All the Ideas | Stuff that Bugs Pastors

Friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast,
our series, Stuff That Bugs Pastors,
a look at some of the kind of behind the scenes of things that go on in the church that are sometimes
frustrating, sometimes navigating them,
takes some planning,
sometimes not always easy.
Today,
I don’t know, Michael,
I think of this as kind of a fun conversation.
Really, what we’re talking about today is kind of preferences.
We all have different ideas.
And how is it that churches
can be places where those ideas are shared when they’re helpful?
But through the years,
I think most pastors end up surprised by the kind of things that come up.
And so,
I think if there’s a theme today that we’ll try to unpack,
it’s the idea of suggestions to make things better,
which when they are good suggestions, is wonderful.
When they’re less good suggestions, it’s a challenge.
Well,
so I think starting at the top may be helped then by sort of fleshing out a little bit
about what we mean by that.
Because there are some ideas that are good,
that are not good ideas right now.
There are also some ideas that may have been good somewhere else that aren’t good
here.
And this list can go on and on and on.
I guess an example I would give is my wife grew up
in a rural farming community.
And every year, they did a service that surrounded planting,
and then another service that surrounded the reaping of the harvest.
And for that community, those were milestones.
Those were moments in time where they were praying for a good season
of growing.
And then they were giving thanks for a successful season on the backside of that.
That made sense to their community.
Now, we do have some farmers at first press,
but we’re not nearly
the kind of farm community that my wife grew up in.
And so that service,
though it may be a good idea,
may not be a great idea for our community.
So I think nailing down Clint at the very beginning
of this conversation is what do we mean when we talk about those kinds of ideas,
those suggestions that help a church move forward versus those suggestions that can sometimes actually be
distractions?
Because we want to be clear in this conversation.
We think that an active
conversation throughout the whole church is helpful,
especially when that comes to church
leadership.
And hey, we have an idea.
Could we do this?
Or what do you think about this?
That’s great.
It is interesting, though, the number of times that that gets brought up,
where at the end
of that meeting, you kind of just look and you think,
huh,
that was surprising.
I didn’t even
see that one coming.
Yeah. And I think I’ll just start personally.
One of the places that lands
for me are what we might call hot buttons,
things that happen in the culture or in the church.
When our General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church used to meet every year,
now they meet every other year.
They used to meet every year.
And I dreaded it because I knew it was the one
time a year we were going to make the news.
And I was going to have people come in and say,
we have to do this.
We have to do that.
Did you know this happens?
And I think that continues
to happen culturally as we face different things.
A few people want to have genuine conversation.
You know, recently,
questions of racism and classism,
those kind of things have risen to the
surface.
And people say, I’m really wrestling with those things.
I don’t know what they mean.
Other times, people say, hey,
we need to talk about this.
But what they mean is,
we need to make sure everybody knows the right way to look at this,
which is always the way that
they happen to look at it.
And I think pastors often just kind of dread the next news cycle
as the idea that we’re going to have to trot something out to keep in line with those themes and those ideas.
And generally, we don’t want to.
I would say 99% of the time,
we feel like we have
stuff that is more pressing and more important in our own place.
Or we understand that those
conversations are bigger than our grasp of,
and we need some time to sort through and do some study
and do some thinking.
And so, I think hot button issues are tough from a pastor’s chair.
And I think I would only speak for myself.
I don’t love them.
We live in a moment where these issues, Clint,
I think very often come forward as being the
essential issues.
Yeah, they dominate the news cycle.
Right, yeah.
This is the thing that we must take a stand on.
The trouble with this is as people who
try to think and to varying levels of success,
we recognize in the church that we not only have our thoughts today,
but we have thousands of years at this point of Christian history,
some very faithful disciples and readers of Scripture.
And we, in the midst of our present moment,
are always trying to,
with two hands, hold on to the reality of today’s questions because
the gospel compels us to our own time and place to be witnesses to the grace of Jesus Christ.
But simultaneously,
we’re compelled to hold on to the full richness of the faith that we’ve
been given.
I mean,
generations of disciples who have sought to help us know and see the full
breadth of the revelation of Jesus Christ.
The point I want to make is when a person comes in
and says, this thing is essential,
we need to say this.
The thing I struggle in those conversations
to find words for Clint is to say,
I understand that right now,
if we were sharing a conversation
on a news program or on a sitcom or whatever that looks like,
if we were talking to our culture,
yes, this is the question of this moment.
But what we have to realize is that this question
may have four questions behind it that our ancient Christians would call us to think differently or
to ask us to have a more nuanced understanding of.
It’s almost never as simple as what we would
like it to be.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the church doesn’t need to have conviction,
Clint,
but it does mean that we need to approach it with a very strong dose of humility.
And often, the conversations that sound like we need to fill in the blank often do not start at that place.
