Set Free

A Little Prayer for the Ministry Team

If you're the praying sort, would you think of The Princess this morning? After the bean supper at church last night, she expressed some feelings of sadness, and I realized that she misses the churches and people we have left behind. Interim Ministry is all about change, and we knew that, but this is the first time she has faced integrating into a new church without a brother or two along to make the adjustment with her.

My children made a shockingly smooth transition to being theological offspring when I graduated from seminary almost six years ago. They have spoken politely and with interest to countless adults, told the stories of where they go to school and about their extracurricular interests. They have done readings and worship dramas, but have stepped aside to let others have center "stage," too. They have sung and played instruments. They have waited patiently for their mother when "five more minutes" became thirty or forty-five or an hour.

Our new church family has been nothing but gracious; we're just experiencing a little homesickness for what we've left behind. And I guess that's the way it will be for us, if this is the path I'll be walking.

I guess you could throw in a little prayer for me, too.

(Sermon over here, if you are so inclined.)

Something I've Missed Today, Something I'll Miss Tomorrow

My sermon finished (or at least drafted), I find I'm avoiding home Easter preparations in favor of nostalgic musings.

One of the things I loved at Small Church was going over to the church on Holy Saturday in the morning to check in with the ladies arranging the flowers. Unlike Main Street Church, where the flowers are uniformly lilies, Small Church included all sorts of spring bulb flowers: narcissus, hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, even a few hydrangeas which the nursery school ladies and I struggled to keep alive until Sunday.

I miss them.

I am too far away from MSC to make a special trip, and anyway, it's not quite the same. The lilies will be plentiful and beautiful and, for some, allergy-inducing, and it will be Easter. Over at Small Church, there may be some worry about who will show up with flowers this year, and at both churches there will be some stress over whether the list of names will be properly printed for the bulletin, because it's always the person whose feelings will be most hurt whose name is inadvertently left off or misspelled, isn't it?

I won't hear about any of that this year, unless a word comes to my ear while I am packing up my office on Tuesday.

One of the other things I loved during my time at Small Church, and the centerpiece of my Easter experiences there, was the Sunrise Service at a gazebo in a city park overlooking the Bay here in City By the Sea. My Sunrise exposure was limited before I became a pastor, but I am a convert now. Main Street Church does not have one, and, again, I am too far away for it to be feasible. Next year in Retail Mecca...on behalf of the Church Without a Blog Name...I will participate in one again.

It's the sort of thing that makes me look ahead with eagerness, knowing the sun will rise again.

When the World Seems Out of Sync

It's too bright for Good Friday and too cold for Spring but exactly as windy as March at its worst.

We sprang ahead too soon, I believe it's true, and at a moment when I am ready for the day to begin drawing in, I know there are hours of light, though diminishing, still to come. At church last night we wondered if the Tenebrae service could run long enough for the sanctuary to fully darken?

It did.

I can remember Holy Weeks when I had much deeper things to contemplate than the light, the impending loss of a baby one year, my own despair in a profound postpartum depression in another. I've spent this Friday recovering from "a procedure" and phoning the mental health number on the back of my insurance card.

The echoes of those two Fridays, so bad despite being Good, ring down through the years and some times touch me softly and other times shake me hard.

Today I led worship for a small group, and we heard my son play his clarinet. Its wistful quality suits the reading of that long gospel passage from John, after the dramatic readings of the night before. We are shocked and culpable at Tenebrae, but we are deeply sad at noon on Good Friday, helpless to stop what has happened. What wondrous love, aren't those the notes to that hymn he is playing? And what is this one? Do I know it?

And am I born to die?
To lay this body down?
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown.

Those are the words, from the Sacred Harp, of the least familiar tune. He was, and we are, and although it is the most natural thing in life to leave it, we resist our departure, unless we embrace its possibility too closely.

Does it strike the right note? Do I? It's almost finished mattering. With these people, at this church, there is but one more service to lead. I looked around the Chancel, where we all sat, noticing the architecture, realizing that on Sunday, in the bright lights and amid the lilies, some features will be unnoticed. For those who did not hear the story, the grief may go unrecognized, the truth of our mortality may be denied for another year, or so we may hope.

But you don't get the cycle of Resurrection, the Circle of Life, without Death. You don't get the joy of anything, really, without the effort of attention to it.

At dinner before the Maundy Thursday service, a Deacon said, "I wanted to know what happened to your bulbs, to know if they came up."

As our ways diverge, I wonder, too, if the planting I've done at Main Street Church will lead to new growth. I pray the real Spring, when it comes, will be beautiful.

The Panic Major? Or the Challenge Minor?

Lent is upon us.

The natural coming to an end of the Interim I'm serving simply magnifies its insistence, as this arc of the church year moves us toward, or perhaps even through, the end of a transition process consciously pursued over the past year.

On a spiritual and a metaphorical level, it feels just right for moving to a time of celebration and joy (Easter and the choosing of a new pastor for them, a new job for me), but on a practical level, it feels like just about the worst time to be doing the tasks of separation and completion.

There are, you see, extra services to plan (Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday), and one might hope that the Lenten services will bring us to a place of understanding, to the extent possible, our faith story.

My goal for this afternoon is to finish laying out the way those themes and services will work together and to transmit the outline to the Director of Music. I feel I'm running late already, but this abbreviated Epiphany has not allowed for any other position.

I'm hoping I'll find this to be the Challenge Minor rather than the Panic Major.

So, at church this morning...

...I go across the hall from my office to use the bathroom, and I find the door is locked, with a sign that says "Occupied."

Songbird: "Occupied?!??"

(It's early, you see, and I can't imagine who is using it. Or why it's locked.)

Snowman: I think it's #1 Son.

Songbird: In the Ladies' Room?

(Knocks.)

Songbird: #1 Son?

#1 Son: Yes?

Songbird: Why are you in the Ladies Room?

#1 Son: The Men's Room creeps me out. Besides, it's a Unisex Bathroom!

Songbird: (backs away to read the sign, joined by Snowman) Oh! How can I have been here a year without seeing that?

Snowman: It's a Unisex Bathroom.

The sign actually says:

UNISEX BATHROOM
HANDICAPPED ACCESSIBLE
CHANGING FACILITIES

Snowman: Are you a unisex, handicapped baby who needs changing?

#1 Son: (flushes)

Songbird: (starts laughing, mutters) "Are you a unisex, handicapped baby who needs changing?" (cannot stop laughing) I have to sit down.

(Eventually I learned that the Men's Room has no stalls with doors. How's that for Hospitality? I think I have something for the first meeting of the Welcome Ministry.)

Ripley's Believe It Or Not

How do 250 first class letters (our entire Stewardship mailing) disappear?

If you have seen them, please let me know.

Favorite Moments of the Morning

1) I said these words: "I twisted and turned, I pondered and puzzled, and I asked for advice I did not take."

There seemed to be no reaction to this, and I prepared to move on, until someone laughed out loud and a ripple of appreciative laughter spread throughout the congregation.

2) As I stood shaking hands, someone asked, "Has anyone ever told you you're good fertilizer?"

3) At coffee, she made sure I knew it was a compliment.

4) I noticed my brand new pantyhose are bagging at the ankles and realized the problem: the size is too big!

How was your Sunday morning?

A Gift

The past two days a lot of people came in and out of my study. I met with a bereaved son, conducted the service for his father, met a young couple who might want to be married at the church, had lunch with the chair of the Search Committee, visited with a number of church leaders who just dropped by, talked at length with my administrator, wrote a bulletin and a service, created a survey form, met with a women's group and a committee, discussed an upcoming congregational meeting and its impact on the schedule for our planned Stewardship campaign programs, registered for interim training, received the coordinator of the NAMI chapter that meets at our church and the young man from the Red Cross chapter that holds its blood drives in our Vestry, answered a phone call from a stained glass company and other things I either can't describe or can't quite remember.

