Today I was pondering a moment when a well-meaning member of Central proudly said to a group of visitor’s last summer, “I hired him!” The language fascinates me because this is, in fact, the way that a good number of folks look at their pastors – they were “hired” and therefor are “employees.” This particular woman didn’t mean that – but it’s amazing how language manages to cover up what we think we mean!
Here’s why I don’t like the idea of “hiring” pastors and other paid staff-members in the Church:
If a pastor is “hired,” then the pastor is an employee. As such, the pastor’s primary responsibility is to make their employers “happy.”
If a pastor is “called,” then the pastor is a shepherd. As such, the pastor’s primary responsibility is to help lead the congregation into spiritual vitality in the name and way of Jesus. This may often make congregants “unhappy.”
Of course, real life is no where this clean, but these are the poles along which I navigate. As I get stretched between them by the various expectations of Central’s community members – I am, myself, called to become like Jesus alongside these people (a reality that leads me to embrace the second point).
Next time you speak of your pastor, or where you worship, try to remember that how we use language will inevitably color the way we (and those we speak with) see reality.
When you’ve been part of system where the default stance is to be in hostile conflict for a lengthy period of time, it tends to be bad for your soul. This is because the system sucks in you energy, hopes, and passion and gives back only bitterness, burnout, and anger. This is not a good thing.
Such was the world I pastored in up in MA for two years, and such was the world that I entered into here at Central five years ago (wow, five years). Folks were just used to being at each other’s throats, and it was choking the life out of the community. I knew the cycle had to be broken from the moment I got here, I also knew the simply white-washing the internal conflicts and the lack of direction in the Central Baptist community would put this community into a sedated “maintenance-mode.” I’ve made mistakes, and have certainly been sucked into the dysfunctional system more-often than I’m even aware of – but we’ve all made progress, and for that I’m grateful.
One of the best behavioral changes that’s happened here over the last 2 1/2 years or so is that we’ve pretty much nipped the mocking, “But we’ve never done it that way before” chant. This statement would pop out any time we tried something creative in the Central community. One of the folks setting up, or playing-out, a new idea would put it out on the wind and the rest of those present would chuckle and add to the remark. I played this game myself. It’s poison. There is no other reason for making such a remark then to remind those “in the know” that what’s really important is beating those people who don’t like what “we” (the “real” Christians) into submission – causing them to repent of the error of their ways. Does that sound like Jesus to you? Me neither.
It finally dawned on me just how poisonous that statement was, and I not only made an effort to prevent it springing from my lips – I also took people aside who made the comment and told them, “We’re not going to do this any more, and here’s why.” After all, if our target of ministry is “them,” rather than a reaching out towards Jesus, we’re not going to experience the breaking-in of Jesus’ kingdom very much!
It took a while to douse the fire, and there are still flare-ups (old habits die hard), but I haven’t heard this for a while and the less I hear it the more I see the community beginning to come together as one. There are still people who want no part of being one body (both young and old), and who still try to stir up some of the old fights in an effort to regain some power, but they are having less an less success – and I really think it’s because many folks finally figured out that trying to “win,” rather than striving to be “faithful,” was going to kill this community completely.
We don’t do that any more – and a small wound in our collective soul has begun to heal.
I was feeling introspective the other day and felt I needed to obtain a piece of information that’s always been available to me (in fact, I pass the answer in the form of a plaque every time I go up to my office) – but one which I never took the time to learn. I wanted to see how many pastors had been serving here at Central over the years. It turns out that I am, in fact, the 17th pastor to serve with Central Baptist – and I’m not even sure that this number includes all the interim pastors over the years.
When you see the congregation from that perspective it’s easy to see how referring to Central (or any congregation that a pastor serves) as, “My Church.” This really is a statement which makes no sense on at least two levels:
Each of those pastors which proceeded me has left their mark on Central. Some of those marks are good, and some of them are bad – but their impressions can be seen in the expectations, methods, structures, and arguments that the congregation continues to have. When I eventually move-on my own marks will likely be left here (some good, some bad). This is the way of human communities.
