Leaving Church, a Book Review

I first encountered the preaching of Barbara Brown Taylor in a homiletics course I took in Seminary. Taylor is an Episcopalian priest turned professor of religion at Piedmont College in Georgia. As such she doesn’t tend to garner much attention in move Evangelically minded circles, though Time magazine named her as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world, in 2014, and Baylor University named her one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world, in 1996. So she has street cred.

In my homiletics course, we were given a number of different sermons to view and critique, as a learning exercise, and a Barbara Brown Taylor sermon on a passage from Ephesians was included on the list. Taylor is a careful wordsmith, with a poet’s ear for rhythm and a storyteller’s taste for imagery, and these qualities sparkled in her preaching. I was still trying to find my own voice as a preacher, at the time, and was wondering if my own love for a well-turned phrase might somehow marry with my passion for speaking the Word of God. Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermon gave me at least one reason to hope that it might. She never became one of my “top 12 preachers” in terms of influence, but the example she set, of using words poetically in the proclamation of the Word of God, left an indelible mark on me.

It was with great joy and much curiosity, then, that I started into Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, her personal story of becoming a priest, serving God in a small Episcopalian church in Clarkesville, Georgia, eventually discerning that God was calling her into something other than the priesthood, and finally, as the title suggests, leaving church. Not that she left faith, or worship-in-community, or serving God, but she did leave active ministry.

I myself have wrestled at various times with my own sense of vocation. Even when I left my career as an English teacher and went to seminary to prepare for ministry, I did not know exactly what form that ministry would take, whether academic, or pastoral, or something altogether different. When the Lord made it clear to me that it was time for me to leave my previous ministry appointment, a post I’d held for some 12 years or more, I was not entirely sure I was being called back into a pastoral position. And over those last 12 years—during a pastoral burn-out in 2014, deciding to complete a doctorate in Rochester, New York in 2016, stepping back for a three-month sabbatical in 2020-- at each point I've had to do some wrestling again. Sometimes this was mild sparing, even play-wrestling, other times it felt like a life-or-death struggle. Each time, however, I eventually pinned my questions and doubts to the mat, and emerged from the ring clear in the conviction that God was still calling me to serve him in this way.

So I was deeply intrigued to read Barbara Brown Taylor’s story, as someone who has wrestled in a similar way.

The book is good read. Even if you’re not in vocational ministry specifically, it asks a whole bunch of important questions that we all should probably wonder about more: what’s the real difference between doing and being? What does it mean to be “called” to a vocation in the first place? What should life-lived-in-community-loving-God really look like, after all?

As a pastor, though, a few things in Leaving Church felt especially poignant to me. Taylor has an extended section where she describes the days immediately after leaving her position as priest, as she begins to realize how deeply she had longed, throughout her ministry, to be treated like “just one of the flock,” and not set aside the way being a pastor often does set aside those who do it. In another scene she describes the moment she realized that she first went into the ministry because she had fallen in love with God, and yet the demands of the ministry were making it harder and harder to experience that love. In another passage, she describes the discovery that her vocation is broader than simply the things she does as a priest, and is tied more fundamentally to who she is in relation to God. These were all things that spoke to my own experience in ministry, some because they were lessons I, too, learned the hard way; others because they’re lessons I’m still trying to figure out.

A few days ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine who is also a pastor, and we were talking about the unique challenges that come with this particular line of work. In a moment of epiphany, I said something to the effect that I was starting to think that being a pastor actually changes the person doing it in some deep psychological way. I hadn’t thought about it like that before I said it, but when he asked me to elaborate, I mentioned how the “setting aside for ministry” and the unavoidable “being setting apart from community” that so often comes with it, how the weight of spiritual responsibility that we unconsciously shoulder, how vagueness of the job and yet its intense precision (we pastor people wherever they happen to be, through whatever they happen to be experiencing, yet our work is tied to and focused on the singular person of Jesus Christ as revealed in his Word)—how all this shapes our psyches in ways we probably none of us fully appreciate.

As a pastor, reading one colleagues journey through ministry helped me to appreciate these things more fully, and caused me to reflect more deeply than I have for a while, on the nature of my own calling. One of the conclusions that Barbara Brown Taylor draws from her experience is that all of us have a calling in Christ, even if we don’t wear a collar to signify it, and sometimes, ironically, the more formally we attach our calling to our work, the more difficult it becomes to pursue it. These are lessons all followers of the Great Shepherd would do well to mull over, not just those who serve as under-shepherds.

Singleness and the Church, Part I

Here’s a quick mental exercise for you.  If you are a church-goer, ask yourself: when was the last time I heard a sermon or Christian teaching on the topic of marriage, family, children, or sex?

Now ask yourself: when was the last time I heard a sermon or Christian teaching on the topic of singleness?

This purely speculation on my part, but I’m willing to bet that the former (teaching on marriage and family) was both more recent and more frequent than the later (teaching on singleness).  Christians have an unnoticed tendency, I think, to idealize, romanticize, and over-emphasize marriage, and ignore, under-emphasize or subtly denigrate singleness as a legitimate way to follow Jesus.   I don’t have a lot of hard data on this, but my gut and my experience tells me it’s so (hence the quick mental exercise at the start of this post).

I wonder a lot about what impact this idealization of marriage has on single people in the church.  I wonder this in part because it is, in fact, quite unbiblical. The Bible actually puts singleness on even par with marriage as a very good way to follow Jesus, and, if anything, portrays marriage as a concession for those who can’t walk the walk when it comes to singleness. (But that’s gonna have to be a post for another day.) More importantly, I wonder about the impact of our emphasis on marriage, because on a spiritual level it seems like a bit of a double standard, to tell unmarried people that they ought to walk a path of celibacy, on the one hand, but offer them none of the spiritual support and recognition in the church that married people get.

Whether or not I’m on to anything here, all the signs in Canadian society suggest that this issue—how does the church relate to, make space for, and spiritual care for the singles in its community—is going to become increasingly relevant in the coming years. In a 2005 study of Canadian social trends, Susan Crompton suggests that Canadian singles, what she calls the “won’t marry’s,” represent a “small but distinct” segment of Canadian society who face a whole slew of unique social pressures related directly to their single status.  Statistically, wont-marrys have fewer socio-economic opportunities, have a higher likelihood of not entering the work-force, and tend to have a median income 16% lower than that of “will-marrys” (Crompton, “Always the Bridesmaid: People Who Don’t Expect to Marry,” Canadian Social Trends, 77, Summer 2005).

These pressures are likely to sharpen and intensify as more and more Canadians opt to remain single. A 2011 Stats Canada study, for instance, found that the percentage of single Canadians has increased from 39$ in 1981 to 54% in 2011.  Most notably, this study found that for the first time ever there were more people living alone in Canada than there were couples with children.

The Canadian dream of a spouse and a house and white-picket fence enclosing a yard where 2.5 kids gleefully play the day away seems to be evaporating.  And as it does, I wonder if the Church realizes that in the gospel, which clearly affirms singleness as a good way to follow the Lord, we have all kinds of spiritual resources to minister well to this growing segment of the population.

My gut tells me it does not realize this.  Partly because of the results I get when I conduct the aforementioned mental exercise (and I'm the preacher in my church!), but more because when I look around the Church in general, I see all the highlighter ink getting used up emphasizing the ministries we do for kids, families, and marriages, and very little of it getting spent on highlighting the special issues and unique opportunities that single Christians face as disciples of the Lord.

I offer this mostly as a word of encouragement today to any of the single Christians who stop in at terra incognita from time to time to peruse some of my thoughts on God, life, faith, love, words, and spirituality.

But I also offer it by way of a preamble to the series I’m starting this month here at my blog.  For the next few weeks, I’m planning to use this space to explore some biblical, theological, pastoral and practical issues related to being a single Christian in Canada. I’ll be travelling this road as a foreign pilgrim, of course.  I married young (20 years old) and have been happily married for going on 25 years now, so I speak humbly and from inexperience on this matter.  But still, I am a pastor, and I care very much that all God’s children should find their place in the life of the church, whether they are married or not.  It is a place of joy, freedom, service, and worship for all, and if the church has been subtly (or not-so-subtly) communicating that you can only find it well if you’re married, than I believe it’s something we ought to repent of, and learn to do better at.

