I’ll always remember a trip we took to St. John’s, Newfoundland in the summer of 2002. We’d been staying in a pleasant hostel in the city centre, getting up daily to explore the coast and fishing villages, and of course on Sunday as a traveling pastor I had scoped out a church to attend.
The historic downtown Anglican Church was attractive to our travel sensibilities, a chance to spend time inside a historically rich architectural build environment.
Of course we were also hoping to meet people.
However, to our surprise (in retrospect we shouldn’t have been surprised, this was Canada in the 21st century, after all), the liturgy was sparsely attended. All told I think there were four or five couples in the service.
After church we met all the couples in the traditional “nice sermon, pastor” receiving line, and of those present, three pairs were retired clergy and their spouses, one was the spouse of the preacher together with a friend, and I think only one other family were truly “lay” members.
We were the attraction to all of them, and although they showed nothing but kindness, I can’t help but remember reading in their eyes a kind of soft disappointment: “Oh yes, a traveling Lutheran pastor from the states. Of course he came to church, but he won’t be back.”
It’s little events like this that remind me the extent to which our definition of church is dependent on our definition of pastor. Although I’m sure there are some churches around that can and do gather without a notion of (or a dependence on) pastor, they are likely few and far between.
So although the Western church largely did away with “private mass” as a result of the critique of Protestantism, nevertheless in some places, given the right societal pressures, church can and still is reduced to “the clergy” in some spaces. And largely with the best of intentions.
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Pastoring is weird like this. We really are in love with this thing called church.
Those of us who pastor see tremendous potential in the local church. I think we continually imagine and hope for a certain kind of revival, the membership self-activating and throwing themselves into the various functions a community organized “in the way of Jesus” can accomplish.
However, this vision is a hard one to pass on, and I think it is not unrelated to our culture’s captivity to bourgeoise sensibilities.
I’ll be honest, one puzzle I’ve long had with (at least the North American) people’s relationship to the church is the extent to which people go to church to meet their own needs rather than begin with the core Christian practice—love the neighbor. There is the dynamic of “church shopping” so prevalent in our context, probably exacerbated by the reality that church in America has always been a marketplace of options. We “choose a church” rather than “meet the neighbor in their need.”
So, we attend worship or join a church in order to hear a good sermon, have a spiritual experience, find a youth program for the kids. I guess it’s kind of like joining the local gym or any kind of shopping experience. We shop for resources that add value to living.
However, the church is an unusual institution. William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury, famously remarked, “The Church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members.”
If I could convey one idea so that it would sink into the essence of my congregation, imbuing everything we do in church life, it would be this idea: “We go to church for others.”
This idea has all sorts of powerful implications. For one, it side-steps the legalism implicit in a certain way of thinking about church attendance, that it is somehow your “duty” or “obligation.” It also turns at least on its side the question we might otherwise ask ourselves about church attendance: “Do I feel like going to church today?”
Of course, if the main reason we go to church is to meet our own needs, then if we aren’t feeling particularly needy on a given Sunday, we won’t go. I tend to think this is why participation in religious community is waning these days. Nobody needs it and is super busy with other things.
However, if participation in church is a form of neighbor love (and it is), then going to church is reframed as a concrete way we love our neighbors. This is why Scripture is so committed to the notion of church life as being part of a body—it’s not really for you or just you, anymore than being a knee is primarily about bending in two directions. Rather, the knee serves a role as part of the body, and the body itself can’t function well without the knee.
You go to church so that you might encounter your neighbors in their need and then be open to loving them. This is both an interpersonal practice (discovering what fellow members or visitors need and then loving them enough to meet some of those needs) and also an ecclesial practice (learning through preaching and shared practice how to address the needs of our neighbors writ large (social justice).
Those of us who are pastors see this, and we see the potential. We lead these very unique institutions situated between the laundromat and the rental complex, or the corner between the elementary school and the suburban neighborhood, institutions that do not sell anything nor do they have a singular mission like a non-profit, and instead we occupy enough space to organize whoever arrives in ways that love God and love neighbor (and which in the modern theological context is the same thing).
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So let’s talk about how pastors are special. Because for all our protests to the contrary, we are. Think about it. There’s a way in which this one person, the pastor, typically “stands in for” the entire congregation.
I’m not making an argument that this should be the case. I’m saying it almost always universally is the case, especially in any church where the church has one pastor and that pastor is full-time.