Theologically speaking, this is Jesus’ Church. I am, at the very most, a steward of those the Lord has placed under my charge. They are never, ever, “mine.” Nor is the community that Jesus’ sheep form “mine” in any sort of possessive form. If anything, the community Jesus has formed in this place has a claim on me, rather than the other way around!
I take two lessons from my introspective moment. First, I don’t “own” Central Baptist. This would be a lot easier claim to make had I founded Central, but I didn’t so it’s not really something I’ll ever be able to claim anyway. Central Baptist is not “mine,” and even if I’m here for 20 or 30 years there will still be those marks from other pastors still on this Church (some good, some bad). We can reform, restructure, and recommit ourselves over an over again – but cultural memory tends to linger for a long time. Second, if this congregation doesn’t “belong” to me, it doesn’t belong to any of the folks sitting in the pews either. Central, and really every congregation, belongs to Jesus. We belong to the Church because we belong to Jesus.
I think a lot of congregational renewal trips up on these two points quite a bit. Both pastors, and the congregations they serve both fall into the trap of shouting, “Mine!” Frequently with disastrous results. Yet, no one looking at the status of many congregations can come to any conclusion besides the fact that congregations are in desperate need of renewal. The question is, “How can this renewal happen without falling into the ‘mine!’ trap?”
My answer, ironically enough, is partially inspired by a tee-shirt meant to show how insignificant the Earth (and, therefor, people) are in the grand scheme of things. You’d probably seen it, a shirt with a picture of a spiral galaxy on the front with an insignificant speck on it with a point reading, “You are here” on it. It’s meant to make you feel small – and it accomplishes it it’s task pretty well. Yet, it’s also meant to show you how we’re part of a reality bigger than we can possibly know – and this is what I want Central to come to understand. We are part of a story greater than we are typically aware of – greater than 16 other pastors or our own parents and grandparents. We belong to, and are part of, a story thousands of years old. A story which spans continents and languages and cultures. A story which we can never, ever, possess – but are wonderfully and graciously invited to be joined with. If we can be both humbled by, and awe-struck with, this story we are bound to in Jesus – then the “mine!” dilemma can be revealed for that shallowness that it is.
For mother’s day, my wife wanted me to order a Wii Fit. It didn’t like having to make my wife wait a bit for the bulk of her mother’s day present – but she was generously patient and we picked up our pre-ordered Wii Fit on Wednesday this week. All I can say is, “This thing is cool.” The balance games, Yoga instruction, and aerobic activities are all very helpful and even (dare I say it) enjoyable. Yes, we realize that we’re using a video game system as an exercise partner – but I’m a geek, what do you want?
Nintendo put a lot of thought into this product, and it shows. The best example of the wisdom put into developing the Wii Fit is the idea of setting goals. As any fitness trainer will tell you, setting obtainable goals is an important aspect to attaining (and maintaining) physical health. Set the goals to lofty, and you’ll get discouraged. Set the goals to vaguely, and you’ll stall. Wii Fit encourages it’s users to set goals for achieving a healthy Body Mass Index – and helps you get there with proper encouragement (positive or negative as the need arises). I set my first goal on Wednesday, and because I have a marker in sight – I find myself wanting to get there.
Contrast this with the common resolution of “getting in shape.” What does that mean? What’s the actual goal? How will you achieve it? Questions like this are so often left unanswered, because if we answered them then we’d have to change our behavior! Not surprisingly, most people never “get in shape.” Well defined goals are essential to healthy living.
This is true for more than just physical health, however – think of all the small congregations out there which have no goals at all other than, “we want to stay open.” How will they achieve this goal? Is it even a goal worth having? These congregations never answer these questions – and, not surprisingly, always end up in closure (or hovering near it). It’s been a struggle convincing people at Central that well defined (and achievable) goals are not only good, they are necessary for the health of the community! When people are pressed for specific goals – they most often answer with a vague, “Well, we want to be loving.” Or something akin to this statement. This is true across the gamut of ages and backgrounds in this fellowship – ambiguity in setting goals means that people are “off the hook” in actually trying to achieve them, and this leads to greater and greater sickness in the community.