Yeah, it’s not always a feather in our cap,
but generally speaking, Presbyterians have not made
the mistake of jumping in too quick.
If anything, we live on the other side of the spectrum where
we tend to overthink,
but it does take some time to try and understand an issue and give it some
depth.
I have a family member,
an extended family member,
Michael, who knows that I’ve done some
coaching and have just a little bit of experience with injuries and medical stuff,
and somehow being a pastor gets folded into that.
So they will sometimes call me and say,
“Clint,
I have this doctor who told me this.
What do you think?” And my answer is always,
“I think you should listen to your doctor.
Why are you asking me?” And the same is true
if there are questions of history,
if there are questions of sociology,
if there are questions of politics.
We, as much as we appreciate the confidence,
we don’t deserve it in many instances.
It takes some time to seek out some experts to try and understand an issue,
and then put that issue in conversation with the theology of the church.
That’s not something that’s done in an afternoon.
That takes some very intentional and very time-consuming effort.
And I think we feel it’s important to do that stuff because jumping in too fast can have
some really tough ramifications for the church and for people.
We can do damage when we rush ahead
because something was on the news.
We want to push the pause button and think that through.
And so I do think pastors feel often,
if we’re using this language of being bugged,
I think we feel sometimes bugged by,
and that doesn’t even necessarily come from the congregation.
It’s from the culture as a whole who wants to obsess over something for five minutes
and then go on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing without actually having
careful, thoughtful conversation.
And certainly that’s a challenge.
Well,
and really, Clint, if we’re going to dig under the surface of that,
at some point, we’re going to need to be able to admit that there is a difference between the deep,
grounded, thoughtful, nuanced understanding of any particular thing and our opinions or
even our preferences, what we would like to believe.
I’ll tell you,
some of the most
transformational moments in my life,
things that have transformed the way that I view the world
around me have come in being exposed to engaging with,
wrestling with ideas that were radically
different from what I had held previous.
To be quite honest,
they came from moments that were
uncomfortable, sometimes even a struggle to find a way forward in that.
And a thing that I’ve
learned in those moments,
Clint, is that, yes,
it is harder to take it slow.
It is harder to
actually open yourself up to a thing or an idea that is not natively your own.
It’s not inside your own experience that and to say, huh,
what can be learned from this?
We will often find critique
in that.
That can be hard.
Sometimes we’ll find affirmation or we’ll find a richness that we
didn’t even know existed.
We’ll say,
wow, can’t believe I’ve gone so long without that piece of the puzzle.
But as we do that work,
Clint, I do think that the bugging part of it is,
is when there’s the feeling of an expectation that the church should be immediately relevant to the
question that I have right now.
That this is the moment,
Pastor, we need to go 100 miles an hour in this direction.
If we did that,
if church leaders always went 100 miles an hour in the next direction,
we would inevitably leave behind a lot of people off of the boat who just weren’t
even aware that the church was going to change direction or understand that we should change.
There’s a kind of denying of the us and us kind of demanding that everything needs to be right now.
We as a community need time to travel together.
And that’s often not satisfying when folks encounter that.
At our best, Michael, and we certainly don’t always live up to this in the
Presbyterian church, but as part of the Reformed family, at our best,
we are kind of allergic
to shallowness.
We strive to get deeper in our faith than the surface.
And so I think whenever
we’re forced to rush into something with the feeling that we don’t really know what kind
of water we’re in yet,
there is a frustration there of thinking,
“We’re not ready for this.
We don’t know what this means.” And the danger that we live with is overthinking,
paralysis by analysis, that we sort of end up ignoring things by not having a clear word about them.
But one of the ways that kind of,
a very lighthearted way that that shows up is the plethora,
the ton of mail and email that we get each week and each month of the newest,
latest, greatest thing, what we could call tricks and trends.
“Hey, pastor,
revolutionize your worship service.
Hey, pastor,
use this new hymnal and people will flock to your church.
Have you done this yet?” And you get that stuff through those channels.
You also hear some of it
when you gather with other pastors, particularly at conferences.
There’s this whole,
“Hey, do you guys do this?
Have you tried that yet?” But this idea that there are just these kind of plug and
play, just if you just do our thing,
if you just read this book,
if you just implement this program,
and I have a very knee-jerk reaction to that because my experience is very rarely
do good, thoughtful,
effective ministries happen easily and quickly and without a lot of work on
the front end.
So I will say with no reservation that that kind of marketing is a thing that bugs me.
Well, it goes against one of my cardinal rules of when an idea is helpful.
And that’s when that
idea fits into a particular place.
Whenever you have an idea that you think of as being universal,
like, “Hey, look, we have this book that we’re going to import or we’re going to have this
program we’re going to import.” I’m not saying that it doesn’t work.
And lots of times congregations
do sort of build around it.
It kind of reminds me of you’ve seen those times where maybe they’ll
put like a board against two trees and then the trees will grow around the board.
