Hello, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We are thrilled to have you with us.
We are in the middle now of a series we’re calling Stuff that Bugs Pastors.
We are two pastors.
That’s really the only thing that qualifies us for this conversation.
If that is indeed a
qualification, we’ll let you determine that yourself.
But the idea behind this series,
just to be upfront right from the start,
is we’re not two people here who are expecting you to hear
us complain about our jobs,
but rather think that if you look behind the scenes of the day-to-day
kind of life of the church,
what do the people who serve in the church see as some of the most
essential parts of a Christian community’s functioning?
And where are some places where
we together should be particularly vigilant in how we continue to seek to practice the faith in
a way that honors Jesus Christ?
And there are some themes that come up over and over and over
again, and we tried to collect some of those themes.
And today we’re talking about this idea
of we and me.
And the basic idea behind this is that as people,
both inside and outside the walls
of the church, we are always tempted to find the points of connection with some,
and then therefore also the point of disconnection or difference from another.
We do that in lots of different ways,
right?
There are some people who drive Ford cars and some people who drive Chevy cars,
or some people who drink Pepsi,
some people who drink Coke,
and a lot of people who would say,
“I wouldn’t drink or drive any of those things,” and they would have strong feelings about it.
It’s innate to our human experience,
and so on some level we take for granted that that will
also happen in church.
What we have in mind today’s conversation is not just those moments of life
where folks have disagreements about small and petty things where they say,
“Well, you know, we have some people who really like Folgers and some who really like Maxwell House.” You know,
those can be a source of even humor sometimes as we joke about what others would prefer.
But today we have more in mind some of those substantial moments in the church’s life
where people have begun to take sides.
In fact, maybe they’ve not even taken sides.
They’ve begun to build a trench between the sides and become incalcitrant and unwilling to bend or change.
And in those moments there’s lots of different forms that that takes,
but I would say universally,
Clint,
destructive in some way or another.
Yeah, I think, you know, the history of the American church testifies to the difficulty
of staying together as a church family.
You know, if you drive into towns,
you often find First Baptist,
Second Baptist, Fourth Baptist, First Methodist, Third Methodist, First Presbyterian, John Knox Presbyterian.
And if you do the history,
it’s not uncommon to find out that they used to
be one church and now there are two or there are four or there are five.
And we have seen that
repeatedly.
We see it with denominations.
We see it with congregations.
We see it with churches of all types.
This sort of repeated pattern and what tends to happen is there’s an issue.
Something comes up.
It causes some unhappiness.
People dig in.
They begin to fight with one
another.
They can’t get past it.
And one of the other groups or one of the two groups or three
groups or what some portion of people leave to go do their own thing.
And that doesn’t count
the number of times that that’s not a split,
but just an exit where a group of people
leave from one church to go to another church.
This happens all the time.
And yes,
of course, it bugs pastors and as pastors,
we can say that.
But I think more importantly,
it harms the church.
It harms the actual churches that experience it.
It harms our witness as the church when we break
down and when we’re not able to resolve conflicts,
when we’re not able to get past those things.
And so what we hope to do today is just kind of look at a little bit of a continuation of last
week.
When those moments happen that we’re unhappy about something,
how do we avoid it becoming
detrimental?
How do we handle it in a way that it doesn’t do damage to the church and to the
people in the church, ourselves included?
You know, Clint, if we were going to give a label to
our last conversation, I might say that it was something along the lines of how we engage in
conflict and how we seek to resolve it.
We gave voice to blowing up,
to trying to leverage with threats.
That is really a description of the ways that we seek to engage in an outcome that we desire.
Today, I think that switches to who.
Who do we conceive of as being the one both for and
against a particular outcome?
Who is the one who we consider an ally and who and at what point do
we consider them an enemy?
And of course, that should immediately fire off for us the biblical
text in which Jesus makes it very clear,
love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.
So we have within our own faith story,
straight from the mouth of Jesus,
a command to handle
conflicts and disagreements within our own fellowship in a way that is as many leagues
higher than the expectation of our culture,
the practice of our world,
certainly even the expectation of business and some of the marketplace opportunities that we have that we take for
granted.
We in the church have a very high bar and I would say, Clint,
we seek to live up to it.
We recognize how difficult it is and we fail often and that’s just the reality.
I think we seek to live out our faith in a way that embodies the best of who we are as those who are redeemed
and reconciled in Jesus Christ,
but sometimes we just get caught up and we lose focus and we
struggle to make a way forward.
And that’s not to say,
I feel like, you know, before we jump into
some of the specific ways that we’ve seen this happen.
It’s not to say that there are,
once again, not moments in which standing up and having difficult conversation,
even breaking out.
