Tag Archives: discernment

Jun 17, 2013

Why Congregations Are Stuck

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We can... but will we?

We can… but will we?

I had an “aha” this weekend about why many of our congregations seem so stuck.

I attended a “Building and Empowering Communities” leadership training sponsored by VOICE, a group of congregations and institutions in northern Virginia that are doing community organizing around issues of affordable housing, immigration, and other issues.

The tools of community organizing are not just for engagement in the wider community; they are also helpful within the congregation, as you seek out leaders and discern a vision.

The crux of the training centered on the one-on-one “relational” meeting, in which you try to identify potential leaders through getting to know people and learning their stories—their histories, their passions, and what “keeps them up at night.”

To give us a taste of this, each presenter offered a bit of personal history before launching into his/her topic, and it was easy to connect the dots between the person’s past experiences and his or her life’s work. One person’s aunt and uncle was the victim of a predatory loan. Another saw her single working mother face discrimination and sexism and was driven to empower herself and other women in her community as a result. You get the idea.

Then we practiced one-on-one meetings, and I was struck with how many stories (mine included) were some variation of “I had a pretty comfortable life… and now I just want to give back and make the world a better place.”

Now, admittedly, many of us were brand new at this relational meeting stuff. The organizers who trained us (and whose dots were so easy to connect) have been telling their stories for a long time. And granted, it was an artificial exercise, taking place in a fishbowl, and we could only go 8-10 minutes long instead of the 30-40 minutes that is suggested.

But these rather bland, generic responses revealed to me how we find leaders and volunteers in the church, and how we talk about service. And how it’s killing us.

Here are three realizations I had:

1. We do discernment primarily around gifts rather than stories. We need to stop doing that.

Whether we’re the nominating committee trying to put forth a slate of officers, or a youth director trying to find confirmation sponsors, we think predominantly about a person’s skills and gifts. “This person is a teacher, so I bet he’d be a great Christian Education elder.” “She’s chief operating officer of her company; maybe she’d serve on the stewardship team.”

It’s not that gifts are unimportant. After all, spiritual gifts language has been with us from the very beginning. But one of the tenets of community organizing is that good leaders are made, not born. As a pastor, I can teach skills. But I cannot teach passion. Getting in touch with a person’s history allows you to find those deep hungers that will motivate and drive them even when the going gets tough. No wonder so many of our congregations are boring and lethargic—we’ve been talking about the wrong things!

2. We need to get way more concrete in our language about service.

“I want to help people because Jesus tells us to love our neighbor” doesn’t get us anywhere. Yet it’s our default response when people ask us what drives us. The content of a relational meeting is why and how. “Why do you want to help people? Why does that matter to you? How have you seen that impulse lived out? How do you see that not being lived out in your community?”

Just as we’ve relied on gifts as the primary mode of discernment, we have not taken the time to drill down past our surface responses about service. Many of the overworked pastors there (myself included) were searching for shortcuts—Can’t you do this work in group settings? Does it have to be one on one? What do you suppose the response was?

3. Anger is not the enemy. It is a resource. 

Maybe you’re one of those who had a genuinely untroubled childhood. You didn’t see your aunt and uncle’s devastation at almost losing their home because of that predatory loan. But I bet there is an injustice that makes you furious. We don’t like to talk about anger, especially in the Church of Nice that so many of us belong to. Anger is bad, we tell ourselves—something to suppress. But anger, properly contextualized, is also energy. Anger is fuel for action. And there is plenty of holy anger in scripture. One of my favorite benedictions has the line, “May God bless you with anger—at injustice, oppression, and the exploitation of people, so you will work for justice, freedom and peace.”

There are plenty of injustices in the world that I worry about. But when I look back on my personal history, the key issue for me has been women and girls, again and again. The specifics of that have played out in different ways over the years, and the pivotal events that sparked that anger are for another post. But yeah. Women and girls.

My favorite quote these days is this one by Howard Thurman:

ask2

But how do we know what makes people come alive unless we ask them?

Jun 11, 2013

I’m Not Married to My Church, Are You?

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Does it? Why and how much?

Does it? Why and how much?

I was with a group of folk from another congregation recently, introducing them to NEXT Church and talking about my involvement as co-chair. We got to talking about generational differences when it comes to membership in an institution, particularly a church. Millenials are way less wired toward joining a group in the sense of signing on the dotted line. In many cases they are committed to the organization and will support it through time and money, but they do not see the point of being a member.

