(Admin's Note: On behalf of our team here at Bring Back The Burning Bush, please allow me to apologize in advance for the dearth of posting over the next week. We have entered that time of spiritual and literal testing known as finals week, and we will all be too busy praying for grace to post until after it's over. To tide you over, I've reposted a blog I wrote on my personal site for the UMC Young Clergy last August - I considered updating some of the references since nearly a year has passed, but I thought it might be more informative in its original state. See you on the other side! - Kate)
My name is Kate Mackereth, and I am a certified candidate for ordination in the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the UMC. I am 22 years old, white, female, and belong to Christ United Methodist Church. Christ UMC is a contemporary, multiracial, theologically conservative congregation just outside the city limits of Frederick, MD. For 20 of the 22 years this congregation has been in operation, we worshipped at Ballenger Creek Middle School, next door to our current property. While attending Messiah College, I worshipped at First United Methodist Church in Mechanicsburg, PA, an 1800-member liturgical congregation. While at First, I served for 18 months as Service Director for their (at that time) new evening contemporary service, U-Turn. At CUMC, I have been active most recently as a worship leader and youth leader.
There were, as I can recall, two important events in my discernment process, which began seven years ago. The first was my decision to attend, and later to join the leadership team, at First UMC in Mechanicsburg. It was a congregation different in almost every way from my home church, including the presence on staff of associate pastor Lucretia Hurley-Browning. My home church would not receive its first woman pastor for another year, and the transition could charitably be described as rocky. However, Lucretia had been on staff at First for five years, and I was able to witness for the first time a woman pastor ministering to a congregation successfully, something I was unsure I would be able to do at that time. Lucretia’s example and guidance over the 2 years I attended First Church was invaluable in helping me to accept not only God’s call for my life, but also His call to ordination. I also received great support and encouragement from the entire U-Turn leadership team, including Rev. Mike Minnix, Ed Geiger, Charlie Renner, Lorette DeWalt, Allison Ometz and their families. The good people of First Church gave me my first real responsibilities in leadership and were always supportive of me in anything I chose to do. That support gave me the freedom to really test the limits of my event-planning, worship-leading and organizational skills, and I discovered that I had a talent for administration.
The second event which confirmed my call to ministry was my visit to Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. I grew up near DC and had always loved the city, but I had no real intention of going to graduate school so close to home and no definite plans to attend graduate school at all when I visited the seminary. But from the moment I arrived on campus, I knew that not only was I going to go to graduate school, but I would be a student at Wesley. The class I sat in on held my attention in a way that no lecture class has ever done; the stories I heard from other students at lunch convinced me that this would be a place where I could explore my call and my beliefs publicly without the censure I had earned for doing so with others in the past. I move to WTS in just a few days, and I am so excited to begin the next part of this insane journey to ordination.
My theological standpoints have changed radically in the year since I formally entered the ordination process. Where I would have self-identified before as a mainstream, middle-of-the-theological road Christian, I now identify myself with pride as a liberal Christian feminist (much to the chagrin of some of my former fellow-congregants at CUMC). The discernment and ordination processes have been difficult, but also freeing for me because they have allowed me to break out of what my ordination mentor calls “the box of theological origin” to discover a set of beliefs that I can finally own as mine, rather than preserve as a hand-me-down heirloom of my predecessors. I have recognized and come to appreciate the place and role of doubt in a vital and evolving faith life – doubt is the room in which God works in our minds and hearts to bring us in tune with Him. Most importantly, I’ve embraced the fact that God’s call on my life is NOT the same yesterday, today and forever – it’s as fluid and changing as my faith in Him, but always imbued with His love for me.
If I have any advice to give to those who are in the midst of or just starting out on this journey, it would be to become dumb. Forget everything you know about yourself and your beliefs, forget everything you think you know about what a good pastor or missionary or whatever looks like. Your preconceived notions about what you have been, who you want to be and what God wants you to be are going to be your biggest stumbling blocks on the road to actually figuring out all that stuff. Don’t let anyone tell you what to think, but don’t think you know what to think either – just let it all go and start fresh, with God as your goal, your desire and your guide. Good luck!
