Editor’s note: Wesleyan Accent fully appreciates the arts and the significant gift of creatively expressing truth, beauty and goodness: for more, consider this piece from Relevant magazine, Design Should Matter More to Christians.

This is not an anti-technology diatribe.

There are enough diatribes in the world, I think: talking heads, Facebook rants, raised fists and honking horns etching anger for a permanent moment of rush hour that hangs now in the universe reflecting our contorted faces back to us. What if I died in that moment? The moment of my life when my face betrayed the ugliest, most conniving, grasping lust for getting my own way? (Gollum, anyone?) What if I died in the moment when my face softly revealed the most loving, joyous, celebratory delight in someone else?

Which person am I? 

Oh, the pilgrim’s progress. I am pilgrim, wandering from grace to grace. Sometimes the ordo salutis leads to bloodied knees.

Only how do you market bloodied knees?

I’m so glad the Desert Fathers and Mothers weren’t on Twitter.

Instead of a diatribe, let’s try confession, towards which we’ve recently been so beautifully encouraged.

Confession: I am a marketer’s dream. I have brought home a bulging plastic grocery bag with one item particularly chosen due only to its packaging. Who cares how it tastes? It was on the list, and the font on the front – oh, the font – it spoke to me. Once on a flight I sat next to someone whose job it was to extend a net over shoppers just like me. We chatted about the psychology of it all, color and design and that marketer’s dream, the moment of delight when you reach out and have to touch the box.

Of course, carefully hidden out of customers’ sight is the less romantic reality of plastic-wrapped pallets stacked high with identical products being forklifted to other people by hungover operators wondering if their ex-wives are going to let this weekend with the kids be drama-free. Bill’s picture doesn’t make it to the front of the package.

Just like Golden Globe red carpet coverage doesn’t start at 6 am with a make-up free actress smoking, downing a kale smoothie and working out for three hours while snapping at her personal assistant to take the dog out.

Confession: I love to market. It’s like giving a persuasive speech, and I’ve always loved to argue. More than that, it’s fun to promote something I care about, to engage others I may never meet. I’ve written promotional copy for websites – nonprofit and academic – I’ve conceived of words to explain why alumni should think about giving gift annuities, I’ve written a speech for someone else that brought listeners to tears.

Words are a gift, language is a gift, and whatever your views on evolutionary biology, there is still such a leap between us and the most communicative of animals that I believe expression is one of the most God-like things we can do (in the beginning was the Logos-Word…). Let there be, and there was.

No, technology, and words, and mass communications, and persuasion are all good.

Until they’re not.

We pilgrims with the bloodied knees have ways of ever-so-slightly twisting focus, blighted with spiritual astigmatism. Instead of a diatribe, let’s try confession.

We do not need to try to brand Christ. We need to receive the brand of Jesus Christ.

By all means, have a good church website. By all means, use your words to draw people to the Messiah. By all means, be smart and use your best resources.

But be warned: the moment you slip from branding as an evangelistic tool to branding God, your logos and graphics have slipped from tool in service to God to weapon of iconoclasm – destroying an image. Hashtag simony. We do not create Team Trinity.

We are called to receive the brand of Jesus Christ (not his motivational verse t-shirt). Christ imprints himself on our thoughts, our emotions, our decisions. By his stripes we are healed, and there is no web analytics metric to measure the bleeding back of Word Made Flesh. We are called to be made into the image of God, to be bearers of God’s image, and anything that eats away at the image of God in us is violently iconoclastic.

There is a fine line between marketing the church and marketing the faith; between marketing the faith and marketing Christ crucified like scalpers on the street corner gambling over his clothes. Receiving the brand of Jesus Christ on our souls runs deeper than the most ardent Yankee fan’s tattoo. We are not called to be Jesus’ #numberonefan.

And so, let us confess our sins to God and one another: we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent…

Are American clergy suffering a crisis of faith?

From megachurch pastor and quintessential church cool guy Rob Bell to Seventh-Day Adventist pastor-turned-atheist-for-a-year Ryan Bell, 2014 was a doozy (the topic even emerged as a central theme in Steven King’s new novel “Revival”).

From Rob Bell: “All of these things that people think dropped out of the sky by divine edict are actually a reflection of ongoing human evolution and a thousand other factors that have shaped why we as humans have done what we’ve done.”

From Ryan Bell: “I do think I’ve now seen both sides of the coin. Being with the atheists, they can have the same sort of obnoxious certainty that some Christians have, and I don’t want to be a part of that. It feels like I’m stuck in the middle. I want to be for something good, but I don’t want boundaries, and religion just feels like a very bounded thing. The question I am asking right now: Why do I need religion to love?”

