Somebody's Got to Do Something

Once again we on the leadership council thank those of you who sacrificed and made it out for tonight’s emergency meeting. As for those who aren’t here, obviously they didn’t care enough about the fate of our church. Evidently they couldn’t be bothered to make the effort to come to this meeting and cast their vote, but that’s between them and God now. The rest of us will simply have to take care of business as we know He would want us to conduct it—in the fairest way possible, of course—the way we’ve always run this church.

Let’s cut right to the chase and get down to business. It’s been several years since we had to hold one of these emergency meetings. You will doubtless remember the unfortunate situation when we had to let Pastor Jesus go. Once again we find ourselves in a similar situation, but for somewhat different reasons.

If you don’t know why you are here tonight, then you must be out of the loop. Most of you know what this is about: the abuse of power. Pastor John is starting to become a dictator, a despot who’s trying to run this church the way he sees fit! And we on the council, as those appointed to shepherd this flock, have a big problem with that.

What do we mean by that? Well, you are all aware that we were very clear as to what we felt this church needed when we hired Pastor John three years ago. He knew that he was being hired to serve the people of this church! That’s what pastors do, isn’t it? Don’t you all agree with that? Why, that’s the very essence of ministry—to minister to others. Right? Of course it’s right, it’s in the Bible.

We think we can pinpoint when the trouble all began. About six months ago, Pastor John actually had the audacity to come to the council and complain that he was working too many hours, and that he wasn’t able to spend enough time with his family. We, of course, were generous: we told him that he could cut back to sixty-five hours a week. We even found someone to mow the lawns for him so he didn’t have to do it on Saturday evenings any more! Of course, he still has to go out on Saturdays during the day and do the door-to-door witnessing, but at least he gets the evening off now. What more could he want?

It hardly needs to be said that we care about he and his family. We even decided that next year, we would let him have a sabbatical: one weekend off, two days to go wherever he likes for a well-deserved rest. All he needs to do is to make sure that he brings a qualified pastor in to preach that day—from a church who lines up with our doctrinal statement—and find somebody to lead the worship in his place.

We’ll have to deduct the time from his pay check, obviously, but we all agreed that by that time the man will certainly need a rest. If you remember, we had to cancel his vacation last year because there were too many things going on around the church to let him leave. Now, no one can say we’re not generous—we even said that his wife could go along too. All he has to do is to pay her way, provided that she finds someone to play the piano in her place during the morning’s service, and someone to teach her Sunday School classes that day as well. Surely that is not too much to ask, is it? Of course it isn’t.

Now for most pastors, this would have been more than enough to keep them happy. Don’t you think we’ve been more than accommodating with Pastor John and his family? We thought so too, thought the problem was all but solved and things could get back to normal. But a few months ago, Pastor John came to the council again and said that somebody had given him a book on church leadership and church growth, and he had actually read it on his own, without discussing it with us first. The man hadn’t even told us what book he was reading! That kind of secretive behavior can’t be good in a pastor—a spiritual leader, no less—who is supposed to model transparency and authenticity.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse. We hardly need to explain what’s been happening in the last few months around here. We’ve got a full-scale rebellion on our hands, and this from the man who is supposed to a servant leader! Pastor John has actually tried to set up what he calls “ministry teams,” but thank God so far nobody in this church has responded to his appeals.

He’s even been talking some nonsense about letting other people preach from time to time, and not fellow pastors from other churches either! He wants people from this church to preach for him! What’s next, will some other person start teaching his Sunday School classes or his weekday home groups? He’s even had the audacity to suggest that we change the worship service, and bring a guitar up on stage! That way his wife won’t have to play the piano any more. Even she is in on it.

But if you ask us on the council, it sounds to us like the man is simply trying to get out of work. Remember why we hired Pastor John: to preach the Word and grow this church. We have always been more than clear—just look at his job description! And now he’s trying to shirk his duties by getting other people to do his job for him. What did he go to Bible College and seminary for? So somebody else could do his work in his place?

We hardly need to remind you all that it is our job on the leadership council to make sure that the wishes of this congregation are represented as fairly as possible. Not only that, but to make sure that if changes do need to happen, they will come about in such a way that everybody is happy with them. We all know that change is inevitable, but why alienate people in the process? Why break with time-honored traditions when there seems to be no need to do so?