The Thursday Review: Paroxysms of Peace

first posted October 3, 2012

The English word “paroxysm” is an oldie but a goodie. Literally it describes a sudden and/or violent outburst of emotion. You could have a “paroxysm of laughter,” though the term generally has negative connotations. Paroxysms of rage are more common.

The word itself comes from an old Greek word, paroxusmous, which, according to my Greek lexicon, means “stirring up, provoking”. It only appears twice in the New Testament.

The first appearance is in Acts 15:39. Here Paul and Barnabas have what the NIV calls a “sharp disagreement” and the KJV a “contention”. Literally, Luke says they had a paroxusmos so intense that they parted company. The fight, it turns out, was over John Mark (of the Gospel of Mark fame), who had deserted them on their first missionary trip over in Pamphylia. Paul felt he was unreliable and didn’t want to bring him on their next foray. Barnabas begged to differ—begged so sharply that a paroxysm of conflict flared up—begged so sharply that he and Paul parted ways, Barnabas to Cyprus with Mark in tow and Paul off to Cilicia.

It’s a sad story, to be sure, but then, those of us who have been doing ministry for a while now know that churches have split over smaller issues than the roster of the mission committee. And bigger.

But here’s the fascinating thing. Besides its use to describe the “sharp disagreement” in Act 15:39, the word paroxusmos only shows up another time in the New Testament. In Hebrews 10:24 the writer says, “Let us consider how we can spur one another on to love and good deeds.” This is how the NIV renders the verse. NASB says “to stimulate one another to love and good deeds.” Old KJV says, “Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works.”

Literally what it says is something like: “Let us consider one another towards paroxusmon-- incitements, provocations—of love and good deeds.”

Now, former Bible teachers of mine read this blog from time to time, so I need to be careful here not to commit the exegetical fallacy of semantic anachronism, but I find it worth reflection, at least, that the Bible uses the word paroxusmos once to describe a sharp disagreement between two Christian ministers, and elsewhere to describe (in what most biblical scholars would agree is an startling image) our duty to “provoke” one another to Christian love. On the one hand, a paroxusmos led to a deep rift between two friends; on the other hand it leads to Christian charity and shalom.

And I’m reflecting on this especially, because like I say, conflict in ministry is inevitable. Paroxysms of all sort are bound to come. And because we tend to prefer smooth feathers and shiny faces on Sunday morning, I think received wisdom is that they ought to be avoided, or at the very least resolved discretely, even if, in their avoidance or resolution, we find ourselves settling for false peace. At least the tomb looks white, right?

But Hebrews 10:24 and Acts 15:39 fly like two sticks between the spokes of Received Wisdom’s bicycle, sending False Peace head over handlebars. Because when you line these two verses up, they suggest that conflict is not by nature bad; nor is it to be avoided at all cost; and there are fates worse than ruffled feathers.

These two verses suggest that conflict can actually become a catalyst towards charity and service, if it’s entered into for Christ’s sake; and what determines whether or not it will is whether or not the parties involved are really provoking one another for Christ’s sake. (Even Paul and Barnabas’s paroxysm led to love and service in the end. In the short term, it expanded the ministry of the gospel by sending Barnabas to Cyprus and Paul to Cilicia; and in the long term, we have hints that things get patched up between Paul, Mark and Barnabas (see Col 4:10)).

This is hard work.  Paroxysms of any sort (ancient or modern) hurt. But then the cross itself teaches us that the Way of Christ has never avoided the suffering that redemption costs. And conflicts that redeem will cost us: utter humility and risky openness, and above all real, raw honesty about our own goals and agendas in any given dispute. But if well seek those treasures of his Kingdom, first, then we may find that redemptive Paroxysms of Peace are being added to us, as well.

Angels Among Us

In the opening chapters of the Book of Revelation, the Risen Jesus dictates a series of prophetic letters to St. John the Divine, addressed to the Seven Churches of Asia Minor: the Church at Ephesus, the Church at Smyrna, the Church at Pergamum, at Thyatira, at Sardis, at Philadelphia and Laodicea. For those even vaguely familiar with the Book of Revelation, this will probably ring some bells. These seven churches are in various stages of success and failure, hopefulness and helplessness, victory and defeat, and Jesus sends them each a letter, warmly commending them for their spiritual victories, tenderly comforting them in their trials, and sternly warning them when it’s needed.

I think about these seven letters to the churches in Revelation a fair bit in my work as a pastor; they come to mind, actually, on a pretty regular basis. It’s not, however, because of the specific content of any individual letter. To be sure, they are among some of the most poetic and compelling passages in the whole New Testament, and I fully trust that the same Jesus who promised the Pergamonian Church a taste of the hidden manna should they overcome, promises to reward the FreeWay’s overcoming in like manner.

But that’s not what draws me to these letters.

It’s this curious observation that I made a few years back and I can’t “unnotice” now that I’ve noticed it: Jesus addresses each letter, not to the “pastor” of the church, or the “over-seer,” or the “elders board” or even the individual congregation. Instead, in each letter he address “the angel of the church.” “To the angel of the church at Ephesus” he says, “write ....”

“To the angel of the church at Smyrna... to the angel of the church in Pergamum ...” and so on.

This is supposed to be a blog post about church ministry, specifically, not angelology, so I won’t delve too deeply here, but it strikes me as all kinds of interesting that, when addressing the trials and triumphs, the struggles and successes, the warp-and-woof of each church’s spiritual life together, Jesus does not address individuals, specific leaders, or even corporate congregations. He addresses the angel of the church.

If you’ve read the work of Walter Wink before, or William Stringfellow, or Hendrikus Berkof, who each write eloquently and insightfully about the “inner” or “invisible” realities that exist in all human efforts to order our life together—from political power structures, to economic system to, even, church institutions—you may see where I’m going with this. There is—the Bible is quite convinced of it—a spiritual life or a spiritual entity (words are difficult here) that becomes evident whenever we structure human life-together.  It emerges from the power structures we erect, and at the same time transcends them. The Bible calls these things Powers and Principalities, Thrones and Dominions, Authorities and Rule. In Colossians we’re told that Christ defeated the Powers and Principalities through the cross (2:15); and in Ephesians were told that Christ is enthroned above them all (1:20); and later in Ephesians we're told that our battle as Christians, is not against flesh and blood but against them (6:15).

The Bible regularly depicts these “Powers and Principalities” in personified ways, as angels and/or demons, variously at work in the world. In saying that, I don’t mean to imply that I take the Bible’s talk of angels and demons as “mere” metaphor, as though there was nothing “real” behind Daniel’s demonic “Prince of Persia” (Dan 10:13) than “simply” the power structures of the Persian Empire. What I am saying is that, as far as the Bible is concerned, the two are intimately connected. The demonic “Prince of Persia,” and the concrete realities of the Persian Empire—the spiritual beings in the heavenly realms and the human power structures that exist on earth—are opposite sides of the same coin. The later are concrete expressions of the former; and the former draw their meaning directly from the later.

I promised I wouldn’t delve too deeply, so let me resurface with this. Put simply: nation states—as human efforts to order our life together—nation states all have an “angel” that exists invisibly, but powerfully, and exerts an invisible but powerful influence over the people who “belong” to that nation state. So do multi-national corporations. And economic systems. And institutions of higher learning. And, as far as the Book of Revelation is concerned, it would seem, so do churches.

There was, in a very real sense, an “angel of the church at Ephesus”—a spiritual entity, a spiritual reality—a spirit—that exists because the church at Ephesus exists, and though it transcends the Ephesian church and exists separately from it, its life is intricately bound up with their life. And so, when Jesus wishes to address the life of that church, even though he has very real, flesh and blood human beings in mind while he’s doing it, he doesn’t address individual leaders or church members. He addresses “the angel of the church at Ephesus.”

There’s an angel of the church at Laodicea, too; and at Sardis, and, if I am reading the Bible right on this one, an angel of the church called FreeWay, at Oshawa.

Every church has its angel.

Anyone who’s ever walked into a church and just sort of knew without being able to put a finger on it, that the “spirit” of this church was dead, or bitter, or vibrant, or reverent—anyone who’s ever been in a church that just couldn’t seem to break through a spirit of failure, or pride, or what have you, no matter how many times they changed the pastor, no matter who moved on or who moved in—anyone who’s ever been in a church where the spirit of the place was full of life and love and joy and before they knew it they were radiating life and love and joy, too—will get what I’m trying to say here.  There is a spirit to every church—every church has, for lack of an even more biblical way of putting it—its angel.

