Malingering And Boredom: How My Parents Helped Me Become A Pastor
Part II in a three-part series on progressive Christian faith formation
I don’t know if my parents will totally appreciate the title of this post, but hopefully by the time they read the whole thing it will be fine. I didn’t warn them in advance.
Anyway, one of my MOST significant memories of church when I was growing up was waiting around for my parents. Like, this might actually be my most significant memory of church.
There are many shades of waiting for your parents at church. For example, I often had to wait after the last service simply because my mom and dad would be talking to friends.
Sometimes I had to wait because my youth choir would get done practicing but the adults were still practicing so I’d be waiting for them to get done with choir.
Sometimes I had to wait between services because I was an acolyte at one service and my parents sang in another service. Sometimes there might be as much as two hours between those services.
Sometimes I had to wait while my dad helped count the offering. Later, sometimes I helped count the offering.
Also, some if not a lot of worship was boring to me. I had to find ways to entertain myself (in particular during the sermon). Our senior pastor was pretty interesting as a preacher but another preacher in the church had his written sermons on rotation and delivered them in a sonorously soporific manner.
I read a lot of fantasy novels this way.
But we were in worship every single Sunday. Every Sunday. Always. So I learned patterns and shapes to the malingering and boredom that would ensue.
Because I was often waiting around at church, I spent a lot of time with my church friends. Some of the deepest relationships I established were with other kids who ran around the building with me discovering hidden closets beneath the stairs and back doors that led out onto balconies.
I’ve had a lot of time to consider the various reasons I felt a call to ministry as a pastor, and I can probably say with a lot of certainty at this point that my call was solidified because my parents were so often at church, so often took me along, and when there didn’t have me as the center of their attention some of the time, which meant I was free to develop a relationship to the building as a second home.
I’ve had that kind of relationship to church buildings ever since.
I’ve got parents in our congregation now who do this kind of thing: they’ll just sneak into the building after church and mess around in the sanctuary with their kids. Maybe they’ll schedule a birthday lock-in there. Maybe they’ll enroll their kids in a week of VBS.
The point is, so many relationships are developed in down-time, while waiting.
Regular readers of Scripture will notice this is how Jesus developed relationships with his disciples. They just hung out together.
Regular readers of other great works of literature like the Canterbury Tales will notice this also, that camaraderie happens through long shared travel in the same direction, with slow stories emerging.
This topic of malingering and boredom isn’t unique to church spaces. Why do you think those who served in the military feel so close to their comrades? Why are football teams and marching bands so relationally close? It’s because they are there, together, a lot, often with nothing to do while they wait for the next thing.
A lot of Christian formation happens while waiting together for the next thing.
I had a totally different experience of going to church as a young child. My mother chose an English speaking church for us to attend which required a 2 bus trip to a Missouri Synod Lutheran church . I never asked her how she decided on that church but we went religiously every Sunday rain, snow or sunshine and I have fond memories of attending school there 6th thru 9th grade. I was married there and even many years later joined a quilting group there with a few of her friends as mentors. I grew to appreciate how important worshiping in a church was on Sunday and to this day, not being called to preach or become a Pastor I still feel the need to worship regularly in a sanctuary with fellow Christian’s , thanks to Good Shepherd I’m able to do that.
You touch on a different area of church, outside the formal worship, that of ecclesia. The bonds formed with other members is a key component of continued connection. When I was young, I would stay with my stepfather's mother, who we called Granny, at the beginning of summer vacation. We did not get much snow, but my cousins did, so I had her all to myself while they were making up snow days. She lived at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and the nearest neighbor was about a mile away. The only time I got to see kids my own age was Sundays at the Pentecostal Holiness church most of my family attended. Though I remained faithful to my Lutheran roots, I learned a lot about hospitality and spirituality there, values that continue to motivate me to this day.