Friday, April 30, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
We Are Not Alone
We are not alone; we live in God's world.
We believe in God:
who has created and is creating ,
who has come in Jesus, the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others by the Spirit.
We trust in God.
Often in these first few months of new ministry I have had the opportunity to reflect on the difference between being a paid minister vs. an unpaid volunteer leader. The expecations are different, and rightly so - if a church is paying for for specific services, you should be working hard to ensure those expectations are met. But the attitude, the approach, is almost totally alien to me, and I'll admit to more than the occasional stumble in the past weeks as I work to understand not only my youth and the church as a whole, but also their view of me. I was hired in part to be a prophetic voice of change, which is much easier said than done when your livelihood depends in part on the approval of the people you're about to piss off. This situation is also different for me in that unlike every other church I've been a part of in the past, I have no advocates, no allies, no "in" to help me - just a title and a desk. I love what I do, but this experience is forcing me to come to terms with the loneliness inherent in my vocation. I have a handful of people I can turn to at seminary or from other communities who are, in essence, my "church family" - but they are not part of my church life and cannot share in my joys and sorrows with any kind of immediacy. There's no one to turn to after a conversation to ask, "Did I handle that well?" because everyone has some sort of stake that I don't fully see in the life and vitality of the community, and without knowing their bias, I can't rely on their input.
We are called to be the church:
to celebrate God's presence,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope.
In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.
We are not alone.
Thanks be to God. Amen
-Statement of Faith of the United Church of Canada
Thursday, April 22, 2010
The Angry Disciple
Why must you be such an angry young man? Your future looks quite bright to me!
From “Fooling Yourself” by Styx.
We’ve all met angry disciples. In fact, we’ve each been one. But angry ministry-types embarrass us and, when we join their ranks, we feel guilty about it. What’s with all the anger? We can never be happy unless we follow God’s call. The opposite of happy is depressed. Depression focused outward onto others (like God) is anger.
In my last two posts, I wrote that being called into the ministry is like being diagnosed with a fatal disease because, in order to accept the calling, we must first grieve. Every time we start down a path, at some level, we must grieve the loss of the paths not taken. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression/fear, and finally (hopefully) acceptance/peace. In this post, I want to talk about anger.
An angry disciple has moved past denial. She knows she’s been called by God to ministry… there is no ambiguity. But she hasn’t said yes. In fact, she might even follow Jonas’ example and head as fast as she can in the opposite direction. Call it rebellion. Call it sowing your wild oats. Call it what you want. It’s perfectly natural, but not exactly faithful. I should know… I tried it.
My wife Becky and I got engaged while we were in college. Everybody had warned me that, if I didn’t get married before entering ministry, I was in for a difficult path. Therefore, I pursued finding a spouse with a single-minded sense of purpose. I had many, many first dates. This is how they all ended, usually around 7:30 p.m.:
“So what are you doing after college?”
Seminary.
“What’s that?”
Grad school for ministers.
“Gee… it’s getting late, can you take me home?”
Anger.
Becky was the first woman I met who was actually impressed, so I proposed. After I graduated, Becky had three more years to go. We both felt having two people in school while starting a marriage was a bad idea, so I decided to work for three years and save some money while Becky finished school.
Then I had to decide which job I should look for. I ended up with two jobs: One working for the Boy Scouts of America, and the other as a part-time youth pastor. Both jobs made sense to the DCOM, because they both had obvious relationships with my calling. But in the back of my head, I was always thinking: “If this situation is fulfilling enough for me, maybe I can just run with it.” I was looking for a way to do it half-way. I wanted to do… whatever I wanted to do! But yet, this struggle for freedom from God didn't make me happy. I alternated between anger and depression.
