Avdat

Marginal ministry

Here's an article by William Willimon that I would have loved back in seminary, but reading it with 13 years of parish ministry under my belt just makes me want to drive to Alabama and strangle the man.  Willimon is characteristically gleeful about the disestablishment of the Protestant establishment.  He despises those who would minister to the "cultured despisers of religion."  He invites us to embrace the sheer weirdness of the gospel, and the weird, malcontents on the margins of society who've always been more receptive than most to welcoming Christ.  The vital center is vapid.  To quote Molly Ivans, "The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow lines and dead armadillos."

OK.  Fine.  I agree with all that. 

That said, my career thus far has afforded me more than a few opportunities to minister with the marginalized:  mostly poor white trash, juvenile delinquents, the elderly and cranky, and the mentally ill.  And let me tell you, ministry with folks at the center is a lot more pleasant. 

From the stale comfort of Will's bishop's chair, it certainly must seem dashing, romantic and adventurous to be a post-modern David in the wilderness, gathering to oneself everyone in debt, distress or discontented, anointed to lead God's revolution.  In fact, it's hot in the day, and cold at night; there's only bugs and snakes to eat, and that fed-up lot will quickly become fed up with you.  People tend not to get better, and they tend to let you down or flat out turn on you.  And all you did was give them a cup of cold water in the name of Christ.

Instead of waxing romantic about the gritty glories of post-modern, disestablished Christianity, Willimon would do us clergy a favor by sitting us down to soberly count the cost.  Otherwise, get thee to a bland, suburban megachurch.

Another thing.  If Willimon's a bishop, he must realize how short a leash so many of his congregations have their clergy on.  If you want a mosh-pit ministry, a hip-hop ministry, a meth-mouth ministry, a runaway ministry, then it takes time and money.  Most lay people are really not that willing to put significant time and money into ministry that does not directly benefit them or their demographic cohort.  They are especially unwilling to give their ministers permission to sink their time and energy into marginal people. 

Willimon's article is running in Journal for Preachers, but my impression is that the preachers by and large understand that there's no going back to the 50s.  It's the lay people who don't get it.  I hope that Willimon is using that lovely Methodist bureaucratic instrument called the Charge Conference to put the fear of God in a few prissy blue hairs here and there.  Maybe he can even drag one of those pierced, angry kids out of the mosh pit and bring him into the memorial library at First Church wherever, to sort of defile the place simply by having him sit in one the comfy chairs.  Sure it's exploitative, like the limousine liberals bringing Black Panthers to cocktail parties on the Upper West Side, but it would play to Willimon's flair for shocking people.

He just needs to shock the people who need to be shocked.

Boutique religion

Little pearls of wisdom on ministry I collected from my car-ride companions yesterday:

First, as shopping goes, so go the churches.  Today we shop at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or at little boutique shops, but not at general stores.  They're long since dead.  So too, the churches that will survive are those that achieve megachurch status, or those who specialize in one thing and do it very well.  The church for people in recovery.  The gay and lesbian congregation.  The church of starving artists, intellectual eggheads, young adults, or empty nesters.

Secondly, a year ago The Christian Century reported that megachurches are not just an evangelical phenomenon.  Megachurches are increasingly the norm in mainline denominations as well. 

Economics are driving this trend.  The author introduced me to "Baumol's cost disease," which states that churches (and liberal arts colleges, symphony orchestras, and theater companies) face ever increasing costs but have no significant way of offsetting those costs by becoming more efficient.  If you own a factory that makes widgets, you can cut costs by replacing some of your workforce with robots.  Or you can re-locate your factory to China.  But you can't replace the string section with a machine.  Or the DCE.

Thus, the only way to offset costs is increase revenue (get bigger).  The churches that can't will have to make do with less, fewer staff, fewer programs, and perhaps no ordained, master's degree wielding pastoral leadership.

I think that now and in the future an important missional and pastoral task will be helping most congregations discern "the one thing needful" that Jesus Christ is calling them to do.  The missional element is asking, "If Christ has no hands but our own (a quote I'm not fond of, but you get the point), then what is the one facet of God's love for this part of the world that will not shine brightly, save for our witness?"