I mean, sometimes you can take an external thing and the church can grow around it and that can be a good thing.
And far too often,
those are not offered in the spirit of,
“Hey, in 10 years, this is going to provide
your congregation a new opportunity to serve.” They’re intended,
or at least the way that they were that is,
“Hey,
here’s a get fixed quick scheme.
Get more people in the church.
Get more giving.” Every time around October or November,
I get a plethora of emails of things that you should
do to increase church giving,
which I understand that that is on every pastor’s mind.
You’re coming to the end of the year where you’re mindful of the organization’s needs.
And lots of pastors,
quite frankly, are uncomfortable talking about money.
And so, you know, that’s a natural thing.
But when you export,
“Well, come to this video conference and we’re going to give you the four
steps to success,” that is always the temptation of,
“We’re going to do this thing and it’s going
to fix the problem,” instead of taking a step back and asking some of the harder questions,
such as, “Why do people not feel compelled to contribute financially in the midst of this
ministry?” That’s a very difficult question,
but that is, it seems to me,
a far more helpful way
in than that particular sort of tool that’s being given or offered.
Yeah. That’s a good point,
Michael.
One of the inherent flaws in that logic is that something
that works in one place will work the same way in another place.
And it’s just,
you know, it’s just not the case.
And you hear some vestiges of this.
You hear some evidence of this.
Maybe someone visits a church.
Maybe they go to a large church and that church does some kind of wild
stuff.
And they say, “Hey, at that church, the pastor rode in on a horse and it was really great.”
And you say, “Well, yeah,
I guess, but probably we’re not going to do that.
We don’t need
a horse.” And I think for our tradition,
and again, one of the temptations is we’re slow to change.
But for our tradition,
one of the most important questions on the front end is,
“Why do we do this?” And that people like it can be part of the answer,
but it can’t be the full answer.
And so, there are things that are meaningful to people,
but what we try to ask is what is the meaning of doing it?
Why do we do it?
So someone says, “Well, he rode in on this horse and it was great.” Yeah,
but why?
Why does a pastor
ride a horse into a sanctuary?
What’s the message there?
What does it convey?
Who does it point to?
Who gets the attention and the sort of adoration of that?
What is it about?
Why would we do that?
Literally,
why would that be happening in a worship service?
And maybe there’s good answers
to that.
And I believe that good ideas will survive that kind of scrutiny.
A good idea
will bear up to all those questions and it will prove itself to be a good idea by bearing up,
whereas other ideas, you’ll be able to say,
“Well, I guess there’s no good reason.
We just thought it was fun to have a horse running around.” And sometimes that’s okay.
Certainly during COVID, we did some stuff because we thought it would be fun.
And we thought fun
in that period was worth it.
But it came at the end of thought.
The idea wasn’t just how
do we entertain.
It was in entertaining what is provided to people.
And I don’t want to suggest
that we have it figured out.
I don’t mean that.
Nor do I criticize churches that make decisions
that we wouldn’t do here because we’re not them and they’re not us.
I just think sometimes people
don’t understand that there’s a more complicated process than,
well, people seem to like it.
Yeah.
Let me give an example maybe to even take that another step here,
Clint.
So I think one
tradition that some congregations have in worship,
especially the more technologically advanced
congregations, is you’ll see a praise team and they’ll lower the lights of the sanctuary of the
congregation and they’ll have bright spotlights that they’ll put on the musician team.
Maybe the singers, maybe the instrumentalists.
And so what you have is a dark room with people who are
illuminated.
And I’m not going to criticize that.
I think Clint makes a great point that different communities,
different worship styles, we can have conversations.
But think about the theological
meaning that comes in darkening the room for everyone except for a select few.
As those in the Reformed tradition,
that suspect, we believe very strongly in the worship of all of the people.
So in elevating some in that very visual way,
we would have some concern and want to have some substantial conversation about,
well, why do we do that?
What does that communicate to those who come
and become darkened while some are illuminated?
What does that have to say about the status we give that one?
Are we suggesting that those who have a nicer singing voice should have different
treatment than those who don’t?
Or are we suggesting that those who stand on the chancel
should in some ways be elevated in the worship experience?
We would want to wrestle with that.
The point that I’m making here is not so much to illuminate that other than to say
that most people when they come and say,
“Hey, I think it would be a more meaningful worship
experience if we dimmed the lights,” are not saying that they want to elevate the people on
the stage.
They’re not saying that they want to contradict some Reformed theology.
They’re saying, “I think that this would be meaningful.” Where I think comments like that are helpful
is that when they are offered in the spirit of,
“I think that this would be a meaningful contribution
to worship,” then what that admits is,
“From my seat and my vantage,
I want to offer this as an idea.” Incredibly helpful.
When that comes and says,
“We are not worshiping until we lower those
lights and get bright stage lights,” then that now ceases to be a conversation for the community,
and it now becomes one person trying to really put over the community a preference.