And may I remind you,
the Reformation was fundamentally a split between we and me.
It was a moment where
the reformers said, we can’t find a path that walks together.
And I think to the credit of the reformers,
they realized how schismatic and divisive and painful and dangerous that was.
There’s a lot of writing about how we reconcile that theologically and practically.
So not to say
that there isn’t a time,
but it is to say that we should take it very,
very seriously when we begin
to see these teams form this division of identity,
because it has at its core,
really,
the question of how we answer that question in many ways defines how we will navigate it together.
And I think it
is essential that we slow down to engage that conversation.
Yeah.
And I think maybe that’s a
experience, us them,
when we begin to see the division into groups that
sort of assume that they’re against one another.
And having done some work with churches that
were in conflict, having been a part of presbytery conversations in which churches were struggling,
when you begin to hear that kind of us/them language,
it’s almost always a sign that that
kind of thing is happening in a congregation.
Well, they said this, and they did that.
Well, but we wanted to do this,
and they wouldn’t let us.
And that is rarely,
I would say never,
a sign of healthy stuff happening in a congregation.
It’s not that we have to agree on everything.
We said this last week, we won’t agree on everything.
We will have differences of opinion.
But when we sort
of make those concrete and we begin to label each other as us/them,
as that team and this team,
I think that that is almost always a sign that things are not in that congregation pointing in
a good direction.
And as we have to have those conversations that can be difficult,
as we disagree with one another, again, as we said last week,
we have to do so in the Spirit of Christ.
And to the end of reconciliation,
grace,
forgiveness,
and being the church together in the love that God
has shown us in the cross.
And that doesn’t mean dividing up and picking your team and then going
to battle with one another.
That just doesn’t work in the church.
It never makes a church
better.
Now, are there moments where churches have to take a stand and people may have to do
something else or people have to take a stand in a church and leave a church?
Yeah, those moments happen.
They’re out there.
But how we do that is essentially important.
And just one more quick
word, Michael, I want to say that we fully understand pastors are not exempt from this at all.
Pastors can get into this we,
us, they, we, me,
we can get into that routine just as quickly,
in fact, maybe more easily than some.
And often you will find pastors and congregations squared
off against one another.
And that’s also not good.
It’s not good leadership.
It’s not good for a congregation.
It’s not good for a pastor.
And so this isn’t something that just happens
to people who aren’t pastors.
This happens in churches and it can involve,
it can involve anyone in the church.
Just to flush that out or give it an example,
I actually,
in my time, I’ve now had several friends from seminary who have served in different congregations.
And I think I’ve noticed in the midst of those transitions is one can get a pretty good
gauge of how one’s experience has been in their church,
how quickly or if ever they come to begin
to use the word we,
if a pastor can never say,
well, we are doing this and it’s always,
well, they are doing this or the church is doing this is generally been assigned in my very limited
experience, anecdotal experience that the kind of integrative work that’s necessary between
the entire body and the shepherd hasn’t happened.
And that that generally bodes of not good sort of
outcomes.
Right. And what’s the first thing that happens once we have some teams established,
once we try to figure out who’s with us,
then we begin using labels to identify which side
a person is on.
And, you know, I have long said and I try to stick with this,
I just generally do
not find labels helpful.
Anything that modifies the word Christian,
I think is suspect because
it can be used to do this kind of grouping.
So I think labels like liberal,
conservative,
progressive,
I think we often don’t know what they mean.
And most often when we use them,
we’re not complimenting the person we’re saying it of,
we’re actually trying to kind of insult
them.
And so I think when we find a congregation that is living with labels,
well,
the young group, the old group,
the old long time members,
the new people, the whatever it is,
I mean, that can take a lot of forms.
But when we begin to treat groups as something other than us,
then I think it is often in my experience,
in fact, it is always in my experience,
a sign that the particular congregation in which that’s happening has some work to do.
So number one, I just want to share,
I think that this conversation is particularly
troubled in this moment of time,
because of how popular culture has been unbelievably affected
by the idea of teams.
In fact, I find as I look at culture,
the team making and therefore the
other team defining is a central part of some of our public discourse right now.
To the extent that
there are some key words that I could throw out in conversation,
there are some labels I could name,
and I could just say that word,
and it would immediately conjure for you,
well, that person is this does this thinks this and believes this and that is unbelievably effective in terms of
shaping the world into a large narrative.
In other words, we if we can group people in relative
buckets, we can be relatively confident of where we are,
and they are and there’s something comforting in that.