After a year or so of this, I began to look at my job as a trade-off. I wasn’t doing as much ministry as I knew I should, but I was getting paid well, and the money tempered the sense of dissatisfaction. I began to wonder if more money would temper more dissatisfaction. In other words, I was leaving anger behind and entering into bargaining, which will be the topic of my next post.
From “Fooling Yourself” by Styx.
We’ve all met angry disciples. In fact, we’ve each been one. But angry ministry-types embarrass us and, when we join their ranks, we feel guilty about it. What’s with all the anger? We can never be happy unless we follow God’s call. The opposite of happy is depressed. Depression focused outward onto others (like God) is anger.
In my last two posts, I wrote that being called into the ministry is like being diagnosed with a fatal disease because, in order to accept the calling, we must first grieve. Every time we start down a path, at some level, we must grieve the loss of the paths not taken. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression/fear, and finally (hopefully) acceptance/peace. In this post, I want to talk about anger.
An angry disciple has moved past denial. She knows she’s been called by God to ministry… there is no ambiguity. But she hasn’t said yes. In fact, she might even follow Jonas’ example and head as fast as she can in the opposite direction. Call it rebellion. Call it sowing your wild oats. Call it what you want. It’s perfectly natural, but not exactly faithful. I should know… I tried it.
My wife Becky and I got engaged while we were in college. Everybody had warned me that, if I didn’t get married before entering ministry, I was in for a difficult path. Therefore, I pursued finding a spouse with a single-minded sense of purpose. I had many, many first dates. This is how they all ended, usually around 7:30 p.m.:
“So what are you doing after college?”
Seminary.
“What’s that?”
Grad school for ministers.
“Gee… it’s getting late, can you take me home?”
Anger.
Becky was the first woman I met who was actually impressed, so I proposed. After I graduated, Becky had three more years to go. We both felt having two people in school while starting a marriage was a bad idea, so I decided to work for three years and save some money while Becky finished school.
Then I had to decide which job I should look for. I ended up with two jobs: One working for the Boy Scouts of America, and the other as a part-time youth pastor. Both jobs made sense to the DCOM, because they both had obvious relationships with my calling. But in the back of my head, I was always thinking: “If this situation is fulfilling enough for me, maybe I can just run with it.” I was looking for a way to do it half-way. I wanted to do… whatever I wanted to do! But yet, this struggle for freedom from God didn't make me happy. I alternated between anger and depression.
After a year or so of this, I began to look at my job as a trade-off. I wasn’t doing as much ministry as I knew I should, but I was getting paid well, and the money tempered the sense of dissatisfaction. I began to wonder if more money would temper more dissatisfaction. In other words, I was leaving anger behind and entering into bargaining, which will be the topic of my next post.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
In-between
I've been told this feeling is normal. I've been told that sometime during your seminary "life" you will have thoughts, questions and concerns about your future, your faith and God. I think I have entered this period.
To be honest, my relationship with God has been rocky for a while. Since my brother died it has been hard to fully worship the God I love, and who I know loves me unconditionally. It's that last part that hurts the most. If God loves me unconditionally, then why did my brother die. This is something I wrestle with each time I pray.
I know I am suppose to be in seminary, through all the work, pain and paper writing I know (one hundred percent) there isn't any other place I want to be, or should be. However, sometimes, well more than sometimes, I wonder what God has in store for me. You see my coming to seminary was based on faith that God will not leave me, nor forsake me. The one Bible verse I've clung to since my brother's death (I have it printed out and hanging on my wall) is:
Another significant decision I've made during this time, when this blog entry was listed as a draft, is that I have an internship at a local church. As part of my seminary education I'm required to have a small internship for one year at a local church. This is both exciting and worrisome. So, I continue to dwell in this in-between space. But I find comfort in the following passage from Jeremiah. Instead of extracting simply the one verse so many people enjoy, I have included the verses around it. Exile, captivity, has to happen, but God has a plan: before, during and after.