This is why I think about the letters to the churches in Revelation regularly in my work at the FreeWay, because in my more imaginative moments, I wonder: what is the FreeWay’s angel like? Don't worry.  I’m not going new age here, or theologically flaky or dropping off the deep end. I don’t waste much energy on this; but every once in a while, in good Book of Revelation fashion, I wonder.

What does the Angel of the Church called FreeWay look like? (I imagine him as shorter and spunkier alongside the more staid, noble and somber angels of the Heavenly host. His armour of light is held together with duct tape, his wings affixed with chewing gum, and where all the rest of the assembled angels have swords, he has a slingshot protruding from his back pocket...)

More important than what he looks like, though—and this is a question I do spend a fair bit of pastoral energy on—what would Jesus say to the angel of my church, were he to address it the way he addresses the angels of the churches of Asia Minor?

Ecclesia Ludens, the Church at Play

There’s an obscure, somewhat bizarre episode in the Book of Acts that crosses my mind every once in a while when I’m deep in the thick of ministry at the FreeWay. It’s the story of Paul and the Seven Sons of Sceva.

In case this one wasn’t included in your Sunday School flannel graphs, let me give you the background. During the course of his missionary journeys, Paul arrives in Ephesus, where there is a septet of Jewish brothers going around performing exorcisms for hire. These seven “sons of Sceva” get a load of the miracles Paul’s performing in Jesus’ name, so they decide to give it a try. “In the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches,” they intone over their next demonized client, “I abjure you to come out!” And the result looks something like a cross between WWF and Monty Python:

The evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and I know about Paul, but who are you?” Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and ... gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding.  Acts 19:16

Now: when I say that this episode crosses my mind sometimes during ministry, I should clarify. It has nothing to do with the beating these guys get for trying to capitalize on Jesus’ name; and it’s not because anyone has ever run out of any of my services bleeding. It’s not even because it involves a failed attempt at casting out an evil spirit.

It’s only because it’s—well—if you can get past some of the cultural baggage here—evil spirits, random acts of cudgelling, seven dudes fleeing a house “naked and bleeding,” and what not—if you can let those things simply exist as they might have in their original, first century context—it is a funny story.

At least it was meant to be so, I think. Seven bumbling exorcists who don’t know Jesus from Adam get a royal whooping from the evil spirit they’re trying to exorcise because they misused the name of Jesus, with the ironic effect that the evil spirit, who surely has no vested interest in upholding Jesus' name, ends up pointing out just how precious and sacred and powerful it truly is. Okay: it’s not Corner Gas material, maybe; no sides got split in my telling of the tale, I’m sure, but still, the more I think about it, the more I think Luke, the author of Acts, wants this little episode to crack a pious but genuine smile on the faces of his readers.

Not that I’d recommend the majority of his work, but the guy who runs the Brick Testament website maybe got this one right, presenting it in the medium of a Lego diorama. It sort of does sound like what you’d get if a 10-year-old boy were to come up with a Bible story. Lots of action, a few good fisticuffs, and a eyebrow-arching guffaw at the end: “And he gave them such a licking they fled the house naked and bleeding!”

And this why I think about it every once and a while at the FreeWay, because it suggests to me that, for all its seriousness and eternal import—and make no mistake, ministry is serious and of eternal import—but even in the midst of all that, there is something to ministry that was meant very much to be, for lack of a better word, fun.

This isn’t an exegetical hill I’m ready to die on yet, but I wonder if a passage like Acts 19:13-16, the one about the seven beaten sons of Sceva, was written especially for church leaders who've let church life wring out of them the ability let themselves go with a good-natured, whole-hearted laugh. Or for church communities so burdened with the weight of glory that life together is no longer life-giving. Or for Christians who don’t really think, actually, that the Christian life has space in it for a healthy sense of humour.

It’s not just in Acts 19:13-16, either, that we see Luke throw a sideways glance at his audience with a wry grin that sort of says, “There is, in fact, some very holy fun, going on here, for anyone who wants to get in on the action.” In Acts 12, for instance, you get the one about Peter, escaped from prison, who goes to the house where they’re praying earnestly for his release, and the servant girl is so flummoxed to see him there that she forgets to let him in and no one will believe her that he’s at the door. In Acts 20 you get the one about poor old Eutychus, who fell asleep in the window because Paul’s sermon was so long-winded (the original long-sermon joke...) Acts is peppered, actually, with funny scenes once you start to look for them.

I should clarify. In calling these things “fun” or “funny,” I don’t mean to trivialize the things of God, or to suggest we should handle them flippantly or foolishly. C. S. Lewis has a great letter in The Screwtape Letters where he unpacks humour theologically, and suggests that there is a very important place for “the Joke Proper,” as a channel and expression of Christian Joy, that there is such a thing as a godly joke, and that laughter is not only spiritual healthy, but has all kinds of potential to be redemptive and worshipful if we’ll let it be so.

That’s the kind of funny I’m trying to get at here. And that’s the kind of fun, I think, that church ministry should include: the “funny” that is willing to watch the greatest made the least and the last made the first, and bubble up with laughter because it’s happening—the “funny” that is humble enough to laugh even at itself— the “funny” that views all things, our trials and our accomplishments, in the clarifying light of eternity, where most of the things you take so seriously will turn out not to be nearly so serious as you take them to be.

We laugh a fair bit at the FreeWay. Jokes get told at board meetings all the time. No small amount of play happens during the Sunday morning set up. Our worship team banters with one another between every other song during Thursday evening practice. And when I hear it, or see it, or join in it—the fun, that is—sometimes I think: I bet Luke would get the joke here; and other times I think: I bet Jesus is laughing with us, on this one.

That’s me with my guard down. The straight-laced theologian in me wants to put it like this: in addition to our understanding of the church as Ecclesia Apostlica (the Apostolic Church), and Ecclesia Semper Reformanda (the church always reforming), we must come to understand her, too, as Ecclesia Ludens.  The church at play.

Christ's Comet: an analogy for the local church

As a pastor, I have often found the image of a comet to be a helpful framework for thinking through and reflecting on the various levels of participation in church life that one sees among the people connected to any given local church, from Christmas-and-Easter Christians, on the one hand, to fully devoted day-in-and-day-out disciples on the other.

In case you've never seen one before, let me explain.  A comet is a beautiful moving object in the night sky with three basic parts: the nucleus, the coma and the tail. The "coma" is a glowing cloud around the nucleus, that the nucleus creates as it moves through space, and the "tail" is the luminescent stream of gases that the nucleus leaves behind it on its journey. What's important to note, for our purposes, is that it's the movement of the comet’s nucleus which creates the coma and the tail, and makes it shine so brightly.

Here’s a diagram:

Let me point out the parallels here, for starters.  The local church is like this in that ideally it, too, is moving—that is, it is on mission for Jesus and going from point A to point B, spiritually speaking, in the process.  A stationary or stagnant church, obviously, doesn’t ‘shine’ any more than a stationary comet would.   And, like a comet, it is made up of a solid core nucleus, namely, serious disciples who are genuinely committed to living out their faith in the context of day-in-and-day-out community. Without that nucleus, you've got no comet.

But here's where it gets interesting.  Because around that nucleus of disciples there's going to be a glowing “coma”—that is to say, a bunch of folks who are Christian and committed to Jesus (so they’re glowing) but they aren’t “all in” in terms of their commitment to this local congregation (i.e. they’re not part of the nucleus). They are attracted to the ministry and life of the community, they participate in it on a more superficial level. They are, more or less, moving with the congregation, but they haven’t yet made a deep commitment.

Then there are folks who are in “the tail”—that is, they are Christmas-and-Easter types, maybe, or perhaps they are they are the spouse of a member of the church.  It could be that they were once involved but in various ways have dropped off. They may not even be Christians, but they still have a residual “glow,” because they were or are in contact with the nucleus. However, they’re not really “moving with” the nucleus (or if they are, they’re moving much more slowly).  Every church community, whether they realize it or not, has a "tail" like this.

Like I say, as a pastor, I find this a helpful image for thinking about church life.  Ideally, my work as a pastor helps people in the tail move up into the coma, and people in the coma move up into the nucleus. When people in the nucleus break off into the coma, I do what I can to keep them from dropping into the tail.  I sometimes find it helpful, even, in pastoral work, to ask myself "where in the comet" is this person, and then shape my pastoral response accordingly.