But I don’t just have to look at the headlines about Rob Bell’s seismic theological shift (he learned the most about Jesus from…Oprah? She’s great if you want to know if you’re wearing the correct bra size, but – Oprah?) or about Ryan Bell’s wrestling with the problem of evil and whether God exists (I completely applaud him for being honest about his struggles and for stepping out of the pulpit if his beliefs were in flux that deeply).

No, I don’t have to read stories like this one or this one to wonder if these North American clergy suffering crises in faith and theology are part of a greater trend. I have too many friends who are going through a similar process to wonder if it is, as my Facebook feed daily demonstrates.

It’s a mistake to think that clergy suffering crises of faith are something new under the sun, though. If Mother Teresa recorded her struggles and doubts, I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

It’s also a mistake to criticize questioning by and in itself. Buddy, you better. An unexamined life is not worth living, and an unexamined faith will last about as long as Farrah Fawcett hair, Hammer pants, beanie babies, MySpace, “Gangnam Style” and every other grass that withers and flower that doth fade away. Or as I occasionally put it to my congregants from the pulpit: “I really believe this. Otherwise I wouldn’t waste your time. Join the Rotary if you just want to be a good citizen.”

Why here, though? Why now, and why so many?

Orthodoxy itself is not bankrupt. In fact, if you feel disillusioned with the church or faith (though people rarely actually say they’re disillusioned with Christianity itself, which is why you don’t hear, “you know, the Apostle’s Creed really disappointed me today”), reading G.K. Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” might be just what the doctor ordered, a breath of fresh air that anticipated with remarkable acumen what the intellectual challenges of the next century would be. No, orthodoxy is not bankrupt even if modernism is. As many clergy or church-bred people I know who are slowly, gradually breaking up with the church, I know nearly as many drawn not just to orthodoxy but to an additional packet of dogma as well, eschewing North American Protestantism for the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions.

If there is this crisis of faith among North American clergy, then, why here? Why now? And why so many?

Here are a couple of factors that I suspect are shaping this trend.

The fault lines in fundamentalism have taken their toll. What a heartbreaking process to read (former Seventh Day Adventist pastor) Ryan Bell’s intellectual turmoil. Fundamentalism is all baby, no bathwater, as the LA Times piece recounts: “All along, his doubts grew. The more he tried to reconcile the Bible with science, the more it seemed he was putting together a puzzle with parts that didn’t fit. The more he thought about the unceasing suffering in the world, the more he doubted God’s existence.”

If your faith falls apart when you pull on the string of literal, six-day creation theory, you probably grew up a fundamentalist. There are good, loving, generous Christian fundamentalists who are the salt of the earth. But if your faith – the whole of your faith – could be shaken by the discovery of millions of iconic, undisputed, beautiful “missing links,” then your faith wasn’t in the Creator God whose mysterious ways caused all life; it was in one narrow interpretation of a complex language. This intellectual legalism has churned out more atheists and universalists than even Ricky Gervais could ever hope for.

What happens when you go through college and seminary without working through these theological issues? You work through them after you’ve joined the ranks of other clergy, after your own faith gets hit with challenges while you’re also trying to serve in ministry. American clergy are in part suffering a crisis of faith because we’re still recovering from a wicked hangover left by the well-intentioned fundamentalists of the 80’s, committed to coalitioning everyone to heaven.

The fatigue of the faithful has taken its toll. Show me a pastor who is struggling with theology or philosophy of religion and I’ll show you a pastor who’s also very likely burned out. Clergy see the best and the worst. Consider this statement from a Huffington Post piece on former megachurch pastor-now-Oprah-network-show host Rob Bell:

Now resettled near Los Angeles, the couple no longer belongs to a traditional church. ‘We have a little tribe of friends,’ Bell said. ‘We have a group that we are journeying with. There’s no building. We’re churching all the time. It’s more of a verb for us. Churches can be places that help people grow and help people connect with others and help people connect with the great issues of our day,’ Bell said. ‘They can also be toxic, black holes of despair.’

Competition from colleagues, church members fixated on petty, ego-driven concerns – these realities can knock the wind out of a beautiful baptism, a tender, hard-fought reconciliation, or a quiet “thank you” after a sermon. It’s not always the moments when a church can be a “toxic, black hole of despair” that send clergy into a theological tailspin. Sometimes it’s what they’re also dealing with themselves: grief, loss, depression, mental illness or addiction.