It was a lot of what I call "face time" in a two-day period.

As I began to pack up this afternoon, I heard a rap on my study door, and with a carefully veiled sigh, I went to open it.

It was one of our Trustees, and he came bearing raspberries. God bless him, he came bearing raspberries, just picked off the bushes at his house. He came bearing little reminders of summer, as fresh as they could be, firm and fragrant.

Let's just say they didn't make it home with me. Instead they filled the gap created by a little stress and a late lunchtime not yet come and a long car ride home. While I ate them, I admired the autumn colors alongside the highway.

They were delicious.

(Also, only 1 point for 1 and 3/4 cups, amazing!)

On the Mountain

I'm up in the mountains for the annual meeting of the Maine Conference of the United Church of Christ. My work as nominating committee chair is done, and my report made, so the rest is listening and visiting and knitting and networking. I'm excited to have met one of my blog readers in person for the first time--shout out to Becky! She is knitting an impressive pair of socks on Size One needles.

My perennial roommate, The Wise Cellist, and I had a drink after the evening's session and chatted with RevFun and Pastor Peters, among others. Now we have retreated to our room and an edition of Nightline about the Hallelujah Diet, supposedly drawn from Genesis. Huh?

I've been tickled to hear comments from a number of people about how well I look. While I know there is a long way to go, it feels good to, well, to feel good and to have other people notice it.

The drive here was gorgeous! Sometimes I wish we lived in the mountains. Maybe someday.

I'll be home tomorrow night. Hope you're having a good weekend, too.

Sunday Snippets

• I've had a lot to do this weekend. There is one thing left. I am out of steam.
• Snowman visited this church today. Let's just say it wasn't his cup of tea: musically, theologically or personally. I encouraged him to get off the bus at the Methodist church next time.
• This afternoon The Princess did her homework. I did not complete my task.
• Pure Luck went to a gym in the Mitten-Shaped state. If he has a day off, why shouldn't he be able to come home? Oh, it's 13 hours by car. That might be why. I told you, I'm out of steam.
• Would someone come over and help me pick up the 73 pairs of shoes The Princess and I have scattered all over the house?

Extreme Makeover Street Edition

A little over a year ago, we received a notice from the city saying our quiet dead-end street was on the list to be made new in all significant ways. City By the Sea comes in and re-does everything under the street, then re-paves. They never got around to us last year, but over the weekend, the No Parking signs appeared taped to our lovely maple trees, and while yesterday was a washout due to rain, early this morning the crews arrived and the work began.

Water, sewer and gas lines will be replaced, so there is a lot of digging ahead.

Part of living an examined, reflective life is doing just this kind of digging and examining and re-laying. I'm watching the Search Committee and other leaders at Main Street Church engage just such a process in this interim time, looking beneath the surface to see what needs addressing. Last night we had a lively discussion about conflict and past difficulties and how they ought or ought not inform the search for a new pastor. There is a difference between knowing what troubled you last year or ten years ago or twenty years ago and being troubled by it now. We need awareness, not stuckness or, worse yet, denial.

Our street, though charming, has been in need of this paving job for quite a few years. When it is all over, it will have been worth the trouble. We'll know where we were and where we have arrived and what had to happen to get us there, too. We won't want to be defined by the the old-fashioned terracotta water pipes that allowed roots to grow through, but we can be informed by them, learning new ways to get the water we need in our homes and not insisting that the old ways were the only ones we could possibly tolerate.

What is happening on my street can reflect the inner landscape, too. Old ways of being need not rule us, need not rule me. Suppose I were to go beyond the digging phase, the one that always seems to interest me most, and actually replace the old with some new materials? Instead of digging and making a stopgap repair, as I have so often done, a repair covered over with hot top? Suppose I actually changed on the inside, as my street will be remade this summer?

Mother's Day After

It started at 5 a.m. with the arrival of a noisy dog who thwumped down on our bedroom floor. Hoping to discourage her by playing possum, I didn't move, and I managed to go back to sleep.

Pure Luck? Not so much. Since he had planned to hike today, and the sun was up, he crept out and hit the road about 5:15 a.m.

When I woke up at 5:42 a.m., did I remember, rationally, that he had a hike planned, and then tell myself, reasonably, that he must have left early, taking advantage of the lovely morning?

Um, no. I had a little nutty. You know, the kind where you start off thinking he's wearing his headphones, then progress to looking for his dead body, then think, he's going to wish he was when you look out the window and see the car is gone.

Thank goodness he was still in cell phone range.

Not to be outdone, Snowman called me at the office this afternoon to report his iPod is missing. Remember how I backed over his iPod, which he dropped when given a lot of things to carry just before Christmas? And then we all felt terrible about it and wondered how he would live without portable music, so I found the money to replace it?

Yeah.

Repeat the list above.

Of course, there's always the possibility that someone stole it at school today. (Let's not even go there. Have you seen how helpful Apple is with lost or stolen items? They suggest reporting it to the police, even though the thief will surely plug in to a computer to download more typically teenage music than the material on Snowman's highbrow iPod, and wouldn't you think Apple could flag it as coming from a non-typical source? I mean, you know they could if they wanted to do it.)

In other phone-based parenting news, I talked The Princess through unloading the dryer, moving her clothes over from the washer and most of the way through starting another load. The last bits were too confusing and required an on-site consultant, her brother.

Meanwhile, at church, it's the closing dinner of the program year for an adult fellowship group, and I put the wrong time in the bulletin yesterday. And when I announced it, I asked to be sure it was right. But no one said anything. Apparently there is some unpleasantness coming. It's a good thing we have a therapy dog coming (Molly is the subject of my remarks this evening and will be making an appearance).

I'm beginning to understand the desirability of Monday as a day off, because after a big Sunday, I have a lot fewer resources for dealing with life's vicissitudes.

My First Appointment

My First Appointment of the day arrived at 9:25. Fair of hair and serious of expression, she shook my hand when we met.

She is four years old.

When I made the appointment I imagined a conversation with her parents, but clearly her father had accompanied her, not the other way around.

We discussed what will happen at her baptism, and I described my beliefs about baptism: that God already knows her name, and she is already counted among those God loves. At baptism we will celebrate something that is already true.

She listened, but she also explored the stones and the meditation chime on my coffee table. She unhooked pink Gorilla "Polly" from the loop on her jeans while her father and I talked. But when I spoke of Jesus and his baptism, she gave her full attention. She earnestly described a book at her house that told her all about it. She felt it might be all right to be baptized in a river or a lake, but she knew we wouldn't do that here.

Her father told me they were asking for baptism because the little girl wanted it and had called her parents to account. She knew her older brother had been baptized when he was too little to remember it. Why hadn't she?

This will be no Infant Baptism. Do we understand My First Appointment to be a Believer? I do. I will ask her on that day if she wishes to be baptized, to be known as a member of the family of Jesus Christ, named by God and by the Church as beloved.

On that day we will acknowledge with a sacramental act the Love that already surrounds her and claims her. I wonder what the Spirit will ignite when we do?

Polly the Gorilla sits in my Jesus boat, my reminder of the need for rest and self-care. Sometimes I love ignition too much to remember that part.

We shook hands and said good-bye. We will meet again on the awesome day of her baptism. My First Appointment *is* a beloved daughter, and I feel sure God is well-pleased.

Small Church Farewell

  Small Church Farewell 
  Originally uploaded by msongbird.

At the end of the service today, after the closing hymn but just before we passed the peace (our practice just before the Benediction each week), the leaders of Small Church came forward to say a few words and to present me with this beautiful image of the sanctuary, created from fabric scraps used in a series of banners over the past two years. I wish you could see its full, three-dimensional beauty. The circle over the altar is a beautiful stained glass window portraying the young Jesus. The little squares of blue on the pews in the foreground are the new hymnals dedicated just a few months ago.