But let me challenge it for a second to say,
you are inevitably wrong when you
use a label, a label, if it is a helpful tool,
and there are many times in which it is,
it is only helpful when used rightly,
when you recognize that you’re painting with the broadest brush,
when you apply the liberal and let’s say that in church,
when you apply the liberal of the
conservative or the liberal and you think you know exactly what that means about that person,
you are by definition wrong.
If you sat that person down and had a full conversation and truly listened to them,
they would think things that put them all over the spectrum,
that they would be
unique in their own life experience,
the values that they have come to from that experience,
the ways in which their faith has formed it versus the ways that they’re reading in their family.
And people are deep and complicated.
And when we put a sticker on them that says they are this,
it gives us the feeling of orderliness in our world,
but it takes away from others the true
depth of being that is them.
And so I want to just caution you,
and this is so true in church,
when we label the other side or label ourselves,
what we’ve achieved in that simplicity,
we have now put in danger by stripping away the humanity of the other that we’re called to love.
And by the way,
that is the very one who Jesus came,
knows by name, loves and calls you even if
you’ve labeled them enemy to love yourself.
So I think the inherent harm in the practice of labeling
is simply that we dehumanize and we make an idea or we make a group of ideas.
And that feels more manageable,
I understand it,
but it often becomes for us a sort of seed bed or an ammunition source
that we later level against other people that,
like I said, is inherently not nuanced enough and
generally, when not used properly,
does more harm than good.
Yeah, I read one time a military history book that says in throughout military history,
it has often been the practice,
the intentional practice to come up with a term for the enemy
that intentionally depersonalized them.
So Germans were called Krauts,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Because in order to do that,
that action of war,
it wasn’t necessary for most people,
not to think of their enemy as human,
but as something a little less than that.
And I think that’s a telling lesson,
Michael, because that’s essentially what labels do.
They at some level depersonalize people and make them the sum of not even all of their ideas,
but really just the sum of their ideas.
And we think once we can put them in that box,
we understand them and we can therefore dismiss them.
We can therefore demean them.
And my experience is that once the labeling starts,
typically the next step in that process is the
kind of move towards slandering.
We begin to criticize them.
We begin to make fun of them.
We begin to sort of have humor about them.
We begin to gossip about them or take shots at them
to other people to feel out,
“Is this person on my team or that team?” And that goes downhill
very, very quickly.
And you and I have both seen,
and I suspect a lot of our listeners have seen
churches where that kind of thing gets loose and it is almost impossible to shove back in the bottle.
When that thing gets out,
it is bad.
I mean, it has a terrible impact on a church.
And we see some
of this in the New Testament.
Paul’s dealing with Jews and Gentiles who have historically not done
well together.
And then they’re in this context where they’re trying to learn to live together
in the faith and it’s brutal.
And when they didn’t handle it well,
it was nearly impossible.
Right.
Yeah.
And that I think is an interesting turn,
Clint, when we go from the label that’s
been applied to self or to other,
and then it moves us to what we have to say.
Because that’s when slander happens, is when we have now come to address that label in the real world.
And,
I mean, if you tune into Late Night right now,
it is so barbed.
It is so incisive.
It’s almost like the cutting, you know, sarcasm means to cut flesh.
And so I think our words become so very deadly
once we’ve applied a label because of the freedom that comes in that depersonalization
that you were naming.
And I want to make it clear,
if you read someone like Martin Luther,
he certainly had a way for the insult.
And by the way,
I’m not because he did it,
doesn’t mean that it was Christian or that it should be a practice,
that model.
But it’s to say
that this has always been a struggle when there is another side and we’ve identified that side,
then we find ourselves poisoning the well.
And I want to be clear,
our words have the power to create ripples.
And fundamentally, the reason why we see
a sin like gossip included in lists in the New Testament with things like murder and adultery,
which may blow our minds,
is because its damage to the Christian community is generally far outside
our ability to actually intuit.
A small word that spreads can be like James says,
“wildfire.” I mean, it is unbelievable the kind of damage that can be wreaked when we say of another person that
they’re intractable, that they’re impossible,
that there’s no way forward except through around or
through them or without them.
And when we begin to insult,
when we begin to find humor at another
person’s expense, who we’re called to be brother and sister in Christ with,
at that moment, we’ve stepped outside of the deepest values of the faith.
And now we’ve taken on some behavior that
models much of what we were talking about last week,
but it’s deeply rooted in this idea that
that person is that thing and so therefore deserves that kind of conduct.
The Christian conflict that is thoughtful,
measured,
resolute,
and intentionally and carefully treats the other
with full dignity, respect, love,
and graciousness is a very rare thing and should be celebrated when it happens.
And we call out today the temptation,
that ever-present temptation,
which is to not only label,
but then use that label as a tool through slander.