To be honest, my relationship with God has been rocky for a while. Since my brother died it has been hard to fully worship the God I love, and who I know loves me unconditionally. It's that last part that hurts the most. If God loves me unconditionally, then why did my brother die. This is something I wrestle with each time I pray.
I know I am suppose to be in seminary, through all the work, pain and paper writing I know (one hundred percent) there isn't any other place I want to be, or should be. However, sometimes, well more than sometimes, I wonder what God has in store for me. You see my coming to seminary was based on faith that God will not leave me, nor forsake me. The one Bible verse I've clung to since my brother's death (I have it printed out and hanging on my wall) is:
The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Deuteronomy 31:8To be honest, I've had this post as a draft for months now. I kept thinking about this in-between space I find myself in at seminary. During these months though I've made and followed through with a major decision. I have officially switched from an M. Div. to an M.A. I have made an official switch that will prevent me from being ordained an Elder in the UMC, which is, for me, wonderful. My call is not to the sacraments. I could never image myself baptizing an infant, or preaching each week, or anything like that. My call is to work with middle school and high schoolers, and possibly Christian Education.
Another significant decision I've made during this time, when this blog entry was listed as a draft, is that I have an internship at a local church. As part of my seminary education I'm required to have a small internship for one year at a local church. This is both exciting and worrisome. So, I continue to dwell in this in-between space. But I find comfort in the following passage from Jeremiah. Instead of extracting simply the one verse so many people enjoy, I have included the verses around it. Exile, captivity, has to happen, but God has a plan: before, during and after.
"For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfil to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile." Jeremiah 29: 10-15 (NRSV)
Friday, April 16, 2010
Personal and Theological Crises
Well, I haven't posted in awhile. With good reason, I promise (hopefully people actually care enough about what I write so y'all were missing me!). School has overwhelmed with stuff to do, but that has little to do with why I haven't been able to make time to write the blog. Unfortunately, I've been having a lot of physical issues the past few weeks. Enough physical issues to make me think I was dying for a few days, and then even when I thought it was safe to say I wasn't dying I was still scared enough to not go to classes. I won't get into the details of what was going on, you'll just have to trust me that it was pretty darn scary and I hope no one ever has to go through with what I did. After a couple visits to the hospital and doctor we finally diagnosed me with general anxiety disorder. That is important to this blog.
Knowing I have general anxiety disorder has done a whole lot of things to me in the past week (it was last week to the day that I was diagnosed). A lot of positives have come out of it. The medication is helping me feel better and the awareness of my condition is also helping me be more aware of when I'm carrying extra tension and anxiety, and it's allowed me to better manage my time to sneak in some relaxing alone time. Best of all, though, it's actually been rather enlightening into my life history and personality. I now acknowledge why I am the way I am, and how frustrating it can be for other people and myself, and can look forward to a future without those characteristics.
On the flip side, though, being diagnosed with general anxiety disorder has launched me into a crisis. First of all, though I can look forward with hope to a new future, I also look forward with despair to a new future. What if I'm no longer the energetically humorous person I've always been? What if I'm not as efficient a worker as I've always been? What if my grades and other future responsibilities (pastoring a church, especially) suffer because I'm not as stressed out about doing well? I have a number of questions to answer about who I will be and whether or not I will like that person, and I'll only be able to answer those questions when I get there, which is more frustrating. Thankfully, though, this personality crisis is not the worst thing ever. I acknowledge first and foremost that other people in the world are going through much worse problems and dealing with medication is near the bottom of my concerns in the world. I also acknowledge that, though I've worked hard to become someone in Christ that I am happy with (of course, I still have lots of things to work on, but I'm happy with where I'm coming from now to work on those things), becoming a new person because of medication isn't either a good or bad thing. It is what it is, and I'll just have to work hard again to integrate something new in my life and still be a disciple of Christ.
