The Church I Love

The Church I Love:

Reflections on Fifteen Years of Pastoral Ministry

February, 2017

My years of called Christian pastoral ministry will end, for now at least and probably forever, on March 10, 2017. That’s when my resignation as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Maltby becomes effective. I began called pastoral ministry on March 24, 2002, at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ. Fifteen years is not a lot of time in professional ministry compared to the time spent in it by people who entered it younger than I did. I was 55 when I started, and I’m 70 now. Not a great many years perhaps, but they were the most important and the most meaningful years of my professional life. They include enormous changes in my life: the death of my first wife, remarriage, seminary, a change of professions, ordination, my twin brother’s devastating stroke, the deaths of my parents, the marriages of my children, and the birth of grandchildren. My life looks little like it did fifteen years ago and virtually nothing like it did twenty years ago before I entered seminary. I have learned much in the last fifteen years, and I have experienced more than I have learned. I want here to reflect on some of my learning and some of my experience from fifteen years in the pulpit.

One of the most fundamental thing I learned over the course of my fifteen years in the pulpit is that churches are very strange places. They proclaim that their allegiance is to God and Jesus Christ. They say their purpose is to proclaim the Gospel and bring salvation to people and to the world. The people of a church gather to pray, sing hymns, and listen to someone preach what she or he thinks needs to be or at least what he or she wants to say on any particular Sunday. Churches believe that people become part of them at least in substantial part to worship God and to be in communion with other Christians. Some Christians don’t think of churches as earthly, human institutions at all. Most churches say Christ is the head of the church. They say the Holy Spirit creates and sustains the church, calling people to it. They say that the church is a divine institution, not an earthly one.

Yet there is no institution more earthly than the church. Individual churches can all tell you when they were founded, and they know they were founded by human beings. Churches function pretty much like any other volunteer organization. They need money to operate, so they work at raising funds in ways a bit similar to the ways other nonprofits do. Though they may be not for profit corporations, they have an organization usually specified in constitutions and bylaws just like any other corporation. They have a board of directors. It isn’t usually called a board of directors. It’s probably called a church council or by some similar title, but it functions as a board of directors. It makes most of the decisions for the church. In many denominations it functions between meetings of the formal members of the congregation, and there are some functions that only the members can exercise, usually including approving a budget, electing people to be officers and members of boards or committees, and calling or dismissing a pastor. In all these ways a church is a very worldly institution.

The churches I have known have had their structures and their formal ways of doing things, but often things aren’t actually done in those churches in those formal specified ways at all. People go off on their own hook and do something they think just needs to be done and they can do. Sometimes that Lone Ranger kind of working functions reasonably well. Sometimes everyone just knows, say, that Jerry mows the grass even though no formal body has ever asked Jerry to mow the grass or authorized him to do it. This kind of individual initiative can sometimes work well enough, but it doesn’t always. Sometimes people take it upon themselves to make decisions that truly are not theirs to make. Then others resent either what they have done or just that they have done it. Tensions result. Conflict results. People feel insulted or dismissed. It can be a real mess, and it is all very human.

Beyond that, the people in the churches often act in ways every bit as worldly as people do in any other organization—or worse. Church people know that there is no fight like a church fight. Sometimes the more petty the nominal subject of a fight the nastier the fight becomes. Churches have been torn apart by fights over the color of the carpet in the sanctuary or by even less significant issues. The people of most churches can tell you appalling stories of how people in the church have on occasion treated other people in the church. Churches sometimes split into warring camps. Sometimes those splits are over important things like how to read the Bible and the nature of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Sometimes they’re over who gets to be on the  board of deacons or some other substantially less significant issue. Whatever the nominal issue is, these fights can get really nasty. They sometimes drive people out of the church. They sometimes make the church a very unpleasant place to be. There’s no fight like a church fight.

Beyond that, as a denominational regional executive I know is fond of saying, in a church the issue is not the issue. Churches are far from immune to the human tendency to divert divisions and disagreements from their actual substance onto some seemingly less significant issue and then to fight over that stakeholder issue. A fight over the color of the carpet might actually be grounded in a tension between older, long-time members of the church and newer members who want to take the church in a new direction. The real issue is rarely easy to discern beneath a nominal issue, but an ability to see beneath a conflict to the real issue is a vital skill for churches to have.