Yeah.
And I mean, slander is in many ways,
and it’s listed in the New Testament as a thing
that is just not compatible with the faith.
It is inherently mean-spirited.
It is ugly.
It is accusatory.
You know, Michael, I remember I was a college student at the time,
and I went into the care process to become a pastor really pretty early.
My pastor pushed me
into that as soon as I said I might be interested.
And so I had an opportunity while I was in
college to go and do some preaching.
And it was typically small churches like we have in Northwest Iowa.
And, you know, the pastor was on vacation or whatever,
and they needed somebody,
and my name was on some list.
So I’d get to go do this at these churches.
And it was fun.
It was really good practice.
I was not at the time a good preacher.
I didn’t know that.
But looking back now, clearly I had no idea what I was doing,
though I’m sure I did it confidently.
But I
remember I’ll never forget at one of those churches,
you know, you stand there and then
you shake everybody’s hand when you’re done and that kind of deal.
So in one of those churches,
a gentleman came through and he said,
you know, thank you.
He said,
and then he said,
I wish you could come back every week because the guy we’ve got now doesn’t know what he’s
doing.
He can’t preach at all.
And this is a guy in a church having a very negative conversation
about his pastor with a college kid who showed up to try and preach a sermon and make 25 or 50 bucks
or whatever it was back then.
And I remember thinking,
oh, yeah, I don’t want to come back here.
Right.
And my point is there were probably 20 people in that line that day.
It was, you know, those churches were small and he’s the guy I remember.
Now,
all the rest of them, I’m sure,
but he’s the one that left the taste in my mouth for that church and left me thinking, boy,
I feel bad for that place and for that pastor.
And that’s not a place that I’d want to
go back to.
And, you know,
slander does kind of poison the water.
And when we put that out there,
it just doesn’t do good things in a faith community.
I do want to turn meditative for just a moment here because this isn’t just about church leadership.
It’s not just about the health of a congregation.
I do think,
I want to encourage you
that the words that you hear yourself saying can often become a measuring stick of your spiritual health.
If you find yourself turning words against others regularly,
if you find yourself at the fellowship table,
if you find yourself at the coffee hour,
if you find yourself on the phone,
regularly criticizing regularly speaking negatively about a person or a group of people,
if that is a pattern and a habit and a rut that you find yourself in,
then I just want to encourage
you to let that be a sign that it’s time to re-encounter the transformative and dare I even say
freeing grace of Jesus Christ.
I found in my own life,
and I only say this from personal experience,
that there have been a few moments in my life where I’ve heard the words that came out of my mouth.
And it struck me in that moment,
“Oh my goodness,
this is not a good sign.”
And upon further reflection, sure enough,
there was some grudges I was holding.
There was some anxiety I had been unwilling or unable to name and to deal with.
And so I want to make it clear,
this isn’t just about,
you know, don’t do these things or it’s going to hurt the church.
That’s true.
Our words have the impact or they have the impact to build up and to destroy.
Absolutely.
But they also have a way of becoming a barometer of how we’re doing.
And so if you find yourself in that position,
take note of it.
And the implication of that does apply to our neighbor.
Clint, if you find another person,
that individual in the illustration you give,
I would put money on the table that there’s more happening in that comment than you could have
ever ascertained in that moment.
There’s more to that than just a feeling about a pastor.
And so
we need to be careful about how we receive comments like that.
If a person comes to you
and they’re incredibly critical,
if they call out the labels of others and they attack them in a substantial way,
how we receive that and how we reflect that also matters.
Can we have grace for
the person who’s here while also letting that stop with us?
Can we be the kind of person where
that’s the dead end for that without it becoming a judgment of the other person without us turning
them into a label that this goes far deeper than just what I say today and what that person told me.
I mean,
this is a practice of how we choose every level down to be a community that deals
with that temptation to create a label for a person and then to respond to it.
We at whatever level we’re operating should try to detach that from our practice.
Yeah, I’m sure it’s happened
to other people, Michael, but I know that you and I have both had the experience because we’ve talked about it,
of visiting a church in which somebody in that church,
the first thing they felt compelled
to tell us was negative stuff about someone else in that church.
And you never leave there thinking,
“Oh, this is a healthy place doing some good stuff.” That is never a ringing endorsement for
the work of Jesus in this place because that quickly gets messy.
Once those teams are divided,
once the labeling starts,
once the slander begins,
there is hard,
painful work to do
to get back on track.
Not even to move forward,
just to stay where you are,
just to undo the
damage that is done in those moments.
And that stuff happens in churches all the time.
And for some of it is important reasons.