The pastoral element is convincing people that the move from a general store-style ministry to a boutique-style ministry is not downsizing, retrenchment, diminishment or failure, but is a matter of doing one thing well rather than many things poorly.

It's partly an adjustment to realities beyond our control, and partly seizing an opportunity.  A metaphor which I know I've repeated to my congregation, and may have already put up here:  We mainliners are like the guy who went to the mill every day for 26 years, and then went to work one day and the mill was closed.  It's not his fault.  He worked hard. 

And it's not our fault.  We worked hard, but the world changed.  But what we will be held accountable for is our willingness to adapt to these changes.

Ministry

I've had a couple of conversations of late in which I've been groping for the right metaphor to describe the kind of ministry for which I was educated versus the kind of ministry in which I am actually engaged.  I think I've settled on this:  going to a mainline Protestant seminary with a heavy emphasis on Liberation Theology is like OCS for the Social Justice Corps.  There you learn strategy and tactics for leading a liberation community of peace and justice in the nonviolent but deadly conflict to establish God's kingdom on earth. 

And then you report for duty--ordination to parish ministry--and find that you have no troops to command.  Or you find that all your troops are too badly shot up to go into battle.

13 years later I still haven't figured out what to do about this gap.  I'm not bitter about it anymore, but I am genuinely perplexed.

Or, to switch metaphors, the yearning in both Liberationist and Radical Orthodoxy circles for a leaner, meaner Christianity to emerge from the ashes of Constantinianism seems to be a variation on a theme that's as old as the "serious" Christians who headed for the desert once the Romans stopped throwing them to the wolves.  If Christianity ought to be something worth dying for, and nobody's dying, then something's wrong with our commitment, our witness, or the permeability of our boundaries vis a vis the world, right? 

Or maybe it's just that our world is a bit more humane than, say, Diocletian's world.  Can't we give the world a little credit for that, instead of casting about for a theology and an ecclesiology that's cranky enough to provoke worldly contempt?

Augustine reconciled the high commitment level of New Testament Christianity with the low threshold of Constantinian Christianity by holding the clergy to a higher standard than the nominally Christian laity.  And to some extent, this two-tiered commitment level remains intact. 

In some ways, both Liberationists and the "Radically Orthodox" seems to be about the business of reinventing congregations as high commitment communities who relate to a secular society as monastic communities related to a Constantinian society.  But the ethos of congregations remains firmly low commitment, with a fairly low threshold for entry, and fairly low expectations of its members.

And that clash of expectations between clergy trained as I have been and the laity who've been enculturated as they have been is a tough one to adjudicate.

Awe-full or Full of It?

In my continuing search for a Reformed worship aesthetic that's in critical conversation with our image-saturated world, I stumbled across this passage from Marva Dawn's Reaching Out without Dumbing Down in praise of the organ (please, bear with me):

(Martin) Marty suggests that one of the gifts of organ music is that we cannot be in control (which I take to mean that the organ ushers us into the presence of God and an awareness of various divine attributes by means of its diverse sounds--majestic, mysterious, massive, ethereal, thundering, pastoral, trumpeting, meditative, plaintive, jubilant).  The Church's organ repertoire can convey all sorts of aspects of God--the horror of the Passion, the glory of the Resurrection, the nothingness of suffering, the exhilaration of Joy.  Certainly there is no single way to be in the range of awe, but, as Marty stresses, there'd better be awe.

Oddly enough, this tribute to the awe-full, awe-inspiring potential of the organ called to mind a very different description of worship from the introduction to Baker and Gay's Alternative Worship:

Alt worship has also been shaped by broader currents of post-modern living.  The practice of sampling feeds into the post-modern emphasis on continuous and shifting processes of construing meanings.  "Texts," whether they are written, visual, or aural, are wide open to interpretation, with interpreters unmasked as those who make meanings rather than merely uncovering or discovering them.  This process of interpretation can be violent, suspicious, playful, and subversive--one text can be read through another unlike text.  Post-modern theories of interpretation offer one way to describe what is happening when an alt worship service explores a theme simultaneously through the use of computer graphics and photographs of medieval religious paintings; through dance music with sampled quotes and fragments of the 1662 Anglican Communion Service; through continuous loops of silent TV ads backgrounding the gospel reading from a modern inclusive language Bible, with another slide showing a page of the King James text for the same passage.  Instead of full frontal pulpit/altar dominance, large screens construct a space within a space, a worship space with false walls and hidden depths; temporary icons are flashed up while the real monumental stained-glass sits obscurely in darkness 20 feet behind.  The organist is a DJ.  The vicar has been deconstructed.  There is no front--people worshiping in the round--and the space is visually overdetermined (you cannot look at or take in everything at once), so you have to make your own meanings--even which direction you face in is a decision about making meanings.