The goodbye was sweet. The Conference staff person who met with the church council this past week affirmed our years together and spoke with great and convincing hope of their future. I suppose a person could say a few things about the burden on smaller churches to meet the standard for paying benefits and wonder why such a progressive denomination couldn't be a little more cooperative in making it possible for smaller churches to afford fulltime pastoral coverage.

But today we truly shared a love feast as people came forward for Communion, each of us called by name, just as Jesus in the gospel lesson this morning. They are surely God's Beloved Sons and Daughters, those wonderful people at Small Church. I give thanks for the time we had together and pray that God will bless them on the way.

(You can find my parting words here.)

On the Mountain

There were no fire alarms.

There was a modicum of listening, and there were a few flashes of insight about my own call.

There were meet-ups with old friends and meals eaten with new acquaintances, and there was shopping for institutional swag and clerical garb.

There was the joy of seeing my son interacting with other young people who are part of the United Church of Christ congregations in Maine, kids he met at camp this past summer, kids who urged him to get more involved, kids who hugged him and included him.

There was spinach in the salad at dinner.  What the fireplace?

There were controversial resolutions and more straightforward ones, too. And while there were those inevitable mind-numbing twists of parliamentary procedure, there is pride at being a member of the Maine Conference of the United Church of Christ, a body whose Annual Meeting voted to decry torture, to be a Fair Trade/Fairly Traded Conference and to bring the message about fairly traded coffee back to our congregations, and, most importantly, voted to work together for the quality and equality of marriage.

Can I get an Amen?

Dinnertime Stream of Consciousness

Songbird: I read something today that says church has become feminized.

Pure Luck: But the whole thing is totally patriarchal!

Songbird: Something about the color of the walls being pink. These walls are lilac. Do you feel less manly when you come in here to eat dinner?

#2 Son: Definitely.

Songbird: So what color should the walls be? Blood red?

Pure Luck: That's right.

#2 Son: And black. Red and black. That's why we like ketchup! It's the color of blood.

The Princess: When I was at Montessori, there were girl colors and boy colors. Girl colors were pink and purple and occasionally yellow, but all the other colors belonged to the boys. I couldn't have green as my favorite color!

Songbird: They were also complaining that flowers on the altar were too girly.

Pure Luck: We should have the bodies of those we have slain decorating the church.

#2 Son: Yeah.

Songbird: They also seemed to think men wanted to hear more high content sermons, full of theology and the Bible.

#2 Son: More like high contact! "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" (POW!!) "Praise God all creatures here below (SHOVE!!)

Pure Luck: You need more pictures of David and Goliath.

Songbird: That performance certainly went over well.

#2 Son: I told you. High Contact.

Pure Luck: You should make church more like the World Wrestling Federation.

Songbird: I see. That would certainly be manly...I read some unbelievable stuff about how women should step back and accept the headship of men, step aside and let them lead, even if they don't want to do it. I guess the root of the problem is people who are unhappy about the ordination of women.

The Princess: I don't see why. You, and the other ministers you know, you're preaching and bringing the message of love. God made you want to do that, so how could it bother him? Uh, her? We need a new pronoun.

Pure Luck: Well, according to some things in the Bible, you aren't even supposed to talk in church.

The Princess: But they were just writing about the ways in their time. If we were writing now about who we think should preach, people in 500 or 1000 years might look back and think we had different ideas. They might think animals should preach!

Molly: Wroo!

You Can't Go Home Again

I'm not preaching tomorrow, but I find I'm thinking a lot about the gospel lesson, in which Jesus stops off home with his disciples and discovers the hometown folk don't think much of his ministry. Who does he think he is, anyway?

I sometimes wonder what the people of my childhood church would think if they heard I'm a pastor now? It's a Southern Baptist church, and it contained people who ranged from free thinkers to (or so it was rumored) Klan members. I suspect the roles women played in that church years ago were limited by tradition. I haven't been to church there in 30 years, save one visit when #1 Son was a toddler, so I'm not exactly up to date on the church's character or culture.

Sometimes I dream I'm back there, walking through the building and into the sanctuary. I loved the curved pews and the expansive balcony and the stairways leading up to it. I loved processing down and around and up those stairs each year in the Christmas Pageant. I acted and sang on the broad and curving platform that formed a semi-circle in front of the baptistry. I remember sitting in the choir loft as a teenager and singing Handel and Bach for the first time. I remember being baptized there.

And I wonder, what would they think? After all, I came from them. Surely some of who I am is still influenced by those experiences with loving Sunday School teachers and a kind minister who sometimes preached too long having been gripped by either the Holy Spirit or a thought that hadn't crossed his mind when he wrote out his sermon.

What would it be like to preach there?

I wasn't thinking of it yet when I was young. I didn't imagine myself standing behind the movable but impressive brass lectern that served as a pulpit, movable that it might not block the view of a baptism, that most central sacrament in our lives together, the focal point of our belief. That pulpit was so big, I don't think I would want to stand behind it. It was designed with a tall man in mind, not a short woman. I think I would almost rather sit on the edge of the raised platform, which is really as high as a stage in that theatre-style church.

I wonder what I would say to them, but I also wonder if they would even listen in the first place.

Since I cannot say it there, I will say it here:

Thank you for teaching me the Bible stories that continue to inform and challenge me, I would say. Thank you for treating me with love when I was a small child and planting the seed that church would be the place I lived my life. Thank you for giving me the chance to sing and sing and sing when I was older, helping me to know music as a powerful connection to God, the route to refreshmen of the spirit when I am sapped and sagging. Thank you for the way you swarmed around me on the day you learned I was to be baptized, welcoming me to the family of faith. Thank you for all these things, even if I can't come home again.

Change

This morning at church we sang some old-fashioned favorites, popular hymns from our recent congregational survey. We have been shopping for a new hymnal, always a ripe field for drama in church life.

I’m reminded of a similar time in the life of the Southern Baptist Church in City By the River, Virginia, the home church of my mother and grandmother and my church as a little girl. It was 1975, and Baptist churches had the chance to buy a new hymnal. It looked very modern and contained lots of new music. As is the case in so many churches, the choir loved it, and the congregation, well, let’s just say in general they tolerated it. No one said too much. After all, the hymnals were already in the pews. No one said much about it until the choir began singing a new closing response every Sunday:

“share his love by telling what the Lord has done for you, share his love by sharing of your faith, and show the world that Jesus Christ is real to you ev’ry moment…ev’ry day.”

I’ll never know what bothered the congregation about that response. Maybe they didn’t like having us sing the same thing every week; the members of that church were opposed to becoming too liturgical, and anything that became a habit was considered to be dangerously close to ritualistic (and therefore Catholic, although I never heard anyone put it precisely that way).

Maybe they didn’t like the music itself. It wasn’t exactly rock and roll, but it did have a contemporary flavor.

And maybe they didn’t like the pressure of the message, urging them to share their faith every moment, every day. That was a pretty reserved church, a historical church struggling with what it meant to be the Body of Christ in a downtown setting in an increasingly integrated city. Even something as simple as a new hymnal was a challenge to the accepted way of doing things, a threat to the status quo.

It was around that time that a rumor went around the youth group about one of the younger deacons in the church. Someone heard that someone had said that...he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. It got me thinking about what it meant to be a Christian in the South in that decade when Civil Rights were supposed to be something that was settled. But the fallout of integration was still apparent in the schools. Some schools in that city of 100,000 or so were more integrated than others, and although the excuse used was that the educational offerings were inferior, white parents who could sent their children to private school, mine included. The church had its own little "Academy," another such sheltered environment.

I remember a discussion about whether a "black" family would be welcomed if they came to the church, and I remember wondering why in the world they would want to?

