Living Theology
in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church In America
Volume 6, Number 1
Easter 2001
Where Do We God From Here?
Paul
R. Buettner
My wife has for some years now been serving as
interim pastor in various congregations around the synod. I’ve heard from
others that she’s quite good at it, and I believe that. She has gone to
considerable lengths at her (our) own expense to complete several training
experiences advancing her pastoral understanding and skills for serving in
these very specific and uncertain circumstances. As the Holy Spirit would have
it, she has very often found herself serving with congregations struggling with
the unsentimental realities of declining numbers, aging and needy facilities,
fewer than enough people to carry on and support the congregations’ ministries,
no hopeful new pathways opening on the horizon, and nowhere else to turn. In a
few of these situations the pastorally correct and loving thing to do has been
to walk with these faithful ones as they learned to let their congregations go,
celebrating God¹s faithfulness in the past and affirming God’s grace and power
for the present and future.
As for my own “career path” in congregational
pastoral ministry, a bishop’s associate, in a recent exit interview between
parish pastorates, told me the staff was surprised that I was willing to
consider a call from a congregation to which my name had been given, a
congregation with whom I did come to serve. Why, the question implied, would an
experienced pastor go to a place like that, with so few discernable prospects
and such obvious problems, not to mention the unimpressive pay scale? As the
Holy Spirit would have it, I, too, have nearly always found myself serving in
congregations near the margin of existence. A colleague once questioned me as
to why such might be the case. I had no answer then and still don’t. One
hypothesis I have entertained is that neither my wife nor I have been
considered “quite up to” the level of sophistication and challenge required to
run (excuse me, I mean, “serve in”) a successful parish with bright prospects.
It’s hard to test such a hypothesis, though, without absolutely ruining your
remaining self-esteem. Another hypothesis I came up with is that we were so
darned good at making lemonade that everyone assumed it was just our calling.
Hard to test that one, too. Maybe it’s a combination.
Or maybe it¹s just God’s call – no other explanation
needed. For my part, I have no doubt that God has indeed called us to all the
pastorates in which we have served and do serve, every one. So maybe God sees
things we just miss. And maybe we miss out on what God sees because we so often
want to be other than we are. Not content with being faithful, we want to be
successful.
It really doesn’t even need to be said. Of course we
want to be successful! We want our
ministries to thrive and grow. We honestly do want to reach everyone we can
with the gospel about God’s love for us all in Christ. But I grow increasingly
fearful that over the last decade or so, and persisting today, we are evolving
a veritable cult of success in the church. The prominent use of
success-oriented language at church-sponsored “leadership” and “spiritual”
events bespeaks, it seems to me, an uncritical adoption and use of many of the
concepts and terms of the secular corporation, as if those concepts and terms
were theologically neutral, as if they were just tools God has handed us for
righting the ecclesiastical ship, which has, to be honest, been sailing in some
harsh and unforgiving waters of late.
The problem is, the concepts and terms we are using
are not neutral. They become increasingly competitive and quantitative in
nature, laden with techniques and measurements and presumed marketing savvy and
tricks of organizational novelty and emotional manipulation, all to help us
believe we are saving the ship when we may only be rearranging the deck
furniture. Apply these superficial and unbiblical ways of thinking to our
congregational life, and we come up looking, sounding, and acting like nothing
so much as bottom-line-hugging businesses, obsessed with numbers, but not able
to address our significant spiritual needs and deepening societal unravelings.
We may indeed thus wind up with a few successful enterprises (excuse me, I mean
“congregations”), but I question whether we will be able to say what we are
truly being successful about.
