24 hour infotainment cycle, what pours through us from that big data pipe is the right now.  It's immediate, lizard-brain amygdala data, gratifying our desire for gossip and sex and violence and tension and kittens, sometimes all at once.  It affirms that we are wonderful, the center of everything, and that even given the wonderful thing we are, there are all manner of electronics and pharmaceuticals that would make us even more amazing.


It is not a deeply literate era, or an era that sees past itself and its own immediate hungers.  That impacts how Jesus is interpreted and understood in ways that is increasingly driving the majority of Christians away from the essence of his teachings.   Christianity, as it exists within the realm of our globalized society, is increasingly focused on matters that pertain not at all to the core teachings and ethos of the Gospel.


We come to Jesus so we can be successful and live lives filled with an abundance of material prosperity.  The Gospel of Health and Wealth is easily the biggest growth market for AmeriChrist, Inc. and its international subsidiaries. We come to Jesus to affirm our political positions, particularly as it pertains to those uppity hoe-moe-seckshals.  We expect Jesus to embrace the binary conflict dynamics of our culture, and pay no attention to what he told us was the core decision point against which we either stand or fall.  We want a neatly packaged, soundbite faith, and so chop the great story of redemption and reconciliation into verse-by-verse prooftexts that meet that basic human desire to not think, not imagine, and not understand. It's just easier that way.


In coming to Jesus with those things front and center on our shopping list of demands, we walk away from our interaction with the Nazarene precisely the same as we were when we walked towards him.


We want a commodified, packaged, and marketable Jesus, one who meets our needs and gets us what we deserve.  And Lord knows, we get what we deserve.


In the face of this dominant cultural approach to Christianity, what Presbyterians have to offer is countercultural.  We remember.  As Reformed Christians, we pay attention, not just to the now, but the great arc of history.  We understand the nature of what the church has been, how it has moved across languages and cultures, how it has stumbled from being in the thrall of the state to being a pitchman for the market.


We understand the character of the sacred texts that guide us, and the forces that formed them from outside the crucible of the Right Now.  That may mean that we're no longer front and center as a force in cultural Christianity.  But as cultural Christianity pitches out consumerist treacle, pop psychology pablum, and literalist straw men, what the Reformed Tradition offers is a sentient Christianity.


Not all will want that.  But it is what makes our witness unique and valuable.  It's our gift, and we should both cherish it, develop it, and be willing to make the case for it to those who are disaffected by the  spiritually self-evident failings of marketized and politicized Christianity.  

Priorities and Challenges for the 21st Century Church

3)  What do you think are the highest priorities and challenges for the church in the 21st century? 


Answers: Jesus.  Why?


Here, the question is twofold.  Priorities are pressing concerns.  Challenges are those things that materially or conceptually countervail against the norms that govern a person or organization.  For the church in the 21st century, just as the church in the 20th, 13th, 3rd, and First centuries, the teachings and person of Jesus of Nazareth represent both the ultimate goal of the church as a movement and the primary challenge to the church as a human organization or institution.


Teaching the essence of Christ's message needs to be front and center for any gathering of bipedal hominids that claims itself as a church.   Insuring that we're conveying the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and embodying the grace, justice, and mercy of Jesus is the central priority for both the Church with a Capital C and that particular place you go on Sunday.


Yeah, the world has a whole bunch of other things wrong with it.  We're mangling our ecosystem, our society is bleating and baa-ing its way to a globalized oligarchy, and for some reason people keep watching Jersey Shore.   Our culture has become a seething, directionless mess of commodified sexuality and political polarization.  Churches have a prophetic voice about those things, and shouldn't be silent in the face of injustice, but those things themselves are not the gravitic center of our purpose and identity.  


Jesus is.  


And that is where the challenge comes in.  As we attempt to be relevant and engaged within our culture, it becomes really easy for the church to become consumed by the ethos of our environment.   It can become just another reason to justify ancient bigotries and hatreds.  It can become so "relevant" that it stops being the Gospel.  It can become co-opted by political persuasion, to the point at which being a Jesus follower can be just a front for a particular ideological position.  It can become just a light gloss over almost any social interest or group.


A straight-up reading the core teachings of Jesus challenges all of those highly seductive ways of being church-that-is-not-church.  No matter where we are in the arc of human history, no matter what the sociological, cultural, or technological context might be, our assumptions tested, tried, and transformed by our relationship with Him.