Thirty years later I'm sitting here in City By the Sea, a mostly white city doing its best to educate not only my kids but also lots and lots of immigrant children from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. I'm so happy to have my kids in this school system, to look at The Princess' friends and see how multi-hued they are, to attend the 8th grade graduation at #2 Son's middle school and see the same varied population, to note that I recognized the family names of Ethiopian and Cambodian classmates of #1 Son's as much as the white ones.

Not too long ago I looked up the school at my growing-up church and found an entry on Private School Review's website. There is a breakdown of registration by grade--and there is an entry listing the percentage of students of color. It's 26%, less than the 29% statewide in the Commonwealth of Virginia, but so much more than the 0% of long ago. Twenty-two African-American, two Hispanic, one Asian and one Native American kids are going to school where I used to play Batman on the playground with the minister's son and all the other little white kids in the kindergarten class.

It makes me hopeful.

Friday Mom asked...

...and I will try to answer. What follows is a lengthy post about life in a small church and one pastor's discernment process, so please know that if you skip it, my feelings won't be hurt. (Unless you're one of my revgalpals, and then you'd better read it!)

Friday Mom wrote: "I'd love to hear more about your church's recovery from the financial problems to a new enthusiasm about stewardship."

The root of the financial problem was low institutional self-esteem and a history of feeling like the "can't do" church in town. Always the smallest and least affluent of four UCC churches in City By the Sea, Small Church members seemed to feel they would always be behind, so there was no point trying to catch up at all. They also had pastors, or so I'm told, who didn't talk about money.

I do, and I own up to how uncomfortable it can be. I think that has helped. And it is uncomfortable. I grew up in a family where you would no more talk about money than describe your latest bowel movement at the dinner table. It just wasn't done.

But the truth is that New England Protestants have an average giving level of about 1%, and 102 church members can only come up with so much money while giving at that level, and it's not likely to be enough to cover the costs of a fulltime pastor's salary and benefits. The health insurance is a killer for smaller churches, and even after they pay so much, I am still paying 20% out of pocket on top of Office Visit co-pays. I can't afford to go on working for the same salary I got in the first place, and the church can't afford to remain stagnant on salary while the Conference salary recommendations go up each year, leaving them a larger gap to overcome when at some point I do go somewhere else.

And, gosh, these are touchy issues for a beautiful night in July, and really for any night. Telling 11 people who have worked really hard on every kind of thing you can imagine at the church that they need to pay you more for everyone's good is not fun. I had no idea what the response would be like.

As it turned out, they all understood. And what's more, they are ready to go to work and try to raise the difference. One of the reasons the attitude toward stewardship is more optimistic is that our financial picture is much better than expected as of July 10. The Annual Meeting approved a budget that included a $15,000 shortfall for the year. Now in a big church, with a budget of $500,000 or so, that wouldn't seem unmanageable. But in a smaller church, with a total budget of about $80,000 (most of which is related to the pastor), that gap is huge.

There are some limited back-up funds totalling about $45,000, and the church voted to use those as needed to make up the difference this year. I would have anticipated needing a significant portion of that money at this point in the year, especially since our rental property (the parsonage) was empty for two months. But when we looked at the financials, the news was very good. Pledges are $6000 ahead, based on an average for the 12 months, which is great and shockingly good news. If you know anything about churches, they don't usually run ahead at this time of year. Many people give most of their pledge late in the calendar year, as is the case for so many non-profits. I've never seen a trend toward paying earlier. I've also been told that some of our more modest pledgers have already given above (some considerably) their pledge amounts. I know this isn't happening because of an overall economic upswing, since there isn't one going on at the moment. It's an upswing of Spirit.

And I think that in part explains the new enthusiasm for Stewardship. We recently re-organized our committees into a structure of Ministries, and the new Council of Ministries is composed of church officers and representatives from each Ministry. They are all involved in a variety of hands-on ways. The new by-laws give them the responsibility for naming a Stewardship committee. I suggested that they show their leadership by being that committee themselves and each inviting someone else to serve on it as well. We had six Council members at the meeting and five other invitees, and they were all willing to volunteer for a committee to get the campaign underway, and to host dinners or brunches in various homes to talk about Stewardship this fall.

I was flabbergasted.

The second key, however, is critical mass. When you get two or three people together to talk about fundraising (the most who have been involved in recent years), you're lucky to get a letter mailed out to the congregation. But 11 people is 10% of our membership. That's a great size group to get things done.

Now, it remains to be seen whether it's really possible to raise the needed funds from this particular congregation. In fact, it will be pretty amazing if we do. But if we can cut down the gap between expenses and income by a good chunk, I don't think it will seem like such a bad idea to cover the difference from the "nest egg," not to them or to me. I must admit that I have felt hesitant to have them spend more of it on me; I have wrestled with whether this feels ethical, with whether it's good stewardship.

But when I started talking to them last night about how changed they are, how bright and open and warm the church feels, how well they have incorporated newcomers--and when they talked in ways that sounded future-oriented (as opposed to seeking to recapture the glory years of American mainline churches, in which their membership was around 300), and when they named the ways they feel the same changes, I knew we had to try this together. I knew, suddenly, that the Spirit was moving us together and not apart, at least not yet.

And I realized that if I was complaining that the church felt too small, maybe I wasn't being called to go somewhere else, but rather being called to invite more people to come in and join us. And that thought broke my spiritual logjam, thanks be to God.

Up to this point, I've been a pastoral pastor, kindly and gently moving things along in a manner designed to make people feel good about God, their church and each other. And I think I've begun to chafe at the restraints, restraints I had placed on myself. "It's not a prophetic call," I muttered to myself. "I really should be talking about things that matter."

"Look to the rock from which you are hewn, and the quarry from which you were dug."

That verse (Isaiah 51:1) has been on my mind. My father and my grandmother were people of conscience, Methodists as it happens, people who understood their faith as a call to getting this world set right. In particular, they both stood up for the rights of all children to receive equal educational opportunities. They did it at a time and in ways that put them at risk. I want to be like them. I want to take the risks.

At the same time we are preparing this Stewardship drive, we will also be conducting educational sessions about Open and Affirming. The church has published a statement on every Sunday bulletin for the past 7 or 8 years welcoming everyone and specifying a welcome to people of all sexual orientations. But for some reason they didn't choose to submit the statement to the denomination and get on the official list of ONA churches. As we strive to grow in faith and Spirit and, yes, numbers, it would make sense to get the word of inclusivity out there. I don't think this would have been all that controversial if not for two things: the UCC General Synod Resolution in favor of marriage equality and an upcoming Civil Rights ballot question at the state level this fall. The former has already caused one long-term member to ask me if we can get out of the UCC; the latter campaign is going to include an attempt by the religious "right" in the state to associate rights for GLBT people with gay marriage, which is not part of the current ballot question.

As if that weren't enough, we're also going to be raising money for new hymnals, often a controversial move in any size church.

For the past few weeks I had been thinking that money being tight, I probably would have to look for another job, so it wouldn't matter if some people wanted to be mad at me about hymnals or ONA. But if I'm *staying*--well, that's a bit different.

"Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and the quarry from which you were dug."

I know where my father and my grandmother got their courage. The rock was Jesus. The quarry was God's. They didn't worry about being popular; they answered the call, my saints of God. And I mean, God helping, to be one, too.

Fairly Long-Winded Saturday Night Musings from a Pastor Who Clearly Has the Day Off Tomorrow

rev-ed commented:

“I'm not sure how any kind of creed is meant to embarass a denomination. Affirming the deity of Christ is a basic doctrine of Christianity and has been for almost 2000 years. I'd much rather force people to make a choice (I'm talking congregations, not necessarily individual congregants). While services should be open to anyone, if a Christian church is ashamed to stand for the deity of Jesus Christ then I have to wonder why that is.”