Some of it is legitimate.
And a lot of it is petty.
A lot of it is stuff that doesn’t matter.
It is not kingdom stuff.
It is just people who kind of dig into
their opinion or their way of doing things.
And they have a hard time accepting that not everyone
agrees with them.
And when we do that,
and again,
pastors included,
Michael,
I hear you say,
“It’s happened to you a few times.” I wish I could say,
“It’s happened to me thousands of times.”
Pastors, I wish we were exempt from this stuff,
but we are clearly not.
I promise you, we understand how it works because we’ve been guilty of it.
So that’s exactly where I was going to go.
And in fact, I think that maybe helps shed a different
light on the same exact conversation,
because substantially it’s the same.
The temptation that the church feels,
people within the church feel to claim a team in opposition to another,
however those labels shake out,
is actually in an interesting way the reverse side of the coin to
the same temptation the pastor has.
Because so many pastors,
and this comes from my own
experience with my own friends from seminary,
pastoral collegial relationships both locally
and nationally, all those kinds of things.
Pastors do, I think, have a present temptation to become the victim.
I don’t think rightly or wrongly.
I think every person in the job is going to go
through seasons where it feels like,
“Woe is me.
I wish I didn’t have to do this right now.” But
pastors do have a particular kind of cultural temptation as those within the role to say that
I don’t have a fair shake or that people are overly critical.
And I hear that narrative a lot.
Whenever that’s the case,
pastors, I believe, are also very tempted to play into,
if not even actively support that team kind of language.
Because if you can find a group of people who will affirm you,
that will affirm your position,
your leadership, or maybe even more
temptingly for a pastor,
to affirm your thoughts or to affirm your work,
your value as a person, your identity,
those are moments,
Clint,
when I think pastors are very tempted to throw weight
behind teams and to say,
“Hey, these people are with me,” and then that is a real sea change.
I’m really, really, truly dangerous in the congregation because the shepherds should be
for all in the flock.
And when the shepherd has chosen out those sheep who are the ones who are
going to be at the center,
that is always going to lead to further disconnection to even higher
writeric, more slander in the midst.
And so, yeah, I think looking at from the vantage of
the pastor’s office, I think that it even shows how essential it is to walk this line and to stay
away from the same temptation.
Yeah, to some extent, I think we covered this in our last podcast, but
the reality of these kind of moments is just going to happen,
that this is going to be the
case in the church at some point where people disagree with one another.
That’s not the issue.
The perfect church isn’t one in which people all think the same,
act the same, do the same stuff,
and don’t disagree with one another.
The perfect church is when those disagreements happen.
They happen under the heading of how do we reconcile in our faith in Jesus Christ?
How do we remain connected in moments when we don’t necessarily agree on what is right?
And it becomes about Jesus having His way with us,
not us getting our way in the church.
And that’s not easy to do,
but it is essential for us to pursue what Christian community means,
I think.
You know, Clint,
I think one of the dangers of this kind of conversation is how easy it is
for us included to come and be talking about the danger of labels,
the danger of the things that
we say against others,
the danger of picking a team and reveling in that against the other team,
is that we then take that as leverage against another person and say,
“Well, yeah, you need to stop labeling me.
You need to stop this us and them thing.
You need to listen to me.” And what
ends up happening in those moments is we begin to make ammunition a thing that is a practice
for individual discipleship.
In other words, this is our task.
We should be working on
ourselves.
Jesus says, “Don’t point out the speck in your neighbor’s eye when there’s a
plank in your own.” The reality is we,
for all time, have been more interested in that
speck than we have been the plank.
In fact, most of us don’t even see the plank in our eye.
We don’t even recognize our vision is blocked.
And so I want to encourage you that the more difficult path
is actually the right path in this conversation.
In other words, this is not an opportunity for
us to create a new label to put other people in.
Like, “Hey, look at you.
You’re a label maker.
That is human brokenness.
That’s our sinfulness and the road that’s easy to go down.” But rather
the difficult way in this conversation is to admit,
“Oh yeah,
I’m in this.
This happens to me.”
And if we can start from that point,
then we can begin to make that a very spiritual journey in
which we’re willing to turn over another thing to Christ.
Say,
“God,
I feel so strongly about this
thing.
I’m angry about this thing.
I want to lash out.
I want to speak vengefully against this other
person.
I want to be sarcastic and to cut flesh.
That would feel good.” And to give that up is a
courageous and humbling act.
But we start in prayer.
We start in devotion.
We start that with
journaling.
We start on ourselves.
And as we work on ourselves,
it’s amazing both how the Spirit of
God meets us in that process, Clint,
but it is also amazing how it changes the tone for the whole
body.
