As a new pastor in a small church I hungered for colleagues and routines to guide and shape my work. I had neither. I was a solo pastor in a “redevelopment” congregation; the routines that had guided the church before my arrival were exactly the ones that needed adapting.

Maybe that situation would cause another inexperienced pastor to thrive, but it didn’t me. Instead, I had to learn how to trust my gut and to shape my own routines. My second call and a terrific colleague taught me how to do that even more. That lasted eight years.

It’s funny how things come around, because my present call gives me colleagues and routines in abundance. Only now, 13 years after my ordination, it’s taken some time to figure out what to do with them. I’d got used to making it up as I go.

What do you wish you had? Learn to flourish without it, then it will come.

The discipleship of my early 20’s fed on a steady diet of cultural critique. “The culture” was watermark by which I measured the church’s mission and my own integrity, and that measurement needed to exceed or oppose or supplant everything I deemed to be “cultural.” I fashioned myself counter-cultural.

The culture was relativistic. I championed truth.

The culture sought pleasure. I sought restraint.

The culture rewarded individualism. I cultivated community.

Of course, what I’ve learned since then is that there is no such thing as “the culture.” Instead, we live in a bazaar of cultures, where churches, parachurch ministries, and individual Christians are all taking part in various elements of multiple cultures, advancing their values, all the time.

I am the culture. My discipleship, my vocation, demands a counter-cultural posture, I still believe. Only now I suspect I need to be more specific about which culture I’m countering, perhaps even which values of which culture. And then I need to own all the other ways in which “the culture” is my friend and ally.

Because if “the culture” doesn’t exist, then neither does “the counterculture.”

 

Very few people without citizenship documentation have called upon me for pastoral care in my career. My failed attempts to offer them some measure of comfort or reassurance made a durable impression that their challenges outstrip my awareness and my skill by a lot.

It is perhaps worst for the young, who are closer to me in age than the parents who   brought them to the United States to make for them a better life. That promise largely delivered, with a standard of living, safe housing, and educational attainment far beyond what was in the offing in the country of their birth. But the constant awareness of one’s tenuous citizenship status takes a spiritual toll.

Hours spent in my cheerless office with a young person, a college graduate, perpetually unemployed and vigilantly fearful for hers and her parents’ potential deportation, crying heaving sobs about isolation, anger, and depression, forced me to recognize the spiritual crisis our country is in: countless (literally) young people who love this country and know no other home live in constant fear of ejection and face menacing structural barriers to becoming contributing members of the American citizenry and workforce.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy enacted in 2012 addressed two elements of this human crisis in a meaningful way. Young people brought here as children were spared the paralyzing fear of deportation and given a work permit. It allowed people who have only ever experienced themselves as Americans to relax even just a little into the assurance that this country wants them to be part of its future.

Suspending DACA will do palpable harm to masses of mostly young people for no compelling reason.

Suspending DACA will also diminish the present character and future prospects of the United States. Ejecting people who desire to contribute to the future of the country is foolish policy, even if you believe, as the Attorney General does, that the policy granting them reprieve was inappropriately enacted by the Executive, and not the legislative, branch of the government.

Suspending DACA will deepen a spiritual crisis that is barely five years into being made slightly, though tangibly, better.

 

My daughter is so into slime making that she is getting into the YouTube slime tutorial game. On Tuesday she recorded a video and I began to show her how to edit it. Last night she finished the edits and we uploaded it to her new channel.

She’s an utter beginner, and everything about her first video sticks to the conventions, from the subject to the music to the titles. That’s fine. Learn the rules well enough to break them effectively, I say.

But there is one convention on which I put down my parental foot: the comments. Disabled. My reasoning is that nasty comments aren’t good for a nine year-old.

But am I overreaching? Am I being too protective and keeping her from receiving constructive feedback and learning how to take it? Am I contributing to thin skin?