I think the spirit of what we offer in our ideas and the humility with which we’re willing to engage with
some of that back-and-forth questioning that you speak about, Clint,
I think that is the thing that
determines whether or not we’re contributing to an ongoing conversation or whether we’re trying to
get our way.
It’s a very tricky line,
both for pastors and for congregates.
That goes the other
way where a pastor has a very strong idea,
“This is theologically what we need to do,” and the
congregation says, “But it’s not meaningful.” Well,
then we need to engage and figure out that middle way.
Yeah, and I think what makes that interesting,
Michael, those conversations, is that somebody has had that experience,
they went to a church,
they saw that, they thought it worked,
but they don’t necessarily bring to it all of the questions that we try to ask from the
other side before we offer it,
say, in a sanctuary.
I had another experience with things
that we could loosely call blessing services.
There are churches that do pet blessings or
RV blessings or motorcycle bike blessings.
And in those services,
we kind of elevate those things,
and of course people like them because if they like RVing or they like their dogs and cats,
they like the idea that these things are getting a blessing.
And I think when they say,
“We should do a pet blessing,” that’s what they mean.
I enjoyed that.
I liked it.
But when you stop and
you ask the question,
“Okay, we’re bringing dogs and cats in the sanctuary before God Almighty
and asking God Almighty to bless,” first of all,
Presbyterians, we don’t bless things.
That’s not really our tradition in the sense of a blessing of,
like pastors have some
power to bless things.
And if you wanted to argue,
maybe you could argue dogs and cats
because they’re living things,
part of family, but a motorcycle or an RV,
not that there’s anything wrong with having a pet,
an RV, or a motorcycle.
Those are all fine things.
But the idea that they’re going to somehow be blessed,
what does it mean that they’re
blessed?
Are they holy?
Is my motorcycle now holy?
Or am I simply praying that as I ride it,
I’ll hopefully be safe and not make stupid decisions?
Yeah, maybe.
But when you really dig
into some of those things,
there isn’t always a lot there other than people liked it.
And again,
it is wonderful when people like things we do at church.
Of course it is,
but
it doesn’t always fit.
And that’s not a criticism.
I think it’s just to say that
there are more questions than simply how people react to the thing.
Have you ever been in church?
This is my question.
Have you ever been in church
and you left a worship experience and you felt like it was perfect except fill in the blank,
maybe music style sermon,
the way that the scripture was read,
the words offered in the prayer.
I imagine that’s not only happened to you.
I imagine it happens to you nearly every week
if you’re a regular attender in church.
And I just want to encourage you,
that is everyone’s
experience because this is the nature of being Christian community is we are always on the road
seeking to worship together to blend our voices as the unique body of Christ.
And I think one of
the things that did surprise me,
Clint, in my early time in the pastoral role is how much diversity
of life experience and opinion and preference and even meaning there is in the Christian family.
There are some who grew up in very,
very what we would call liturgical,
very kind of formal church
experiences.
There are others who come from very informal church experiences and very expressive
kinds of environments.
We’re all gathered together.
And in some ways we’re a little bit
of a motley crew.
We’re trying to do the best we can with the gifts that we’ve been given.
We’re trying to honor a holy God who’s called us as his own by his own grace and love.
We’re trying to worship.
We’re trying to praise the creator,
the redeemer, the judge.
We try to take that very, very seriously.
And when we take it seriously,
we inevitably leave lots of ideas on the table.
And even some of those are good ideas.
Some of those would work for me,
but they’re not going to work for us.
And so I think it takes a lot of wisdom and a lot of open-handedness to walk into Christian
community and just say,
here’s a thing that I have seen done that was really meaningful to me.
Would that be meaningful to us?
And then to navigate that messy middle,
because who’s us and how do we
know if that’s us?
And does that fit our tradition?
And clearly it’s complicated and nuanced.
This is why we try to work with our lay leadership and our pastoral leadership.
If the church seems like
it moves slowly on good ideas,
that’s not always a sign that it’s broken.
Right.
Sometimes it’s a sign that we’re cautious,
maybe too cautious.
But there’s an interesting place where that
sometimes happens, Michael.
And I want to be careful with this because we do genuinely
appreciate suggestion.
We do genuinely want the church and believe the church should be a place
that arrives at what it does through the input of lots of people,
not just the pastors.
We’re two pastors sitting here who will tell you that we don’t think pastors
should have some sort of iron grip over what the church does.
In fact,
that’s not a good,
healthy pattern for a church.
Having said that,
there are times that people
transition and what their last community meant to them is hard for them to let go of.
And so the typical phrase is,
“At my last church.” And I think generally,
generally and genuinely, we want to hear some of that.
But it also has to have a recognition that this isn’t that place.
And maybe those things don’t work here.
Maybe the culture’s different.
Maybe the context is
different.