Partially, the special-ness of the pastor is promulgated by the congregation itself. Certain habits abound: for example, it’s almost a universal rule that if a congregation knows a pastor is going to be away on a certain Sunday, less members will attend worship. Similarly, on average when lay members ask other members to volunteer, they get more “no” answers than if the pastor asked. The pastor has a certain kind of leverage.
In our congregation, for example, the pastor (me) is in the unusual position of being both the pastor and a voting member of council. Similarly at our synod assemblies (which I don’t typically attend, but that’s a whole other story) something like a third to a half of all voting members are the pastors of the synod.
All of which is to say that on some levels that worship service in Newfoundland was more honest. The service “counts'“ if the clergy are there, and it doesn’t “count” if they aren’t.
If you doubt me on this, ask yourself if your polity officially allows for the regular consecration and distribution of communion in the absence of an ordained clergy person.
Similarly, the wider culture recognizes this place-sharing role the pastor has with the congregation. When people say they love or hate what our church represents, quite often they mean they love or hate what I do or represent.
So too, if we want “the church” to speak at events or on behalf of causes, I as the clergy person can speak “for” the church in a way others can’t (or at least don’t), and this also goes both ways, because in some instances even if the pastor believes they are speaking for themselves, there will be members of the church concerned the pastor is speaking “on their behalf.”
Or most commonly, it’s the pastor who gets asked to pray at meal. Any meal. As if prayer is the somewhat exclusive property of the clergy, presumably because they have “special access.”
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Recently I sent a note to a friend. He’s the imam at a mosque, and we were comparing how our communities coordinate and plan. He wrote:
“Our community is a volunteers based organization and it is very hard to get people to commit to anything!”
Oh my do I feel that! Like any volunteer organization, all the sociological dynamics are at play. People are less likely to volunteer unless they are personally asked; the 80/20 rule applies, meaning that about 10-20% of the people perform 80% of the functions; and in general its very hard to communicate through media channels and announcements in ways that help everyone be aware of opportunities.
What is it like to be a pastor in this context? Well, sometimes it’s enervating. I will find myself puzzled by certain conundrums. For example, here’s a current one: we have about 18 new member households joining the congregation this year at the Easter Vigil. This means we need to match them with 18 current member households who will serve as their sponsors. I’ve mentioned the need for sponsors in multiple contexts (worship, e-mail, Facebook), and so far haven’t gotten a lot of response.
As a result, if we want to make all the matches, I’ll need to spend this next week reaching out to make individual asks in order to secure enough sponsors for these new families. And also of note, probably if I didn’t organize the new member process, I’m not entirely sure the “members” of the congregation would ever coordinate an onboarding process for new members…
Here’s where I start analyzing things as a pastor. First, I try to keep in mind that this is my job. I’m paid to be a full time church person. Most members are not. So they are pondering whether they can fit a weekly meal after church for five weeks into the constellation of activities they’ve committed to. And more generally, their headspace is taken up by a whole host of other obligations and they assume (correctly) that they’ve called and hired a pastor to handle a lot of this.
But then, on the other hand, I ask myself, “As a body, are we not thrilled that these new families are among us? And if we are thrilled, and if we believe we attend church for others, then wouldn’t sponsoring new members be the kind of thing our members would actually be competing with one another to do?”
There’s my revival idealism kicking in again, but maybe you can see why I might think or feel that way.
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Another friend, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, teaching among an inter-faith progressive body of folks who don’t necessarily connect themselves intentionally to traditional religious resources, writes:
“Students at Union have always served as a kind of weather vane, an advance indicator of where the cultural winds are blowing. What a number of them seem to be saying to my colleagues and me at this moment is this: "we cannot sustain ourselves in our activism from secularist resources alone. We need spiritual resources to inform, fuel, and sustain our activism.”
This is what I’ve been wondering of late. Are we at an inflection point where religious communities (at least of the progressive variety) are now made up of folks from at least five pathways of struggle.
Religious trauma: I’m here, and I know that being part of progressive religious community is part of my healing, but also, sometimes it’s dysphoric or triggering and I’m definitely going to move carefully because I’m wondering when the other shoe will drop.
Tired activists: I’m here, and I’m so thankful this church aligns with my values, but wow am I tired and I don’t know how to fight for all the things.”
Still part of the liberal/modern “church is a resource for me” group: I’m here as long as this helps me with some aspects of my identity presentation and feels good, but I’ll shop around (or drift away) as necessary.