In other words, you can’t change the actions of another.
But when you lay down your life for
others in service and love and true care,
as Jesus calls us to,
it does have a way of transforming
the conversation.
And I’ve seen time and time again that people are legitimately surprised
when even difficult words are spoken in true love.
And that’s a hard place to get to,
but it can radically transform a church if we can practice this kind of walk individually,
because it makes a corporate difference in the end.
Yeah, I think to some extent,
Michael, all of those things are relational breakdowns.
I mean,
in order to put someone on the other team,
in order to hang a label on them, in order to
enable to bad mouth them and talk down about them and slander them,
I’ve inevitably had to
sort of put the relationship on hold and not remain connected,
not be reconciled.
And so, yeah, when that happens,
again,
it’s going to have impact in a church.
One of the ones that’s
interesting you may not think of is that all of a sudden it becomes very important very quickly
what belongs to whom and who gets what things in church and what spaces.
And again, it’s been my experience that in those kind of conflicted church moments,
there are lots of peripheral arguments about,
“Well, they moved our stuff,
and well, they tried to do this,” or “They took that thing
that we always use,
and we don’t do it that way,
and they want this,” and you get into all of these
just soul-wearying kind of arguments over who owns things,
who do things belong to,
who’s used them the most,
who gets to store them,
where do they,
somebody use them.
You know,
the funny side of this,
if there is one,
is that I have a collection of pictures and
stories.
I love,
the thing that most interests me,
if I ever make a church book,
it’s going to be pictures of signs in churches,
but not church signs.
I’m talking about the
handwritten signs that go on doors and cabinets that tell people who can use the stuff and who
can.
And my favorite is a picture that was emailed to me,
some friends in a church where there was
some, I think it was silverware or dinnerware,
something was in a church cabinet,
and it was literally,
it had a chain and padlock through the doors saying,
“Off limits to be used only by
whichever group claimed ownership of it.” And I think this is in a church,
we’re locking up our
dinnerware in a church to keep it from the wrong people,
and I know that we want to take care of stuff.
I know that stuff is important,
and we don’t want people to be flippant with it or abuse it.
I know that that stuff matters, space matters.
I get, that has real implications,
but man,
when we start talking what I own or what my group owns and what the others can or can’t use,
again,
boy, if you’re in a church where you find that happening,
that couldn’t be a bigger red flag.
There’s red flags waving all over the place at that point.
Right, because ownership precludes the idea of sharing,
it recludes the idea of that it is ours.
If I own it,
then you need permission
to use it or you’re incapable of being trusted with it.
And by the way,
the church is a public place.
Things will get broken.
Stuff will not always be handled in the way that you would handle it.
And anyone who’s been married has experienced a similar version of that conversation within
every marriage relationship.
At some point, someone has either done something with that thing,
or they’ve had a practice that the other person was totally shocked by and was like, wait,
you’re willing to use that to do that?
Or you think it’s okay to do that in the kitchen?
Or like, whatever it is, we’ve all had experiences where we have just encountered the breakdown
of expectation that will happen in church.
I would dare say,
if it doesn’t happen in church,
that’s also a dangerous sign because it means we’ve pushed everybody out who might have enough
difference to be able to have the conversation.
What matters here,
to be clear,
is that we understand that being a church family will involve a level of openness and willingness.
And I’m going to even dare say a little bit of humor when things don’t go the way that we think they should.
In other words, when the confirmation kids accidentally tried out the good dinnerware
for a thing that they shouldn’t have gotten it out for,
it’s one thing to say,
yeah, maybe we talked to the confirmation leaders and see if next time we can use the plastic forks or whatever.
It’s another thing to say,
I can’t believe that you kids got this out.
Now it’s going to have to get right.
Because one says to those kids,
hey,
listen,
we’re trying to do this together as a
family and this stuff happens in the family.
And the other says to the kids,
you’re not welcome here.
This isn’t a place where you have a part.
And that is a trivial example, Clint.
I think it gets far deeper and maybe even it touches deeper into our identity and far other kind of examples.
But we need to be careful about what we conceive of owning because that’s the thing that our
fist is clenched around.
And then we’re not able to open it to hold hands with anybody else.
There’s a kind of closeness to that posture.
Yeah, I want to be clear.
I’m speaking just for Clint.
So Michael’s exempt from some of this conversation.
If you ever feel compelled to give something to the church,
that’s wonderful.
If part of that gift is you want to continue to say how it gets used,
who gets to use it,
then I would argue you’re not ready to give it to the church yet.
In fact, I would say maybe don’t,
maybe continue to think about that.
It’s always an interesting situation, Michael.