In At Home in Mitford, writer Jan Karon hits the nail on the head in this fictional letter from a bishop to his clergy friend:

You ask if I have ever faced such a thing as you are currently facing. My friend, exhaustion and fatigue are a committed priest’s steady companions, and there is no way around it. It is a problem of epidemic proportions, and I ask you to trust that you aren’t alone.Sometimes, hidden away in a small parish as you are now – and as I certainly have been – one feels that the things which press in are pointed directly at one’s self.I assure you this is not the case.An old friend who was a pastor in Atlanta said this: “I did not have a crisis of faith, but of emotion and energy. It’s almost impossible for leaders of a congregation to accept that their pastor needs pastoring. I became beat up, burned out, angry, and depressed.”The tone of your letter does not indicate depression or anger, thanks be to God. But I’m concerned with you for what might follow if this goes unattended.

Keep a journal and let off some steam. If that doesn’t fit with your affinities, find yourself a godly counselor. I exhort you to do the monitoring you so sorely need, and hang in there. Give it a year!

Good-enough pastoring. When I became a new parent, I was panicked, constantly waking the baby by checking on him. Then I read just a short review of a book with a title that, in itself, calmed me down. The book? “Good Enough Parenting.”

Thank you, sensible reviewer, who, having had enough of the neurotic 21st century moms and dads who overparent so lovingly, gently suggested that perhaps parents need to relax a little and simply aim their expectations at “good enough.”

Dear clergy slogging through a crisis of faith: I know you are pressured on all sides to be intuitively genius at social networking; to have the preaching abilities of your congregation’s favorite pastor from 20 years ago; to have the evangelistic zeal of Billy Graham; the charismatic charm of Jimmy Fallon; the generational with-it-ness to know who Jimmy Fallon is; the biblical knowledge of a cloistered New Testament scholar; the entrepreneurial spirit of Donald Trump; the organizational abilities of Martha Stewart; the leadership abilities of whatever current “best practices” guru is popular; the financial soundness of Dave Ramsey himself; the parenting insight of Super Nanny; the technological and fundraising prowess of the 2008 Obama campaign and the humility of Mother Teresa.

Oh. And the holiness of our Messiah.

Let’s prevent a few existential crises by saying, here and now, that the Body of Christ in North America might better be served simply by pastors who are “good enough.” You may never have a multiple-book publishing deal, but you never got sent to federal prison, either. You weren’t ever a keynote speaker, but you also avoided major public meltdowns. In our quest to give God our best, maybe it also would have been valuable to give God quiet, almost invisible consistency.

Philosophy matters. Some of the most pastorally gifted people I know, who seem to intuit the pastoral needs of those in their care, are extremely well grounded in philosophy. I’ll never forget what a seminary friend once said to our philosophy of religion professor. After a tragic loss while she was young, she was left with enormous life questions that threatened to engulf her. In all her questioning, it wasn’t counseling classes or time with therapists that ultimately gave her peace: it was the content of an introduction to philosophy of religion class, where questions like “why would a good, all-powerful God allow suffering?” were dissected with compassionate logic and reason rather than answered with a quick-fix Bible verse or a prod to rehearse the blank abyss of her own sorrow on the therapist’s couch.

The best response to bad theology isn’t an absence of theology: it’s good theology. And the best response to deep philosophical questions isn’t to throw away faith, but to acknowledge that faith and reason complement each other, and that any version of Christian faith that rejects intellectual and philosophical questioning – or claims – is a version of the Christian faith that is cheating you.

And dear friend, you deserve more.

Let’s eavesdrop on G.K. Chesterton in closing:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Oh God, take our cynicism and hand us back our wonder.

A reading list for the underwhelmed, overmarketed and disillusioned:

“Orthodoxy” by G.K. Chesterton (non-fiction)

“At Home in Mitford” by Jan Karon (fiction)

“Heaven, Hell and Purgatory” by Jerry Walls (non-fiction)

“Harry Potter” books 1-7 by J.K. Rowling (fiction: trust me on this)

“Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism” by William Abraham (non-fiction)

“Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality” by David Baggett and Jerry Walls (non-fiction)

I’m learning what pastors around the globe know so well: that Christmas Is Different For Pastors.

The same truth reverberates – Emmanuel, God With Us. It has, however, sunk in that this year I work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and not only work, but serve to fashion a threshold between tired hungry human hearts and the Trinity. The Advent season has been joyous at church, candles lit every week, new faces showing up in worship; in the past week I’ve swung from sitting with a family while a woman has knee surgery to taking the youth roller skating to chatting with a young woman who faces her first Christmas without her mom, a cancer victim, all the while catching Christmas songs on the radio, trying to keep my own Advent calendar up to date and trying new spritz cookie recipes until I’m too tired to keep my eyes open. At 7:30 last night I told my husband I was going to bed, then discovered once there that my mind was whirring.