Maybe the community’s different,
whatever it was.
And we understand that there’s
something of grieving in that often when people look back.
Or the other expression of it,
and this is almost always, I think, tied to grieving, Michael, is when a church looked back at its own
life and says, “We used to do this,
and it was wonderful.
It worked, and people volunteered, and the whole community came out to do it.
And then that thing stopped working.
And we just think if we could do the thing again.” I think we mentioned this in a previous podcast.
We just hold on to the idea that if we could do that thing again,
we could kind of recreate the past,
which honestly virtually never works.
It just isn’t typically productive.
But when people have those connections to either a prior place or a prior time,
and they offer those ideas,
I think one of the things that can be hard to sort out is whether it’s about the idea itself,
or whether it’s about the emotions and this sort of nostalgia,
or even the missing of
what and when those things were.
I want to just add a category to that.
It’s not just a time or a place.
I’ve actually had the
experience occasionally where I felt like it was a person,
where someone says, “I became a Christian under pastor,
fill in the blank.” But this pastor, this church leader,
maybe even my parent,
was so substantial in my coming to know Jesus.
They’re my mentor.
They inspired me.
They were charismatic.
In those situations, it’s also very challenging because while you’re hearing this,
you number one want to affirm,
“This person sounds incredible.
Thanks be to God that you
got to have an encounter like this with a person.” On the other hand,
it’s also very scary because
you sit in the room thinking,
“Well, I’m not them.
I don’t have that skill or I don’t live
in the same place.” There’s a sense in which, yes,
we want to affirm that in our life experience,
whether that been a place that we were,
a place that we grew up,
people who we met along the way,
experiences that we’ve had in that journey.
These all come together to form us,
to give us a
meaningful faith, faith that means something to us.
That’s a great gift.
Thanks be to God.
And I mean that wholeheartedly.
I think the trick is,
or maybe the struggle of Christian
discipleship, is recognizing that we’re not living then and that person may not be here.
We’re living today and we’re seeking to be faithful together today.
And so though that
particular mentoring experience may have been helpful to give an example,
maybe we don’t have
that here right now,
but maybe this is a way that you could offer a similar gift in the midst of the
congregation in a way that it is ready for.
That requires of us,
Clint, a kind of flexibility
that I think, you know, not a lot of us are generally need to,
or sorry, that we’re not used to.
I mean,
lots of times we get to choose where we’re going to eat or where we get our
groceries or how we’re,
what we’re going to watch on the TV.
And if we’re used to that,
church may be a difficult place because we have to recognize what’s meaningful to circles that we
might not even really know,
especially if it’s a larger church.
Yeah,
I think, Michael, those moments are just tricky to navigate.
Again, from the pastoral side, because you have this person,
this event, this place that was desperately important,
genuinely important to someone,
and you realize, “I don’t think we can be that.
I don’t think we
can do that well.
I don’t think it fits in this place.” And you know that inevitably there may be
a disappointment in that.
And I think all pastors,
to some extent, you know,
live with the hatred of
disappointing people.
We’d like not to disappoint people,
as most people do.
And so when there is
that moment where you say,
“Oh, yeah, I’m glad that that worked for you.
I’m glad that that
was meaningful.
I’m glad that that person had that role in your life.
I hope you’ll find down
the road something here that will be that.” And I think that’s the danger in those moments,
is that we want to shortcut the process,
right?
Because that person who was hugely important,
that didn’t happen in a day.
It happened over time.
And in a new place,
you can’t just start where
the old place picked up,
left off.
You can’t just pick up there.
It takes time to grow roots.
It takes time.
The first few times the church did whatever that great program was of the past,
it had to figure out the details.
And then it worked really well for a while,
and then it worked
less well for a while.
And a new thing isn’t going to just step into the shoes and kind of pick up
in that place.
It takes some time.
And I think some of the temptation is the hope that maybe we
could short circuit the process and jump right to the results and not have to slog our way through
the efforts.
And it’s a nice idea,
probably not super realistic.
I think that mirrors other avenues in the Christian church.
It’s not just our desire to
short circuit the time process that’s involved in integrating into a new place.
I think there’s also
a temptation to gravitate to the newest,
the shiniest, the most interesting ideas of the time as well.
And Clint, you can almost tell what thing has hit the bestseller list by the conversations
that will come into the church office.
And I want to be clear,
it’s good to engage with some of the
things being written, some of the things being talked about.
Lots of times,
Christian authors are bouncing ideas off of the general culture.
They’re trying to engage with the world that we
live in.
And so folks will read that.
They’ll find it helpful.
In some cases, it will be unhelpful
to them.
And they’ll bring that in,
and they’ll want to have a conversation about it.
And that’s always good.
I think it’s helpful to engage in some of those conversations that you
might not have found yourself and to learn some new vocabulary and to try to lean into that.