My experience is pastors don’t generally care where things came from.
When they go to
serve in a church,
they see a lamp.
It’s a lamp.
But for some family,
it’s the lamp my great,
great grandmother gave or made or was in our previous building or whatever.
These things get vested with the sort of extra meaning.
So it’s not a lamp.
It is now a part of
my great grandmother’s legacy and as such has to be protected.
And so the lamp can’t be moved.
It can’t be replaced.
It can’t be used because it is now something other than a lamp.
And again,
I understand there are two sides to that because we do want to treat the things we have with respect.
We want to take care of things.
But when those gifts come with strings attached,
it makes it hard for the church to know what to do with them and how to use them in a way.
Because some things just aren’t helpful.
If I donate today a computer to the church,
I can’t assume in five years the church is still going to be needing that computer.
Sometimes things in the church change and our needs change and our tastes change and different people make decisions.
And so I do say this kind of tongue in cheek,
but there are lots of church conflicts that have
started with something got moved or something got changed.
And it’s because the thing was
important to someone in a way that the people doing it didn’t realize.
They weren’t trying to be disrespectful.
They simply didn’t invest it with the same meaning that some others did.
And I think there’s something to learn on both sides of that.
Sometimes we need to be more careful
about hearing those stories.
And other times we need to be a little less committed to the stuff.
Maybe we say, “Oh, thank you.
I’ll just take it back home now,” or whatever that may be.
But, boy, that can really be a landmine,
a field of landmines for congregations.
I will be brief here because I know that some of you have heard this before,
but this sticks out
in my mind as an example of what you’re saying, Clint.
When Rachelle and I were in England,
we had an opportunity to go throughout some of the countryside.
We visited some churches because
my wife is married to me.
She has to bear that burden.
And so we went through a few country
churches and we went through a few in the region.
It’s called the Cotswolds.
It’s a beautiful sort of rural country area.
And we went through some churches.
And it was striking because each
church there had a tour guide.
I mean, literally a little trifold booklet.
And inside was the
history of the church.
The church was immaculate.
The floors were so clean.
I’m sure you could have
eaten off of them.
Everything was in its place.
Every historical marker of every pastor,
every notable person who had been literally buried in that sanctuary.
It was, for all accounts, a museum of that church’s life.
Then we went a couple churches down into a city.
And inside was a church that looked no younger as a building.
And they too had a little trifold booklet on the
back of the church.
And they also had toys strewn about the side of the room.
They had pictures of
their kids hanging on the wall.
They too had some things that had been donated and that they had
placards on that were important to them.
But the striking difference between these two places,
Clint, was one felt like a museum of what had been.
The other felt like a living home
where people lived, worked, worshiped, and served together.
And the difference to a person who
walked in them without any person there was striking.
I ask you when we go to church and
when we get upset about the stuff in church,
is it about the people?
Is it about the we of the
church or is it about ourselves or what the church was or what we wish it could be?
Because if it is
that, then I would just challenge us to realize that we have too narrow of a view.
This is a challenge to every single one of us.
Maybe that thing that we are so passionate about absolutely
needs to be in the church and it needs to be used regularly and it needs to be used well.
If that’s the case,
we should be the first to generously open it to others and to teach others
and to be there as encouragers and gracious sort of welcomeers and people who put hospitality first.
If we don’t have that in our spirit,
then that’s not a good sign.
That is likely a reference back
to our previous conversation about idolatry than it is actually about something in service of the whole.
It may look the same.
It may even some cases sound the same,
but I think the difference
between us taking unhealthy ownership of a thing and us being willing to really invest
passionately in a smaller area of the church that is important,
that is an important ministry and
it takes some wisdom and discernment from all of us,
pastors included, to know what that is.
In some previous podcasts we did,
I don’t remember the series or the episode,
Michael, but you and I
talked about the reality that in the Presbyterian Church,
at least in the mainline church,
probably Methodist,
Lutheran,
you know,
we are not terribly unlike what we have typically been.
And so the church is one of the few places in a world where it seems like everything is changing all the time.
The church is one of the few places in that world where people can kind of take a
break and a breath from that and say, you know,
the church is kind of like I remember it.
The church is sort of a basic version of what it always has been.
And there’s something really important in
that, but sometimes it means that change is extraordinarily difficult for congregations.
You know,
this week Jane and I are painting the kitchen because we used to need one color on the wall.
And now,
you know, we need another color,
a different color.
And every now and then we have
to get new furniture because the old furniture that looked great when it was new and it was exactly
what we wanted isn’t what we need anymore.
We need a different style.
There’s no bite to any of this.
Speaking of sarcasm, right?