This sounds rather disorienting to me, but not dissimilar to the disorientation one can experience in the midst of an outstanding piece of organ music.  Both passages call to mind Jacob's oddly fearful and reassuring encounter with the Lord at Bethel, a dreamlike experience endlessly open to interpretation--by Jacob himself, by Jesus much later on, and by today's reader.

So I'm led to wonder if Debra Dean Murphy's caustic critique of PowerPoint in worship says less the inherent dangers of screens and tubes in worship and more about her personal experiences of multimedia technology.  For instance, if all I knew about the organ was the standard funeral medley of How Great Thou Art, When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, In the Garden and The Old, Rugged Cross that one hears on cheap, electronic instruments in mortuaries throughout the land, I'd be dubious of the organ's ability to facilitate an encounter with the Holy God.  But I've heard it played well, and I know that Marty's description of the organ's potential to generate awe is spot on. 

My experience of multimedia technology in worship is far more limited--projecting words on screens, slide shows, and the like.  This I do find distracting, aggravating, or worst of all--entertaining, and as Postman and Dawn show us, entertainment is not capable of bearing the weight of religious agony and ecstasy.  But what I read about Emergent Worship suggests that something different is going on there, despite, and even because of their use of visual technology.

Dawn's book tries to do two things at once:  1.  Argue that seeker-sensitive worship is disastrous because it makes something other than God the subject and object of worship, and 2.  Argue that traditional instruments and hymnody lend themselves to keeping God at the center of worship better than guitars and praise choruses.  Awesome God, it turns out, makes for less than awesome worship. 

I'd like to affirm her first point, but as for the second... well, it's just a less important point to debate.  Sure, no tool or technology is neutral, but...

Rather than writing off a technology, an instrument, or a genre of music, we ought to ask, what technologies and instruments are at our disposal, and how can we use them to glorify God?  If there's no one in the congregation who plays the guitar, it's not necessary to run out and hire a praise team just to "appeal to the unchurched market in our community."  Nor do ministers need to stop reading theology and start reading PDA owner's manuals, as George Barna recommends.  On the other hand, if you do have a web designer or graphic artist in your congregation, why not ask that person to serve on the worship committee and think with you about bringing his/her gifts to bear on the upcoming lectionary text or liturgical season?

Some discussion of worship elements is important.  We aren't free to substitute beer and pretzels for wine and bread.  But the broader question, Who and what is worship for?  is the essential one.  And if you answer that question properly, you may yet find room for a drum set or a screen in your service.  Not for the purposes of relevance or entertainment, but for glorifying God.

Writer's Block

A critique of PowerPoint's corrosive effect on Protestant worship by in a recent Christian Century reminded me of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I re-read this week.  I mentioned Postman in passing in this post about potential problems with Emergent Christianity.  What I've been trying to do all week is write a post, or series of posts comparing the aesthetics of Emergent worship with those of Eastern Orthodoxy--another form of Christianity that revels in the visual--in light of Postman's critique of electronic media. 

I've been failing.

So I'll put it up here when I finally say it right. 

In the meantime, more frivolity...

37

I'll admit it.  I was feeling a bit old in the run-up to my birthday.  My conversation with Jonathan had something to do with it.  I can't speak for my lectionary partner, but I was feeling... wistful... thinking about the Emergent Church described in the Christian Century article, and the contrast with my own ministry.  Frankly, I'm jealous of those who have the opportunity to serve congregations full of young adults who are neither nihilistic hedonists nor the sanctimonious types one associates with certain para-church ministries.