We feel that we have been more than fair with Pastor John, but there comes a point when one reaches the limit. We’re at that point now, and something has got to be done about it. So in the interest of fairness, we’re going to ask all of you now to cast your vote on the piece of paper in front of you. Tell us what you would like to see happen. You’ll notice there are two choices: One, we have to let Pastor John go, or two, we keep him on—but with a reprimand—and we will demand that his dictatorial behavior stops now, and things go back to normal.

Does everybody have a pen or a pencil?

Emerging Church?

A group of believers had become fed up with what the traditional church had become. There were several problems they had with the traditional church. For one thing, the sermons were predictable as well as boring. Every week, it seemed like preachers offered up the same tired, formulaic sermons. Preachers utilized confusing outline formats, with multiple points, and tried to wax eloquent, but obtained the same old results. Even though they preached from the Bible, sometimes with very careful studies of the Greek and Hebrew, and tried to apply it, somehow it didn’t seem like people’s lives were changing all that much. It appeared that many people attended church out of a sense of duty and little else.

These believers also felt that the traditional churches had leadership structures that were authoritarian and formal. The churches were cold and sterile places where there seemed to be little appeal to the emotional side of people. There also seemed to be little place for women in ministry as well. Church leaders clung to their formal leadership structures, but at the same time appeared to be insincere about their faith journey. Where was the authenticity and transparency? These believers desired a dynamic walk with God, but the traditional church just was not meeting their needs.

To make matters worse, the traditional church spent a lot of time and energy on two tasks: first, they defended their doctrines against other churches that disagreed with them. Their theologians wrote bigger and bigger volumes of doctrine and systematic theology, to the point where every aspect of the faith was scrutinized and refined. Second, the traditional church had seminaries and universities that turned out educated ministers, trained in the traditional ways. They interpreted the Bible, preached sermons, and led their congregations in the ways in which they had been taught. It seemed that in every way, the status quo would be maintained.

One Christian man believed that things had gone on long enough. He and a group of these disgruntled Christians decided to start meeting in his home every Wednesday and Sunday. What would they do? Their ultimate goal was to come alongside each other and encourage each other in the Christian faith. This emerging church encouraged all believers—men and women alike—to live out their faith and minister to others, and to rely less on formal structures of church leadership. They met regularly in homes to pray, to discuss the previous week's sermon, and to apply passages from Scripture and devotional writings to individual lives.

This leader of the emerging church eventually wrote a book outlining the problems with the traditional church, as well as what could be done about it. In it he criticized the ministers of the traditional churches for substituting cold doctrine for warm faith. He also outlined six basic values to which he believed this emerging church should hold:

1. There should be more of an extensive use of the Bible among Christians, and that Christians should help each other in their spiritual journey.

2. That each believer is called to serve others, regardless of gender, education, background, etc. Every believer is a priest. Believers should not rely on professional ministers to do the works of ministry.

3. Christianity should go beyond mere knowledge and be demonstrated by everyday practice, in the workplace, home, school, or church.

4. There should be restraint as well as love regarding religious disputes. He felt that rather than arguing people into the Kingdom, Christians should show love toward nonbelievers and those who wish to argue, and to pray for them and be kind to them instead.

5. Theological schools should be reformed: Future ministers and church leaders should be trained not just in academics but also in how to love others in practical ways, and how to succeed in a life of Christian devotion with the help of other Christians.

6. Preachers should preach sermons that actually build up their listeners, rather than engaging in pointless and technical sermons, in which few were interested or could even understand and/or apply.

So take your best guess: What period of time in the church’s history am I describing?

Believe it or not, this is not a description of the postmodern ‘emerging church’ of today that is fed up with traditional, modernist churches and is seeking its own way. All of this took place in Germany nearly 350 years ago, in 1675. A group of Christians, led by a man named Phillipp Jakob Spener, became known as the “Pietists” because they desired to emphasize more the practicalities of Christian life and less the formal structures of theology or church order. The Pietists had a profound impact on Christianity as they tried to help and encourage each other live out the Christian life in practical ways.