I love Christmas. My favorite time of year, and this year, I’m enjoying watching my little one rip paper off packages and exclaim delight at illuminated yards.

I wonder if the poinsettias are watered. I haven’t watched It’s a Wonderful Life yet this year. I need to call and ask who organizes the handheld candles for the Christmas Eve service.

Lots of “I” there, I see. The truth is, don’t say a prayer for pastors just because it’s a busy season, it’s busy for everyone.

Say a prayer for those like me who are homesick or grieving. Those are the emotionally draining things, truly, not busy hubbub. I’m not the only one. Many people in this economy see their loved ones less, and many people grieve during the holidays. Pray for them too. For those separated by distance, separated by hurtful choices, separated by necessity. I think of military families and marvel at their daily strength. It was a tiring Christmas for Mary, after all – travel over bumpy paths nine months pregnant, then labor pains, then visitors kept bothering her blabbering about visions. I think it took a year or two for the wise men to arrive just to make sure Mary wouldn’t tell them where to stick their frankincense.

Truth is, it’s hard to feel Not Your Best or Not Your Holiest at Christmas, when you love the season and deeply want to create space for others to worship. Silly human instinct, really, to want to dress up to visit the Manger.

Most of us don’t overly love “Little Drummer Boy,” but I do, because sometimes I’m keenly aware that all I have to offer the Baby is the ability to bang loudly on a potentially annoying instrument. No bank account of gold, no Neiman Marcus myrrh, just myself, rhythm, playing in thanks for God With Us. Here’s my rhythm, Lord. My excitement at your birth. It’s all I have.

I think that times like these, it’s important to step back a bit and consciously adopt a posture of receiving, rather than one of acting. There are times when you build character, and times when you draw on character – and I think, in seasons of unexpected limitations, it’s important to passively allow God to take you where God will. 

Advent is to be received, not performed (pastors – take note). Childbirth is both acting – hey, there’s a reason it’s called labor – and receiving – you’re receiving this child, this experience, whatever it entails. Jesus’ Incarnation was not initiated by humans: that is one of the most important implications of the Virgin Birth. Jesus came, unexpected, uninvited, uncreated.

Receive Christ, then, this season, as you do in Holy Communion. You can put up a tree: you cannot create Christmas. You can get a great deal on The Toy for your kid: you cannot create Christmas. We receive Christmas.

Receive Christ, and the celebration of his birth, this year, and be blessed.

This first appeared in 2011 on The Threadbare Couch.

Featured image courtesy Sixteen Miles Out via Unsplash.

Let’s just say I know a thing or two about distraction.

In the past 12 months, three of our four family members were stricken with flu on Christmas Day, we celebrated our childrens’ first and fourth birthdays, we went on a two-week multi-state road trip visiting family and friends with said small children, my husband suffered chronic migraines so far untouched by most medications, two close family members underwent life crises, I underwent a major medication change which took several months of adjustment, three different job opportunities surfaced simultaneously, I changed jobs and we moved, our house was broken into, our house hosted “rodent invasion 2014” (imagine the sound of Gollum scratching in your wall attempting to get out), I managed two ER visits (crashing headlong into a dresser; sustaining a bizarre medication reaction), my Grandmother almost passed away and the doctor deemed her a “miracle” several times, the kids grew so tall the four-year-old can open the freezer and the one-year-old can rip a cabinet door off its hinges with her frenetic shenanigans.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

I should note this year follows on the heels of several similar ones.

You say “focus,” I laugh manically in your face.

Hey Joseph, focus.

You’re engaged, you’re establishing yourself as a sufficient man, and your fiancée appears claiming a vision and a “miraculous” pregnancy.

How difficult did Joseph find it to concentrate on his work for several days, until he received his own surprising vision?

Hey Mary, focus.

You’re engaged, you’re a model citizen, you care about community and family and friends, and then you’re scared out of your comfortable day-to-day wits by a bizarre, otherworldly creature (you’ve never seen any Michael Bay special effects). Aside from the appearance of, for lack of a better word, this heavenly alien, the being brings an uncomfortable message: surprise! You’re going to be pregnant soon, and not because the wedding date has been moved up. And you’re going to be pregnant with a being the likes of which you can’t imagine. Your parents are not likely to believe your story.

How difficult did Mary find it to concentrate for several days? How did she rehearse the conversation in her head?

“Um…Mom? Can I talk to you about something?”

“How are we going to break this to your father?!”

What does holy focus look like in a life of distractions? Despite saturation in productivity best practices, how might we winnow out what actually is urgent in our lives of faith?

Learning which distractions to ignore and which distractions to follow

Holy focus requires we learn which distractions to ignore and which distractions to follow. Consider the shepherds, who allowed themselves to be distracted from their important and pressing job of caring for animals – guarding a valuable asset in the middle of the night.