The United Church of Christ was formed in 1957 by the merger of the Congregational Christian Church and the Evangelical & Reformed Churches. In the CCC, each congregation had to vote as to whether to join the new UCC. AT THAT TIME they affirmed a Constitution that states: "The United Church of Christ acknowledges as its sole head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior." In other words, we've already done this.

Our Statement of Faith says of Jesus Christ: "In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord,God has come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the whole creation to its Creator."

The resolution is intended to embarrass the denomination, in my opinion, by making a question of our faith in and our calling by Christ, because those proposing it don't like the liberal theological stance of the national setting, nor of local churches and conferences in certain areas of the country. The proponents of the resolution want it to fail in order to say we are not Christians at all; the opponents cannot “win” if the resolution is voted up or down as it stands, because giving in and voting for it will mean giving local autonomy away. And local autonomy is the keystone of our polity. It is the responsibility of the local association to determine fitness for ordination and ministry. As members of Association Church and Ministry Committees, local pastors and lay folk exercise that responsibility solemnly and prayerfully. A loyalty oath administered at the national level would upend the polity on which our denomination was formed. That’s why it’s a serious matter and not just the slam dunk or no-brainer it might appear to be.

I cannot believe that Jesus as portrayed to us in any of the four gospels would have given five minutes to this debate, except perhaps to point out how pointless it is. How much time did he spend describing what titles we should give him when we formed complicated and unique institutions 2000 years down the road? None at all. Time may be short, and I will come again, but meanwhile, feed my sheep, he told us. Give a drink of water to the thirsty. Visit the sick, and those in prison; clothe the naked and feed the hungry. When you do these things for those who are least important in the world's eyes, you do them for me. For me, that answers Bemused's question, too. I believe God does appreciate those acts of caring and understand them as worship, along with our spirit of thanksgiving for creation, and also our praise offered up in church, but I have a hard time making the case that one would be that much more important than the other.

As for the UCC, it either is or isn't a creedal church. And it's not. Neither were the Southern Baptists; I ought to know, having grown up as one. Look where they are now! And it began as seemingly innocently as this.

What possible reason would I have for giving my life to Christ's service if I did not believe in him? The fact that I don't say "Lord" every time I say "Jesus" doesn't mean that I minimize him or think he is any less God than someone who uses more, to my ears, old-fashioned language. My language is inclusive because I understand Jesus to have been inclusive in his love and his teachings and in his death and his resurrection.

On the other hand, my taste in church music is pretty old-fashioned and although I am friends with the pastor of the UCC congregation close by that does a more rocking service, it doesn't feel like worship to me. I miss the hymns. The hymns leave his folks cold. Which way is right? I would say both and neither.

Tomorrow I'm going out of town to attend a Latin Mass, because I want to understand, or at least to try, what beauty and God-presence occurs there. I'm not a consumer looking for something to make me feel good but a seeker who wants to know God and give thanks to God for the different ways God has given us to worship.

Well, scratch that. I *am* looking for something to make me feel good--in the sense that I am seeking an experience where I feel GOD, the ultimate GOOD. Worship is not one-sided. God is present there, too, in relationship with us, whether we're singing Morning Has Broken or Here Comes the Sun or Christ the Lord is Risen Today or whatever I will hear tomorrow. Vatican II encouraged worship in the local language, so that the people might understand the words being spoken, but there are still many Catholics who feel God more keenly in the Latin Mass. Are they wrong? Is God not there?

I believe God is everywhere, on the lake and in it and beside it, atop the mountains, at Mass in the gorgeous cathedrals and ornate churches and ugly little modern ones, and at the services in the tall-steeple churches on the village green and in the little white clapboard ones that no one much notices, and even at the services in a hall or a school, where they use an overhead projector to shine the song lyrics up on the wall. God is expansive enough to appreciate different styles, I feel sure of it. The important thing is that faith leads us to worship however we do it. It’s all good. It’s all God’s.

Questions and Answers

Bemused commented on my post "Lord, Lord," saying: "...I find this UCC stuff Songbird brought up kind of distressing. Every once in a while I think about looking for a church--in general, I tend to think I get more from running by the lake on a Sunday morning than sitting in a church--and I've researched some UCC churches. I liked what I've read of their philosophy, but this latest development is rather off-putting."

It's off-putting to me, too, but I remind myself it's a small group within the denomination as a whole. My own strong reaction probably comes from having been more engaged by questions than firm answers, and of course one of the questions that questioning may lead to is what's the point of all this?!?!! How can arguing over language serve God? It's as bad as spending too much time on the job worrying about how to raise the money to pay for your job!

But then something good will happen, as St. Casserole put it so beautifully in a post last weekend-- something small in the world's eyes, usually--and I will know in my deepest places that I am living a life with meaning and doing a work that has meaning, and I will remember again that residing in the questions, no matter how uncomfortable, is what makes it all meaningful.

After my parishioner, Pattie, died in April, we received a larger-than-usual number of memorial donations. It saddened me to think of them going to general use in our Memorial fund, the money the church dips into during the summer months to pay the bills. I suggested to the Church Council that we plant a memorial garden. Pattie loved gardening; she was a dab hand with petunias, a flower I understand to be finicky. Two gardening ladies in the church jumped right on this as soon as the money was designated. They put in a cutting garden along a fence out back. One of the ladies, Jane, knew Pattie for many years and worked with her in our nursery school. The other, Lelly, is a new member and hardly knew her at all. But Lelly, who is a good fifteen years older than Pattie will ever be, has for some reason taken on this garden with passion. When she heard that Pattie also loved birds, she planted a hummingbird bush and found a little bird house, which her husband hung on a fence post. Lelly planned the garden so that the plants will sweep around and up toward the bird house. Jane brought a beautiful big rock from her own garden to put in the front, and a brass plaque with Pattie's name will be attached to it later this summer.

Caroline, who keeps the list of everyone who comes to church (and everyone who is there "in spirit"), lived across the street from Pattie for 35 years. This loss has been hard for her. We were talking about the birdhouse and the energy Lelly and Roberta have brought to this memorial garden, and Caroline's eyes filled up with tears. "No one ever did anything for her when she was alive."

I don't know how much this garden will do for Pattie, or for her family, but I know it is healing for her friend. That is loving your neighbor. I still don't know how an institution can encourage that except by speaking out on the broader issues. It's up to you and me, and Roberta and Lelly, to do the rest. And perhaps that's the answer to my questions, for tonight at least.

Lord, Lord

"Why do you call me 'Lord,Lord," and do not do what I tell you?" (Luke 6:46)

There's a controversy in the United Church of Christ right now about how we define God. A conservative group within the denomination has proposed a resolution for the General Synod (our biannual national meeting) that would ask the delegates to vote to affirm the divinity of Christ or, as they also put it, say "Jesus is Lord." It sounds harmless until you look deeper. After all, the denomination is the United Church of *Christ.* So it might sound redundant, but essentially harmless, right?

Well, maybe not so much.

This resolution would require UCC pastors and seminarians to swear a sort of loyalty oath, affirming the “divinity and Lordship of Jesus.” A newspaper article about the resolution, published in a New Jersey newspaper, quotes a UCC pastor there (I’m reprinting from Chuck Currie’s weblog; Chuck is a UCC seminarian).

“The Rev. Albert W. Kovacs of Woodbridge told The Record and Herald News that the resolution was needed because in the UCC:

‘We have significant numbers of clergy who don't believe in God.’

I called Rev. Kovacs today and asked him if he could name any UCC pastor or church that didn’t believe in God. He said there might be some ‘Unitarians up in New England’ but he could not name any.”