Some Pietists, like August Hermann Francke, were profoundly impacted by Spener’s teaching. Spener and Francke went on to found the University of Halle in Germany in 1691, and Francke taught the students by example what Pietism could mean when put into practice. He opened up his own home for poor children, founded a world-famous orphanage, established an institute for the training of teachers, and later he helped found a publishing house, a medical clinic, and other institutions. At Halle, Francke encouraged the translation of the Bible into other languages and encouraged graduates to go into foreign missions, which they did. Other groups, like the Moravians, also sent out some of the first foreign missionaries, as they tried to put Christian faith into practice.

The Pietist movement would also have a major impact on Wesley and what would become the Methodist church. Pietists also worked among German settlers in America in the 18th and 19th centuries and had a major impact there as well as in sending out others to the mission field. Even today its influence is felt in the church as there is still the desire among many Christians not to rest until they find intimate fellowship with God himself.

(This article drew on the article by Mark A. Noll, "Pietism" in The Elwell Evangelical Dictionary).

In Search of an Authentic Experience

Q: Who had more influence on music, Chopin or Jim Morrison?
A: I don’t know, but they are both buried at Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Recently we were in Paris and I absolutely had to make the pilgrimage to the world famous Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. I realize that there are many famous graves there, including Oscar Wilde, Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt and many others. For me, though, I wasn’t there to do the typical “tourist thing” and check off one more site to see. It was a personal pilgrimage that had a lot of deeper reasons behind it.

When I was in high school in the 1980s I lived next door to my two cousins, Andy and Dan. Dan introduced me to the music of The Doors and for several years they were a huge part of my life. I can remember driving around the Seattle area in Dan’s beat-up car that didn’t even have a tape deck in it. We had to bring along a battery-powered boom box so we could listen to “Riders on the Storm” and “LA Woman” at full volume.

Dan and I were very close. We went through U.S. Navy boot camp together in San Diego shortly after high school, and a couple of years after that suffered the loss of his brother Andy, who was killed in a drunk driving accident. Dan didn’t handle it very well and sort of went his own way for a while: he was kicked out of the Navy for drugs, went off and fished in Alaska, then tried to hold down several different jobs, but wasn’t having much success out of life.

It was down in Portland at Bible college, literally on the day my first daughter was born, that I heard the sad news: Dan had committed suicide after a night of heavy drinking. He put a gun in his mouth in the parking lot of a tavern near Seattle, and ended it all. For him I suppose all the rage at everybody—the world, his abusive father, whatever—finally proved to be too much when coupled with a massive intake of Jack Daniels.

One thing Dan had mentioned to me a few years earlier in passing conversation was that, when he died, he wanted The Doors’ “Break on Through to the Other Side” played at his funeral. Sadly this request was not honored, and I have always vowed to visit his grave and play the song, which is something I have not done as of yet, nearly fifteen years after his death. It’s one of those things I just gotta do…

So to return to our recent trip to Paris and my journey to Pere-Lachaise: I wanted to visit Morrison’s grave, not in order to have my picture taken in front of it like most of the other tourists, but as a true pilgrimage. I wanted to sit in the quiet, with the trees and the sunshine, and reflect about my life, my experiences with Dan (the good times and the bad times), and what part The Doors’ music had played in all of that. But sadly, this was not to be.

By the time I found the grave (which can be quite difficult in a cemetery without many straight paths), I was ready to do some reflecting. But no—the grave itself is protected with a steel fence. There were tourists all around it taking pictures of each other. One Chinese student asked me in broken English if I would take her picture in front of “Jeem Moreeson grave?”

Finally I had my ten seconds in front of the grave and took a couple of pictures, just to be able to remember it later. Looking at the famous graffiti on the tomb next to Morrison’s was disappointing as well, since they had clearly scrubbed off previous graffito. I was hoping to read stuff that went back to the 1970s, but it was all gone. All the contributions were from 2008…whatever. Just then a yuppie couple from the States came up to start taking pictures of the grave. The wife asked the husband, “Now who was Jim Morrison again?” Husband: “I think he was some kind of an actor or something…” I couldn’t bear to listen and had to get out of there.

I wandered around the cemetery for a while taking some pictures, and then finally found a bench in front of a rotunda with a statue. I thought this would be a good, quiet place finally to reflect on my life, The Doors, and cousin Dan. But no, this also was not to be; the quiet reverie of Pere-Lachaise was rudely shattered. Two American teenagers sat down at the bench next to me and then one began a long—and quite loud—conversation on her cell phone with somebody in high school French. Frustrated, my reflective mood evaporated, and I finally gave up and left to explore the cemetery.