Churches are, for the most part, extremely averse to change. We church professionals all know the saying “‘We’ve never done it that way before’ are the seven last words of a dying church.” In truth the only thing really constant in human life is change, or at least change in every person and every institution is inevitable. Institutions that do not change die, and dying is of course itself a profound change. Yet churches hate to change, or at least most of them do. Even when they say they are open to change they usually aren’t. Beyond that, when they are open to some sort of change the change they’re open to is often only to go back to the way things were in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when that big sanctuary the church built back then and still has was full on Sunday morning and there were dozens or even hundreds of children in the Sunday School. They don’t want to hear the undeniable truth that the world has changed and the church will never look like that again, at least not in any of our lifetimes.

Churches often resist change even in quite trivial things, but they tend to be even more profoundly resistant to change in more significant things. Most of the people in most of the churches today learned a version of the Christian faith that was widespread and largely unquestioned by most church people in the early decades of the twentieth century. In its most extreme form that version of the faith was Fundamentalism, but even in churches that aren’t truly Fundamentalist certain assumptions about the faith similar to those of Fundamentalism prevail. These include the ideas that Christianity is the only true faith; that the fundamental human existential dilemma is sin, forgiveness, and how we get to heaven when we die; that Jesus Christ is Savior because he came as the Son of God` to suffer and die as an substitutionary atoning sacrifice for sin in order to procure divine forgiveness that could and would not otherwise be given; that the Bible speaks facts that are to be understood always literally, that is, factually, and that there are no errors or contradictions in the Bible. Better Christian theology moved beyond all of those assumptions about the faith a long time ago, but most churches haven’t followed and don’t want to follow better theology’s lead. They don’t see why they should follow. They don’t understand that if they don’t follow they will become utterly irrelevant to the world in which they live and work because the world has changed but they haven’t. The church’s resistance to change in its foundational theology may well be the reason it finally dies altogether.

I am well aware that all of that paints a pretty bleak picture of the church. There is much in the life of the church that is bleak, that is depressing, and that makes us wonder why anyone would want to have anything to do with it. Yet I have devoted the last fifteen years of my life to professional work in the church, and many of my friends and colleagues in ministry have been doing that a lot longer than I did. If the church is so bleak, why do we do it? Well, I think we do it first of all because we have convinced ourselves that God called us to do it, and who are we to deny God? Professional ministry is a bit like teaching in that it is a profession that you really shouldn’t go into unless you can’t live not going into it. If you perceive that you have a choice, don’t do it. For most of us the pay is lousy and any job at all is getting harder and harder to find. The profession has virtually none of the prestige it used to have. Most of our culture thinks church is irrelevant at best and pernicious at worst. Yet a great many wonderful, bright, capable people devote their lives to it. Why? Ultimately because for all its drawbacks and shortcomings we love the church of God, the church of Jesus Christ. Ultimately we devote ourselves to it because we know that those drawbacks and shortcomings are not the true church and are not what the church is about. We do it because we know what the church at its best or even when it’s just not at its worst can be and can offer people that no other institution can.

The church is a human institution, but it is not only a human institution. It is an institution in which people really do experience the presence and the gifts of God. It’s not that we can’t find those things outside the church, but they are what the church is about in a way that no other institution or place is. In church we really can and do find and worship our divine Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. In church we really can and do find our spiritual home. The church must never ignore the world and must always seek to speak divine truth to it, especially in times like these when that truth is so desperately needed; but in church we can also find an escape from the world. We can come into the presence of God in a place and a time away from our usual worlds. In church we can find the peace and hope that are so badly missing from secular culture. In church we can find, maintain, and strengthen our connection with ultimate truth, ultimate reality, the reality behind reality, the depth dimension of reality that gives life meaning and purpose, that is, with God.

We humans are all both immensely strong and almost unimaginably weak and fallible creatures. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about a lot more than this, but it is also about grace and forgiveness. In church we can learn and really know that God is there with us and for us. In church we can find the strength that comes from God that will get us through whatever is it we must get through in our lives. In church we can know that God forgives us when we fail. In church we can know that God suffers with us when we suffer and is there to love us and sustain us through whatever suffering we face in life. Church people sometimes say that what they want from church is something to get them through the coming week. Giving people that something is certainly not all that the church is about, but it is part of what the church is about. The Christian faith lived in church can give people what they need to get through the coming week. It can give people what they need to get through the rest of their lives with peace and courage. No other institution has doing that as part of its foundational purpose. No other institution can do that like the church can.

