Those %&@#! Numbers

I’m struggling as a pastor these days. I know I’m not the only one. While I expend a lot of energy convincing myself and everyone around me that I’m doing well, ministry is great and everything’s coming up roses, sometimes it takes more energy than I can muster to maintain the façade. If I’m completely honest, I have to admit that I’m fumbling to find my way.

It’s odd that in this, my sixth and most likely last parish, I am less confident than I have ever been about my ability as a pastor. I was not prepared for ministry in the 21^st century. I can’t think of a single thing I learned in seminary that applies to today. I’m sure there must be something, but I’m hard-pressed to tell you what. Even with 40 years of parish ministry under my belt, the ministry skills I’ve picked up through experience don’t seem to apply.

It reminds me a lot of the time I spent immersed in Costa Rica while I was in a school to learn Spanish. One day I got lost as I was walking to school, and I couldn’t find my way back. My Spanish was so limited that no one I stopped on the street could help me. Yes, this is a lot like that.

Last Sunday the number of people we had at worship was abysmal—the worst I've seen since I’ve been at Ascension (apart from traditionally low Sundays, like the week between Christmas and New Year’s). When I saw the number, it threw me into a tizzy, and I’m questioning whether I’m the right pastor to be serving this congregation. In my head, I know that the number of butts in the pews has only a little bit to do with me and a long list of other variables are at play, but in my heart, I feel like it’s basically my fault.

How can a simple number throw me into such a funk? The whole time I’ve been a pastor, I’ve pushed back against those who look at numbers as a way of determining worthiness among clergy and the congregations they serve. (Even back in seminary I wrote a paper about success vs. faithfulness in determining clergy self-worth.) Upon meeting someone new, when they find out I’m a pastor, one of the first things they’ll ask me is, “How large is your congregation?” as if that’s the most important thing to know about my value as a pastor. I’ve hated that question, even when I’ve served very large congregations. There is no correlation between the size of a congregation and its faithfulness to the mission God has called it to be about in the world. So, when I find myself being sucked into the numbers game and allowing Sunday attendance figures to throw me into a funk, my anger becomes directed toward myself and then I begin sliding into a full-blown depression. (I’m hoping to avoid that by blogging about it.)

It’s painful for me to recognize that of the six congregations I’ve served, this is the first one that is declining numerically on my watch. I’m not sure what to do about it. I can console myself by noting the individuals I’ve seen transformed during my time at Ascension, and the way the congregation has grown in its understanding of mission to those outside the walls of the congregation, while continuing to care for its aging members. I can see God at work in so many ways. And that should be enough to sustain me, but there is always the very human part of me that looks at those %&@#! numbers.

I know that churches need to change to meet the demands of a culture that is rapidly changing around us. But that’s a whole lot easier in theory than reality. It’s far easier to start a new mission church than to turn an established church around in its mission. People who have been a part of Ascension for decades are with us for a reason. Change threatens to displace them, and while I sometimes get frustrated with resistance to change, I understand it and sympathize with their fears. Aren’t people who like things just the way they are, thank you very much, also included in God’s loving embrace? There is no easy solution to this dilemma.

Any possible direction we might take in the future is impeded when we get hung up on numbers. A bold new mission may very well alienate the people who are with us, and we’ll lose them. But if we proceed the way we always have, we will continue to bleed numerically while the world around us leaves us in the dust. Not a good look for God's people--stuck in one place, dusty and bleeding. I don't know how to deal with this.

I’m just starting to see that serving in a congregation that is declining numerically may be just what I need right now. It’s a clear reminder to me that I am not in control and Ascension Lutheran Church isn’t all about me. I can’t make everybody happy. I can’t make them want to worship with us on Sunday mornings. I can’t make them give their hearts to a life of service through our community. I can’t change the culture that competes with us for attention. None of that is up to me. And maybe it’s going to take serving a congregation with declining numbers for me to trust in God.

Isn’t that the way God always works? We pastors act as if it all depends on us and we work as hard as we can to do what we think God wants. In truth, it’s what we want, and it may or may not be what God wants. There is always an opportunity when I throw my hands in the air and cry, “Nothing I try is working! I don’t know what I’m doing! God help me!” There’s an opportunity for God to step into the void and do what God has been wanting to do all along, if I’d just get out of the way.