So what’s it all about? To be perfectly honest, I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that there are times when I need to take time out seriously to think about my life; where I’ve come from, what kinds of experiences have shaped me, and how various people have come in and out of my life, and what an impact they have had. Even a guy like Jim Morrison—who died only a few years after I was born—had an impact. Certainly Dan had an impact. I can’t overlook the good times we had, and I still miss him.

I promise you Dan, the next time I’m in the Seattle area, I’ll visit your grave and play “Break on Through” for you.

The Great Pretender

As Karl—Homer Simpson’s assistant—said to him, “You don’t belong here. You’re a fraud and a phony, and it’s only a matter of time before they find you out.” And Homer gasps and says, “Who told you?”—his worst fears realized.

We the viewers are privy to the truth—Homer is indeed a fraud and a phoney, an absolute incompetent—and his promotion came about because of his new head of hair. Nothing else.

This episode brings up an issue that many of us, both in teaching and ministry professions, struggle with mightily: the impostor syndrome. Not the title of a Robert Ludlum novel, it is what adult educator Stephen Brookfield writes about in his work Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (Jossey-Bass 1995, pp. 229-235).

What is “the impostor syndrome?” Brookfield explains that it is the fear that we have, deep down inside, that at some point—like Homer—we are going to be unmasked for the frauds that we truly are. Whether it is a teacher in front of a class, a preacher in the pulpit, or a youth leader addressing a group of teens, the dynamics are the same.

We feel like impostors. We feel that we don’t really deserve to be taken seriously; that if the people we’re about to address knew the truth of the matter we’d be finished. What is that “truth”? The truth is that we feel as if we really don’t know what we are doing. We feel as if our teaching or preaching is being done under false pretenses, and at some point the ugly truth will finally come out.

Brookfield says, “We wear an external mask of control, but beneath it we know that really we are frail figures, struggling to make it through to the end of each day. There is the sense that a
around the corner is an unforeseen but cataclysmic event that will reveal us as frauds” (p. 230).

Following our public and humiliating unveiling, our colleagues and employers, he states, will shake their heads and wonder how they could have ever been so stupid as to hire such an obvious incompetent in the first place. Is it any wonder that we as teachers and church leaders have to spend so much energy desperately avoiding the certain humiliation of being found out for the frauds we truly are?

The reality is that the impostor syndrome takes on many forms. One may manifest itself in an academic context: As a teacher I worry that I have to know everything there is to know about a subject before I teach it, otherwise that one troublesome student in the class who happens to know more about it than I do will unmask me—in front of everyone—for the fraud that I truly am.

Within the classroom setting, the impostor syndrome affects students as well. A student may think, “I don’t belong in this class. Clearly I don’t know as much as some of these other, smarter students. So I will sit in the back row and say nothing, for fear of being unmasked for a fraud.”

And we are all familiar with the student who thinks, “The teacher doesn’t belong here. She is a fraud and a phony, and it is my job to unmask her for the fake that she is.” In my experience there always seems to be one or two of these types of students in every Bible college or seminary classroom. These students make the teachers’ jobs a living nightmare, especially when the dynamic of arguing theological minutiae comes into play.

The impostor syndrome affects those involved in church leadership as well. I spent seven years as an elder and a pastor working myself into the ground to try and prove that I was not an impostor. I reasoned that if I kept all the plates spinning, made sure that all the ministries hummed along nicely, and never made a single mistake, there would be no grounds for criticism. The truth is I was desperately avoiding being found out. No one could be allowed to see through my façade. Even the slightest criticism could be devastating.

How can we deal with the impostor syndrome? Brookfield argues that the essential ingredient is to make it public. “Once impostorship is named as an everyday experience,” he points out, “it loses much of its power” (p. 233). When we hear others—particularly those whom we admire—admit that they struggle with the same issues many of the effects of the syndrome are defused.

A second, equally important factor is to address the culture within which we are working. Unless it is a safe place for teachers and church leaders to disclose their struggles, no one will admit their deepest apprehensions for fear of being eaten alive or worse, being fired when the truth comes out. It is the job of leadership to create and maintain a safe and healthy culture so that issues like impostorship can be discussed without fear of reprisal.