Abandoning your night shift to search for a newborn baby because you trade you choose to listen to a flock of angels instead of your flock of sheep? Someone’s going to be angry in the morning. From the outside looking in, at best it looks irresponsible and immature. Yet millions of people place tiny figurines of these shepherds on their mantelpieces every winter; millions of children dress up to imitate them.

Here you are, trying to teach your children values of discipline, responsibility and hard work, and a choir director hands you small wooden staffs and cotton ball beards and tells you Junior is going to portray someone who leaves his shift on a vision quest.

How much more difficult to teach our children discipline, responsibility, hard work – and the holy focus that pays attention to the voice of God, which sometimes comes in the form of a distraction.

And consider grown-up Jesus, who, Scripture tells us, “had to go through Samaria.” What an odd distraction that must have seemed to the disciples. And what of Jesus dragging his feet, waiting to go to Lazarus’ family, seemingly distracted or unfocused on the crisis at hand? “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

In the middle of life – car repairs and cancelled trips, cancer test results and job changes, crises and half-finished projects – what is truly urgent, and what is only a red herring? Holy focus slowly grows out of maneuvering from one situation to a next, feeling out the tempo of the Holy Spirit and recognizing the holy even when a child is vomiting on the floor, someone is screeching their brakes before rear-ending you, and your daughter is beginning a conversation with, “um, Mom?…can I talk to you about something?”

And ministers – we can’t delegate “distractions” to our ministry spouses so that we can focus on the “important” work of ministry. Holy focus and unholy distractions are found in all arenas of life – family as well as church.

Learning how to live with distraction fatigue

Holy focus demands that we learn how to live with distraction fatigue.

I’m not referring to the mental haze that comes with social networking distractions or the splintered concentration that results from checking the news online five times a day.

Distraction fatigue is closely related to decision fatigue (because distractions so often require decisions – a flat tire means deciding whether to replace one or all tires; a job loss requires multiple decisions; so on). Learning to live with distraction fatigue involves a great deal of resilience. When you are hammered with distraction and decision fatigue, emotions become blunted; exhaustion sinks in; critical thinking ebbs; survival mode kicks in.

If you’ve had an ailing parent you’ve cared for or placed in long-term care, you likely know exactly what I’m describing. If you’ve been through the dark night of the soul, you recognize this description.

A hard year, a hard few years, leaves you craving stability. Just let everything be normal long enough to catch my breath, you pray.

How do you live out holy focus in this state? In the unspoken gap between Mary’s encounter with the angel, Joseph doubting her, and her arrival at Elizabeth’s house? (It’s pretty obvious she was sent away quietly, away from gossiping neighbors and smirks. On top of morning sickness and mood swings, she endured loss of reputation, bearing blame with no wrongdoing. What an exhausting time it must have been.)

I remember a time a few years back when I wrestled with my perception of how my spiritual disciplines had changed because of a season of exhaustion. I described the feeling to a friend: “it’s like I look at my Bible and don’t have the energy to read it for myself, like in an old movie when a sick person can’t feed themselves a bowl of soup and it has to be spooned into their mouth.”

Holy focus doesn’t require keeping your practices the same. There is benefit in the Word read, yes – but also the Word heard.

It was at that time I realized how much corporate practices meant to me. Go and receive. Let someone else do the thinking. In the best, fullest sense, put your spiritual renewal on auto-pilot: let others carry you for a while (counterintuitive to a Protestant, highly individualized conception of spiritual growth).

If you need a place to go to be fed – even if you can’t get out of bed, from disability or the flu or depression or newborn baby-exhaustion – hear the Word beautifully preached here: http://www.collegewes.com/series.

Learning Which Distractions Lead to Creation

There are distractions which lead to creation (as a happily married couple will tell you). Holy focus is not the same as workaholism. Holy focus is not a sanctified version of being task-oriented.

Holy focus revels in concentration on truth, goodness, and, yes, beauty. Holy focus relishes imitating the Creator by creating. There is nothing iconoclastic about holy focus, shunning the “trivial” in favor of the “urgent.”

A lenient innkeeper allowed something about the couple in front of him to capture his heart or his imagination, even if the route went through his pocketbook. That guy’s stable (cave, wooden structure, whatever) made history. He never witnessed the birth of the universe, but his stable hosted the birth of the Messiah. An innkeeper’s life is a busy life, especially during a town-wide homecoming, but this additional distraction – latecomers to an inn already crammed full – proved iconically beautiful.

Productivity can lack holy focus, and seemingly aimless leisure or enjoyment can produce it.