God’s Cleverly Disguised Transportation System

Faced with a decision along the path,
I chose the wrong way.
Stumbling and tumbling downward,
engulfed in darkness,
my hands disappear before my face.
Into what hole have I fallen?

Musty wet walls on either side of me,
a tunnel twisting before me,
I crawl through inky soup,
feeling my way forward
...or perhaps backwards
...or perhaps sideways.
My direction disturbed
Moving into the void
Nowhere
How will I find my way out of of this cave?

Suddenly I am violently vomited
from my place of despair.
Tangled in seaweed
Strewn among the scattered shells
Sand scraping my back
Cheeks seared by the sun
What hole heaves with such force?
What cave careens upward?

This is not the path I traveled
before descending into darkness.
It is a place I have never seen before.
Had I been stuck in hole or cave,
emerging, I would find myself
exiting the same space
where once I had entered.
Instead, I am transported
by my tomb.

How could I know that I had been traveling
inside the belly of a whale?

Is Your Church a Holy Holding Tank?

Most faith communities are all about belonging. Their goal is to increase membership, to get people to belong. The church serves as a holy holding tank. When belonging becomes the emphasis of a congregation it’s easy to become judgmental because it is all about who’s in and who’s out. That’s what happens in a holy holding tank. And when a community’s emphasis is on judging, the community sets the standard for who you need to be and you can strive really hard to become that person.

The problem with that kind of striving is that it means becoming someone you’re not and your life becomes a lie. You’re always trying to please other people, to meet the standards someone else has set for you. Talk about living in bondage to sin. But it’s not God who binds us, it’s the judgment of other people as well as the judgment we might impose upon ourselves.

Churches aren’t meant to be holy holding tanks that people can belong to. They are meant to be places of transformation that are always growing into a Jesus Way of being in this world. Never static, the community is always moving. We’re engaged in a journey together. The kind of transformational life we’re called to as God’s people is not about being converted into people we’re not. It’s about truly becoming the people we are. The people God created us to be. And there’s a huge difference between becoming the person God created you to be, the person you truly are, and the person other people tell you you have to be in order to become acceptable.

For those of us who are on a journey toward becoming the people God created us to be, the challenge lies in discovering who that is. We often mistake our past behavior as an indication of who we are. But our past behavior doesn’t define who we are. In fact, it may only serve to mask our true selves. Especially if we have a history of allowing others to judge us or perhaps judging ourselves. Judging never leads us to an understanding of who we really are as children of God. The only way we can grow to understand who we really are is through love. Because we’re not defined by what we’ve done, whether good, bad, or ugly. Who we are is defined by whose we are. We’re defined by our relationship with the God who loves us.

The challenge and adventure of life is in discovering who we really are. It takes faith, courage, and imagination. Because God created us for so much more than we realize. To live well is to grow into the person God created you to be. That’s what our life’s journey is about. I know it’s a worn out cliché, but it really is true that it’s not the destination but the journey that matters in life. The journey of faith is one transformation after another for us. Some big, some small, but we’re always being transformed. That’s why we can say that God’s purpose for the church is not about belonging, it’s about transformation.

Can't You Just Work Around My Junk?

When I was at a former church I did campus ministry, and every year we’d take a group of college students on a mission trip somewhere. I’ll never forget the year we went to Washington DC. We worked with a group called “Hearts and Hammers”, which sent work crews out to do house repairs for people who didn’t have the means to do it for themselves. We went to the home of a woman I'll call "Mrs. Black." She wanted us to paint some walls in her house.

Words can’t adequately describe this woman’s house. From the outside it looked like a typical bi-level, suburban home that was about 20 or 30 years old. But as soon as you opened the door, you knew that there was nothing typical about this house. The first thing that caught our attention was the odor. This woman had 17 cats who roamed throughout her house at will and, to my recollection, there was no litter box.