So it's a useful visual, to be sure.

But, here’s the reason I find the comet analogy especially helpful: because for the comet to be a comet (and for it to shine brightly in the night sky) it actually needs the coma and the tail along with the nucleus.

Every local church needs all three.

Of course, you can’t have a tail and a coma without a nucleus, anymore than you can have a church without a core of serious, committed disciples who are moving in the direction of Jesus. However, that nucleus won’t “glow” unless it has a coma and a tail—just like the church won’t “glow” if it doesn’t have an aura of seekers, neighbours, Christians who are not quite “there” yet, etc.—people who are participating in the community at various levels of commitment, but they haven’t made a covenant or membership commitment to this local church.

Sometimes church leaders can be tempted to despair over the "commitment level" of people in their community (and to be sure, the ideal movement is always "up into the nucleus" through deeper commitment and fuller devotion to Jesus), but the thing to understand is that a church without any loosely-committed adherents is like a comet without a coma or a tail.  And just to beat the analogy to death: the movement of the nucleus actually creates a coma/tail; it's inevitable, even, dare I say, desirable.  In the same way, the mission of the church’s core will create a coma and a tail of people who are more-or-less moving with the church but not quite “all in.”

It's inevitable.  Even desirable.  Because a church that doesn’t have this happening, is probably not moving that much on mission, and probably isn't, actually, shining too brightly for Jesus.

Miriam Triumphant, a song

Another song from my latest album, "Accidentals."  A song I wrote almost a decade ago about women in ministry and leadership in the life of the church.  I wanted to save it for the International Women's Day, but that's not till March, and I want to celebrate today.  I am grateful to God for the many godly women, past and present, that he has given his church as examples of what it means to be a courageous, Spirit-fulled, fully devoted follower of Jesus.





You are, you are Miriam Triumphant,
Dancing before the congregation
Leading God’s people in a song of victory
The horse and rider fell into the sea

You are, you are Deborah the valiant
Calling God’s people to the battle
Leading his captains in a march of victory
Judging from your sea beneath the tree

Let the daughters of our Father shout Hallelujah!
Let the children of our God say amen
Let the handmaids of the master usher in his kingdom
Let His spirit on our sons and daughters
Pour out in abundance
Let His vision fill the eyes of our women and our men
Let the children of our God say amen

You are, you are Mary in the morning
Seeking the tomb with your spices
Finding him shining in the light of victory
Proclaiming the news for all to see

You are, you are Phoebe the servant
Working with the gospel of salvation
A sister, commended with the light of victory
Sent by God to set the captives

Let the daughters of our Father shout Hallelujah!
Let the children of our God say amen
Let the handmaids of the master usher in his kingdom
Let His spirit on our sons and daughters
Pour out in abundance
Let His vision fill the eyes of our women and our men

Let the children of our God say amen

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained, a devotional thought

Mark 10:29-30 is one of those verses I think about a lot: whatever sacrifices you've made for the sake of the Gospel, Jesus tells his followers, whether it be houses, property, family, friends, reputation or a secure future, God will pay you back 100 times in this life (with persecution) and with eternity in the life to come. 

The part that makes me think is how he says, they'll receive their sacrifices back one-hundred-fold in this life, not just in the life to come. I wonder what he means here. I get the idea that God will repay our sacrifices on the other side of eternity, but how in this life? Is it even right for us to expect repayment in this life? The best I can make of this verse is that, inasmuch as the sacrifices he's described have to do with one's place in community--family, friends, reputation, wealth, and so on--the 100-fold repayment he's talking about must be the alternate community that God offers us in the Gospel: the friends in Christ, the family in Christ, the reputation in Christ and the wealth in Christ that is our through our life in the Church, regardless the persecutions that come from the world.

This makes sense, but doesn't make it any easier. Because instead of wondering "how will God reward our sacrifices in this life?" it gets me wondering a deeper, even harder thing: is the community I'm part of really a 100-times-better swap for worldly friends, family, wealth and status? I mean: would people counting the cost of following Christ look at what's going on in my community of faith, and really say, "yeah, that's more than ample repayment for what I'd have to give up"?  And, hot on the heels of that wondering comes this: what's my role (by the Spirit) in making it so?

On a break with Jesus, a devotional thought

There's a simple line in Mark 6:31 that reveals the spiritual camaraderie that Jesus wants for us, and with us as his friends and followers.  Earlier on in the chapter, Jesus sends out the disciples with the job of proclaiming the message of the Kingdom, and from the description of their mission, it sounds like it's going to be pretty hard rowing. Then here, a few pages later, they've returned and they're "telling him everything they did and taught in his name."

Already I find this picture so vivid and tender, Jesus gathering his friends back after a hard month or two of work, and sitting down with them as they pour out all the highs and lows of ministry. But then he says, "Come, let's go by ourselves to a desert place and rest a little." And he takes them off by themselves to a lonely place, an out of the way place, away from the press and demands of ministry, with the express purpose of resting a little.

They need it. He knows.

Of course, it won't turn out that way: the crowds track him down and follow him, but even so, it doesn't hurt to linger over his simple invitation: "It's been a lot of hard work telling people about me; come, let's find a quiet place alone and rest a bit."

Those of us in ministry--lay, vocational, bivocational, ordained or some combination of all 4--we need to hear that invitation on a regular basis, too.  "Come," he says, clapping us on the back a bit, maybe, throwing a brotherly arm around our shoulder, "Come, let's find a quiet place and rest a bit together."

May we all have the grace to take him up on his offer.

Polishing up my Proverbs 16 Crown of Glory (Part I): Outnumbered 4 to 1?

One of the tasks I had to complete when I was finishing my training to be a pastor was something we affectionately called the MRRP (pronounced “merp”), that is: a Ministry Related Research Project.  The idea was to choose an issue that was of concrete relevance to the local church, research it thoroughly, and develop a practical project to address it.  When I wrote my MRRP, I had almost no real experience as a pastor, so I chose a topic that was of concrete relevance to me, in particular, and I just took it for granted that it would be of relevance to the church local, too.

I am still convinced that the topic I chose back in 2008, Christian Faith and Care of the Environment, is of vital importance to the church, and I’ve actually had a number of opportunities to follow up on my research in practical ways since becoming a pastor.  So I’m not saying I regret my decision, by any means.  But in the years since my Seminary days, every once in a while this thought strikes me:  “If you were to do a Ministry Related Research Project today, with 6+ years of real ministry experience behind you, and, hopefully, a much more accurate picture of what issues really are of vital importance to the church, which would you choose?”

Lately when I ask myself that question—what pressing issue especially needs theological clarity and fresh creativity and careful attention to biblical detail, today?—the topic that comes first to mind is this one:   How can and ought the church do seniors ministry in ways that are theologically faithful, biblically informed and pastorally responsive to the unique spiritual issues that accompany aging?

Sorry, that was how you wrote MRRP research questions back then.  Let me try again.  Seniors Ministry: how do we do it faithfully, biblically and well?

Please don’t click “Next Blog” just yet!

I know that ministry to, with and among seniors—the elderly, retirees, the aged and aging—this whole vaguely-defined demographic—is not nearly so “exotic” as almost every other ministry focus: ministry to the marginalized, global missions, consumerism and social justice, sexual identity questions, you name it.  But it is, I am increasingly convinced, something that churches neglect to their determent, their loss and, (dare I say) their failure.

And generally speaking, we do neglect it.  I realize that a few entries in the Amazon search bar hardly counts as hard data (and let me assure you, I was much more vigorous in researching my actual MRRP!) but for curiosity’s sake this afternoon, I went to Amazon.ca and queried: “Youth Ministry.”

12,274 results.

Then I queried “Seniors Ministry.”

2,797 results.

Even if you add the results I got for “Ministry to the Elderly” (325) and “Ministry to the Aged” (178), bringing the total to 3,300 results, still, it sort of makes you go hmmm... to think that Amazon has almost 4 Youth Ministry items in their catalogue, for every 1 item they have on Seniors Ministry.  And just to add more specious data to the mix, when I searched Google for a “Youth Pastor Job” I turned up about 1,280,000 hits; searching for “Pastor to Senior Adults jobs,” got me 325,000 hits.  Again the ratio between the two, roughly speaking, is 4:1.

