soulwerker

Here in the U.S., we seem to pride ourselves on being able to “super-size” everything — even our churches. For the past thirty years or so, people who are inclined to be a part of a local congregation have tended to congregate in the larger ones. The larger churches in any denomination (and their non-denominational mega-church cousins), as a rule, get larger. Smaller congregations struggle to remain stable, but increasingly find themselves on the shrinking side of the standard church growth equation. Generally speaking, whenever “church growth literature” speaks of growing congregations, the focus is on numbers — budgets, average attendance at weekly worship services, events, ministries and programs.

Everyone, it seems, wants their congregation to “grow”. And of course, there is a biblical precedent. When we read the book of Acts (the story of the first few years of the church following Jesus’ resurrection), it seems as if every time Peter, Paul or one of the other apostles opened their mouths, hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people respond to their message and joined the movement. I think it’s important, though to note what the newly converted were NOT joining:

They were not joining an organization that kept membership lists and published pictorial directories. They were joining a community of people who not only recognized each other’s faces, but also knew each other’s names and something about each others lives.

They were not joining an organization that had pledge drives, budgets and paid staff. They were joining a community that took responsibility for each other’s needs and held each other accountable.

They were not joining an organization that provided “something for children and youth”. They were joining a community in which it was understood the first people who needed to be taught and formed in the ways of the movement were the adults (parents would then, in turn, teach their children).

Even though the early church grew, the emphasis wasn’t on stadium-filling religious extravaganzas. The emphasis was simply on telling the story — whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. Sometimes the story-telling happened in the public square, other times in the local synagogue, sometimes on a street corner, sometimes by the river bank, sometimes in the halls of the civil authority, and plenty of times around a dinner table. And while the tradition has been blessed with individuals oozing with oratorical prowess, most of the time, the story of Jesus has been told by very ordinary people who stumbled and bumbled along, trying to avoid being tongue-tied and doing their best to hide their nervousness.

I am not appealing for any attempt at constructing a fantasy facsimile of “the New Testament Church” in the 21st century. For most of us in the U.S. to belong to a local church usually means there are buildings, budgets, staff, events, programs and ministries. I am simply wondering how we might recover an understanding that such things reflect the values, gifts and mission of a particular congregation in a particular place instead of simply being things we “have, need and do” because we’ve always had, needed and done them.

Instead of worrying about how we could super-size our respective ministries, what would it be like to right-size them?

When I was in seminary, “The Senior Sermon” was a rite of passage. Members of the senior class were scheduled, usually on a weekly basis, to offer a sermon at one of the community liturgies. Senior sermons were fraught with some degree of anxiety for the preacher. After all, preaching in front of one’s fellow classmates was daunting enough. Having to preach to one’s professors, the seminary administration and the staff, only served to heighten the stress. Some of us handled the stress better than others. For many of us, though, the senior sermon simply came down to toughing it out and getting it done. And for the most part, the sermons produced under these circumstances were theologically solid, biblically based and reasonably cogent.

I don’t remember what I said at my senior sermon. And since I don’t as a rule keep old sermons on file (either digitally or on paper), I can’t go back and refresh my memory. But I do distinctly remember two exchanges in the hours and days after the congregation had said “Amen.” at the conclusion of the sermon I offered.

In the refectory, later the same day, one of the seminary staff members — a person with an easy going humor, a quick wit and an infectious laugh — complimented the sermon at the salad bar. The exchange went something like this:

“Good sermon today, Gary.”

“Thank you.”

“Hearts were warmed! Minds were changed! Lives were transformed!”

(Laughter from both of us.)

We then went back to the business of constructing our salads.

Two days later, I saw the same staffer in the refectory. This time, standing in the serving line. She said,

“Hey Gary, remember that stuff I said to you about your sermon and how it impacted hearts, minds and lives?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s worn off now and everyone’s forgotten what you said.”

(Again, laughter from both of us.)

We then returned to making our food selections.