Since my ordination 12 years ago I've served small congregations in small to tiny towns and rural communities.  That means being cut off, to some degree, from people my own age.  To be sure, gray hair is a crown of glory.  I'm grateful for the gift the aged have given me:  a vision of a life well-lived.  (And I'm also grateful, in a different way, for other gifts a few have inadvertently given me--a vision of what not to become).  But sometimes I feel like I missed out on young adulthood because I didn't move through it with other young adults.

So when I woke up last Wednesday to hear Steve Inskeep cheerfully announce that it was also Wilfred Brimley's birthday, I wanted to pull the covers back over my head.  Did you know that Wilfred Brimley is only 72?  How is that possible?  Wasn't he at least that old when he was in Cocoon 20 years ago?

I'm feeling better this week.  For one, there's more young adults around me than I tend to realize.  In fact, after nearly nine years at John Calvin there's almost a critical mass of single people in their 20s in and around the church.

Parker Palmer's book Let Your Life Speak has also cheered me.  The last chapter talks about the life cycle in terms of seasons.  Middle Age is Autumn.  Now Autumn is a beautiful season, but it's tinged with sadness.  The shortening days and the shedding of leaves reminds one, even in the midst of dazzling fall color, that death (Winter) is nearer. 

But Autumn is also the time when trees drop seeds and acorns.  Prodigious amounts.  They get scattered everywhere.  Migrating birds feast on red dogwood berries, and then deposit them far from the tree that produced them, to germinate and grow.

Middle Age is a time when you've actually accumulated enough knowledge to spread it abroad.  Who knows what might grow up in the next generation thanks to a class you teach, a friendly piece of advice, a hug or a kiss?

If Middle Age is Autumn, then I suppose it's Labor Day for me--me being 37.  In the South, summer hangs on too long.  Labor Day is not a nice day for a parade in North Carolina.  It can be hot and humid, and, if there were a drought in mid-summer, the oppressive air is matched by the sad, washed-out green of tree leaves panting for cooler temperatures.

I've been in a spiritual torpor.  Psychologically, it's been the dog days of August for me, Labor Day at the outside.  The last year has had more than it's share of stresses, vocational and familial.  But the change in weather has been matched by changes in circumstances for us which have left us feeling much less stressed, and left me with far more energy for work and family.

So this week I'm not mourning the passing away of my 30s any more than Southerners mourn the retreat of hazy, humid air before the season's first vigorous cold front.  I'm looking forward to Middle Age.

Besides, 37 is a prime number.  What an ingenious creation of God's--the prime number!  Surely there's something special about this year!

Emergent Church--A Bridge too Far?

When Jonathan and I step into the pupit, we see a lot of gray hair.  This alone is enough to give us pause when thinking about what role Emergent Christianity might play in our congregation.  There's at least three reasons why Emergent "techniques" might find difficulty takng root in congregations where lots of members were born before World War II:

1.  Pedagogical.  Older adults seem most comfortable in a passive learning environment.  They sit and listen to the lecturer.  Emergent's participatory worship rubs older adults the wrong way.

2.  Theological & spiritual.  Older Protestants, who came of age before Vatican II, are generally suspicious of anything ritualistic.  It smacks of "Catholic superstition" which is easily equated with "ceremonial, legalistic Old Testament works righteousness."  For older Protestants, Christianity is all about "The Big Idea."  It may be a "liberal" idea of "The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man," or a "conservative" idea of "Believe on the Lord Jesus and Thou Shalt Be Saved," but it's still a Big Idea as such.  Theirs is a rationalistic religion that has no use for the real Presence, whether it's at the Communion table, or in a labyrinth, or caught up in an experience of smoldering incense and throbbing music.  In short, they think "all that stuff is hokey."

3.  The Emergent Church has a heart for the unchurched.  But among middle to upper class residents of small southern communities, church membership is still seen as something "everybody does," along with joining Rotary.  Christendom is alive and well in certain demographic segments of Salisbury, North Carolina.  Getting these folks to think of themselves as missionaries in a post-Christian culture is a daunting task.

So what do you do when you've developed an appreciation for Emergent liturgy and mission, yet you minister to congregations whose culture is, at best, only moderately friendly to Emergent Christianity?