Does the church really have 4 times more interest in youth ministry than it does in ministering to, with and among the elderly?

I don’t know.  There are all sorts of ways to interpret these results so that they say nothing at all about the church’s interest in, commitment to or readiness for ministry among the aged (e.g. Seniors ministry is not so easily distinguished from ministry generally, like Youth ministry is; Seniors ministry is often not a formalized ministry, the way Youth Ministry is, etc.).  But still, 4:1 feels right on a gut level.  For every pastor I’ve known who felt called specifically to minister to seniors, I’m sure I’ve known 4 who felt called to Youth Ministry.

But again, I have no clue if the 4:1 ratio is even remotely accurate. Even if it’s not, however, the real point I’m trying to make today still stands.  A church that inordinately emphasizes youth without also thinking through the unique discipleship opportunities that come along with aging, the unique challenges to spiritual formation that the elderly face, the unique blessing to the community of Faith that seniors are, and the unique role, biblically, that elders were meant to play in the spiritual formation of youth—that church is missing something vital.

More than simply missing something.  If recent findings by Stats Canada are any indication, a church without a robust “theology of aging” that in turn inspires practical ministry initiatives among the elderly, may find itself missing some crucial Gospel-opportunities in Canada’s New Millennium.  Stats Canada predicts that by 2030, seniors (65 and older) will make up 24% of the Canadian population (up from 15% in 2013).  In the next 50 years, they say, the number of octogenarians (80 years and older) will have tripled, going from 1.4 million today, to around 5 million by 2063.

These numbers are intriguing.  They become pressing when paired with Stats Canada’s prediction that the number of people between 15-64 (i.e. those of working age) will decline, from 69% today, to somewhere around 60% by 2030.  (See http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-s-seniors-population-to-jump-workforce-decline-by-2063-1.2770359 for details.). 

In short: over the next few decades, Canada’s population will see a significant increase in the number of seniors, and, at the same time, a decrease in the number of young adults.  Most analysts wonder about the strain this shift will put on the work-force, the healthcare system, the Canada pension plan, the nuclear family.  Churches, I think, should be wondering about this:  how do we do seniors ministry faithfully, biblically and well? 

I am not planning on rewriting my MRRP anytime soon, but I am planning, over the next few weeks here at terra incognita, to ask this very question in a variety of ways.  My plan is to draw out some key biblical themes that should inform a Christian’s perspective on aging (which is, it turns out, often directly at odds with the secular culture’s perspective on aging), and my goal is to sketch out a theological framework for thinking about and talking about, and especially, ministering to the aged.

It may be that these issues seem especially pressing to me because I turned 41 last spring (my reticence to include that detail in this post is probably a sign that the culture I was socialized in is in more desperate need of a “theology of aging” than I realize).  But whatever the reason, I find that it’s on my mind more than ever these days, the theological meaning of growing old.

If you, like me until recently, have always given 4 times (or more) thought to everything else other than aging, and never really suspected that the Christian Faith actually has some wonderfully counter-cultural things to say about this mysterious activity that all of us, whether we realize it or not, are doing every minute of every day, let me invite you to join me here in asking it:  What does the Bible have to say about what it means to grow old?

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Notes from the Ashes, Part VI: A Gift Wrapped in Barbed Wire

It was a dreary morning in December, only a few days after my doctor had put me on "reduced duties" because of symptoms related to work-place stress, and I was walking my then ten-year-old daughter to her bus stop.  I was miserable, with this weight of discouragement and defeat and despair hanging around my heart like a leaden albatross.  To paraphrase Augustine only a little bit: my soul was curved hopelessly in on itself.

As we walked, my daughter was saying something I was barely hearing about the song-writer's club at school. As I gradually came to and it sort of dawned on me that she was talking to me, I heard her say something about how she was looking forward to the day because the song-writer's club was happening at lunch. I asked a few questions and found out that her school had this group of kids that got together each week and, with the help of the teacher sponsors, learned how to write songs.

I write songs-- or I used to--but at that point, in the gloomy days right before Christmas 2013, it had been at least two years, maybe more, since I'd put pen to paper.  I never felt like I had the time. Or the energy.  Or the inspiration.  And anyways, what's the point?

One of the first things depression steals from you, I've since learned, is your ability to find joy in things that were, once-upon-a-time, joyful.  I've come to take this as a bit of a heart-barometer for me: when things that should be giving me joy feel like drudgery, it's time to take stock and/or a breather. But this is now, and that was then, and like I say, my daughter mentioned the songwriters club at school and I thought, "Man, it feels like ages since I've even wanted to write a song, let alone had something to write about."

And so I told my daughter that I'd be interested in volunteering at the club, if the teachers would let me.  She said she'd ask at school that day.

Things progressed for me pretty quickly from there, as far as my burnout was concerned.  My "reduced work duties" turned into a full-on stress leave. A lot of things came crashing down that I'd been clinging to, to keep me standing; some of my favorite masks to wear came off; and some of the emotional immaturity that I'd been trying hard to hide for a long time finally came out into the light.

But also: I started volunteering at the songwriter's club, where I found the energy, the time, and especially the inspiration to start writing songs again.  Not to sound too melodramatic, but in the midst of my defeat and despair--often because of my defeat and despair--I found something to sing about, and more importantly, the words to sing about it.

I didn't see it coming, but those three months, January to March, 2014, would turn out to be one of the most creative seasons of my life.  It was not a bright cheery kind of creativity, mind you.  It was often a raw, unpolished, haunted kind of creativity, but because of that, a more honest creativity than I'd ever really experienced before.  The songs didn't necessarily gush out of me--I was still very tired a lot of the time--but even so, I wrote at least twelve complete songs in three months, along with a number of arrangements that I worked on for the kids at my daughter's songwriter's club. Besides that, I also wrote a handful of poems, trying to process what I was going through, and, in the second half of my leave, as I felt my energy and optimism returning, four chapters of a novel that I'd been wanting to get to for years.

I'm sharing all this to illustrate one of the paradoxical truths I discovered about burnout.  I haven't done an quantitative study of it, of course, so I can't say if this is true for everyone who goes through it, but it was certainly true for me (and for the record, most of the books on pastoral burnout that I've read more or less bear out this simple observation):  burnout doesn't only steal; it also gives.

At least, if you take it seriously and get the help you need, it can. Burnout can be a profound gift-- a gift wrapped in barbed-wire, you might say, but a gift nonetheless.

I say this as someone who's been through it, and not at all to make light of the struggle, the darkness, the very real risk to your well-being that is burnout; but as someone who has been through it, I don't want to make light of the gift that's there, either.

What, in particular, did burnout give me?  I mentioned the renewed and deepened wells of creativity.  I'd add to that: greater authenticity and transparency in my ministry; better insight as a pastor into the spiritual and emotional struggles of others; greater wisdom in how to love and help and respond to people as they go through them; more real friendships; a deeper relationship with my wife; empirical evidence that God will be there still, on the other side of the dark night of the soul.

It may be that burnout is just a conceptual thing for you today, something you've only read about but never experienced.  It may be that you've come through burnout yourself, and what I'm saying is resonating with you here.  And, of course, it may be that you're right in the middle of something overwhelming today, like I was back in December 2013, and you're wondering if it could possibly get better.

If you're in that third place, let me say that it can.  It will mean taking it very seriously and getting the help you need, it will take honesty and discipline and, especially, God stepping in, but it can become, not just better, but, when you least expected it to be so, an unlikely and beautiful gift.

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Notes from the Ashes, Part V: Busy-ness, Pride and Responsibility

One of the hard truths that I learned about pastoral burnout—and this is one of those truths, I think, that only those who have been through it can really say—is that, while my burnout was not my fault, it was my responsibility.  What I mean by that is, on the one hand, burn out is a consequence of an over-loaded or unhealthy system, not a weak or a failed pastor; and inasmuch as the pastor is not solely responsible for the system, burnout is not his or her fault.  The whole system, not just the pastor, needs to change.

On the other hand, however, as a leader in community, as a follower of Jesus, as a freely choosing agent in the system, I was hardly a mere victim of circumstances beyond my control.  I chose how I would be in the system, what I would say yes to, what I would say no to, what disciplines of self-care I would or would not practice; and, while I couldn’t necessarily choose how certain events or people might impact me emotionally, I could choose how I would process those emotions, what space I would give them in my life.   In this regard, I was responsible for my burnout.