Surprisingly, however, if properly controlled impostorship can actually be productively troubling, says Brookfield. Somehow there needs to be a balance: on the one hand, there can be an arrogant sense of overdeveloped overconfidence. On the other hand if taken to an extreme, impostorship can be crippling. Identifying and challenging the feelings of impostorship with which we struggle is precisely what opens up possibilities for us to realign our ways of thinking and practice.

Living Outside the Box

The other night I sat at a pub with a couple of friends discussing, among other things, our journeys through life, theology, and our stance toward the traditional church. One of the guys was named Brian and I had only just met him that night. Somewhere in his mid-50s, Brian has led an interesting life since coming to know Christ some 40 years ago at L’Abri in Switzerland (yes, that’s the Francis Schaeffer).

As I was sharing with Brian details of my own journey, he finally looked at me and said: “Well, coming from someone who’s been on this journey for nearly 40 years, here’s the good news—you’ve only just begun the journey. Keep moving forward!” I was somewhat startled by that statement, because up until that point I had—mistakenly, as it turns out—thought I was doing pretty good with myself. But he was not being condescending, he was being encouraging. From his point of view, I’m just a little baby taking those first tentative steps, while he’s been walking along for decades now.

Certainly it doesn’t mean he has everything figured out—not by a long stretch. But it is kind of humbling to think about it. Not that I have arrived at all, but I thought I had made some major strides from where I was just a few years ago. I suppose I have, but then the next question came up: Where do I go from here? What do the next steps look like?

Brian sat back after I posed that question and said, “Well, if you could answer that question, there’d really be no point, would there.” Thinking I was being clever, I shot back: “Well, it seems to me that the main thing is to think outside the box.” Just as quickly he returned with, “Actually, the problem is not merely thinking outside the box. It’s learning to live outside the box that is the real challenge.”

What I got out of our conversation the other night was that in all honesty, it is all too easy to sit back and criticize the traditional, Western church for all of its shortcomings.—to name a few: a rationalistic theological bias, its propositional idea-centered preaching, its lack of engagement with the emerging culture, and its increasingly outmoded styles of leadership. And the thing is, those criticisms are all too close to the mark. They’re probably all true. The church does need to get its head out of the sand; the church does need to realize that in about 20 or 30 years, the baby-boomers who are filling its seats will be dying off, and then what?

But in my conversation with Brian, I walked away challenged by it all. It’s fairly easy to sit back and sling arrows at the bloated, inefficient, increasingly irrelevant entity that the traditional, Western church is becoming. But it is quite another thing to do something about it—in a positive sense. For me, it comes down to the two values of ownership and expression—something I stole from our church in Portland, Imagine Church Community.

It is not enough merely to own something; the step beyond it is to begin to express it too. Take spiritual gifts, for example: Learning what your gifts are is but the ownership end of the equation. Beginning to express them through various aspects of ministry is the other side of the coin: expression.

This relates to our discussion of criticizing the traditional church as well. My ownership of the conception that things are horribly wrong is not nearly enough; for me, I have to begin to work out ways of expressing those convictions in a positive way other than sitting back and criticizing. The beauty of those two values is that they are just abstract enough that individuals can go away and work out what it means for him or her, in their particular and unique context of life and ministry.

For example, it’s like what Barth said about Jesus—that he came not only to reveal the Father, but also to show us as humans what we could be like as well. As one who was completely undistracted by sin, and free from the self-deceptions and self-interests that plague us, he could have done anything he liked. So what did he do? He really only did a couple of things: One, he lived always to serve the Father, and two, he lived always to serve others. He was truly a relational, communal person.

Barth says that in this way, Christ is our example of what it means to become truly human: Live to serve God and others, and exist in true community. But for me the key is this: Those elements are just abstract enough so as not to become a formula. What does it mean to serve God, serve others, and live in authentic community? For each of us it means something different, as we work out the implications for ourselves.

Getting back to the point about the church, for me it is a major challenge to begin to work out those abstractions of ownership and expression as it relates to my own sense of mission. I have no idea what it means, other than to serve God and to serve others, and to pursue authentic, intentional community. If somehow those can take place within some conception of “church,” then, as I see it, so much the better.

Is this what it means to try and live outside the box?