Church can and sometimes does supply people with needful things that our culture lacks. Most importantly church can and sometimes does give people the community that most Americans don’t have any more. We live isolated lives. It wasn’t always so among us. We used to live in smaller towns and in extended families. Most of us don’t any more. Most of us can live in a neighborhood our whole lives and barely know our neighbors. Churches, especially but not exclusively small churches, can be the community that we need and mostly lack. I have often said that if everyone knew what a good church can be and do for people in times of trouble they would all go out and find one even if they didn’t believe any of church’s faith at all. I’ve seen it over and over again. When a member of a church is in trouble the other people of the church step up. They pitch in. They’re there for their sister or brother in Christ from church, sometimes even if they don’t even know that person all that well. People go to visit. They bring food. They donate money. They do chores around the home of a person who can’t do them herself. They give rides to the doctor and even help pay the bills when that is needed. They pray together, and their prayer brings them closer to each other and closer to God. The church being a living community is today perhaps its primary reason for it continuing to exist, and in church all of that caring is grounded in faith. It is grounded in the love of God that gives it form and gives it strength.

Church people do good work in the world. For the most part they do acts of charity rather than acts aimed at creating a more just world, but they do many acts of charity that help a lot of people. Just what they do varies a lot from church to church. Common charitable activities in my experience include food drives for local food banks, donating backpacks and school supplies at the beginning of the school year, and giving gifts of food and clothing at Christmas time. Many churches have other charitable programs that are a central part of the life of the church. People not affiliated with a church contribute to charity too, but most churches make sure it’s an important part of their life.

Then there is that part about speaking to the world. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about grace and forgiveness. It is about personal strength and hope, but it is about a great deal more than that too. Far too many people in far too many churches don’t want to hear about that “more”. They want to focus on Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for sin and don’t want to hear that that focus makes his life and his teaching irrelevant. Well, it does, because in that way of seeing him it’s only his divine identity and death that matter; yet our New Testament gives us a lot about Jesus’ life and teaching, and that teaching is grounded in parts of our Old Testament, particularly in the words of the Hebrew prophets. Why does the New Testament do that? Because God insists that we know it. Because God insists that we live it. During his life on earth Jesus was all about social justice. Time and time again he turned the understandings and expectations of the profoundly unjust world on their heads. He upended the cultural norms of his time and of ours. He said blessed are the meek, the poor, and the peacemakers not the strong, the rich, and the warmakers that the world so adores. He said love your enemy and resist evil with creative, assertive nonviolence, rejecting the violence in which so much of the world lives and to which so many people look for salvation. He included women in his inner circle of followers in a time when women had no power and no standing. He said imitate the hated Samaritan when he does what is right. He said welcome back the one who has strayed with no questions asked. He knew we need bread, and he gave it to people; but he said we do not live by bread alone. He called us to life in the Spirit of God, and that Spirit called him and calls us to work to transform the world from the kingdom of wealth and power into the kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice and peace. Many church people don’t want to hear all that in church; but it’s there in our Gospel, and the church at its best proclaims it and lives it like no other institution does or can.

So what have I learned in fifteen years of professional ministry? That for all its faults and failings I still love the church. I love the people of the church. I love the God who grounds the church, is present in it, and works through it. The church is far from perfect. It is too human to be anything close to perfect. Sometimes when you’re in a church, and definitely sometimes when you’re trying to be its pastoral leader, it will drive you nuts. You’ll get frustrated. You’ll want to quit, and sometimes you will. I have resigned from two called pastorates in my time as a minister, albeit for different reasons each time. Yet I have not left the larger church, and I never will. The church is my spiritual home. In its worship, scriptures, sacraments, music, prayers, and communal life I find my connection with God. I can’t imagine my life, or my death, without God; and I can’t imagine them without the church. I may never again serve a church in a called position. So be it. I will still serve the church. I will still live in the church. For me, and for so many of us who still love the church, it cannot be otherwise. Thanks be to God.