But everybody goes through that,
like you’ve had these dishes for
a long time.
They still hold food perfectly well,
but it’s time for new dishes.
And I don’t really
know what the seasonality for what time it is when the dishes change.
I don’t really understand
all that.
I just know this week I have a paintbrush and I’m replacing one color with another color.
We get that in our homes,
right?
But when the church does that,
first of all, there are more people involved.
And second of all,
some of those people have a vested interest in the church being
a place that isn’t different all the time,
that isn’t changing, that isn’t upside down,
that just kind of stays the same.
And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that,
but we need to be
aware of it because it can make it difficult to move forward.
And when those things become issues, again,
it’s rarely about the actual thing.
It’s about the trust level.
It’s about the relationships.
It’s not the silverware.
The silverware is just silverware.
We all know that at some level,
but it becomes more than that when we give it a meaning that it doesn’t really need
and maybe doesn’t deserve.
And that’s when I think we’re in danger of getting sideways with
one another in ways that aren’t productive.
You know, Clint,
I really want to be encouraging
here as we near the end of the conversation to remind everyone that what we as a church
are trying to do is in some ways exceptional.
When Jesus says, “Let the children come to me,”
he’s not saying that in a culture that values children and really raises them up and says that
these young people are meaningful and valuable.
I mean,
those children didn’t contribute to the
family pocketbook.
And so culturally,
Jesus was making a very anti-cultural statement and saying that today,
most businesses aren’t trying to sell their product or services to everyone.
They’re not trying to sell them to those who are 80 plus and to those who are 20 and below, right?
Most of the time, people are comfortable with a smaller segment of the population,
and that’s who they
seek to serve well.
In the church,
we are fully committed to the fact that every single person is
a beloved child of God.
So that means whether you’re young or old,
whether you are able-bodied or not,
whether you come with strong convictions in one way or another,
that we seek to be a place
where Jesus Christ is the one who binds us together,
that his gravitational pull is enough
to keep all of our differences held in tension.
That is unbelievably challenging work.
So, of course, we’re not going to get through a conversation about the “we” and the “me,” about the labeling,
the slandering, the team making, the ownership.
We’re not going to get through
that conversation without taking some bruises because we’ve all had a part in missing the mark
on that.
Pastors, maybe even chief above all.
So we’re going to be beaten up in that conversation
at some point.
But take heart because our vision and our mission as the church is exceptional.
I mean, what we’re called to do and what we seek to do is an important thing.
And if we can live
it out to the best of our ability,
it’s a beautiful thing.
It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.
When churches live with those tensions together,
when we live with a kind of “we” that you don’t find other places,
that is compelling and it’s beautiful and it’s worth fighting for.
Yeah.
And, you know, Mike, again, I don’t want to say that these things that we’re talking about
don’t matter.
They do.
But here’s what I will say.
They matter less than Jesus,
right?
And the good news of the gospel is if I don’t like the new piano,
if I don’t like the new color in the
restroom, if I don’t like the silverware,
if I don’t like the hymn, whatever it is,
Jesus is still Jesus.
Jesus is still Lord.
If the lamp got moved,
it’s okay.
Jesus is still my Savior and the
church is one and only cornerstone.
And some days that just needs to be enough.
Some days,
you know,
we have to make sure that we’re taking our compass headings off the right bearing and
that’s always Jesus first.
It’s not that the other stuff doesn’t matter.
It does matter.
It just doesn’t matter sometimes as much as we let ourselves think that it does.
And as you rightly say,
pastors include it.
So thanks for listening.
We hope we haven’t kind of firehosed you
with our own frustrations.
But I do think there’s some stuff in here that lots of churches
struggle with.
I bet you know of a time that a church has been involved in some of these things.
And we certainly hope that as we continue to serve together at First Press,
if that’s where you’re at
or wherever you are,
that our church and your church navigates these challenges well so that
we can be faithful in our service and in our ministry in the name of Jesus.
Yeah. And I don’t know if it means anything,
Clint, but neither of us have the silver bullet.
I mean, neither of us have.
This is how you resolve tension.
This is the process or this is the magic
word.
Or it looks like us trying together.
And by that, I mean all of us trying,
getting up another day, trying to be faithful.
And we’re glad that you would be part of the conversation,
willing,
if at this point you’re still with us,
to stick through to the end.
And we hope that in the
process of learning and challenging ourselves,
all of us together,
we will be that kind of body that
Paul talks about, the body of Christ,
which lives out the faith in the world in a way that is compelling and invitational,
both for those who are within our sanctuaries and those outside them.
Thanks for being with us.
We look forward to our next conversation and we will see you next week.