Rev. Kovacs is talking about me and about the folks who sit in the pews of my little church so faithfully every Sunday. Our freedom to think, to question, to ponder and to reach our own conclusions, a hallmark of our Congregational heritage, is being challenged. Our Unitarian sisters and brothers are being accused of atheism in a way that belittles them, and our New England independence of spirit is being mocked.

This resolution is offered to shame the United Church of Christ. If it passes it will both violate our polity, which places no corporate test of faith but rather encourages testimony of that faith from the individual, and also make us a laughingstock among others. “Oh, look, the United Church of Christ had to *vote* on who Jesus is!!” And if it is rejected? “Oh, my, the United Church of Christ doesn’t believe in Christ at all!”

If you visited my church on a Sunday, you would know that we offer our praises week after week to Creator, Christ and Spirit, God the three-in-one. If some weeks we relate more to Jesus the man than to Christ the person of the Trinity, we are not minimizing his value. No, we are celebrating the gift of knowing that God cares enough about humankind to walk among us as one of us, to share the human experience of both love and abandonment, to take the part of the least among us and to remind us to share the Good News of God’s love with everyone in the world.

All the calling out of "Lord, Lord" means nothing when it comes from mouths more concerned with speaking than loving, loving of God and neighbor and self.

I pray that the delegates to General Synod will be moved by the Holy Spirit to find some action for this resolution that will not only acknowledge that we are in fact a Christian Church, but also allow us to maintain the integrity and autonomy that are so much a part of our particular Christian tradition.

Breath

Yesterday I had that overwhelming anxiety that I thought was all in the past. I had to remind myself to breathe. I was glad I didn't need to go to the grocery store; that's the worst place when you're anxious, so many things to see, and it's just ridiculously huge. There were times when I had to cling to the cart and wanted one of the kids along as security. I don't like feeling the way I did then.

Part of the trouble was not enough sleep, after being called into the hospital in the middle of the night. But that wasn't all of it.

There's something about being a pastor in a small church that I hadn't fully realized until the past week or so. You don't have to stay very long to really care about the people in your congregation. It's hard to practice a professional detachment when the emotional terms of your call are to love the people. When they die, ergo, it is a loss not just to the community, but to you. And, as is the way of loss, it brings up other old feelings of loss. As I sat with Bill, I thought about how I wasn't there when my dad died. It was too quick and I was too far away.  Someone else was with him, just as I was with Bill.  As I met with Pattie's family, I remembered my mother, also dead of cancer in her 60's, and thought of what a wonderful grandmother she was, how patiently she played with #1 Son and his Ninja Turtle figures on her kitchen table or on the beach at Boothbay Harbor.

I needed to grieve.

And so, when no one else showed up for our meditation circle last night, Roberta and I just sat and talked, candle lit on the table, and talked about what it was like when we lost our parents. She is 70, but she still calls her mother "mumma," just what my father called his. I'm a long way from the home of my childhood, and my parents are gone, and my brother is far away and not often seen. But in this church, we are a family, connected in our joys and our griefs.

Driving home, I realized I was breathing again.

Why I Stayed

My first two months as a pastor were pretty awful. About three weeks after I arrived at the church, the co-moderators sat down to meet with me and told me that the church didn’t have enough money to pay me to work fulltime. As the next month went by and I unraveled the ball of half-truths I was being told by them and reacted to the misapprehensions they allowed to be spread about me, trusted colleagues advised me to put my profile out again and not even list the job.

   

And then I went out on my first pastoral call. I had to drive to a neighboring town, to a vintage 1970’s trailer park for senior citizens, to meet Bill and Bess. They were 50 year members of the church. I knew that he had been a Deacon and a Trustee and an officer of the Men’s Club. But all that was twenty years and more in the past. He had grown deaf, and her eyesight was failing, and church was just a little too overwhelming. He still sent out publicity postcards for our church suppers, faithfully typed each month on an old manual typewriter.

   

Bill and Bess welcomed me into their home. Why, in fifty years, he said, no pastor had ever called on them. (I hope that said more about their enthusiasm at having me there then about the historical record.) I learned that they had been married more than 65 years, and that Bill would soon be 90. We chatted about their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They expressed their deep satisfaction with their home, the first they had ever owned. And by the end of the hour I was in love.

   

Driving away in the car, I called my husband and said, “Somehow I’m staying at this job. I am meant to be Bess and Bill’s minister.”

   

Recently I told that same group of trusted colleagues about the couple, saying they were the reason I had believed it would all work out somehow. “They are the reason I stayed.” Trusted Colleague #1 said, “Be sure you tell them.”

   

When I got home last night, there was a message on my machine from Bess. She said simply, “This is Bess. Bill’s in the hospital. City General.” Going to sleep last night I imagined visiting with Bill and telling him the story.

   

This morning, in the Pastoral Services office, I checked for his room number. It was in the Intensive Care Unit. My stomach flipped. I raced down there and found that Bill was heavily sedated and hooked up to a ventilator, despite the fact that he came in as DNR. One of the nurses on the unit discouraged me from going in, saying, “He’s not going to know you.” “His wife asked me to come,” I said.

   

In the room, I took Bill’s hand. He’s in a coma, and he’s sedated, too, and he’s also deaf, so any communicating was going on at a pretty subtle level. But I talked to him. I told him what a gift he and Bess are, to me and to our church. And I told him the story. “You are the reason I stayed, Bill. You are the reason.”

The Soul Count

Every Sunday, Caroline makes a list of who is in church. She has kept this record for years, at one point in a notebook, but now on the cover of the Sunday bulletin. When Caroline gets home, she looks over the list and makes a second list, of those who were missing. If someone is absent for more than a week or two, she sends them a card or calls on the phone. In my first few months at the church, she kept me tuned in to who was missing until I began to see the patterns myself.

Sometimes we tease her for peeking out the window of the nursery, while the choir is robing there, to see who is driving up in the parking lot. But I rejoice with her whenever we can change a notation from "tall man with beard" to John Smith or Ray Brown or Charlie Parker. (Now that would be fun, wouldn't it?) And who can help smiling when she adds up the number of "regulars" who are not there on a given morning and says, "There were 65 in church, but thirteen more in spirit!"

As she reviews the list of the missing, she makes a point of saying their names. "It's not any kind of formal prayer," she says, "I just take a moment to think about each one." It is more than a head count. It is a soul count.

Last Night at the Church Supper

For years our church has put on a Roast Beef Supper once a month during the school year. It's an established tradition, and people in the community who know us for nothing else know us for All-You-Can-Eat Roast Beef. Given our current budget situation and the challenges facing a 100 or so member church trying to support a full-time pastor, new fundraising efforts are taking place this year. The first of these was a Linguine and Meatball dinner last night. Although the attendance from the community was light (several more established suppers in the general neighborhood were also last night), we knew all along this was a test of both the menu and the willingness of volunteers to work on a second supper this month.

On both counts it was a great success! The food was delicious. But more importantly, the fellowship was stupendous. We had far more help than we needed and got the time to really visit with each other. People who never come to the Roast Beef Supper showed up either to help or to buy a ticket and eat dinner. People with children who never come to the Roast Beef Supper brought their children for this one. I had been briefly worried that there would be a climate of disappointment and a need for damage control, but in fact there was an air of pure conviviality.

Next month we'll try the second Saturday instead of the first.

#2 Son is following in his older brother's footsteps, winning the hearts of our preschool girls. The head chef's three-year-old daughter spent the whole dinner asking to go into the kitchen and say "Hi!" to him. #1 Son's little admirer, age five, likes to stomp on his foot to show her love, so we feel saying "Hi!" is a big improvement.

The best part of the night for me? When I went to the pie table to pick up a piece of Apple for my husband, I really, truly didn't feel like having any myself. Maybe I've finally learned that all the food in the world is not going to disappear before I have the chance to eat again.