 

The thing you’re trying to learn keeps changing, doesn’t it? You’re working on launching new collaborative projects, but, after a few launches, the projects need something else from you in order to endure. They need persistent leadership toward sustainability, so you try to learn that.

Or maybe you moved.  You went from an environment with loads of freedom to tinker and experiment to one that runs instead on process and the chain of command. You need to learn a new way to work, because persisting in the mode that worked in the first place is not going to work in the second. It might work for some things, some new and interesting things, but unless you learn to master process and chain of command, none of your experiments will impact the environment the way you want them to.

“This is how I do things” is not something a professional says.

 

First, Superman. Next, Viper (backwards), followed by Raging Bull and American Eagle. King Chaos was next. Then, in rapid succession, The Joker, Batman–that one was a mistake–, Goliath, and Vertical Velocity (V2). Finish with Revolution and Fiddler’s Fling.

All in a day’s work.

 

 

If you don’t have an agenda, the meeting is likely to run long.

If you don’t have a manuscript, the sermon is like to wander.

Brevity. Precision. Impact. These are the things a plan gets us.

“While the intentions might be good, moralizing worry distracts from the real goal by turning people’s attention inward to their own emotional states, rather than outward onto the problem,” writes Julie Beck in a piece for The Atlantic. 

Worrying about a problem is not the same as taking action to fix it. For leaders in churches, this means that it is never enough to simply teach or preach about social injustice or climate change or hunger without providing a path to action. Stoking outrage and anxiety for their own sake is not good leadership.

I talk a lot when I preach about the things that worry me. I don’t think I talk enough about the things I’m actually doing about them.

“He shied away from the term ‘integration,’ and when speaking of racial intolerance he often suggested that blacks and white northerners were equally culpable—even when the violence against the civil rights marchers was at its height.”

“Yet even in the summer of 1965 he equated the ‘extremists’ in the civil rights movement with the Ku Klux Klan, saying that Alabama would be an exemplar to the nation if only both quieted down.”

Both of these quotes refer to Billy Graham. They are from Francis Fitzgerald’s terrific history, The Evangelicals. I encountered them yesterday.

Yesterday.

The moral equation of white supremacists with those resisting them is not new, and it has been maintained by figures far more religious than the President.

Fitzgerald also notes this, though:

Along with Catholic and Jewish leaders, prominent Episcopalian and Presbyterian clergymen joined the civil rights demonstrations, and around the time of the 1963 March on Washington they gained endorsements from their denominations and from the National Council of Churches. After that, the mainline clergy joined the protests in increasing numbers. A 1968 study of the Protestant clergy in California showed that nearly a quarter had taken part in some kind of civil rights demonstration. Theologically conservative Protestants did not join the civil rights marches or work for civil rights legislation, and some within the large northern denominations submitted resolutions contesting the actions of their leadership.

The previous church I served was in a city with a retirement community for mainline clergy,  so I regularly heard stories from ministers (and church members) who had gone to Alabama and Mississippi to march and register voters. Those stories gave me a vivid sense of the people and the church I was a part of: imperfect, for sure, and still shot through with racism, but not undecided about where it wanted to stand when the marches for racial equality started.

 

 

 

Tumultuous times produce extreme diagnoses from some quarters. I’m not given to extremes. I value nuance and evidence and accuracy. Extreme makes my stomach hurt.

But I am forcing myself to sit with the extreme. I am finding myself in settings where the assessment of what is going on in the world is systematic rather than episodic, that is, where explanations point to corrupt systems before they blame more measurable causes. My stomach . . .

I’m sitting with it because I don’t want to and because those explanations are generally coming from people a generation younger than I, and also because I can sense in myself, already, the impulse to correct the contributions of the inexperienced, if only because I recognize an earlier version of myself in them and because it feels like there is a lot at stake in being wrong about these things.

I am struggling in these days to listen more and explain less. There is a constant wrestling match playing out in my head. Talking to myself helps.

This is how we grow, right?