Through the years I’ve thought about those two exchanges. In the first, I knew I was getting some good natured ribbing — the sort that happens with friends with whom one has developed a level of trust over time. In the second, even with the good humor, I knew I was getting a good lesson in perspective — and not simply perspective on constructing sermons and then preaching them. This staffer gifted me with the first of many lessons for an idealistic priest wannabe.

This priestly vocation is mapped out over time. To be sure, there are some powerful moments. Sometimes hearts are warmed. Sometimes minds are changed. Sometimes lives are transformed. Almost instantaneously. And I get to see it all happen! Right in front of my eyes!

But here in the burbs, as the priestly vocation intersects with the unfolding vocation of the parish I am called to serve, most of whatever God happens to be doing at any given moment is hidden from me. Rarely I am privileged to catch a fleeting glimpse of God’s handiwork in the lives around me. Most of the time though, life in the parish looks pretty ordinary — not unlike any other gathering of human beings. We worry. We gossip. We grumble. We kvetch. We compliment and complain. We praise and say, “Thank you.”

Some of us are stubborn. Some of us are sensitive. Some of us are playful. Some of us are serious. Some of us are cynical and others of us are naive. Some of us long to do great things for God and change the world (or at least Milwaukee). Some of us simply want to make it through the day and remain faithful to our faith. We’re all in this thing together — this thing called a “community of faith” — this parish. Fumbling along. Doing our best as best we can. Offering each other forgiveness when we fail. Cheering each other when we succeed. Hoping against hope that we’re getting some of this following Jesus stuff right. And in the middle of all of this, in moments when we probably least expect it…

Hearts are warmed. Minds are changed. Lives are transformed. Thanks be to God.

So, between the earlier post and this one, I spent some time reading a book, Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, by Shane Claiborne. Here are a few of the adjectives that came to mind while reading the first few chapters. Intense. Challenging. Encouraging. Convicting. Heartfelt. Headstrong.

As I read, I was moved by the directness of Claiborne’s style — his good humor, his curiosity, hie openness and his commitment to what my New Testament professor in seminary called, “The Cause”. The Cause represents a way of living in the world with a commitment to justice, peace and the poor. I wondered what a commitment to The Cause might look like here in the burbs.

I’m about to head out to a Stewardship Committee meeting. Trinity Church, like most other mainline congregations faces some significant decisions regarding the way in which we will live our common life and the sorts of ministries we will undertake given the fiscal realities that seem to be so much a part of congregational life. It would be easy to get hijacked in our conversation about budgets, buildings and benefits. Money in. Money out. Balance sheets. The Church as a profit and loss center instead of a prophet and love center.

For years, I’ve sporadically kept this blog. For years I’ve tiptoed around those issue I identified as “hot button”. For years I’ve played it down the middle — a nondescript, white collar worker with a corner office on a quiet street in an upscale neighborhood. In ridiculous, Episcopal Church parlance from a bygone era, I’m what’s known as a “cardinal rector” — which is meant to call attention to the congregation’s numerical and budgetary size. An interesting descriptor given Jesus’ reminder in last Sunday’s Gospel reading that, “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

Claiborne’s book has powerfully reminded me that I don’t work with budgets, and buildings and benefits. I work with souls. And not just souls who are paying members. I’m praying God will show me what to do now that the ecclesiastically installed blinders have been removed. This could be an interesting ride.

Religious people pray. Or at least we talk about it. Sometimes. I happen to believe we religious types really want to pray. The struggle to do so, though, seems to always wind up traversing the same, old well-beaten paths.

We read books and attend classes to help us understand how we “should” pray. Go into any Christian bookstore, regardless of theological persuasion and there are shelves of texts aimed at addressing our questions about the subject. Reading about prayer, however, isn’t praying. Too bad, because if reading about praying counted, I’d be a certified “prayer warrior” by now! In spite of the plethora of resources across the spectrum of theology, plenty of us feel guilty because we don’t think we pray enough, or with enough fervor, or with enough focus. Face it. Prayer isn’t for the faint of heart.