Well, you don't break the Church in pieces by stuffing PowerPoint down their throats.  That's disrespectful to the Holy Spirit who, presumably, had a hand in molding the congregational life you've inherited.  Passive, rationalistic Christianity is still Christianity.  It deserves better than the "Chainsaw Al" treatment. 

Rather, you find a pace of change that is acceptable to the old guard whose foundation you're building upon, and that will quench the thirst of younger or newer members who may be energized by, and have gifts to lead an Emergent kind of congregational life.

Here's what strange about our congregation.  We're by no means an Emergent Chuch.  No way.  Not nearly that hip.  To borrow from the satire I linked to yesterday, our worship services don't look like this:

And our parishioners, by and large, don't look like this:

It's only been in the couple of years that I've become aware of this creature called "Emergent Church."  But in the nearly nine years I've been at John Calvin, we've been changing our congregational life in ways that have loose affinities with the Emergent Church. 

1.  We've brought our worship service more in line with the Book of Common Worship.  This means more congregational singing through using Kyries or an Agnus Dei after confession, and singing portions of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, the Sanctus, Memorial Acclamation and Amen.  It also means occasional Services for Wholeness and anointing with oil.  We've slightly increased the annual number of observances of the Lord's supper.  Some dislike this "crypto-Episcopalianism," but it's a level of ritual that most people can tolerate and others badly need.

2.  We won a Worship Renewal Grant from the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship which enabled us to provide a variety of experiences for the congregation of the visual and performing arts, and bring the visual arts more into our Sunday worship life.  Our old fellowship hall now an occasional host to art exhibits.  Some of these experiences have been more well-received than others.  And again, there a segment of the congregation that's less than enthusiastic about "all this hokey art stuff."  But they're tolerant.  And the people who are more into this are tolerant of the other people.  "Love covers a multitude of sins."

If Emergent means "cool," then we aren't an Emergent Church.  But I'm sympathetic to folks like this guy in Kansas City who are experimenting with this type of congregational life.

And so that begs the question:  Just what is Emergent Church?  If it's a congregation without pretense, who worships God with all five senses, with a heart for making disciples, a love for church history and a passion for serving God here and now, then there may be a lot of people who are Emergent, but can't be easily satirized.  Maybe we are Emergent here at John Calvin Presbyterian, just not all that cool.

And that's what I really like about the Emergent Church.  It's recognized leaders aren't touting their style as the Elixer of Life for congregations like mine.  They aren't beating Mainline Churches over the head with a Darwinian message of "Change or Die."  There's none of the canned, franchised feeling to it so characteristic of the Church Growth Movement.  And that's a good thing.

Emergent Church--Some Questions

It's not hard to mock the Emergent Church.  By now, this blog post has achieved something like iconic status among Emergent's detractors. 

(For the record, I am a white male from the English speaking world who can say "non-Foundationalism" without sneering.  But I can also say "Calvinism" without sneering.  I do drive a Prius, but there are no bumper stickers on it.  I have had a soul patch in the past, but I am currently clean-shaven.  No tattoos.  I guess I'm one of those lukewarm Emergents.)  If this makes no sense to you, then click on the link. 

Sure, there's something false about a church where people with body piercings aren't welcome.  But a true church isn't necessarily a church where body piercings abound.  So one question is, Just what is this Authenticity of which you speak?  Faith, hope, love, mutually accountability, and mutual forgiveness are better measures of authenticity than a post-grunge wardrobe.

This begs a second question:  Is the Emergent Church just the next big thing?  Though it embraces what the Church Growth Movement eschewed, namely, overtly Christian symbols, is the Emergent Church merely a variation on the same theme--that the church's problem is one of style and not substance, and if we get the style right, then everything else will follow?

Third question:  The Protestant Reformation's great insight was that Faith justifies, and faith comes from hearing, and what is heard from the Word of God.  This led the reformers to simplify worship so that nothing would detract from the preached Word of God.  So, is Emergent's embrace of the visual, especially multi-media technology, an altogether healthy trend?  Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death is even more relevant now than when it was first published in the pre-Internet 1980s.  In it, he argues powerfully that the visual medium inevitably trivializes the content it's delivering.