On the use of such language (at “leadership
development” or “spiritual enrichment” events) as “thriving” to describe
congregational ministries (implying also the opposite -- what would that be? –
“failing”?), and being a real “disciple” versus only being a “member”, etc., I
refer you to Pr. Julie Ryan’s excellent piece in response to a recent such
event for congregational leaders. You will find it in the last issue of Let’s Talk. If you didn’t get or didn’t
read that issue, call a friend, who might still have theirs. Or, I’ll copy mine
for you. It is really worth the trouble. I can add nothing to Pr. Ryan’s
thoughts on the subject, except to tell you I found it deeply affirming that
someone summoned the courage to express in a public forum a needed cultural
critique of our “church visible” with pastoral and theological depth and
clarity. What bothers me, I think, is not a particular “leadership event.” What bothers me is not even the use of
secular understandings, instruments, and techniques that can help us reach more
people with God’s good news. What really bothers me is harder to pinpoint than
that. Yet what I sense and experience in so many ways has been working its way
into our thinking about the church and about ourselves for some time now, and
it does not go away. I will call it an attitude. It shapes the cultural milieu
of “being church” in which we are increasingly asked to operate. And its assumptions
are rarely if ever challenged or even questioned. On so many levels the message
just comes across: If you really want to be faithful in our day and time, then
you need to be willing to cast aside most of what you have been taught it means
to be the church. Is an old liturgy getting “stodgy and boring?” Then it’s beyond redemption. Don¹t cherish
it and nourish it, don’t spend time working on bringing it to new and heartfelt
expression. It’s “traditional” and stands in the way of progress and must be
dropped, or at least sidelined. Are old committees clogging up the works?
Then “blow them up.” Don’t bother reshaping congregational
working groups, don’t mess with adaptations, and don’t stop to worry about
anybody’s feelings. These days we¹re going with “ministry teams.” And all this is new and exciting, and lots
better for the progress of the gospel in church and world. Exactly how? Did you
ask? I get the impression it¹s better not to ask.
The language used will of course change. New
techniques will in time fail to get us past the problems. But the attitude
seems to have acquired a life of its own. It endures. And I find it on the
whole disheartening and chilling. Where is our wider church trying to take us
here? We want to be relevant, but do we honestly believe there is no longer a
sacred treasure of worship and teaching to articulate, renew, and pass on? We
want to be filled with all the fullness of faith, but do we imagine we will
convince the world solely by the sincerity of our feelings of faith or the
intensity of our religious passions? We want to feel we are part of a greater
and wider community of faith, yet is the only pastoral encouragement the church
can offer its loyal partisans something on the order of, “Get with the program
or get left behind?” Where is the lived
gospel here? Where is accountability? And why can’t we at least sometimes admit
that we’re just plain scared? Is there nothing we won’t do to pander to the
world’s fleeting interests and desires, nothing we won’t trade off for the sake
of looking successful? Then maybe we should be ignored.
Very recently a small group of members of a
congregation I know of attended a “thriving church” type of workshop in the
area, hosted by a very obviously successful and very obviously large parish. A
cadre of presenters worked the crowd promoting the notion that most any
congregation can be successful if they just have the vision and the fervor to
be truly faithful in our challenging times. Appropriately, the little
congregational group was impressed, even inspired. But, on the drive home, as
they came physically closer to their familiar parish context, questioning among
themselves as to how they could bring these great ideas to fruition in their
needing-to-be-revitalized little congregation, with its part-time or unpaid
everything, they began to be overwhelmed with the improbabilities. It wasn’t
that they didn’t have the stomach for innovation. They had already turned their
committees into ministry teams (I don’t think they blew up the committees,
though – that might have been a serious mistake, not blowing them up), and they
had done most everything else they could think of and afford to really put
their little place on the map. Still the numbers were in slow but steady
decline. Then they went to that workshop. And it felt like, somehow, by
comparison to the picture of thriving congregations they had been hearing tell
of, their little operation (excuse me, I mean “ministry”) just wasn’t quite up
to snuff. Such anxious and doubtful spirits will need a strong and clear
application of the gospel of God to their uncertain situation by a wise and
caring pastor who is willing to walk with them in all their flawed humanity,
someone who can see that humanity
redeemed
and shining in the light of Christ.
Such a pastor they do have, fortunately. Her work in
this context continues to be a work of significant faith and courage, but one
should not call it heroic. Just pastoral. Faithful. And she will likely never
be called upon to speak at a workshop about “thriving” ministries.