Regularly Scheduled Maintenance

Stop me if you've heard this one. An old guy lives in a house with a roof that leaks. Someone asks why he doesn't fix it? "Well, I can't fix it when it's raining, and when it isn't raining, it doesn't leak!!"

Yesterday the furnace at church wasn't working. I called a furnace company and they came in and fixed it, but first they reminded me that last time we called them they recommended getting on a maintenance schedule. This is perfectly sensible, except that it led to a fight among the trustees, including a shouting match between two of them in the Chancel on a Sunday morning approximately ten minutes before the service began. One side wanted to keep using a guy who they only call in emergencies. The other wanted to change to the new company and get on a schedule. The former wailed that we were taking bread out of the mouth of the old furnace guy; the latter gave in and did nothing, to stop the fighting.

So here we are a year later, and the only thing different is that we no longer have trustees! Now it's up to the Ministry of Property to solve it. And the fighters from both sides are now off the committee. I guess that's a good year's work, although the furnace still needs attention.

Last week my husband told me he felt I was married more to my job than to him.

I'm not sure whether it's worse to be the person who feels that way, or the one who has to hear it.

I mentioned this to a couple of my male colleagues and they just sort of shrugged and said, Yeah, it's like that. Sort of like they were saying, Oh, tough luck for our wives being married to clergy.

I'd like to be a bit more sensitive than that. But if I really were, maybe the water wouldn't be putting out the pilot light.

Jesus isn't much help in this area, always talking about alienation from family, leaving everything behind, giving it all up to follow him. I'm not sure I know how to reconcile these competing calls. I'm not sure I know how to husband my light and heat so that I have some left over when I get home. And I'm not sure where to turn for the regularly scheduled maintenance I, and we, need.

SpongeBob welcomed by the UCC

SpongeBob welcomed by the UCC

The President and General Minister of the United Church of Christ, Rev. John Thomas, has issued a statement of welcome to SpongeBob and all other cartoon characters who may have felt harsh rejection by other churches.

I would definitely welcome Clifford, the Big Red Dog. I love Clifford! 'Course he wouldn't fit *inside* my church...

I'm glad there are still people out there with a sense of humor.

(And I swear, even though I don't like SpongeBob, it's not because he's gay.)

Snow Day

Last night at the Church Supper there was a lot of conversation about whether or not to cancel today's service. I must admit it's a very odd feeling to cancel church. Growing up in the South, I had never heard of such a thing, and the big UCC church we attended for 15 years here in Portland never, ever cancelled. It didn't matter the weather or how far away the minister lived, there was always at least one service. I remember climbing over the banks of snow with the children one Sunday to walk to church, because I *had* to sing in the choir!! It was fun to be one of a dozen singers who made it that day, out of the usual turnout of 40 or so. It was exciting to quickly learn some substitute music. I felt brave and important!! And I felt piously indispensable, just like the ministers.

Today I noticed they cancelled, too.

When I mentioned it to my husband, he asked, "Is that a bad thing?"

At my little church, they never had to cancel, because the previous pastors lived in the parsonage, which is right next door, in the parking lot! That driveway's width was not a great enough distance to justify cancellation. But of course the fact that you're having church makes some people feel they must be there, no matter the weather. Perhaps they feel indispensable, too.

It just makes sense to me that in the face of a blizzard warning, in the midst of a storm depositing 10-18" of snow, that we should all be safe in our homes, not driving around in potential white-out conditions.

But, then, I'm a Virginian by birth. Where I'm from, they cancel school for 1" of snow.

Perhaps the no-cancellation histories of these Congregational churches is not about indispensability, but about hardiness. I always love to look at seed packets and see what zones the flowers they produce will thrive in, or not. I love lilacs because they are hardy. They live through this winter, surrounded by snow (and in my yard gnawed on by Bernese Mountain Dogs), and yet they faithfully bloom each spring, filling the air with their intoxicating scent, as exotic as anything I grew up whiffing down South.

For today, the Annual Meeting will have to wait, and the bulletins already printed and folded will be recycled (or perhaps reused--why not? It's still a good worship service I had planned!), and the world will go on, despite a lack of hardiness or a show of common sense. When we meet again the fragrance of God will still be among us.

Growing Pains

My new friend, reverend mommy, wrote something the other day about the difficulty and discomfort when a church is growing, and I was reminded of caring for #1 Son when he was an infant.

He was a skinny little baby, and he took a long time to get the hang of nursing, and I was inexperienced and worried and kind of shell-shocked from giving birth. I remember sitting in the rocker with him and wondering how to get him to stop crying, when his dad said, "Why don't you sing to him?"

Now this was an odd question, because I sing a lot. But I hadn't been singing to him, and when I tried to sing, I couldn't remember any songs. It's as if that part of my memory had been wiped clean. Slowly songs came back to me, but the first were the songs I learned at Camp Alleghany a hundred or so years ago. So I sat in the rocking chair and held my little baby, and I sang "Black socks, they never get dirty, the longer you wear them the blacker they get..." And then the campfire songs came back to my mind: "All Through the Night," "Walk, Shepherdess, Walk," and the song we sang to our Honor Girls, set to the music of "Going Home" also found in Dvorak's New World Symphony. That became his favorite lullaby, "Sleepy Boy," words by Mom.

By five weeks old, we were good together. And then came the week from hell. No sleeping, all crying, and a whole lot of growing.

Think about what it must feel like to be five weeks old and put on a pound in a week. It wasn't just a pound of flab, which is easy enough for us adults to add and not even notice. It was sixteen ounces of bone and muscle and sinew, everything stretching to fill a new space.

That's what it feels like for a church to grow. And for the people who were comfortable at the beginning of the growth spurt, it is all crying, even when they know it's inevitable, even when it's what they prayed would come to their church. It's unfamiliar, and it's uncomfortable, and sometimes it is excruciatingly painful.

So when I say my 90 member church added 12 new members in 2004, with a net gain of 10 when you subtract the two deaths, I'm saying more than we grew 11%. I'm saying that new people ran the fair and others had their noses out of joint, even though they didn't really want to work that hard on it anymore. I'm saying that we're glad Andrew, a former chef, joined the church and is cooking the Roast Beef Supper now, but I'm also saying our good friend Bob died, and we need a new cook. I'm saying that even though one of the new gals is willing to call around for pies before the Supper, we miss Nola who has retired with her husband to South Carolina, and Liz who is living in a nursing home.

Oh, sure, some of it is closed-mindedness or a bad attitude, but some of it is just hurt and fear that time is moving on without me or you or him or her.

It's growing pains.

The Congregation

PBS showed a documentary recently about the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, Pennsylvania, and I want to share some reactions to it.

One of the things I liked about the documentary was how slow and winding its pace was, very much like life in most churches! I was not at all surprised that the real issues about Fred's lack of popularity were never really addressed, despite the process undertaken and the use of consultants. The United Methodists have a very different system of placement than the UCC. If I wanted a new job, I would put together a "profile" and circulate it wherever in the country I felt like doing it. (It is vetted first by an office at the national level charged with being sure we UCC pastors are not criminals...) While Conference Ministers, who are sort of pastors to the pastors, could advise me or the churches to which I sent my profile, they have no literal control over where ministers serve.

In the United Methodist Church it's completely different. The Bishop and District Superintendents look at who is doing well and who isn't, and they move ministers around. What Fred in the documentary has done is ask not to be "re-appointed," which is to say he's asked to be moved. Other than in a crisis, Methodist ministers who are moving in a given year all move on the 1st of July. Pastor A finishes up on the last Sunday in June; Pastor B arrives in the pulpit one week later. Most of their stays are fairly short. So Ted Loder's 37 or so years at FUMCOG was highly unusual. (If a Methodist reads this and finds I'm off the mark, please say so.)