Some of us struggle with extemporaneous, private prayer. Such an exercise feels a bit like talking into the air (or to the wall). Others of us find our minds wandering during the repetition of the prayers of the Church in the more formal formats of Morning or Evening Prayer. Still others of us can barely sustain more than a couple of minutes of silent prayer before we are doing more snoring than praying.  As difficult as it is to decide upon a genre of prayer (extemporaneous, ordered or contemplative), figuring out the proper attitude for the exercise is even more challenging.

On the one hand, many of us don’t believe that the right set of words (holy incantations) with the right emotional affect (holy feelings) with the right behavior (holy living) will somehow realign the heavenly tumblers and unlock the gates of God’s favor (however we may define such favor) upon the petitioner, his/her situation and/or her/his loved ones. Such beliefs about prayer smack more of attempting to manipulate the Divine than surrendering our wills to the same. On the other hand, if there isn’t at least a minuscule chance that something favorable will occur as a result of our efforts, we could well find ourselves asking the question, “Why bother?”

Some of us truly believe “prayer changes things”. Others of us believe “prayer changes the one praying who is then empowered/inspired to change things”. Still others believe tossing off holy words or sitting in holy silence is pointless — that the only sort of meaningful prayer is prayer that rolls up its sleeves and gets to work — whether in a soup kitchen, a tutoring program or a homeless shelter.

Over the years, I’ve engaged in all sorts of praying. Sometimes I’ve been more intentional than others. Sometimes I’ve had moments in prayer that were almost transcendent. Other times prayer has felt like a hike without a compass — going around in circles and not getting very far. I’ve been most consistent in prayer, though, when I’ve had the presence of others as traveling companions. I don’t think it’s an accident Jesus told his followers, “Where two or three are gathered, I am in the midst of them.” There is a power in a praying community.

To that end, I’ve invited some folks to join me for a 60 day experiment in communal praying. We’re beginning our journey together on October 1st. We will be using the service of Compline from the Book of Common Prayer, 1979 as a way of ordering our commitment to pray with one another (even though we will rarely be in the same room throughout the experiment). I’m looking forward to this latest opportunity to pray. From time to time, I’ll drop a line here to share what we’re learning along the way. In the meantime, if you think about it and are so inclined, pray that God will, “give us such an awareness of God’s mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we will show forth God’s praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to God’s service…” (The General Thanksgiving, adapted, BCP, p. 101)

Two years ago I received one of those unexpected “wake up” calls. I was about twenty-five pounds overweight, quickly headed towards thirty. Unfortunately the “voice of reason” didn’t come from a little voice inside my head. Fortunately the voice didn’t come in the form of some sort of health crisis. Instead I got the word about my widening waistline from another person. Out loud. To my face. On a Sunday morning. Such is the life of a minor public figure — especially when one’s figure is morphing towards blob-ness in plain sight.

After I got over the flood of emotions, I rediscovered something I hadn’t seen in myself in a long time. I laid hold of my hibernating willpower and got to work. I changed my eating habits. I increased my activity level. I lost the twenty-five pounds by the end of 2010. But as anyone who has struggled with weight issues through the years will attest, the effort at losing weight pales in comparison to the effort at keeping what was lost from being found (again).

Over two years later, most of the weight remains gone. I’m exercising more than I have in my entire life — walking, biking, lifting weights. I’m wearing clothes in sizes I had not seen since high school. And guess what? Every day there’s a new opportunity to decide. I get to decide what I will (and more importantly what I will not) eat. When I make a bad decision in this department, the results don’t show up immediately. Every now and then I can get away with a piece of bread, or some marmalade or a pumpkin muffin from my local coffee shop. However, over the course of a few days, if I continue to make decisions based on my carb-craving tastebuds, the bathroom scale will accurately give me feedback as to the error of my ways.