My real crisis is theological. I think I've said that I don't drink alcohol ever. The reason is that I don't see any reason for a Christian to drink alcohol: if you drink to relax, why not pray to God and spend time with Him; if you drink to lose inhibitions, I first question why but I also question why you don't pray and talk to God about finding a new "you"; and then I question anyone who enjoys the taste because I doubt they did when they took their first sips. If you're smart, you may already see where I'm going with this. If I have a general anxiety issue, why don't I just pray to God to release me from my anxieties, knowing that everything is in control when we put it in God's hands? Better yet, why don't I become a good Christian and listen to Jesus when he says that we should not worry in the first place, God will provide?
So you see, because of a simple label on my life I've been thrown into a crisis. I know I need the medication because I haven't yet dealt properly with my condition in my 22 years of life, but if I took my theology seriously then I shouldn't take the medication, whether I "need" it or not. And if I do need the medication, then maybe my theology was incorrect and I need to rethink. That's never easy, for me at least.
I have a few options, then. Either I don't take the medication and deal with this on my own (on some level, I will have to change my life even with the medication, of course), or I adapt my theology to my personal experience. For me, the latter option is extremely scary because I don't think personal experience should have such a drastic impact on how I understand God and our relationship to Him. As a Methodist, I adhere to the quadrilateral for determining religious truth: experience, yes, but also tradition, Scripture, and reason. The other three tell me that God can do anything, experience tells me that maybe God can't do everything (or maybe that I just don't have a very good relationship with Him, which is no more satisfying at the moment).
Reaching a place like this means crisis. What it basically comes down to is I either change how I view God or change my opinion of myself. Acknowledging that God isn't all-powerful, or acknowledging that I don't really know God at all.
In talking all this out I think I'm coming to a conclusion, but I won't share it with you all. It's not the reason I wanted to share my story. The reason I wanted to share my story is that I want to say that we need to acknowledge when we have these types of crises. Wherever I come out on this I will feel more confident because I haven't taken all four pieces of the quadrilateral into serious consideration. I'll also be more confident because whatever my faith looks like from here on it'll know that God carried me through this difficult time. Maybe I need to change how I view God, but that shouldn't detract us from living into the crisis. "Flip-flopping" may be bad in politics but in our spiritual journey. God is always calling us to new and better understandings of Him. Of course, that might be a scary thought for you. It is for me. I prefer if God would just reveal Himself once to me and I understand it all completely right then. That's how I've understood revelation on my spiritual journey so far, but I'm beginning to see that God reveals Himself constantly to us. In those moments of God's presence we need to always reevaluate how He's revealing Himself to us. Maybe it's always the same and we can take heart in that. Maybe it's always the same but looks different and we just need to not lose heart. And maybe it's different, but that's how God chose to present Himself to us at that moment in our life and we need to take it as it is and not fight it too much.
Certainly, there's a fine line between relying on experience too much and not fighting at all for what we previously had concluded intellectually and in prayer, and not relying on experience at all and fighting too much to hold intact what we hold in dear in our mental cages. Take C.S. Lewis for example. He wrote about evil and suffering in the world in The Problem of Pain, but then he lost his wife a few years later and realized what he had written didn't totally hold up, so he wrote A Grief Observed. The experience made him realize that his mental construct of God and evil were, indeed, mental constructs, but he also didn't let his experience fully dictate to him what and who God is, a good portion of his original theology remained, just in a very different form.
I'm not asking that we move through our spiritual journey with such an open mind that we think it's incredibly awesome every time we hear about some new thing or experience something new, but I do think that God is so expansive that we need to constantly reevaluate how we view Him and His presence in our lives. We also need to reevaluate our own relationship with God. I, for one, now certainly realize that I do not spend nearly as much time in prayer with God and reading His holy word as I should. If I had, I might not be so darn anxious!
Knowing I have general anxiety disorder has done a whole lot of things to me in the past week (it was last week to the day that I was diagnosed). A lot of positives have come out of it. The medication is helping me feel better and the awareness of my condition is also helping me be more aware of when I'm carrying extra tension and anxiety, and it's allowed me to better manage my time to sneak in some relaxing alone time. Best of all, though, it's actually been rather enlightening into my life history and personality. I now acknowledge why I am the way I am, and how frustrating it can be for other people and myself, and can look forward to a future without those characteristics.