I’ve also had moments where people have brought in a book that I just struggle to even,
to be honest with you, to know exactly how to interface with it.
Because the author of that book believes
that they know exactly how the end times is going to work,
or they know exactly what Christian
dating in every situation should look like.
Or they just have clarity in places where generally
we trust that there needs to be some discernment and some wisdom and some navigating in nuance and gray.
So there are sometimes temptations, I think,
for really simple, clear, here it is, cut and dry ideas.
And that’s a struggle to engage with,
I think, as well.
Yeah, I’ll flat out say, Michael,
I want to explain this,
but I’ll start by saying,
this bugs me a ton.
If you want to talk about things that bug you as a pastor,
this for me is way up on the list.
But it doesn’t have to do with church people.
When I know someone in a
congregation and they come in and they say,
“I found this book helpful,” there’s a relationship there.
I may read the book.
I may say, “I don’t know.
I have some concerns.
I have some questions.”
But we can sort of work that out in the context of relation.
Where I find that it happens in the
way that drives me crazy is out and about.
When I meet somebody and that word pastor, that label,
“What do you do?” I say,
“Oh, I’m a pastor.” Well,
I believe the Old Testament was an alien visitation.
And here’s the book I read.
And I just want to say,
“I don’t care.” I mean, that’s fine.
You’re likely not going to convince me.
I’m not the guy that’s probably going to sign on to this
idea.
But I don’t want to be flipping,
but I think of them as crazy ideas.
And what I mean by crazy is
out on the fringe,
I guess.
And so maybe that’s a better way to say them.
Fringe ideas.
And you’ll
be on a plane.
You’ll be on whatever.
And somebody will say,
“Oh, you’re a pastor.
Well,
I practice this thing.” Or, “I believe this thing.” And you just go,
“Yeah.
Okay.
Good.
I guess.” The idea that
we’re supposed to kind of take all of that equally,
or I don’t know.
The idea that people
want to tell me about my job from the outside.
When people inside First Press want to talk to
me about First Press,
I want to listen because I know those people and they have good ideas.
When somebody I’ve never met wants to tell me what’s wrong with a church they’ve never been to,
I’m just out.
I’m just out.
I don’t have much interest in that.
And I don’t want to rant
because I easily could.
It happens more than I think people would suspect.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
If you’ve not served in a pastoral role,
I think you would be shocked
the number of times.
It’s a very public sort of position in some ways.
And by that, I don’t mean in the local community.
I mean that there is a spot in society,
whether you like the idea of a
pastor or not, that there’s sort of a cultural spot where the pastor fits.
And when some people
learn of that, they very much have a reaction to it.
I think my version,
if we’re talking about
things that bug pastors,
mine is just slightly nuanced from that, Clint.
Because I would say
that this is a substantial frustration to me personally,
but it doesn’t totally fit within
that category, as you describe it.
For me,
one of the things that really bugs me is when people
are engaging with the faith and they’re seeking to do that in a meaningful way,
but at the end of the day,
they’re doing so on a kind of faddish cycle.
The spiritual fads that they kind of get to me,
sort of like in the dieting world,
what’s the thing that’s in today?
That question’s out there,
well, right now everyone’s eating vegan,
or then everyone’s on the Atkins diet,
or whatever the thing is in vogue.
The people who get into a
new sort of spiritual practice,
and everybody’s doing it,
there’s a new hot book.
Have you read the book?
This is the reason that bugs me so much.
It is because every good thing that exists within
the Christian faith has been there since the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Now sometimes we find meaningful ways to engage that from a different perspective.
The moments of my own spiritual journey that I’ve been impacted the most significantly,
the people who have offered me tools and ideas that have,
in some cases, changed my life,
have never been offered as a,
“You should do this.” It has always been,
“Here’s the thing that I found helpful.
You might find it helpful too.” There’s a completely different affect in discovering
centering prayer.
Someone says, “I’ve been doing centering prayer,
and it has been
unbelievably helpful for me.” That is a beautiful gift.
I think that’s the kind of idea that we can
look and say, “Well, I would like to see if that would be an idea for me.” But when we say,
“Hey, here’s a book that you should buy and you should read because it’s going to fill in the blank,
help you with this thing spiritually,” you know,
I don’t want to,
I hear there’s a note of criticism
in it, and I don’t mean to be critical,
but it’s just to say my own personal experience,
I’ve found those kinds of cycles to be very unhelpful.
Yeah, and you know, and again,
this may…
I don’t want this to sound like it comes from a place of arrogance,
but I think the reality is
pastors spend far more time than anyone else thinking about their churches,
thinking about those communities and what they need,
where they fall short,
how to improve.
That is a constant line of inquiry for pastors.