The fact is, I don’t like having to watch what I eat all the time. I cannot out-exercise bad eating habits, though. Every eating decision for me has a direct consequence. I wish there were “free days” when the calories I don’t want to count didn’t count, but the calories ALWAYS count. Everything counts.

Making the every day decisions about what to eat and what not to eat, when to exercise and how much, are gifts really. I recognize that not everyone has choices about food at their disposal. I also understand that there are plenty of people who have physical situations that prevent them from doing the sorts of exercise they truly love.

With the foregoing caveats listed, however, here’s what making daily decisions about eating and exercise have taught me about the spiritual life. It is unlikely we Christians will learn the Bible until we make the decision to read it on a regular basis. The same goes for prayer. Until we decide to say a prayer, no amount of thinking about praying will actually assist us in learning the discipline. Worship too. We learn to worship God in community with others by making the decision to be present at the appointed time (even if we can think of hundreds of places we’d rather be). Each and every aspect of the spiritual life (mercy, service, evangelism, fasting, you name it) we would like to strengthen requires a decision on our part to give our time and attention towards it.

This is hard to hear. In a culture addicted to instant gratification, the long slow climb of daily, disciplined decision-making isn’t very glamorous. But it’s what we’ve been given. Jesus told his disciples once that, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Easy and light, but a yoke and a burden nonetheless. There’s no magic carpet ride to a deeper relationship with God. No quick fix, no powder or pill. One day at a time. Making little decisions day in and day out that take us a bit further into the life of faith and further towards the heart of God.

I wish I could say that I look forward to exercise. I can’t just yet. I am, however, better able to make a decision to exercise now than two years ago. It is becoming a habit. I do, however, enjoy the results. I think it’s probably the same way with the spiritual life.  Some of the spiritual exercises that are a part of the Christian tradition will likely be challenging to implement. There are plenty of voices clamoring for our attention to do other things. Still, if we can focus for a moment, quiet the demanding voices, breathe, and make a decision towards a new direction, we can change the course of our lives. Maybe not dramatically and immediately, but gradually and faithfully. All it takes is making a few tiny decisions. Every day. Starting now.

Christian holiness can no longer be considered a matter purely of individual and isolated acts of virtue. It must also be seen as part of a great collaborative effort for spiritual and cultural renewal in society, to produce conditions in which all can work and enjoy the just fruits of their labor in peace. — Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation

I grew up in the “Holiness Tradition” — a way of being Christian in the world in which much emphasis was placed on personal piety. Usually centered around what the Christian “should and shouldn’t do”, it was, for all intents and purposes aimed at the individual. Salvation was essentially about the individual making it to heaven in the afterlife. This life was for the sole purpose of shedding all of the sins and vices that would prevent one from entering the Pearly Gates. We obsessed over whether or not Christians could go to see a movie in a theater, or have a beer while watching a ballgame (or indeed if a ballgame constituted a “worldly amusement”). We were convinced that dancing or going to a swimming pool would put us in the express lane towards lust and land us squarely on the superhighway to the fires of an eternal hell. And while it was never explicitly stated, in the church of my childhood, I clearly heard that our little band of faithful followers were the only ones who really had the correct understanding of what it meant to be a Christian.

My upbringing brought me many good gifts. I learned about sincerity in prayer. I learned to take comfort from and be challenged by the words of Holy Scriptures. I learned about how people in the church can care for each other in times of need.

Now I’m an Episcopalian. We’re pretty good at service projects. We do our best to dial down being judgmental (even if we still struggle mightily with this unattractive characteristic of religious folks from time to time). We don’t speak of heaven as much as we talk about the “hope of the resurrection”. But, at some level, we’re not that different from our sisters and brothers in the Holiness Tradition. We still tend to think of faith as a private and personal matter. Only instead of tending to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, we can tend to isolate our faith from the rest of our lives.