I made an offhand comment about churches that have people re-commit to church membership every year. Rather than having someone join and be a member of a church “forever,” there is an annual discernment process. The church leadership re-introduces folks to what it means to be a member (and presumably, the expectations are high), and asks people to consider whether they are willing to devote the time and energy toward that endeavor. As always, non-members are welcome to worship and serve in the community, to receive pastoral care, etc.

There was some predictable backlash to this idea, some of which I can understand. There are times in a church’s life when things just aren’t that much fun. A beloved pastor leaves and the energy declines. There are conflicts and crises. Are we saying it’s OK for people to bail just because things get hard, or because the church is not suiting their needs?

And yes, our culture is one in which ties to institutions and communities are more tenuous than ever. So people are right to ask whether a yearly church membership drive feeds that lack of commitment. OR, does it simply acknowledge the world as it is, not as we want it to be? People can carp all they want about “kids today,” but how does that work as an evangelism strategy?

One comment really grabbed me: What, are people going to get married year by year now? I didn’t have the presence of mind at the time to question that analogy. But now, a few days later… No. Just no.

Church membership is not like a marriage. It’s just not. Don’t believe me? Consider this: when a person relocates because of a job, there is often grief over leaving one’s church. But rarely does someone pass up that job because they have made a commitment to their worshiping community. But I know plenty of people who have done that because a move would be bad for their spouse or family.

We use the marriage analogy all the time in the church. Pastors seeking another call feel like they’re “cheating on their church,” like they’re “running around behind people’s backs.” I can relate to the sentiment—there is a zone of secrecy that must be present in these situations, and it can feel inauthentic and sneaky. Still, I find these kinds of metaphors very unhelpful. Pastors are not called to a church until death do they part. They are called for a season of the church’s life. And in the Presbyterian Church (USA), there is at least a minimal sense of re-upping each year, in the sense of negotiating and re-approving terms of call.

Why would we not at least consider giving church members the same freedom to reaffirm their commitment to a congregation that pastors themselves have? Why do we get to leave whenever we feel the winds of the Spirit blowing, but church members are on the hook for the rest of their lives?

The real crux of this membership stuff is not people’s lack of commitment. It’s that the church has done a poor job of teaching discernment and discipleship.

Discernment: sensing the presence and leading of God, which goes beyond what makes me happy in the moment.

And discipleship: commitment to following the Way of Jesus, even when it’s hard, even when it means being in a community with people who are sometimes a pain to deal with.

A church that does a good job of this doesn’t need to worry about a mass exodus of people if the interim’s a boring preacher.

And a church that does a poor job of this wants to keep warm bodies (or not-so-warm ones) on the rolls any way they can.

Jun 4, 2013

Anyway You Go You’re Gonna Get There

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But what if they'd bounded the other way?

But what if they’d bounded the other way?

As I reflect on 10 years of pastoral ministry, I’ve been talking with friends who are discerning God’s call and job shifts, and it’s got me thinking about U2. Some years back there was an article (can’t find it) that talked about what the guys from Dublin would have done with their lives had they not become the world’s biggest band. I recall that Larry would’ve been a police officer, etc. etc.

Then it quipped, “Bono, of course, could only be Bono.”

I know a few people like that. They’re doing what they were born to do and it’s hard to see them doing anything else. But most of us are like Edge, Adam and Larry (though not nearly so cool). We have many different gifts and many different interests. There are many possible paths we might take. If not this, then something else. And whatever we end up doing can lead to a meaningful life.

It makes discernment more difficult because you’re not usually deciding between right and wrong, but right and right.

Or option A, which is slightly less right, and Option B, which is a little more right but requires a big jump into the unknown.

Or Option C, which is right in several very important ways, and Option D, which is right in several other completely different ways.

But being Edge or Larry or Adam is also very freeing. It’s not about cracking the code and finding that one perfect vocation. It’s about trusting that whatever you decide, you will be where you need to be in that moment. And if you’re a Christian, it’s about trusting that the Spirit can use you wherever you end up—that you will play a small part in God’s grand dream of shalom for all.

You know those studies of people who won the lottery and those who became paraplegics? And how after six months of adjustment they were as happy or unhappy as they were before? Yeah. Like that.