The shepherds burst into worship when they allowed themselves to be distracted. Wise men traveled epic distances in pursuit of an esoteric distraction (their stargazing wasn’t wasted).

May you glimpse the eternal today – even if it comes clothed as a distraction.

Somewhere along the way I read of one who was reflecting on the language introduced by this computer age. He said,

“I remember when… a program was a TV show, an application was for employment, ram was the cousin of a goat, a gig was a job for the night, a keyboard was a piano, memory was something you lost with age, a CD was a bank account, a hard drive was a long trip on the road, a mouse pad was where a mouse lived, a web was a spider’s home and a virus was the flu.”

We have a whole new technological vocabulary. I’m trying to be technologically literate, but my big concern is that in this kind of technological world, and a world lost in moral and ethical relativism, language may be more important than ever. As Christians, and especially as those whose primary vocation is to communicate the Gospel, we need to pay attention to our “first language.”

There is a dark and powerful passage in Morris West’s book The Devil’s Advocate that challenges us here. Monsignor Meredith has grown weary in the church; his life has become institutionalized, his faith reduced to an “intellectual conception, an arid assent of the will.” Yet now his words have struck a responsive chord in the Bishop; they have borne out his own feelings about the difficulty of true communication, here specifically between the church and the laity. The Bishop speaks:

“The root of …[the problem], I think, is this: [as priests] we …have a rhetoric of our own, which, like the rhetoric of the politician says much and conveys little. But we are not politicians. We are teachers – teachers of truth which we claim to be essential to man’s salvation. Yet how do we preach it? We talk roundly of faith and hope as if we were making a fetishist’s incantation. What is faith? A blind leap into the hands of God. An inspired act of will which is our only answer to the terrible mystery of where we came from and where we are going. What is hope? A child’s trust in the hand that will lead it out of the terrors that reach from the dark. We preach love and fidelity, as if these were teacup tales – and not bodies writhing on a bed and hot words in dark places, and souls tormented by loneliness and driven to the momentary communion of a kiss. We preach charity and compassion but rarely say what they mean – hands dabbling in sick room messes, wiping infection from syphilitic sores. We talk to the people every Sunday, but our words do not reach them, because we have forgotten our mother tongue.”

 Let that sink in: “We talk to the people… but our words do not reach them because we have forgotten our mother tongue.”

The mother tongue, our “first language,”  is a language of confidence in the presence of the Holy Spirit; a language of certainty about the power of the gospel to transform.

 When will we learn that academic rigor alone will not win the world for Christ? Proclamation and teaching are not enough. Correct doctrine will not do it. The old language, which we need to make new, is the language lived and preached in the power of the Holy Spirit. In the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church, we are seeking a renewal of our confession of Orthodox Christianity, a reinvigoration of doctrine. We are contending for the faith once and for all delivered to the saints. I believe we are struggling for the soul of the church. But I know it’s not just a doctrinal struggle.

Recently in my reading in Revelation, it hit me hard: only two of the seven churches of Revelation (Pergamum and Thyatira) were scolded for false doctrine. They had lost their first love. But the glorified Christ talked most about fervency, about closeness to the Lord, about overcoming, about having ears to hear, about watching and praying, about repentance, about his triumphant return, about the new Jerusalem, about our sitting with him on the throne of his glory.

 So the mother tongue, our “first language”, is a language of confidence in the presence of the Holy Spirit, and a language of certainty about the power of the gospel to transform. And overarching it all is a language of relationship that has its beginning, its substance, and its ending in love. The incarnation did not cease with Jesus when the word became flesh. The incarnation must go on and on with us. What Christ has been and done for us we must be and do for others.

“Do I stay or do I go, and it is finally I decide, that I’ll be leaving in the fairest of the seasons.” – Jackson Browne

Living in the northeast, I get to witness the changing of the seasons. Each season has its ebb and flow, its ups and downs. When it’s cold we long for summer, until it is too hot outside. We love the beauty of the change of foliage, yet find it a significant nuisance when we have to rake all of the fallen leaves. Spring comes with a birth of new life and another dose of allergy medication. We grow accustomed to change in the weather and expect it.

Why is it, then, that we are still wrapping our minds around change management and leading change within local congregations? We see change every day in our lives; however, change remains so difficult in the congregations we lead. Here is a simple idea – not groundbreaking by any means – but hopefully helpful to you.

Think about seasonal change, or think of change like you think of the seasons.

Why?

Seasons give us a beginning and an end.

Everyone can manage the winter because they know that spring is coming. Sure, it’s uncomfortable for a while, but at least you know it won’t be like this forever – unless you live in Alaska.