So what actually happens in an Emergent worship service, especially the more "extreme" forms?  Is the Gospel truly proclaimed, edifying the faithful, and leading sinners to repent?  Or is something other than the Gospel offered that, while evoking a powerful emotional reaction, serves something other than justification and sanctification?

Again, these are only questions.  They aren't meant to be some sort of coup de grace to the Emergent movement.  While it's easy to mock the U2 Listenin', Brian McLaren Readin', Incense Burnin' Emergent pastor, it's just as easy to mock happy-clappy Evangelicals or Mainline radical feminists.  (For grins, check out this series of light-hearted mysteries set in a fictitious N.C. mountain community.  The protagonist is a police chief who's also the music director of the local Episcopalian congregation.  The licks it gets in on Re-imagining-style liturgical innovations are deadly and hysterical.)

And drawing the line at PowerPoint won't necessarily save the flock from idolatry, or bad taste.  There are plenty of sermons that proclaim "another gospel" than the one that justifies and sanctifies.  And they do it in a style not unlike that of dragging fingernails down a chalkboard.

Shoot, people can screw up just about anything.  The Emergent Church may have a unique set of temptations, but so does every form of Christianity.

Three Cheers for the Emergent Church!

We got off topic at Lectionary Group today.  Rather than discuss Sunday's texts, Jonathan and I discussed the Emergent Church and this Christian Century article about it.

Explainer:  Emergent Church is a style of worship, mission and congregational life that's sprouting among Mainliners dissatisfied with their denomination's arid spirituality, and among Evangelicals dissatisfied with the theological shallowness of their tradition. 

Emergent churches reject the rejection of overtly Christian symbols characteristic of the Willow Creek model.  They eschew the emphasis on numbers that's a staple of the Church Growth Movement.  They ransack other denominational liturgies, mine neglected veins of church history, and utilize technology to create worship services that would be barely recognizable as such to mainline Protestants.

Jonathan appreciates the Emergent Church's "backwards" approach to evangelism.  Whereas Evangelicals have tended to say, Believe, Change Your Life and Join a Church, Emergents start where Evangelicals end:  Worship with us.  Pray.  Sing.  Now do a Meals on Wheels route with us.  And then ask yourself, "Is this way of life intellectually credible?"

The Evangelical style of Evangelism (think Billy Graham and Campus Crusade's four spiritual laws) made the church an afterthought.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that no one has done greater damage to organized religion in the last century than Billy Graham.  We all know more people than we can count who are "believers" but not "joiners."  It's not likely this strange phenomenon would exist were it not for the Billy Graham crusade's emphasis on the altar call, and the admonition to go join a church tacked on as an afterthought right as the new believer heads for the stadium gates.

So kudos for Emergent's ecclesiastically-based evangelism.  Despite its studied disinterest in numbers, Emergent Church may be an important factor in arresting the long-term institutional decline of mainline Christianity.

I appreciate the Emergent emphasis on participatory, multi-sensory worship.  Candles, incense, anointing with oil, frequent celebration of the Lord's Supper, congregations friendly to the arts--Emergent Worship involves all five senses, not just that of hearing. 

I love a good sermon and excellent music as much as anyone.  However, raising an autistic child has taught me about the limits of aural processing in terms of learning and growth.  Helping our son survive the avalanche of words that is emblematic of Protestant worship requires all the creativity, prayers and good luck my wife can muster. Worship that emphasizes the visual and the kinesthetic would be more agreeable to him.  He'd make a better Pentecostal than a Presbyterian.  He wouldn't have to sit still for so long.

Children--period--have taught me a thing or two about how worship engages, or doesn't engage, the faithful.  When I'm preaching, the kids are coloring, or fast asleep.  Even adults are gazing out the window--a bad, bad sign considering that our sanctuary has translucent windows!  But when I'm breaking the bread and holding up the cup, all eyes are glued, not on me, but on what I'm holding.

Now our autistic son would also not do well in the kind of sensory overload environment that characterizes some Emergent congregations.  But the Emergent accent on the visual and the participatory strikes me as just right.

Now that I've gushed, in the next post I'll try to think about some of the problems associated with the Emergent Church.  Not fatal flaws, mind you, but questions from a friendly observer.