In Search of the Perfect Pastor

Our congregation has been gearing up to enter the call process.  With the help of our intentional interim pastor, we have reflected on who/what we were in the past and tried our best to define who/what we are now. We are now beginning the phase of discovering who God is calling us to be.  With a new vision to guide us, we will be better prepared to discern who God is calling to lead us in that journey.

This collective visioning is perhaps the most important part in the process.  I’m hopeful that in doing so, we will avoid one of the big difficulties that could hamper the work of the Holy Spirit.  Because I’ve served on a call committee before, I know that all of us, whether we are willing to admit it or not, have a picture in our mind of the perfect pastor.  But the problem is no pastor we interview will meet that expectation because that pastor doesn’t exist.   

Although it’s meant to be humorous, there is still a ring of truth to this piece:

Picks only hymns WE like to sing.

The Perfect Pastor (author unknown)

The perfect pastor preaches exactly 10 minutes.He condemns sin roundly but never hurts anyone’s feelings.He works from 8am until midnight and is also the church janitor.

The perfect pastor makes $40 a week, wears good clothes, drives a good car,buys good books, and donates $30 a week to the church. He is 29 years old and has 40 years experience. Above all, he is handsome.

The perfect pastor has a burning desire to work with teenagers, and he spends most of his time with the senior citizens. He smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his church. He makes 15 home visits a day and is always in his office to be handy when needed.

The perfect pastor always has time for church council and all of its committees. He never misses the meeting of any church organization and is always busy evangelizing the unchurched. The perfect pastor is always in the next church over!

If your pastor does not measure up,simply send this notice to six other churches that are tired of their pastor, too.Then bundle up your pastor and send him to the church at the top of the list. If everyone cooperates, in one week you will receive 1,643 pastors. One of them should be perfect. Have faith in this letter. One church broke the chain and got its old pastor back in less than three months.

The male pronouns used throughout this betray one preconception right away; that imaginary pastor is never a woman, which right away excludes a lot of very gifted candidates, who are no less Called by God, from the pool.  Intentionally or unintentionally, there’s an unspoken assumption among many that “pastor” = ”man.”   

It tempts me to try a visioning exercise with our congregation something like the one that attorney Jake Brigance ( Matthew McConaughey) uses so brilliantly in his summation in the movie, A Time to Kill. In his defense of a black man who killed two white men for raping his little girl, Brigance describes the men’s brutality in painful, graphic detail, then at the end, asks the all-white jury to imagine that the little girl in the story is white instead of black.  It obviously has the intended effect on the jury.

To what extent does our preconceived image of what is “church” limit our ability to envision new ways of being the church?  When, as a relative newcomer, I say I love the church, I recognize that I’m probably not talking about the same church as the families who have been coming there for generations.  As I noted in my last post, many of those components that used to make up a typical church experience in the past either aren’t there anymore or exist in a diminished state; like junior choirs, Luther League or Ladies Aid.

I pray that we all, women and men, young and old, new and established, contemporary and traditional, conservative and liberal, red, green or cranberry hymnal-lovers, can surrender our personal preconceptions of pastor and church to God so that we might be able to share together in the new vision God has for our congregation. 

Called together by your love, sustained by your love and sent forth to share that Love, Father help us to see where you are taking us and to trust you to show us the way, even when it may not look like we think it should. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Where Have All the Acolytes Gone?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ACOLYTES GONE?

adapted from “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” by Pete Seeger

Where have all the acolytes gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the acolytes gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the acolytes gone?

They need to be here when they’re assigned.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the children gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the children gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the children gone?

We have all these Sunday School rooms to fill.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the Luther Leaguers gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the Luther Leaguers gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the Luther Leaguers gone?

Why don’t their parents just make them go?

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the confirmands gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the confirmands gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the confirmands gone?

Why don’t they have to memorize more?

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where has all the junior choir gone?

Long time passing

Where has all the junior choir gone?

Long time ago

Where has all the junior choir gone?