This distinction between fault and responsibility is crucial for understanding and recovering from burnout.  Fault is debilitating.  It has at its root the idea of failure, and as such it’s a judgement of incompetence.  Responsibility, by contrast, is empowering.  It has at its root the idea of “ability,” and as such presupposes one’s competence.  It was only as I came to see my own agency in the system—my “response-ability”—that I was able to see how I could, in fact, be differently in the system, and heal.

Let me flesh this out in relation to one of the key factors at play in any burnout: business.  I’ve shared in a previous post that business, in and of itself, is not the reason people burnout.  People can have a lot to do without burning out, so long as other crucial work-place conditions are in place (the 4 Rs, anyone?).  So it’s not simply a matter of burning out because one’s too busy.

At the same time, however, it is true that I was extremely “busy”—busier than I’d ever been before—in the months leading up to my final crash.   And when I was finally able to look at things with the kind of clarity you can only get after a three month leave and some honest sessions with a trained counselor, I came to see that being un-busy was actually my responsibility.  I was choosing to be busy and I could, with much self-discipline and emotional-maturity, choose not to be busy.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that I was choosing to have a lot to do at work.  The demands of the job were not necessarily my fault.  And I’m not saying that I could have neglected those demands with any integrity.   The system needed to change.

But when I looked at it objectively, I came to see that my business was more a function of my inner life than it was a function of my to-do list.  Wanting to be certain things for others so that I could feel good about myself, I emotionally “owned” every crisis, every conflict, every project, every problem, basking in people’s approval like a cold-blooded snake stretched out on the asphalt of the Inter-State.  Having attached my emotional well-being to the circumstances of my ministry, and having neglected the spiritual disciplines that by their very nature teach us to attach our emotional well-being to God, I was as vulnerable to business,  as that snake is to the on-coming tires of a careening SUV.

Early on in my recovery time I read the chapter on “business” in Eugene Peterson’s The Contempletive Pastor, and it went down for me like a spoonful of Buckley’s: it tasted terrible, but it worked.  Peterson points out how much of our busy-ness is really a function of our emotional insecurities and immaturities.  Because we fear the rejection and feed off the praise of others, we won’t say “no,” or “not now,” or “not me,” when we should, choosing, in effect, to be busy.  And here comes the tough medicine: we are busy, he says, either because A) we are too lazy to set our own schedule and it's easier to have others set it for us, or because B) we are too proud, and believe that our business makes us look important; our complaints about being busy are really, deep down at the core, boasts. 

Peterson goes so far as to suggest that the busy pastor is in dereliction of duty, because the pastor’s primary job is to pastor— to listen, pray, reflect on the scriptures, and to guide others in doing the same—and these activities absolutely require that we be un-busy to do them well.

Like I say, there was no spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down, but it helped me to see what was really going on for me.  The pastor who is busy because he is too proud to say things like “I can’t,” who believes, even if subconsciously, that business is a sign of importance, who gets an emotional fix every time he hears someone say, “that pastor so-and-so, he sacrifices so much for his flock,” and so on, that pastor is a prime candidate for burnout.  And responsible for it.

So how do we take back our response-ability in overloaded, maxed-out or demanding work conditions?

Two things come immediately to mind.  It’s possible they may sound like so much more Buckley’s to swallow, but they are things that have made, and are making the difference for me, so let me offer them here.

The first is to take responsibility for your inner life.  If we’re saying “I can” when we should be saying “I can’t” because somehow or other it meets an emotional need for us, if we’re letting our insecurities dictate what gets added to or left off the to-do list, if we’re emotionally owning the well-being of the system, these are all signs of emotional immaturity and spiritual unhealth that we need to take responsibility for.  Honest introspection, wise spiritual direction, trust-worthy accountability, disciplined prayer, ruthless self-awareness, and some difficult but necessary conversations, all of these things can help us mature in our spiritual lives.  They are things that only we can do, and things the we must do, if we want to pursue a spiritually-mature, emotionally-centred, un-busy way of being a pastor.

The second is—and I realize I risk sounding like a Sunday School kid here—but the second is: Jesus.  In another place in Contemplative Pastor, Peterson points out that many (maybe most) pastors are not especially good at getting people to take their problems, questions, queries and requests to Jesus, because of their tendency to try to solve the problem, answer the question, field the query and mee the request themselves instead.  Peterson’s still doling out the Buckley’s here, so he goes so far as to suggest that many (maybe most) pastors suffer from an identity crisis, and we actually think it’s our job to solve the problems or answer the questions ourselves, instead of getting people to take them to Jesus.   Could it be, he wonders, with a grimace as bitter as any 10-year-old swallowing cough syrup, could it be that we, as pastors, do this, because really, deep down inside, we’d rather people came to us with their problems, than go to God themselves?

I don’t know about that, but I do know that it was a major shift for me, to acknowledge that I am really only an under-shepherd, that Jesus himself is the Chief Shepherd, and that I haven’t really done my job until my people have actually gone to Him with their pastoral needs.  It’s helped me find a different way of being a pastor, a way of choosing to have a lot to do, without being, necessarily, busy.

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Notes from the Ashes, Part IV: Been There, Done That

When I was studying biblical Greek in Seminary, I made a commitment at one point to read through the entire Greek New Testament in a year.  I figured out the number of pages I’d have to cover each day to get through the whole book in 365, and just started slugging.

Matthew was agonizingly slow.  Mark a bit better.  Luke a bit worse.   After Luke, John was a breeze.  Acts was more agony, but by the time I was done it, I felt like I could tackle anything.  Romans: check.  1 Corinthians: check.

And then I hit 2 Corinthians. 

I was light-years away from being an expert, of course, but even so, here was Greek unlike anything I’d come across in the New Testament to date.  Mark was raw but concrete.  John was simple but stunning.  Acts was convoluted but sophisticated.  2 Corinthians was all of those first things—raw and simple and convoluted—and none of the other—concrete and stunning and sophisticated.  I would read sentences over and over and try as I might, I just couldn’t make sense of them.  The grammar was so clipped, the constructions so terse, the language so allusive that for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out.  I’d consult English translations and sometimes they’d help, but sometimes, too, it looked like they were having as much difficulty as I was.

My Greek prof knew about my read-it-though-in-a-year project and he’d check in on me periodically.  One morning when I was right in the middle of 2 Corinthians he asked how it was going.  When I explained how different, and difficult, the Greek in 2 Corinthians seemed, he kind of smiled knowingly.

And he said: “You’re not the first to notice that.  Many scholars think it’s because Paul’s just so worked up—so exasperated with the situation in Corinth—that he can barely get his thoughts out coherently.”  (Remember, of course, that this is the second letter he’s written to this imploding congregation, and from what we can tell things have been going from bad to worse and somewhere before the writing of 2 Corinthians, it had gotten personal).

I’ve since come back to 2 Corinthians a number of times.  With a bunch of years experience in reading Greek behind me now, it doesn’t seem as bad as it did that first time through, but still, there are exposed nerves all over the place in this letter, and it really does bleed through in the Greek.  It reads more like a hurting, hurried, harried Dear John letter than it does a theological treatise (although, interestingly, it happens to include some of the most theologically verdant texts in the whole entire New Testament.  2 Corinthians 5, anyone?). 

I’m not saying that the Paul who wrote 2 Corinthians was necessarily burned-out when he penned this letter; but I am saying this: as far as I can tell, it sounds in places a whole lot like the kind of letter a burned-out pastor might write, if he were writing to his church in Koine Greek.

Biblical scholar N. T. Wright puts it like this: “[Paul’s] tone, even his writing style, indicates ... that something has happened [at Corinth] which has changed him, and that he and the Corinthians have been through something that has changed their relationship.  ... [He] does not say what, precisely has happened, but he tells the Corinthians the effect it had on him: he was so utterly overwhelmed, beyond any capacity to cope, that he despaired of life itself.”

And then in his analysis, N. T. Wright adds this: “Paul's talk about internalizing a death sentence sounds close to what we might call a nervous breakdown, and certainly indicates severe depression.”  (Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 297-9).

Ok, maybe I am saying that the Paul who wrote 2 Corinthians was burned-out.  Sort of.   And perhaps my hesitancy to put it that starkly indicates some of the lingering stigma that I still carry about burn-out itself.  Could it really be that the author of one of the books of the Bible actually burned out in ministry?  And that he made one of his major contributions to the Canon in that emotional state?