On the flip side, though, being diagnosed with general anxiety disorder has launched me into a crisis. First of all, though I can look forward with hope to a new future, I also look forward with despair to a new future. What if I'm no longer the energetically humorous person I've always been? What if I'm not as efficient a worker as I've always been? What if my grades and other future responsibilities (pastoring a church, especially) suffer because I'm not as stressed out about doing well? I have a number of questions to answer about who I will be and whether or not I will like that person, and I'll only be able to answer those questions when I get there, which is more frustrating. Thankfully, though, this personality crisis is not the worst thing ever. I acknowledge first and foremost that other people in the world are going through much worse problems and dealing with medication is near the bottom of my concerns in the world. I also acknowledge that, though I've worked hard to become someone in Christ that I am happy with (of course, I still have lots of things to work on, but I'm happy with where I'm coming from now to work on those things), becoming a new person because of medication isn't either a good or bad thing. It is what it is, and I'll just have to work hard again to integrate something new in my life and still be a disciple of Christ.
My real crisis is theological. I think I've said that I don't drink alcohol ever. The reason is that I don't see any reason for a Christian to drink alcohol: if you drink to relax, why not pray to God and spend time with Him; if you drink to lose inhibitions, I first question why but I also question why you don't pray and talk to God about finding a new "you"; and then I question anyone who enjoys the taste because I doubt they did when they took their first sips. If you're smart, you may already see where I'm going with this. If I have a general anxiety issue, why don't I just pray to God to release me from my anxieties, knowing that everything is in control when we put it in God's hands? Better yet, why don't I become a good Christian and listen to Jesus when he says that we should not worry in the first place, God will provide?
So you see, because of a simple label on my life I've been thrown into a crisis. I know I need the medication because I haven't yet dealt properly with my condition in my 22 years of life, but if I took my theology seriously then I shouldn't take the medication, whether I "need" it or not. And if I do need the medication, then maybe my theology was incorrect and I need to rethink. That's never easy, for me at least.
I have a few options, then. Either I don't take the medication and deal with this on my own (on some level, I will have to change my life even with the medication, of course), or I adapt my theology to my personal experience. For me, the latter option is extremely scary because I don't think personal experience should have such a drastic impact on how I understand God and our relationship to Him. As a Methodist, I adhere to the quadrilateral for determining religious truth: experience, yes, but also tradition, Scripture, and reason. The other three tell me that God can do anything, experience tells me that maybe God can't do everything (or maybe that I just don't have a very good relationship with Him, which is no more satisfying at the moment).
Reaching a place like this means crisis. What it basically comes down to is I either change how I view God or change my opinion of myself. Acknowledging that God isn't all-powerful, or acknowledging that I don't really know God at all.
In talking all this out I think I'm coming to a conclusion, but I won't share it with you all. It's not the reason I wanted to share my story. The reason I wanted to share my story is that I want to say that we need to acknowledge when we have these types of crises. Wherever I come out on this I will feel more confident because I haven't taken all four pieces of the quadrilateral into serious consideration. I'll also be more confident because whatever my faith looks like from here on it'll know that God carried me through this difficult time. Maybe I need to change how I view God, but that shouldn't detract us from living into the crisis. "Flip-flopping" may be bad in politics but in our spiritual journey. God is always calling us to new and better understandings of Him. Of course, that might be a scary thought for you. It is for me. I prefer if God would just reveal Himself once to me and I understand it all completely right then. That's how I've understood revelation on my spiritual journey so far, but I'm beginning to see that God reveals Himself constantly to us. In those moments of God's presence we need to always reevaluate how He's revealing Himself to us. Maybe it's always the same and we can take heart in that. Maybe it's always the same but looks different and we just need to not lose heart. And maybe it's different, but that's how God chose to present Himself to us at that moment in our life and we need to take it as it is and not fight it too much.