We have beautiful robes hanging in the hall.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

Where have all the people gone?

Long time passing

Where have all the people gone?

Long time ago

Where have all the people gone?

Why don’t they come to church like us?

When will we ever learn?

When will we ever learn?

I’ve heard those words (or something along those lines) more often than I would like.  And while I can sometimes sympathize with the sadness that is experienced by those who look so fondly upon the church of their memory, I also feel impatient sometimes, wanting to move forward, past the grieving for what used to be and on to the work of being the church of the present.

Since I’m not a cradle Lutheran, most of what I know about the glory days of the church are from the stories I hear, and the education I’ve received reading “Lake Wobegon Days” and “Growing Up Lutheran.” Through these sources, I have gathered that once upon a time, our churches all had:

·         acolytes who took their responsibilities seriously and were properly attired

·         Sunday School classrooms filled every week at every grade level

·         throngs of teenagers coming to Luther League meetings, playing games, electing officers, etc.

·         confirmation classes that memorized the catechism as well as scripture

·         large, beautifully-robed junior choirs that sang arrangements in four parts

·         members who attended worship so reliably that others noticed and worried about their absence

·         pews that were filled every Sunday with people who sat in their regular spots

·         pastors who preached about hell

There’s a kind of a common theme in the song stanzas above.  It reflects a question I have often asked, but haven’t come up with a good answer for yet.  To what extent did all of those things take place in the past because there was, at best, an expectation? Yes, we had posteriors in the pews and kids in the choir, but how many of them were there because they were afraid something bad would happen to them if they weren’t?  Is fear a good way to motivate people?  Sure, it’s effective, but is it really fair to award a prize for perfect attendance if the alternative was something a lot worse? 

“We weren’t given a choice,” is a reason commonly given, and that was true at my house as well.  One Sunday, my brother and I, while dressed in our church clothes, decided to go play in the oats shed.  Oh, that big pile of loose oats was so much fun to roll around in and throw at one another.  When our mother called out the door for us to come get in the car to go to church, she quickly discovered where we had been because the oats clung to our hair and our clothes, inside and out.  The yardstick was swiftly employed (and not to see how much we’d grown), we were cleaned up and brought to church.

I’d be willing to bet that not all of those former acolytes, junior choir members and Luther Leaguers are still active in the church today.  You’ve probably heard the joke about how to get rid of bats in the church. You confirm them, and then you'll never see them again.  Even though we weren’t Lutheran, I went through a similar indoctrination.  The result? My 20’s and 30’s went by with very little church involvement.  At best, I was disinterested and at worst, disdainful. So, how effective was that old system?  I’ll admit to my own stubbornness, but does that account for everyone who chooses to do something else on Sunday?

Even putting aside overt threats of bodily harm or burning for eternity in the fires of hell, do we still want people coming to worship out of nothing more than a sense of obligation?  Do the ends, Christian fellowship and the opportunity to hear the Gospel, outweigh the means by which they have come?  I don’t know, maybe so.  Though Jesus does warn against praying loudly and conspicuously like the hypocrites, he encourages some people who were casting out demons in his name to continue.  If absolute sincerity was a prerequisite for entering the sanctuary, I doubt any of us would get inside.  I know I wouldn’t.

We may be inclined to paint history in a more favorable light, but I do think that trying to compare the present church with the past church is an apple and orange kind of thing.  There are different external forces acting on us today than what we experienced years ago. Those influences once tended to drive people in the direction of the church. Today, they are driven in other directions and we don’t have control over how people respond to those things.  As the last stanza in the song suggests, I question how constructive it is to speculate about others.  What we can do is respond to and share what (Who) does draw us.

The church to come is not going to be the same as the church of the past.  That time is gone. But maybe rather than being so concerned about doing what we think our parents, our neighbors or our pastors expect of us, we can learn to focus our attention on what we see God is doing in, among and through us now. Then we can begin to move ahead together in perhaps even more intimate communion than what we had previously, where the Church can come closer to being Christ’s living body.