There was trash, everywhere. Her dining room looked like the inside of a dumptster: McDonald’s cups, pizza boxes, milk cartons, you name it. I couldn’t see the table or the chairs, stuff was piled so high. In her living room there was nowhere to sit, with junk mail from years past, newspapers, magazines… piles everywhere. As we walked through the house, it was all like that. A mountain range of garbage, most of it defiled by her herd of cats.

The students had to leave the house and put on surgical masks so they could breathe. And they were upset. When they offered to help clean her house, Mrs. Black refused, insisting that what she wanted us to do was some painting. This was absolutely absurd!

Finally, we convinced her that we wouldn’t be able to paint because we couldn’t get to the walls. Reluctantly, she let us clean, and we went at it for days. We left a much different house than the one we had entered. But after we drove away the last day, we all wondered how long it would take for the place to look again the way we had first found it.

I still think about Mrs. Black from time to time. I’ve come to realize that I have more in common with her than I would like to admit. I come to God, asking him to help me out with some light painting, thinking that’s all I really need. But there’s so much trash cluttering my life that he can’t do much of anything with me because he can’t get to me.

As a Lutheran, I’m big on grace. I know that I can’t save myself from my own self-destructive ways; only God can do that. But I wonder if maybe there’s a big part of me that doesn’t want God to do his work in my life. Because that would mean opening myself up to the very real possibility of having my life transformed. And that’s scary for me. It would mean letting go of the way of life I’ve come to know. Even if it’s not really working for me, it’s familiar, it’s safe. I know what to expect.

So, rather than risk opening myself up to God’s Spirit working in my life, I continue to fill my life with all kinds of unimportant stuff. I pile it up all around me, hoping that it will make it all the more difficult for God to come to me, and maybe in the process, nothing will change. I can be the same person I’ve always been, well-insulated from the one who has promised me abundant life.

Yes, Mrs. Black and I aren’t all that different. But God doesn’t drive away and give up on me the way our mission team gave up on her. And that makes all the difference.

Growing in Grace

As Christians, we believe that Jesus embodies all that God wants for us, so our life’s work is to become more and more like Jesus in the ways we live and love. The process works something like this. We all make sense of the world around us based on our own experience. And when we make sense of things, we put them neatly in a frame that we call our frame of reference. For example, we may have an understanding about how forgiveness works: when someone wrongs us, they come to us and they tell us they’re sorry for what they’ve done, and we forgive them. That’s the way forgiveness works for us. So, that’s our frame of reference and whenever someone wrongs us, that’s the way we expect it to go. That’s what fits into our frame.

But then, what happens when someone wrongs us and we’re deeply hurt, but they don’t come to us and say they’re sorry for what they did? They just go on about their business. This doesn’t fit into the frame we’ve constructed. And we can do one of two things with that new experience. We can stick with our frame of reference and decide that, since the other person didn’t apologize, we don’t forgive them. Our definition of forgiveness remains intact, and we stay where we were. Or, we receive this new experience that can’t be contained in the old frame and the old frame is shattered. The old frame isn’t big enough to contain this new experience. We need to build a new frame of reference that’s big enough.

Within our new frame of reference we realize that forgiveness is something we offer to those who don’t deserve it, just as God forgives us when we don’t deserve it. And that means that they might not even say they’re sorry. We go from one frame to a larger frame.

We have countless opportunities to grow more like Jesus in our dealings with other people. We may have a frame of reference we have established for certain kinds of people: church people are like this, black people are like this, homosexuals are like this, pretty blondes are like this, homeless people are like this. Then we meet someone who doesn’t fit into our frame: “I thought pretty blondes were all air-heads, but this is a smart woman.” Our frame is too small to contain that new experience. We need a frame that’s much bigger than the little judgmental frame we once used to figure people out. We search for a frame that’s big enough to contain the love of God.

Of course, a frame big enough to contain the love of God is a frame so big that we can never see its edges; it’s more than our finite brains can begin to comprehend. But when we have the courage to let go of the narrow little frames we carry around in our brains, we can grow in our understanding of God’s love by exploring its breadth and width, finding ourselves repeatedly going from one frame to a larger one and a larger one after that. That's how we grow in grace.