We think about it all the time,
and so when we rub
shoulders with someone who’s not a part of that community and they say,
“Well, I don’t go to
church because everyone in church is judgmental,” as if we don’t know that struggle or,
“Well, the church is just this or that,” and sort of impose their experience or opinion on top of all
of the rest, or, “Well, if you want to be a good church,
read this guy’s book,” who, by the way,
isn’t a Christian or probably isn’t a Christian of our stripes.
Now,
again, I want to be careful.
Can we learn from all sorts of things?
Absolutely.
But there’s just a kind of simplicity in that that I don’t find helpful.
There’s a judgmentalism in it that is sometimes…
And I want to say,
“Look, I know these people.
I love these people.
Do we have some wards?” Absolutely we do,
but we’re knocking ourselves
out trying to be a decent church,
and we don’t really need your opinion of what that means,
because you’re not here.
And so,
again,
it could be defensiveness on my part,
Michael.
I want to make that very clear.
I’ve gotten occasional letters from a visitor once in a while
based on one sermon,
one visit, one sermon.
Or even, let’s take myself out of it,
somebody will say, “I visited church and first press wasn’t friendly.” Well,
no, I don’t think that’s true.
I don’t think our track record overall…
Now, are there moments where somebody could have experienced that?
I’ll say yes, that could happen.
You could catch us on a bad day,
or you could be in a bad place
that day and not recognize some efforts.
There are lots of explanations,
but is our track record one of coldness?
No,
it isn’t.
And how do I know that?
Because I’m here all the time,
and nobody thinks about those things more than pastors do.
And so, those kind of things,
they do ruffle my feathers.
And I don’t know what there is to learn in that,
but I don’t find that stuff that starts from a
position of sort of negativity very helpful most of the time.
I think maybe by way of some of my concluding thoughts,
I think that there’s a sense clint
in which people might be surprised by the amount of accommodating that comes with the job of pastor.
The pastor is always trying to navigate,
incorporating new things,
trying to find meaningful connections.
People come and say,
“I think we should do this thing.” You might be shocked
the number of different things that do get included in interesting ways.
And when a person comes in,
sometimes with a great idea,
and says, “I think we need to do this,” and the pastor doesn’t
light up and jump on it.
When she or he looks at that idea and sort of gets those big eyes,
that may have nothing to do with that idea.
It may have nothing to do even with its ability to be
viable in that place.
It may just be that there’s so much happening behind the scenes at that moment
that really, only from the vantage of the one trying to sort of juggle those things,
that you would say,
“No, we’re kind of maxed out on what we’re capable of right now.” That’s a great
idea.
You’ve got a trust that will come back to it.
The point I’m trying to make is here,
pastors are 100% people.
They 100% make mistakes daily.
They make mistakes.
And sometimes maybe you do
see a thing or you bring an idea that should have been advanced far quicker,
should have been wholeheartedly adopted.
Obviously,
stuff gets missed when people are working together.
But may I point out,
that’s always done in relationship.
Relationship between leadership and the church,
between the church and its community,
there’s always a constant navigating through messy, tumultuous,
changing waters.
The next day is never the same as the day that came before it.
And that can be overwhelming depending upon where we are spiritually.
That can feel like a huge rock
that needs pushed up.
On another day, though, that could be engaging and invigorating.
The idea that we as a church are showing up,
we’re doing the best that we can to love and care for one another
and to serve our community that we might be witnesses for Jesus Christ.
I mean, this is the line between where our ideas can become a catalyst for change and growth and really for
the church to become a unified community.
That’s a gift.
Ideas can also become battle lines that we
draw and say, either you’re with me or you’re not,
like we’ve talked about in previous conversations.
And I think how we offer those ideas,
how we think of those ideas,
how we talk about them,
the spirit in which we offer them,
all of this matters.
And if we can try to do that with some wisdom and discernment,
then I think the church is helped by all of it.
If we fail to do so,
it’s going to be a point of contention, both within churches,
and it may be a thing that bugs the pastor.
I think in any field we don’t work in,
we underestimate the process that is
involved to get to the result that we want,
right?
If we have a favorite baseball team,
we want them to win.
We don’t understand- Just bat better,
hit the ball better.
We don’t understand the draft,
we don’t understand the practicing,
the coaching,
the 10,000 things that go into it.
If we like a certain product,
we want it improved,
right?
We want it cheaper,
we want it whatever.
And I think most of us,
we tend to,
in those moments, think about an outcome.
So when someone comes into churches and says,
“We should do fill in the blank,
we should have X kind of ministry,” they are naturally thinking about
the result that they want.
And I think those inside the circle, particularly pastors,
instantly begin thinking about what the process to get there would look like,
what are the hurdles,
what are the demands,
what are the needs,
what are the challenges,
what are the ins and outs,
what are the upsides and the downsides.
And so, yeah, if we ever seem like we’re not thrilled
by the idea, it’s because we haven’t gotten to the end of the idea yet.
We’re trying to work
our way backwards from the idea to even begin to think where would it start.