I’ll let you read it and decide for yourself.

For my part, I have come to see 2 Corinthians as one of God’s great gifts to pastors, and especially to burned-out pastors.  Because it’s the letter where God not only told me, but showed me, that He gets it.  He really gets it and in his book he acknowledges it: the despair, the distress, the discouragement, the darkness that can sometimes be part of this high and glorious calling.  He neither condemns it, nor sweeps it under the rug, but tenderly embraces it.

Having been through burn-out and come through better on the other side, I take a lot of encouragement from the fact that God included 2 Corinthians in his book.  But I also take a few practical lessons from it.  And if anything I’m saying is resonating with you today, let me offer them in closing.

First:  There is great power in the words “Been there.”  Part of what Paul is saying to burned out pastors in 2 Corinthians, is simply, “I’ve been there.”  And there is healing and hope and help in those three simple words, in knowing that you are not alone. 

The second lesson is related:  If you have been there, then be there for someone who is there.  One of the reasons I’ve been doing this series, in fact, is because I’m trying to learn the very same lesson that Paul’s burn-out (if that’s really what it was) taught him: “That God comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble, with the same comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Cor 1:4).  If you’ve come through a burn-out, understand that it wasn’t for your sake that you came through; it was for God’s glory and the sake of others.

Third—and this, I think, is the most important lesson of all—burn-out does not, and will not disqualify you from ministry.  One of the lies that makes it so hard, I think, for pastors to get help or make changes, is this one: “If people knew how much you’re struggling right now, you’d lose all credibility as a pastor.”  We could stretch this out if we wanted to include all Christians: “If people knew how much you’re struggling, you’d lose all credibility as a Christian.”

Whatever else 2 Corinthians is, it’s evidence that this lie is just that: a lie.  Paul’s transparency did not disqualify him as a pastor.  Second Corinthians’ emotional rawness did not disqualify it from the Good Book.  Neither will honesty and humility about how heavy the burden is right now disqualify a hurting pastor from God’s calling on his or her life.

The sooner we call out the lie that says it will, the better.

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Notes from the Ashes, Part III: The 4 R's of Burnout

In a previous post on pastoral burnout, I suggested in passing that burnout is sort of an occupational hazard in ministry.  I don’t have empirical evidence that this is so, but anecdotally, I can say that the number of pastors I met during my own burnout time who quietly admitted, “I’ve been there, too” when I shared what I was going through, was kind of surprising to me.

As I say, I’m not sure if burnout is a special risk in pastoral-work, over and above other kinds of people-leading-people-helping sorts of jobs, but early on in my recovery I came across some teaching that helped me understand, if it is, why that might be the case.

It has to do with what this article calls "The 4 R’s of Burnout."  The whole article is worth a read, but here’s the idea in a nutshell.  Burnout is not simply a function of one’s work load.  That is to say, one can work under a high degree of responsibility, demands and stress, without approaching burnout, so long as the work is meeting certain other, necessary conditions; and conversely, if these conditions are not being met, then even relatively low demands can put someone at risk of burn-out.  We can think of these “necessary conditions” as the “4-R’s,” and the point is: most people can shoulder a relatively high work load without the risk of burnout, so long as the 4 R’s are in place; and by implication, simply adjusting the workload, without addressing the 4 R’s, won’t, in and of itself, mitigate the risk.

The 4 R's are:  Recognition, Rewards, Results and Relief.

According to the article I cited above, “If, no matter what you say or do, results, rewards, recognition and relief are not forthcoming ... the groundwork is being laid for apathy, callousness and despair.”

In practical terms, what this means is that someone can work long, hard hours without burning out if they know that there is an end in sight, if it’s possible to see the tangible results of their work, if they are receiving compensation commensurate to the demands of their work, and if they are duly recognized for what they are doing.  If, on the other hand, they are working in demanding conditions, but not seeing results, receiving recognition or being rewarded in ways commensurate to their work, and there’s no end in sight, that’s when the perfect-storm clouds start brewing.

Now: what I am about to say is simply an observation.  I have worked through these things in my own experience and do not make this observation out of a spirit of resentment or grudge at all.  I love the work that Jesus has called me to do and as best I can I do it “with all my heart, as working for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).  I wouldn’t trade it for the world, even a world of recognition and rewards.  That said, still, it’s my observation that there are things about pastoral ministry that make "the 4 R’s" hard to come by.

We are conditioned by our faith, for instance, not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, to humble ourselves under God’s hand, to become, as Jesus was, the servant of all.  And, while this is certainly a biblical spirit for pastors to adopt, it makes the idea that we may need or want recognition for our work difficult to accept, let alone admit, or ask for.

Or take results.  I am convinced that of all the kinds of work people do, the work of proclaiming the Word of God is one of the few that will genuinely have eternal significance.  At the same time, however, pastors can put in 20 hours or more on a sermon (and many of the best preachers I know do), and yet they have to sit down in the study Monday morning, and start all over again as if last Sunday’s sermon hadn’t even happened.  The Bible teaches us, in fact, that we’ll have to wait until the other side of Heaven to see the real results of our work (1 Corinthians 3:11-15); and, while I believe that the results on that day will make every drop of blood, sweat or tears worth all the effort, still it makes it hard sometimes to see the more immediate results that keep burnout at bay in other kinds of work.

We’d see similar things if we thought about the rewards—the actual compensation for pastoral work—or the potential for relief—time off and time away from the demands of the work.  The unique nature of ministry as work—the steady pace of it, the spiritual nature of it, the ambiguity of so much of it—all these things make it difficult for pastors consistently to find the relief, results, rewards and recognition they need for what they do.  If burnout is a special occupational hazard of being a pastor, this is probably why.

Again, I share these things as an observation, not a complaint.  But if you are a pastor and this observation is resonating with you today, let me suggest a few lessons I've learned to help deal with the missing R's of pastoral work.

First:  do not under-estimate, low-ball or lose sight of the eternal significance of what you do.  This is not pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die kind of thinking, it's simply a matter of reminding yourself daily that the faithful, disciplined, ongoing proclamation of the Word of God in a well-led community of faith is of eternal importance, and we have Jesus' own word that he will reward it well (see Mark 10:29-30; 1 Corinthians 3:14; 2 Timothy 4:1-8).  The results may not always be evident but, unlike any other work, they are guaranteed.

Second: overcome the ingrained hesitancy to advocate for yourself. We are not being "super-spiritual" or "servant-hearted" when we pretend that we do not actually have the very natural needs that other human beings have.  Often that hesitancy to say "I need..." is not spiritual at all, but simply pride or fear or both; and to be blunt, if we kill ourselves because we're not willing to advocate for ourselves, we haven't served anybody in the end.  This does not mean we approach our work with a demanding self-interest, but it does mean we practice humble self-care; and part of self care is being honest about our own needs.

Third: develop rhythms of rest and retreat.  I'm still learning on this one, but the more consistently you can work sabbath, retreat and rest into your daily, weekly and yearly routines, the more likely you'll be getting at least one of those 4 R's—relief—on a regular basis.

These weren't the only lessons I learned about pastoral burnout, or even the most important, but I've found the 4 R's very useful as a practical framework for understanding why it happens.  And, while I don't think this was exactly what Paul had in mind when he said he'd "fought the good fight and finished the course" in his ministry (2 Timothy 4:7); still, we're more likely to be able to say the same when we reach the end of our ministries, if we're mindful of the 4 R's.

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Notes from the Ashes (Part I): Some Reflections on Pastoral Burn-out

It was just over a year ago now that I went through one of the darkest periods of my ministry, if not my life.  It was a season that started after a long run of emotionally demanding ministry challenges, a few hard disappointments in a row, some big uncertainties looming up on the horizon, and my worst self getting the better of me one too many times.  Before long I was exhibiting all the classic signs of burn-out—severe depression, physical exhaustion, difficulty making even simple decisions, unexpected and uncontrollable bouts of anxiety, and what those in the biz call “escape thoughts.”

After a few months of being like this, it all came to a head one very dark Sunday evening, when an unexpected email from a well-meaning friend expressing some concerns about my ministry, launched me into a startlingly intense and disproportionate explosion of frustration, fear and despair.  I say “startling” because when the storm passed, the uncontrollable eruption of emotion was so alarming to me that I finally admitted to myself, and my wife, that I needed help.