So when introducing something new, use the concept of the “trial period.” In churches, we talk so much about eternity that we think that any change we make will be forever. This new program or idea will not be forever, and you know it. You know it because you will probably have to change the new thing you do faster than you would want to. After all, what version of smartphone are you on now? Give it about 20 seconds and a new one will be out. The marketplace is constantly improving and growing.

Are we?

Clergy often fear our evaluation because it’s personal and we realize that what we have offered for years is no longer what people are asking for today. We have gone through seasons in the life of our church, and these seasons change.

So use it to your missional advantage.

Try something – for a season. Have a start date and an end or evaluation date. Give it some time; don’t pull something off the shelf after a week.

Seasons give us permission to try something new.

Go ahead and have that extra Christmas cookie. Why? Because the holiday season gives us permission. If I do that in the middle of the summer I feel bad about myself, but from November 27th to December 25th all is good! We also know that we will be bombarded with infomercials about how to lose all of that holiday weight on January 1st. New Year’s resolutions, right?

In the church, we know that our seasonal life gives us permission to do things differently. The expectations of the seasons also shape our permission-giving. For instance, in the season of Advent you are expected to talk about Incarnation, the birth narrative, or themes around expectation and hope. But with the four weeks of Advent you are given time and space to take a familiar story and be creative and different in your story telling. You can change things while also remaining consistent with the thematic elements: you may have an Advent wreath, but who does the readings each year changes, right? Think of it in that way. How can I take what we normally do and create something new? Yes, that will mean changing things, but don’t worry – it’s only four weeks. At least, that is how you should communicate with those who are fearful.

And here is how  a lot of people will respond:

Week 1: “Well, that was different – not sure if I like that.”

Week 2: “Hey, wait a second, didn’t we do that last week? Is this going to happen again?”

Week 3: “They did it again! I’m not sure I want our church to become a church that does this…oh well, only one more week anyway.”

Week 4: “Last week – it was different, but now it is done. Not too bad after all.”

So take advantage of the permission the season will give you. Think of the natural rhythms of your church. People are more willing to live through Lent because they know that Easter is coming. Let the natural world around us help shape how we create consistent change in our church. Then maybe change won’t be a scary thing after all.

I believe that developing consistent change within the culture of your church will transition a culture from fear of what’s next to the hope of what will be.

One final and helpful part of this is to make sure that it increases in value to the congregation right away. When it snows, it snows. It’s beautiful and we see it. Often in our churches we don’t get to see the effects of a change. Establish early wins and let the “fruit” of the new ministry or change in programming be clearly seen and communicated.

Be encouraged – seasons change.

I am my father, and my son is me.

There will be times in my son’s life when he doesn’t want to admit that we are alike. This will ebb and flow until he reaches the point in his life (much like me and my father) when he accepts that we are related. This is a scary thing to think about as a young father, particularly as one who is about to have another child.

My wife is a superhero, especially on the days when our children are born. I just can’t get over the strength of love it takes to go through such a thing. I sit in the room and just listening to the doctors I start to get queasy. That’s what I am doing now: taking a break from the reality of childbirth to type my thoughts about childbirth. Don’t worry – my wife is fine and I am being a supportive husband! At least for the past 14 hours I have been.

Just before my daughter is born I have the familiar feelings of fear and worry sweep over me. I don’t worry as much about the procedure or her health, but more about how this person is going to be like me. I fear whether or not she will take on the negative aspects of who I am.

We are normally self-deprecating about things like this. I want her to look like her pretty mother and not have my big nose. I want her to have her mother’s joyful spirit and not have my impatience. But this is part of the birthing process – the giving of life. Life is always exchanged and shared. She will be like me. Though she will be fully her own self, there will be parts of her that lead her to acknowledge one day she that, yes, we are related. We are part of the same family.

Leading a church is a lot like childbirth: painful and life-giving all at the same time.

It will look like you.

As pastors we have to understand that as we serve our church, it will begin to look like us. Our shared life will rub off on each other. We will take on the DNA of that local church body and always carry it with us. And part of who we are will always stay with them. We are related after all, and we will start to look like each other.

So many times we fear that the church will only take on the negative aspects of our own identity. This is what we are often consumed with in our meetings or evaluations. Though we may be excelling in several areas, we fear the area where we lack. This fear is warranted because it is true. The church will take on our weak characteristics and it’s important for us to understand this. If we are self-aware and self-differentiated, it does not have to tear us down or hurt the church. In fact, in being aware of what we lack, we can see our inefficiencies and seek to correct them together.

Let me encourage you. The church will also take on your good traits. What makes you who you are, with all of your gifts and graces, will be revealed in the small nuances of ministry, much like how my son’s eyes always remind my wife of me. It is in these moments where we celebrate our togetherness and what it means to be part of the family of God. I may need the DNA of my congregation to rub off on me. I may need to look like them.