And so, yeah, I suppose maybe that can come across as,
“Well, I shared an idea and they weren’t very excited.”
Sometimes it could be that, I suppose.
But I think more often it’s that
some people start at the end of the spectrum and we are more wired to think all the way back to
what would square one look like.
That’s really helpful.
And I want to add to that,
actually, this is a real life experience.
We have a ministry here at the church where we make food every week
as part of a night program.
And church member called and said, “Hey,
I was helping serve in the kitchen,
realized we had this food,
and it made me think of there are some community members
I’m aware of that could need some food.
Do you think that we could maybe help supply some food
out of whatever excess food we’ve created?
Is that possible?” We had to deal with some logistical
concerns about how you transport it and is the food safe,
all these kinds of things that you
dealt with.
But that was speaking up for people who weren’t able to speak for themselves with a
problem that we were capable of solving.
And then that person finished that idea with,
“And how could I help do it?” Clint, I mean,
when a person can bring an idea and says,
“Hey, I may not be an expert in this area.” I mean,
this person had no career experience with food, but said, “Hey,
could I help make this happen?” Even if that looks like just making some phone
calls and helping to organize some things,
that is the kind of idea that moves a church forward,
and it should be celebrated.
That happens all the time in churches in every community in America.
It’s just when the church is faithful,
identify ways that we can serve,
and then we pair that
with, “And how can I have a part in it?” Whether you have a part in that idea or a different idea.
I mean, if we can have a culture of,
“How can I help?” Then these ideas go from,
“Oh, wouldn’t that be nice?” to,
“This is how we will be faithful.” And that is an unbelievably beautiful
and engaging and, quite frankly,
inspiring thing to be a part of when that happens.
Yeah, and I said that probably no one thinks more about church than we do,
Michael, but that doesn’t mean we come up with the most good ideas.
No, yeah, that’s fair.
Many of the great
breakthrough kind of ideas in churches,
and certainly here at First Press,
happen from people.
We didn’t come up with them.
They were given as gifts,
and as we unpack them, we found,
“Yes, they fit.
Yes, we can do them.
Yes, they will work.
And let’s go.
Let’s try to make
that happen.” And those are wonderful gifts,
and we are not opposed to copying what other churches
do if it’s successful.
We’re certainly not opposed to reading the latest,
greatest books, if that works.
But I think that’s a wonderful conversation,
and again, it speaks to the
relationship of a congregation that a person can say,
“I think I see a need.
What do you think
about that?” And we go,
“Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
That’s a fantastic idea.
Let’s put some energy into it, see if we can make it happen.” And those are great moments for congregations.
We’re blessed.
We have a lot of those here,
so we have a lot of good folks who also put time and
energy into the church being the church.
But those are wonderful on the other end of stuff that bugs.
That’s stuff that pastors love.
That’s when you just think,
“Man, what a great place.
What a great job.” I don’t know if every pastor’s had this experience,
but there comes a time where a great
idea is paired with a great group of people.
And when things are really moving forward as a congregation,
the pastor can look and see as the work gets done without the pastor’s pushing,
without the kind of vocational effort.
By the way, every job needs to be done.
So it’s not bad that
sometimes pastors just need to do the grunt work of pastoring and leading in an organization.
That’s fine.
That’s part of the job.
But when a church identifies a thing and it becomes part
of who they are,
I would argue, Clint, it’s no longer an idea.
I would argue it’s part of the
mission.
It’s part of the calling,
even we would use that language.
And every really,
truly good idea,
the things that last and are connected are the things that are capable of becoming part of
that.
The service in the name of Christ,
putting our own preferences down for a moment so that we
can lift up another person,
that is the stuff that is truly inspiring and it happens all the time in
church.
So I hope we end the conversation on a little bit of a recognition of that,
that we’re not just down on those ideas that sometimes make you scratch your head a little bit.
We’re also given a gift as part of the church and we try to celebrate that as best as we can.
Yeah, out of all of the possibilities in ministry,
there is that smaller,
though still very large
group of what can we do.
And then within that,
there’s what should we do?
What are we being
called to in this moment?
What is God leading us to undertake in the season we’re in?
And when churches find that, when they navigate all through the funnel and they get to that point where they
believe they’ve heard the voice and received guidance from God to do this thing for this season
and then the church puts its time,
energy, and money into that thing,
that’s the kingdom at
work.
I mean, that is really a deep,
rich blessing when God leads the church to say,
“Okay, you can’t do everything,
but for now, I want you to do this thing.” And that’s a really good moment
for a church.
Yeah,
that’s helpful.
I hope that the conversation has been engaging.
I hope there’s been a good idea or two in it.
But certainly, if you’re with us still,
thank you for having stuck
through to the end.
We’re glad that you would be part of the conversation and we would welcome
whatever ideas you might have,
both that we might add to this series or things down the road,
things you would like us to engage with you on.
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