About a month later I was off on stress leave for emotional and physical exhaustion.  About three months after that, after a good deal of self-work, some pretty serious work on my life with God, and some much-less serious but vitally needed rest, I was back at my ministry post, with fresh clarity on who I was as a pastor, renewed heart for the ministry, and new depths in my life with God.  I was, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “an older and wiser man.”

The medical term for what happened to me, I think, is “clinical depression.”  The corporate world calls it “burn-out” and the church sometimes calls it “compassion fatigue.”  I just call it “my dark time.”  It was very real, very raw, at times very scary, and, while I wouldn't wish it on anyone, God used it to help me become the pastor he has called me to be.

For the next few weeks here at terra incognita, I intend to share some practical and/or spiritual lessons I learned from my experience, some of the things God was doing in me through that time, and some of the things I wish people had told me about burn-out while I was going through it.  My purpose here is three-fold.  First, inasmuch as all this happened a year ago now, I think it would be personally helpful to review what I went through, to remind myself exactly how I got to a place I never want to be in again.  Second: one of the things that God said to me early on in my recovery time was that none of this would be wasted, that a deeper, more authentic ministry would grow out of the pain I was in; so perhaps sharing some of these spiritual insights is a way of humbly holding him to that promise, to redeem my burn-out by offering it as help and hope for others.  But most importantly, third: if you, or someone you know is now where I was then, or close, or on the way there, my hope is that these travel notes from someone who’s been down the path before may be of help to you.

To start it all off, let me offer four simple things I learned about burn-out that were very important first-steps—not to my recovery itself, necessarily, but to my getting to a place where I could begin to recover.  In a way similar to how acceptance is the first step to recovery of other kinds, these are four things I needed to hear someone I trusted say to me, before I could begin to heal.

1.  Burn-out is not a sign of failure but of strength. 

I know that sounds like the nonsense motivational speakers say when they want you to believe that "obstacles" are really "opportunities in disguise," but the thing is, when someone burns out, it’s because they've been doing too-well for too-long what other people would have given up on long ago.  Or think about it like the fuse in a car.  When the fuse blows, it’s not because the fuse failed, but because it worked: there was an overload on the system and by “blowing” the fuse did its job and protected the system from frying.  The burned-out pastor is like that fuse, inasmuch as he or she “blew” to keep the emotional load from frying the whole system (the local church or ministry context).  Refusing to “blow” and letting the emotional load fry the system would have been the real failure.

2.   You are not alone. 

Eugene Peterson, Henri Nouwen, Peter Scazzero, Bill Hybels, Rob Bell and, as far as I can gather, the Apostle Paul himself, have all been through what you’re going through.  One of the lies I believed early on in my experience, a lie that was keeping me from seeking the help I needed, went like this: “if you do ‘burn-out,’ your credibility as a pastor (such as it was) will be shot.”  So imagine my surprise, as I began reading about burn out, and I discovered that almost every contemporary church leader I’ve ever admired, respected, taken cures from or tried to model my ministry after, have themselves been through this thing called burn-out.  Knowing they’d come out the other side older and wiser helped me to believe I could, too.

3.  This is not "just in your head." 

Burn-out is as much a physical thing as it is an intellectual or emotional.  This was huge for me to realize because it forced me to accept that I could not "keep pushing" by sheer mental exertion alone, anymore than a guy with a broken femur can just "walk it off."  

(I’ll share more about this later, but here’s how it was explained to me:  your brain is built to run naturally on "feel-good-hormones" like endorphins, oxytocin and what not.  These chemicals are produced naturally by things like rest, sleep, physical exercise, good nutrition, making love to your spouse, enjoying the company of good friends, and so on.  If you deplete your system of these hormones because you’re running it too hard without doing the things that replenish them, your body will start producing adrenaline—a stress hormone—to keep it running instead.  This is like if you run out of gas for the car, so you use some high octane rocket fuel because it’s all you’ve got; it’ll run for a while, but eventually it will destroy your engine.  If you’ve been running for months on adrenaline, eventually the system will shut down, and no matter how hard you turn the key, it ain't gonna start anymore.  The only way to heal is to do those things—rest, exercise, recreation, friendship, nutrition—that replenishes the tank.)

4.  Depression is real. 

I would have "said" this before my dark time, of course, but after the dark time, I actually "get it." People who have experienced depression have different terms for it—the noon-day demon, the black dog, and so on—that try to put their finger on what it’s like to be depressed.  I often describe it like this: “It’s like, the sun’s shining.  You can feel the light on your face, feel the warmth on your skin, see the blue sky, and yet your brain tells you with all seriousness, ‘nope.  It’s another cloudy day.’”  I never thought I stigmatized people with depression before, until I faced my visceral resistance to seeking help for my own depression, and suddenly I realized all the prejudices and stereotypes and judgement I subconsciously harbored about “cloudy Dee,” that I never realized or admitted before.  It could be that exorcising those things—judgment, prejudice and stereotypes about depression—was one of  the things God was doing through my burn out.

If any of this is resonating with you today, let me encourage you to take it seriously.  One of the other things I learned about burn-out is that there's sort of a lag-time with it—that is, often we are burned out months before the "running on adrenaline" catches up to us and we finally have to admit that the tank is empty, so the sooner we're honest with ourselves, the better.

Burn-out is not the end of the world, but it is the end of some things—a false kind of self-sufficiency, an unrealistic perception of yourself and your limits, in-authenticity and dishonesty about where you're really at with God. But as someone who's been through it, let me humbly suggest that for us to grow in the ways of Jesus, the sooner those things come to an end, the better.

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Ministry in the Depths

Lectio Divina is a spiritual discipline that I would recommend to any Christian who wants to develop a listening ear for God's voice in the world.  The term is Latin for "Sacred Reading" and it's a way of reading the Scriptures where you meditate closely on a single story, or image, or verse.  The idea is to choose a text and read it prayerfully, over and over and over again, allowing God to speak through it as it settles from your mind, through your heart and into your spirit. 

A quick example:  a few years ago I was working through some self-doubt and self-image issues in my Christian life, and as I wrestled with this junk, I realized that a lot of it boiled down to fear: fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of death (in the most abstract sense).  It was at that point that God reminded me of 1 John 4:18, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear."  So I spent a while in lectio divina on this passage, rolling it over and over in my mind.  Perfect love drives out fear-- how does God love me and how do I know it?  Perfect love-- what is it about my experience of love right now that is imperfect?  Perfect love drives out fear-- what is the nature of my fears and how could God's love drive it out?  And so on.  As these words started to sink in, with their various shades of meaning and levels of emphasis, I actually began to experience the love of God driving out those fears in me.

The reason I'm telling you all this today, though, is because a while ago I was working through some stuff related to my understanding of my purpose as a pastor.  I was praying about it one day, and God reminded me of the story in Luke 5, where Jesus calls his first disciples.  If you recall, he meets Peter, James and John  in a sailboat, washing their nets after a failed night of fishing.  Jesus gets into the boat with them and tells them to let down their nets into the deep water (5:4).  Peter is skeptical, but at Jesus' word he does so, and the subsequent catch they draw in is so miraculous it sinks Peter to his knees with an awed awareness of his own sin, even as the boat begins to sink with the weight of the fish.  (And of course, it's after this catch of literal fish that Jesus calls them to become spiritual fishermen, suggesting, it seems, that this miracle is only a taste of what he will accomplish through them as his disciples).

As I spent some time in lectio divina on this passage, it was that phrase in 5:4 that bobbed to the surface for me:  "put out into the deep water and let down your nets." 

It struck me that Peter and the rest only experience the miraculous presence of the Kingdom of God (as signified by the catch of fish) after they put their nets into the deep water.  And it struck me next that sometimes churches are content to do ministry in the shallows--not to go too deep in their encounter with the Word, or the emotional risk of their ministry, or their engagement with God's world.  It can be tempting, I think, to keep things spiritually superficial--on the surface--safe.

But as those two observations struck me, I heard there God's call to put down the nets "into the deep water" in my own work as a pastor.  With that call came his challenge that it's only there, in the deep water of ministry, that a church will ever answer it's call to become "fishers of men."  Because it's only there, it seems-- going deep with people, spiritually speaking--that the life-transforming miracles of the Kingdom can occur.