Changing ourselves - the changing church

I've been meeting with many pastors, priests, and musicians over the past several weeks, making connections and listening to stories.

Today, I sat down with a Presbyterian minister at a local congregation. We shared some stories of ministry with one another.

My acquaintance asked me an important question: observing that churches can become like clubs, how should churches keep this from happening? My answer was that churches have to be able to genuinely include people who are exactly the opposite of who they are, which I think means that the liberal, white, upper-middle-class, progressive churches so many are proud of in mainline Christianity need to welcome the homeless, working poor, lower middle class, and the Republicans equally well so that all have a part to play in community.

That was a pretty good answer, but I don't know if it was good enough or right enough. But the second part of my response was that each church needs to have an identity, and this act of creating an identity naturally means that congregations and denominations cannot be all things to all people. This means that we have to live into own identity as congregations and denominations. My priest at the church I've been attending reminded us at the annual meeting that we "have an identity" and we "become more and more of ourselves each year".

It seems this question of church identity is not too far from the identity we seek to live into as people who are baptized into Christ, discovering who we are in our deepest places and then wrestling with these truths within ourselves.

Because he was in something equivalent to the committee on ministry in his own denomination's local offices, I asked him about what qualities they were looking for in clergy candidates. He spoke of the very changing nature of the church and the need for upcoming clergy to be less about being good preachers, theologians, etc., and more about the need for people to bring people to faith and nurture them in that faith in the context of what the wider culture has become.

The question I had for him was something like this, "If we are entering this new era in the church, where the old ways of doing things won't work, how do we know enough about what the church of this new era will look like to identify qualities of clergy who will minister effectively in it?"

Through the conversation, my acquaintance told me the story of his ministry in several churches in various parts of the country, and of his internal sense of the go message he heard before he went to accept a new call.

Some of his observations have become a bit conflated with what I'm reading in Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church, recommended to me by another clergy acquaintance I have met here in the Seattle area.

What I have heard in both of these stories is the sense of weariness encountered through working in the church and the questioning one has about why one is doing the work. More than this, I have heard the voices of those people who are clergy and in charge of congregations, and all of the weight they carry and the struggles they must live with - both the tiny, day-to-day tasks that soak up energy, the weekly struggle with loving the "difficult" people that fill churches, and the bigger picture questions of the institution and the faith's ongoing relevance and survival.

I am just beginning to empathize with the very difficult role of being a clergy person in charge of a congregation. Earlier in my experience, I did not have such empathy, and found it far too easy at times to pass judgment on my Christian brothers and sisters who were called to do this work.

It is easy to judge others, criticize, and question when you do not have the weight of their responsibility on your own shoulders. I think this is part of the reason why churches have developed the often exasperating processes, hierarchies, and authority structures they have.

When asked recently about how I handle conflict, a part of me wanted to say that I hide under the covers until I can't deal with it and then burst out in anger when the noise bothers me too much. It's such a human thing, and I have engaged in this very human behavior more times than I'd like to admit.

The better part of me wanted to talk about how when one agrees to be a part of a community, one must remember that one submits to the authority structures of that community. Authority structures are not something I have had explicitly explained to me at times when I needed to understand them, and have on more than one occasion thrown rocks at out of frustration, or kicked unintentionally in the act of learning how to dance.

We do make a lot of mistakes on our life journey, and I certainly hope that I have learned from mine. As my clergy friend told me today, sometimes one must pay a high tuition for the privilege of learning from these big mistakes.