In the UCC, after a pastorate of that length in a big church, a professional interim minister would come in for a year or two and help the congregation do some serious work both in grieving the loss of the old minister and preparing to receive a new one. Methodists don't get that. FUMCOG had a lot of its identity wrapped up in Ted, clearly, and I would guess that pretty much any successor would have been doomed to fail. (In the UCC, if you call a new pastor too soon and he or she leaves quickly, we call it an "unintentonial interim.")

So Fred basically didn't stand a chance. Too much of the church's identity was based on life with Ted. I thought it was very interesting that only one person (aside from the kids who led worship early on in the program) spoke openly on camera about what was missing from his point of view, and that was the African-American guy toward the end. He was talking about objecting to having a lengthy pastoral prayer after the sermon, particularly in a case where the preaching had been done by a guest.

I have to agree with him in general terms, although many of my UCC colleagues preach earlier in the service. But I build up to the sermon all the way through, with the readings and the prayers, and I want to end on that "Amen" and a closing hymn and send people forth thinking about what I said! I've done it the other way, with the offering and/or the pastoral prayer after the sermon, and I loathe that. I especially loathe going from sermon to offering to the Communion table; I don't like having the money right in the middle there. I guess that's because, theologically, I don't think the offering ought to be in response to the preaching but in response to God's grace.

On the subject of praying after the sermon, as a student I preached 4 or 5 times in my home church, and whenever the Senior Minister was there, he made a point of giving the Pastoral Prayer after my sermon and always seemed to re-preach it however he thought I should have said it! Why bother inviting me to be in the pulpit?

FUMCOG's ties to United Methodism are clearly pretty tenuous in terms of their understanding of liturgical theology. It sounds like Ted Loder was a Social Justice Methodist and Fred Day is more what I would call a liturgical Methodist. I was interested that the film-makers made sure we saw him using inclusive language in a baptism and talking about being in South Africa. We saw him worshipping at National Cathedral and protesting the war in Iraq. It's not that he's more conservative politically or theologically than Ted Loder! He is liturgically orthodox, and that feels conservative to some of his congregants.

It also sounds like the church may have been used to a style of preaching with much less emphasis on scripture. My personal feeling is that you can be liberal as all get-out (politically, theologically, liturgically) and still use a lot of scripture. I do. But I'm also not hesitant to use other texts (poems, essays) if they further open the discussion of the scripture.

Coming Out

Okay, here's the truth. I am part of the United Church of Christ, and I believe Jesus would urge my church and others to accept all people, regardless of how acceptable they may be to society. The United Church of Christ is starting a national TV ad campaign today, to let people know that there are churches that actually welcome all the people.

And now for a commercial break: NBC and CBS have decided not to air the ads, because they are too controversial. NBC--let's see now, isn't that the network airing "Will and Grace," a show that has become so profane that it embarasses me? (And I am no prude.) And CBS, a network overpopulated with shows about autopsies, fears offending people?

It's an edgy ad. You can see it at StillSpeaking, part of the UCC's website. There is a softer one, too, scheduled to run the week of Christmas.

Isn't it about time that those of us who call ourselves progressive Christians should actually start sharing with the world just what that means? There has to be a middle way, in which we do more than silently occupy the moral high ground and yet don't sink to the tactics of the right. I thought these ads were a great start.

And perhaps the good news is that the rejection by NBC and CBS is getting press in a way that the ad never would have by itself. Praise God from whom all blessings flow, eh?

Heart Failure

Bob died this morning.  Congestive heart failure is really not a surprise after a lifetime of overwork and cigarettes, but it still hurts to get the news.

In the two years I've served my little church, I've done only four funerals, and none has been for someone I really knew well.  Bob--I knew him very well.  This morning I left my lectionary study group and was headed to the hospital to see him.  Our Head Deacon spent some time with him last night and arrived at a church meeting quite concerned, tearing up as he described Bob's condition.  So Bob was at the top of my list of things to do today.  Once in the car, I checked my cell phone and found four voice mails.  I knew before I even listened to them that Bob had died.

The children had a half-day of school, so I called the middle school and left a message for #2 Son to stop at the elementary school on the way home and pick up his sister.  When he told her why he was there instead of me, she broke into tears.  I guess we all cared about Bob.  Later, when I returned from a visit with Bob's wife and son, the Little Princess wept in my arms and #2 Son joined us in an embrace of compassion.

Then I burned some grilled cheese sandwiches.  In times of great emotion, I always want a grilled cheese sandwich, and I always burn it.

After lunch, such as it was, the Little Princess cried some more and told me this was the first time that someone we knew had died and she understood what death really meant.  "I believe in God and Jesus," she said, "but how do we know there is really a heaven?"  We don't, I said.  We don't know.  But I do believe it.

#2 Son gets that.  At 14, he is listening to his friends say there is no God, because there is no evidence of God.  "They just don't understand, Mom.  Faith is believing in something you can't prove."

That's the work of faith, I told them: believing in what you cannot prove but somehow know anyway.

Bob was an orphan and lived in a home for boys here in Portland back in the 1930's.  He was incorrigible.  One after another, potential adoptive families returned him!  But finally a mother came into his life, and a church, too.  And although he lived around the country, he came back to Portland.  He retired from his work as a chef and started cooking monthly suppers at the church.  The whole operation runs according to his plan.  Last week, quite literally on his deathbed, he rose up to order the groceries for Saturday's supper.  Even though he knew he wouldn't be there to cook it, he knew it would happen somehow.  Really, his heart never failed.

Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes

Things can change so quickly. Children grow up too quickly. #1 Son returned to school to discover that his computer had a busted hard drive, and that his new girlfriend is not over her ex. Something else busted. His dad, grandfather and brother head out tomorrow morning to visit him for Parents' Weekend.

I've worked a lot this week, including officiating at a funeral for a woman 101 years old. Miss E. A. had lived for many years in Washington, D.C., where she was named the "Volunteer of the Century" by the Central Union Mission. Her closest relatives were astonished at the number of great-nieces and nephews who showed up at the funeral, bringing along great-grand nieces and nephews, some so young they sat in their carseats during the service. We drove out to the cemetery on a beautiful autumn afternoon to bid her Godspeed on the journey.

That night, I sat down for Bible Study with a small group, looking at the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. I was amazed to hear a new attender articulate a view of God that was decidedly post-theistic. My little church is becoming a hotbed of progressive theology!!

This morning I had coffee with an old friend, a 50-year-old former Baptist/Zen meditator/potter/self-described Shaker wannabe who wonders if the persistent tug on his heart might not be a call to ministry. Where might there be a place for someone who feels connected to the personal Jesus of his childhood, but experienced that Jesus within an institution that judged and rejected? Thinking back to Wednesday night, I told him, "Yes."

Crossfire

Yesterday we had a congregational meeting to discuss and, we hoped, vote on the proposed Vision Statement and its associated recommendations. Three weeks had gone by since I preached about it prior to a congregational forum in which we walked through the recommendations one by one. Copies of all the documents were available at church for the past few weeks; members of the Vision Commission were eager to talk about it after worship; in the October newsletter we offered to deliver it to anyone who didn't have a copy. Although a few people may have picked up copies on Sunday, no one asked a question or made a comment; no one asked for a copy to be sent or delivered.

You can probably guess what happened next. "We didn't have enough time to read it." "We need more time to digest it." In other words, "we don't like change."

The meeting got fairly heated, although I will say I was happy to hear dissenting opinions expressed in a congregational meeting rather than in the parking lot.

One of the complaints was that the changes suggested are too "dramatic." These include renaming our committees "ministries." Their areas of responsibility will remain essentially the same; the notion was to reinforce for all of us that we are engaged in mutual ministry. Frustrated by the use of "dramatic" as a derogatory term, #1 Son spoke up: "Aren't dramatic changes what Jesus Christ is all about?"

Preach it, son.