Uncertain of value but like what you do: I’m here and love what you do, but I’m just not sure there’s a lot of value in “going to church.”
I’m all in: I’m here and I’m all in. Things have changed so much I’m not entirely sure how to articulate what we “do,” but I love it. It feels like Jesus.
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Tomorrow I’ll be preaching on a text from the prophet Isaiah. It’s one of those passages that really shouldn’t even be in the Bible. I mean really, if you go see a movie, do you want the actors to tell you how bad it is to watch movies? And yet, here we have a text that critiques the very liturgical practices of the community that stewards texts for liturgical use.
3“Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. 4Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. 5Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? 6Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (Isaiah 58)
It’s passages like this that result in at least some people with religious yearnings (like the students at Union) seeking secular rather than sacred resources. They see the extent to which some religious community have abused the faith, making it self-referential and entirely other-worldly, and so they try to loose the bonds of injustice, let the oppressed go free, share bread with the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, etc. all from within an exclusively imminent frame (to borrow a bit from Charles Taylor).
And I mean,. pastoring in the United States in 2023 is rough in this sense, that the wider cultural sense of Christianity is so co-opted by its perceived connection to Christian nationalism (or more concretely, to whatever this Qanon fueled mess is we now know as the Republican Party), it’s really hard simply doing the work of disambiguation.
I mean honestly on the daily pastoring is the same in every community: you visit people in the hospital, visit with and listen to people, prepare Sunday worship, teach classes and plan programs and pray and take care of the building.
But… and this is what’s crucial and also so difficult… what I’ve tried to do over the last 20 years is move away from certain widely accepted practiced forms of church in order to pick up this teaching from Isaiah as if it were programmatic.
Which is to say, what if church isn’t primarily a detached social club, and what if it isn’t primarily “therapeutic”? What if it were less captive to middle class tastes?
What if church could literally take Isaiah (and Micah, and other prophets, and the Jesus of Matthew 5 or 25 and so on) at face value, so the whole point of church is literally engagement with the world in ways that ensure that the bonds of injustice are loosed, less people are in jail, people aren’t hungry or homeless or naked, and whatever the buildings are that churches build for their shared life, and whatever pastors are within those communities, they pour themselves into working on those things?
That’s a tall order, and yes it’s basically Christian socialism, but then a large part of the work of such way of being church and way of pastoring is to convince us that socialism has been misunderstood and abused.
I guess maybe I’ll end with this, as abstract as it may seem, because I think it’s the best way to say what is true here at the end of this very long meditation.
The issue is that Marx was right: we are all experiencing alienation, alienation from nature, from ourselves, from us as a species, and from other humans.
And because Marx helped us reconsider what real self-alienation means (not personal sins but complicity in systemic injustice), we perhaps can see the way socialism and Christianity share common cause: they are not focused on new ways of interpreting the world but actually on transformation, changing things.
And changing things in specific ways, especially in the mode of liberation, and on the side of the poor.
The real struggle of pastoring in this moment is that Christianity as it organizes itself into communities has the same hard work to do that Marxism did, of engaging the class struggle, which in Christian terms is the way of the cross. When I really sit back enough to consider the work of pastoring, especially if I can get beyond the nitty gritty of smaller conundrums (like getting enough sponsors for a new member process) what I’m really getting at is something I’ve learned from the theologian Dorothee Soelle, “to pray together because one has struggled together.” To no longer divide our lives into separate categories, a pious one and a revolutionary one.
All the while keeping in mind how hard it is in 2023 to be either pious OR revolutionary. And here I am as a pastor trying to be both. And inviting you to join me. Because we’re in this struggle together.
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And totally if you’d like to sponsor some new members let me know.
The time when my congregation seemed the most congregational and, well, Christian was when it was without a pastor (each week our bishop gave permission for a former Catholic priest who was a member to preside over Communion). Our only staff was a music director. So we all did what we could do ... visiting the sick, doing administrative work, giving hospitality to people off the streets who dropped in (or slept on our porch), etc. Once we called a pastor, things reverted to the old ways of letting the pastor be the lead on things (some of it was the pastor thinking it was her job to do these things). In any case, having had a glimpse of being church in a new way, I have a hard time thereafter.
Being a sponsor is the one thing I have enjoyed the most as a member other than being a Sunday School teacher. Dean and I are traveling a bunch in 2023 and we can sponsor when we are in town in March. We love your commitment and passion. Thanks for all you do!