The trick, however, is turning. Just like the Wii Fit has done for my family’s exercise goals, there are people in the Central Baptist Community who are now specific goals, and taking steps to get there. Even, gasp, holding people accountable to the tasks they would undertake to achieve the goals! It’s an amazing concept.
The trick is, however, getting people to understand that while we can celebrate the achievement of our short-term goals they are not the end of our Journey (just like when I achieve my first goal it won’t be the end of my Wii Fit journey). Rather, all of our short-term goals are part of a deeper pursuit of Jesus – his will and his Kingdom. Our goals are merely the outworking of the shared discipleship journey we are all on together. If we can keep our goals as a community and the goal of our faith tightly woven together (with our goals subordinated to Jesus’ goal), we can see some marvelous things happen among us.
One of the great struggles in pastoring a church that has been chronically shrinking is that people tend to want to focus on their struggles and frustrations than on trying to find ways to be faithful to our shared calling. This creates a vicious cycle which accelerates the very decay that is contributing to the negative focus. It is, in effect, the process through which congregations dies (though the fatal blow is actually losing sight of the Gospel).
Central has been wrestling with this problem for decades, and I’m onl the latest pastor to be frustrated with it. I’ve been here five years and sometimes it feels like all I’ve done is accelerate the decay even more by forcing people to admit it’s existence as a serious problem that can’t be passed off to “those people,” we all have to own responsibility for our predicament.
Yet, that isn’t all I’ve done – and I keep needing to remember that. My whole purpose in pointing to the death among us it to draw us to the greater reality – that resurrection is peeking through all around us. We have some new disciples preparing for baptism, the core of the congregation seems to enjoy being together, the leadership of the Church is working out a vision to do ministry, and people who are coming into contact with Central are beginning to see something of value going on here. We still have a long way to go (good suburbanites that most folks are, talking with the neighbors – much less actively living out their faith with them – is still high on the “scary things to do” list), but the signs of resurrection are here among us – we just have to choose to look at them.
This leads to the picture above. One of our students drew this image of our Church for a school project. Look at the signs of color and life! For this student, Central Baptist is a “place” of joy and light and color. I showed this to the congregation on Sunday, not as a “warm fuzzy moment” (I don’t really do those), but as an encourgement that those who are often the most perceptive among us (children catch masks quite easily, don’t they?) sees Central as a place of life. I also encouraged us to keep trying to be Jesus to each other, so that by the time this student is my age (35) or a woman named Eleanor’s age (99) he might still picture the Church with vibrant color – as a sign of life. Who knows if anything will come out of it, but I sure can hope.
My wife and daughter took a girl-scout trip this morning, which left my son and I alone in the house. he’s been wanting to get outside the last couple of days, but he’s been running a fever on and off so he’s been pretty much cooped up. This morning was gorgeous, and we spent a bit of time hanging out here (fixing his newest Lego Star Wars ship) before I grabbed my shower. I would have loved to take a walk with him, but one of our students from Central has been asking me to come over and get his Wii online for a couple of weeks and I set it up with him for this morning.
It wasn’t a big deal to my son, as this student’s younger brother is one of my son’s most favorite people in the world (and his older sister is his favorite baby-sitter). So around 11 I called up the family and got permission to come over and mess with their network. As a bonus, the mom just got over being sick for the better part of a week and I could see how she’s getting on back in “real life.” It’s a pastor thing.
I expected this job to take about 15 minutes. Which means, in geek time, I should have put the better part of 2 hours aside to hack around till I came up with a solution. Interestingly enough, that’s about how long it took. Here were some highlights:
A linksys router that was set for the default configuration – and yet wasn’t even connected to the web.
I was confirmed on the evilness of Windows Vista – what idiot thought up that UI? I mean, are you kidding me? (I had to test wireless networking and I left my macbook at home as it was rendering video).
I got to flash a dslmodem/wireless router’s firmware – only to see it’s web-ui replaced by one branded by Verizon, which apparently hired a group of drunk Aardvarks to design it.
I got so used to not having to “log in” to my web account that I find dsl’s need to do this a bit confusing (once I found that page in the router’s UI, however, the Wii connected w/o a hitch).