It may take some time.

This baby is taking forever! As much as I want my daughter to arrive on my schedule, she has a mind of her own. Even though it didn’t work with my first two kids, I still held out hope that she would come in the way and time that I wanted.

On our journeys we grow and change. We look different as we age. It takes time for us to grow into the full picture of our relatedness. We are often so quick to have our churches mirror us that we don’t allow the time that’s needed to give birth to the church. What if we tried to look like our church instead of wanting the church to look like us all the time? The beauty of the Incarnation is that salvation took some time. It took years, in fact. Give time for your relationships to grow and see what is birthed.

Remember – it might be a painful process. But I believe that through the pain we will find life.

It took a while to realize what I was missing.

It does sometimes.

It took sitting in a pew to allow the revelation to dawn on me.

Everyone needs to be led sometimes: especially leaders.

I loved pronouncing the opening line of the call to worship; I loved welcoming the faithful and the not-so-faithful to the communion table; I loved uttering “our Father” and hearing voices join mine. Pastoring my first church, and especially engaging with the flock in communal worship, was a joy.

After a couple of years in ministerial service, I found another distinct joy: sitting in a pew on a rare Sunday away, hearing someone else preach, and being led in worship by someone else.

Most “healthy clergy” initiatives focus on things like physical health (which is good) or individual spiritual development (also good) or even clergy fellowship group participation (another good).

But what about the value of sitting in a pew, receiving communal worship? We all need to be led, to be part of a group of listeners even for an hour. Recently, I read an interesting question posed by a well-known leader: “pastors, do you have a safe house?” The point in question related to time away in a physical space with people with whom you are free to be vulnerable.

Let’s put a twist on it: pastors, do you have a sanctuary? Not the worship space of the church where you serve. Do you have a sanctuary? A place where you can claim safety, peace, anonymity, protection and worship? Maybe as a pastor what you most need is to sneak away to an Episcopalian midweek Eucharist service. Surely “sanctuary” is something clergy members need more often than their yearly vacation. One Protestant pastor I know still cites time he spent at a Catholic monastery as profoundly formative in his vocational journey.

I found sanctuary in Doxa Soma – Christian practice of meditation, prayer, stretching and strengthening through which I can be led (through the marvels of the internet) via live video stream. To have Psalms read to me (which somehow feels so different than opening my own Bible to read a Psalm myself), to be led in prayer and meditation, to be guided through the movements – what blessed relief. I can turn off the responsibility switch in my brain and simply follow and receive. And what an important role to inhabit for a while: that of learner, of follower, of recipient.

North American leaders – in business as in ministry – like to be motivated or inspired or challenged. We want keynote speakers that will give us a half-time speech that will send us to the end zone. But all of those responses still allow – or curse – leaders to feel in control.

The image of Christ here is compelling: fully God, fully human, allowing himself to be baptized – the Divine, being dunked. Over and over again, we hear from the Gospel writers that Jesus went off to a quiet place to pray. If Jesus needed sanctuary, how much more do I?

Lord, we are so much like Simon Peter sometimes – eager, enthusiastic, ready to march ahead or leap into action. And just as he learned, teach us also the value of the truth that even leaders – especially leaders – need to be led…

I Chronicles 22 tells how King David began stockpiling materials for the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. David had been told by God that he would not be the one who would build a temple for the Lord, because of David’s many sins and many killings in war. Rather than pout about that fact, David put his energy into stockpiling materials in hopes that his son Solomon could build the beautiful Temple which was indeed accomplished under Solomon’s reign.

David understood the important of leaving a legacy. He understood that each generation should stockpile resources for the next generation. He accepted that his own failures and inadequacies would prevent him from accomplishing everything he wanted to do during his own lifetime, but he used that fact as a motivation for the future success of those who would come after him.

Perhaps ministry today in the church is not just about the NOW but is also about the NEXT. Perhaps church leaders should always be stockpiling resources (financial resources, new leadership development, strong traditions) in order to help the next generation to fulfill its own ministry.

I am finding that more and more churches and pastors are wanting to develop “succession plans” for their future. Veteran pastors want to see their churches thrive beyond their own retirement, so they are thinking ahead about how best to provide their churches with the next leaders.

I applaud such thinking, but I know it takes a great deal of humility and maturity to admit that our current leadership may not accomplish everything. Accepting our own limitations, including the limitation of time, can lead us to do what King David did – to stockpile resources for the future and to leave a legacy of faithfulness.

May it be so in all of our lives and ministries.

Used with permission ~ Next Step Evangelism