Merton’s call to collaborative holiness isn’t about getting everybody to heaven by getting them to behave like we think they ought to behave or believe like we think they ought to believe. The renewal of society cannot be accomplished by simply voting for a Democrat or a Republican and then going home to read our Bibles and pray that our candidate will win. Somehow, we Christians who live in this country will have to do something that’s at odds with our American focus on the individual. We will have to shift our focus from “What is best for me and mine?” to “Who is my neighbor and how are we called to live justly as a society?” If we begin asking the latter question, we might find our unquestioned suppositions about what it means to be a person of faith upended. Who knows? We might even begin to understand we cannot be a follower of Jesus all by ourselves. We might discover we need other followers of Jesus to support us in that endeavor — even (or perhaps most especially) the followers of Jesus with whom we most vehemently disagree.

Sometime back in the summer, I stood in the check-out line at my local grocery store watching the store employee do battle with all of her company provided equipment. The cash register tape jammed — she quickly, if gruffly, popped open the plastic hood and within seconds had untangled it. Then, the scanner began to refuse to read the barcodes on my grocery items. With an indignant huff she ducked beneath the counter, surfacing with a bottle of glass cleaner and a couple of paper towels. A few sprays of ammonia and some moderately applied elbow grease later, the scanner was beeping happily again.

When my total was tallied, I swiped my debit card on the machine provided. Nothing happened. The employee punched a few buttons on her register and told me to try again. I did. This time, something did happened, but not the desired result. Rather than allowing the transaction to proceed, the “point of sale” (POS) machine’s self-induced paralysis now extended to the employee’s register as well. No response to any of her best strategies at working around the impasse. The line was backing up and my fellow customers were getting noisy — after all, we’re Americans and we had been waiting for longer than five minutes!

Finally she said, “OK, I guess it’s time to put that high priced tech support guy’s advice to work.” And with that, she reached reached in her pocket, pulled out a paper clip, straightened said paper clip and inserted the end into a tiny hole on the underside of the POS machine. This was followed by electronic beeps, burps and buzzes as the little machine came back online. Folks behind me in line cheered. The employee took a bow and, for the first time since my check-out process had begun, she grinned.

“Amazing, huh?” she mused, “The company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or so ago on this system. It locks up all the time. Finally the technician for the vendor who sold us the system came out, and gave us all a training on how to use a paper clip to reset these little boxes. Sometimes I wish I had a reset button for my life.” I doubt the store employee is alone in that wish.

We try our best to meet our days with the utmost efficiency. We race from one thing to the next. We are so tightly scheduled that if anything goes even slightly awry (the car doesn’t start, the child has the sniffles or the overnight delivery service doesn’t deliver), the ripple effect will cause our blood pressure to rise and our stomachs to churn. We use our best strategies. We employee our negotiation skills. We create workarounds on the fly. But sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, everything grinds to a halt. We’re stuck. Where’s a reset button when you need it?

A reset button for everyday life! That would be fabulous, wouldn’t it?

There are plenty of self-help gurus willing to share their systems — books, courses, lectures and workshops — for getting one’s life in order. Through the years I’ve done my fair share of looking for the magic paper clip and the elusive reset button. I shudder at how much money I’ve spent through the years looking for answers to whatever personal “issue”I was trying to fix at the time. Many of the solutions the gurus offered seemed to only to complicate matters. Nothing nearly as elegant as the store employee’s paper clip solution!

Since the encounter at the grocery store, I’ve made a couple of trips to Florida to visit my parents. My dad is presently living each day with the reality of stage four liver cancer. On one day during my last visit, he said to me, “It’s amazing how good taking a shower can feel when you feel good enough to take a shower. When you think about it, Gary, running water, indoor plumbing and hot water heaters are pretty remarkable luxuries to have around.”

Now, my dad has always been a bit of a philosopher with a generally optimistic outlook. But his matter-of-fact delivery and the sincerity of his tone caught me off guard. Maybe getting one’s life in order isn’t about fixing everything that’s wrong. Maybe it’s about appreciating what’s right. Maybe getting ourselves reset and re-grounded in this world is as simple as appreciating a splash of warm water against our skin and giving thanks. Some paperclip.

Thanks Dad.