Out of all this, I looked at the (now completely unplugged) linksys router and checked it’s number – wrt54g v6. Three thoughts went through my mind:
This family isn’t going to be using this. In fact, it was only adding confusion to their setup.
This is a router that is compatible with the dd-wrt firmware.
NEW TOY TO PLAY WITH!
I asked the family if I could snag this router and play around with it some – and they said, “Yah, sure.” So now I have a linksys wrt54g router running dd-wrt (installed w/o a hitch) AND set up to be a client bridge. Which means that I have all sort’s a new tricks I can play with my wireless network. Let the games begin.
Oh, and if the family that was kind enough to let me play with this thing ever wants it back, the good news is that they’ll get a better router in return. Much fun!
This fall Central Baptist will be presenting a series entitled, “Kingdom Collision.” This series will explore the political realities of Jesus’ day, and how Jesus’ ministry interacted with those realities. This is a “teaser,” look for more updates over at Central Baptist’s web-site in the coming months. I’ll also be blogging here as I develop the series. I hope it will challenging!
* Background music is “We Sing To Thee,” by the Ensemble Sreteniye – licensed under Creative Commons.
I didn’t want to put this on-line until the folks at ABCNJ had a chance to see it, but now that they have I can share it with all of you. Enjoy watching what happened to part of the ABCNJ staff on the trip from Fanning the Flame!
Yesterday our family went to a 50th birthday party for one of my wife’s earliest mentors. As a bonus to seeing some folks we hadn’t seen in a while, my wife’s parents were also invited to the party – and they brought our kid’s birthday presents with them. This is always a good time.
An interesting thing about my son is that he’s recently become enamored with the various colors of light-sabers. He had a blue one, and one that actually changed colors from green to red, but he’s been wanting to complete his color collection for a couple of months now (purple being the crowning achievement for him). So grandma finished his collection (the basic kind, not anything overly fancy). Now my son has every color of light-saber ever seen in the movies.
I haven’t been to keen on getting light-sabers, because this means that when friends come over I suddenly find myself in the middle of various Jedi duels (with assorted minor injuries). Yesterday evening, however, I pretty much became a fan of the light-saber collection. My son and I were pretending to duel a bit (very slowly, and for some reason he insisted I use the red one). I was having a good time, until suddenly my son pulled back his light-saber and held out his hand suddenly to do a force-push! Needless to say, I was ecstatic. The prequels may have largely been a disappointment, but it’s neat to see how they caused this story to span generations even more than it already would have.
If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that a couple of weeks ago I was out at Green Lake, WI for a conference. It was a good time for both myself (who went) and my family (which didn’t go). Since I’ve been back, however, we haven’t seemed to have a day to ourselves as a family. First, we had a toddler over-night while his parents were out. Then two of our friends had to travel for a family funeral and we ended up watching their “kids” (2 dogs) for the better part of a week (these dogs have to sleep in a bed with a person – which split my wife and I up while they were here). Our weekend was busy with extended family events which were wonderful – but it just seemed that our immediate family wasn’t connecting.
On Monday, we had our Mexican Church meeting and I ended up working for 6 hours prepping my bit of the presentation (which is still not finished) and attending the meeting (I do hate that Church stuff is “work” for me, but it is). This meant that I missed the after-school playtime with our kids (morning was spent doing errands). This bummed me out, and I rarely do this to the kids – but it was a moment of urgency. So after the meeting Monday night my wife said, “Let’s all just stay home tomorrow. We can head down to the Franklin Institute with the Kids and just spend a day together.”
You have to understanding, my wife and I skip nothing. We don’t miss worship (actually, for me that’s kinda hard), she never skips her small group, I don’t bow out of meetings, and when our kids are signed-up for something they are there every time. It’s part of our family ethic, and it’s a good thing. It is also good, however, that my wife and I are able to recognize when our ethic of reliability needs to take a hike.
So, Tuesday the kids stayed home from school (we called in and told them what we were doing) – and we headed down to the Franklin Institute for a day of awesome Science Fun. It was a great way for our family to reconnect after a couple of weeks of our schedules getting in the way.