During the last decade of ministry, there have been several crossroads moments for me—a church’s search committee that came calling, or that first writing workshop I attended that unlocked something important in me, or a cool non-profit opportunity that tugged on my heart. The most significant was applying for a sabbatical while an associate pastor, only to be called to Tiny Church instead. In fact, three days after Tiny voted to call me, I got the notification that my sabbatical grant application had been accepted and the Lilly Endowment wanted to give me [mumble] thousand dollars to hike in the Rockies and visit Cinque Terre with Robert. I had to turn it down.

God and I had some words about the timing of that. But here we are.

Our family loves Billy Jonas. He’s a sage in musician’s clothing, with some Pied Piper thrown in. One of my favorite songs is “Anyway You Go You’re Gonna Get There.” Check it out:

I got lost far from home, I was scared, I was all alone
A great big circus came my way; let me see what the fortunetellers have to say
First one said, “home is near,” second one said “you can’t get there from here”
Third one said, “it’s time to scatter, cuz any way you go it doesn’t matter….”

Chorus: Any way you go you’re gonna get there!
Any way you go you’re gonna get there!
Lean a little bit to where you wanna get
Cause any way you go you’re gonna get there!

Then here’s the heart of the song:

What if I choose the wrong career?
“Any way you go you’re gonna get there!”
And what if I make my choice in fear?
“Any way you go you’re gonna get there!”

Yes, some decisions are between right and wrong. But not most. Most moments of discernment are invitations to lean a little bit, and trust that any way you go you’re gonna get there.

Are you discerning between Options A and B, C and D right now? How are you being called to lean?

Jun 3, 2011

Friday Link Love

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Some random stuff that caught my attention this week:

I Believe in Child Labour, Sweatshops and Torture

Peter Rollins is an amazingly complex thinker and communicator. But in this post he doesn’t do nuance—for which he has been criticized. Still, for many Christians who have divorced belief from practice for way too long, and in some pretty tragic ways, these are prophetic words.

~

“In My Opinion”: Practices of Discernment for Leaders When Making Decisions

Here’s your nuance:

On one of my work-related trips, I struck up a conversation with a young man who was a professional pilot. He was a serious-minded guy, and before long we were discussing the big issues of life. After a while, he said he noticed that whenever I said something substantive, I always added the qualifier “in my opinion.” In his opinion, he said, someone with my academic background should not qualify his remarks but should speak “with certainty.”

I explained that my degrees have provided me with more questions than answers. He said, “I’ll have to think about that.”

I thought about it, too. And I stick by my qualifier.

The article offers some antidotes to what the author calls “arrogant absolutism.”

~

The Men in Mentors

The author went looking for female mentors… and couldn’t find any.

~

And a bit more whimsy:

Solutions for the ‘Everyday’

Two-way toothpaste? Coffins that screw into the ground? I love it!

May 27, 2011

Friday Link Love

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A few odds and ends from around the Intertubes:

7 Principles of Comedy/ Design/ Creating Anything

Discussion of the HBO special “Talking Funny” with Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis CK. Interesting connections between their process and other creative processes. Plus there’s a link to the special, available in four parts on YouTube.

The Myth of Self Control

From Andrew Sullivan’s blog. “Dan Ariely sees the psychology of self control at work in the tale of Ulysses and the sirens.”

Mom Gets the Right Things Done with the Natural Planning Model

I first read this as “natural family planning,” for which the jokes write themselves. But this is a Getting Things Done post about how to apply the principles of GTD to one’s home/family life, not just work life. The more I get into GTD the more I realize it is really a process of discernment at its core.

Beware the Metaphor

We’ve always known language is powerful, now we have a study that demonstrates one aspect of this:

Researchers asked students to read one of two crime reports. In the first report, crime was described as a “wild beast preying on the city” and “lurking in neighborhoods.”

Guess which group suggested more jails and getting “tougher on crime,” and which suggested more social reforms such as improving education?

This study is not surprising, but it does solidify my intense dislike for cable news and its swooshes and logos and Super Scary Music.

Fidelia’s Sisters: How Do You Do It?

A nice column from a minister-mom that provides an honest look at what it’s really like to engage on those two vocations.

A Benedictine Paradigm for Congregational Life

In all our talk about being missional and the church not existing for its own sake, we can get out of whack as we fail to nurture our own spiritual lives. The Benedictine Rule can show us how to find balance and faithfulness between inward journey and outward service.