A young couple attending a synod assembly as
delegates not very long ago, when I was serving a still smaller congregation in
the city (and was working full-time elsewhere to compensate for the lack of a
salary), stated it to me with crashing simplicity why they would not be willing
to attend another such event. Ministries like ours, they noticed, were not
being celebrated, encouraged, or supported in that place. We just didn’t show
up on the screen. Or, if we did, we seemed to fall into that dubious class of
congregations dubbed (at that time) “unhealthy” or “threatened.” We, on the other hand, honestly felt that
ours was an amazingly vital, talented, and open little community of faith. Our
leadership was young and committed, the worshiping congregation was culturally
diverse, reflecting the character of the neighborhood, and we were even growing
a little. Our worship was what I like to think of as “contemporary traditional”
(words which don’t go together in the current lexicon of the “thriving
church”). We were a little unusual, somewhat offbeat, but definitely
warm-hearted, outreaching, and welcoming, and word was getting out.
But it was quite clear to us that our synod and our
ELCA had bigger fish to fry. In vivid contrast to us, the “super-ministries,”
as I call them, were well funded and staffed and were offering lots of
important-looking workshops claiming the ability to teach the rest of us how to
be more successful. For our part, after a few years of trying, we had honestly
stopped looking to our larger church for any meaningful support, or even
interest.
And we just sort of went our own way, without
looking back. New people kept coming through our own doors, and several were
staying. Just being the church together was one of the most relevant and
important things happening in our lives. And no one even thought of questioning
whether the partisans and hangers-on of this little community of faith were
truly “disciples” of Jesus. Clearly, it seemed, somebody in this picture was
out of touch. And it didn¹t seem to us that it was us. Anyway it didn¹t look to
this particular young couple like there was any need for us to remain at the
party. Whatever it was about, it would go on without us.
But, even if we were deluded by our own hopes and
dreams (much preferring to think of ourselves as creative and resourceful
rather than considering ourselves just sickly), even if our own stubborn urban
denial prevented us from seeing our own diagnosis clearly, is it not even so
possible in the shared life of the church to lift up the impaired, the
languishing, even the dying? Must we go
on implicitly blaming our small congregations for their lack of conspicuous
success? Must we continue to imply that they are somehow being less than
faithful, less than passionate about the gospel? Have we done the ultimate
theological about-face by declaring that the first shall, after all, be first?
Have the “winners” simply edged everybody else out of the game?
No one I take seriously is saying our congregations
should stay snugly nestled in the past, consoling ourselves about how glorious
things used to be and complaining about how nobody wants to help out anymore.
Many, if not most, of us know the effort, pain, and risk involved in reading
and digesting the signs of the time, and most of us have undertaken with
trepidation the considerable pastoral and theological tasks of helping
congregations open to and move into the future with courage and faith. Yet I,
for one, do not feel that most of the things I am doing or most of the things
that are happening in the congregation I serve are considered worthy of
celebration or even notice by the church we are part of. Our congregational
life, and my pastoral ministry, do not feel, therefore, like a shared journey
with the church in its wider expressions. This may or may not be crucial to
God’s vision for us, but I know things were not always thus, and it feels like
something real has been lost.
Sometimes, as we persist in the ministry of
congregational leadership, over the underlayment of an equally persistent daily
discipline of prayer, study, and thought, sometimes, as we seek a faithful
response to God’s leading in our very specific (and often mighty peculiar!)
situations – sometimes we do discern honestly hopeful and exciting
possibilities. Sometimes a way does open to us. I should correct that. God’s
way always opens to us. I shudder to think of all the “openings” I have been
too preoccupied or too scared to see. But our success, or our lack of it, is
quite honestly not our concern. Success is not always the outcome of
faithfulness. Truly proclaiming and living the gospel in our congregational
settings will not necessarily be greeted with applause from a grateful world.
Focusing on how we are doing by some external measurement of successfulness is
a distraction, not a help, in the work of being the church. It doesn’t
energize. It drains needed emotional and spiritual energy.
I find myself uneasy about expressing such thoughts.
I really don¹t want to be just one more of those bothersome complainers, a
basically negative person looking for some unwarranted place in the sun. That
simply is not my character (but, then, what do I know? – maybe I should just
say I hope it isn’t!). I continue to be confident, on the other hand, that God
will continue to call, gather, enlighten, and sanctify God’s church in all
kinds of mysterious and surprising ways. As this happens and continues to
happen, I even dare to hope we will begin to find ourselves in a kind of
recovery from our addiction to success and its attendant but short-lived
emotional and spiritual rush. And maybe we will begin honestly noticing,
celebrating, and praying for each other on this daunting yet necessary journey
on which God is leading us into God’s future.