Certainly, there's a fine line between relying on experience too much and not fighting at all for what we previously had concluded intellectually and in prayer, and not relying on experience at all and fighting too much to hold intact what we hold in dear in our mental cages. Take C.S. Lewis for example. He wrote about evil and suffering in the world in The Problem of Pain, but then he lost his wife a few years later and realized what he had written didn't totally hold up, so he wrote A Grief Observed. The experience made him realize that his mental construct of God and evil were, indeed, mental constructs, but he also didn't let his experience fully dictate to him what and who God is, a good portion of his original theology remained, just in a very different form.
I'm not asking that we move through our spiritual journey with such an open mind that we think it's incredibly awesome every time we hear about some new thing or experience something new, but I do think that God is so expansive that we need to constantly reevaluate how we view Him and His presence in our lives. We also need to reevaluate our own relationship with God. I, for one, now certainly realize that I do not spend nearly as much time in prayer with God and reading His holy word as I should. If I had, I might not be so darn anxious!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Watch Out!
I know many of you readers out there are young adults (like many of us here at Bring Back The Burning Bush) and I wanted to make you aware of an opportunity designed just for you. Wesley Theological Seminary will be hosting a vocational discernment retreat next fall, October 1-2, at its campus in Washington, DC, specifically geared toward high school seniors, college students and young professionals. Yours truly is on the design team, and I promise you that this event will be a great one and well worth your time as you discern your call to ministry. Watch Wesley Theological Seminary's website and our blog for more information and I hope to meet you there!
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
God’s Calling and Denial
I would not say that my discernment process, at least the formal portion of it that was monitored by the church hierarchy, was a positive experience. In fact, I complained about it so incessantly that, as soon as I was ordained elder, I was tapped to serve as a candidacy mentor and to serve on the DCOM. (God has a sense of humor, and so does the United Methodist Church.)
I have numerous complaints about the way our denomination handles the candidacy process:
First: We’re terrified by the knowledge that pastors sometimes “break.” When they do, they tend to do so in spectacular ways. Unfortunately, our denomination has never found a way to deal with at-risk pastors in a constructive way. Rather than intervening mid-career, we’re attempting to find unbreakable pastors by making the screening process difficult. There are no unbreakable pastors. If you push us hard enough (and they keep pushing harder) we’re all capable of “going Jim Jones” on some poor congregation.
Second: Our process attempts to weed out people with questionable callings, psychological problems, inappropriate theological orientations, and a host of other issues. It does not succeed at any of these things. It does succeed at weeding out people who cannot handle extremely high levels of stress. The result is that we’re hand-picking the most tightly-wound, paranoid, pressure cookers on the face of the planet. I’m proud to count myself among their number!
I hope to use this series of articles to cast a vision for a better path.
In my last post, I wrote that being called into the ministry is like being diagnosed with a fatal disease because, in order to accept the calling, we must first grieve. Every time we start down a path, at some level, we must grieve the loss of the paths not taken. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression/fear, and finally (hopefully) acceptance/peace. In this article, I want to talk about the first stage most of us deal with: Denial… the refusal to believe the truth.
There was a movie in the 1950s titled, “A Man Called Peter.” It was not about St. Peter, but about the Rev. Peter Marshall, a famous Scottish-American preacher of that era. According the film, when Peter Marshall first heard the voice of God calling him to the ministry as a young boy, he rushed home to tell his family. They were overjoyed that one of their own had been blessed with such an honor.
My experience was nothing like that.
I didn’t tell anyone for a very long time. In fact, God and I had a lot of arguments over it. I had other plans. My dad thought I’d make a great lawyer, and so did I. (I like to argue with people.) Lawyers are people who get stuff done. (This was the ‘80s, and the legal profession had not yet fallen from grace.) I watched “L.A. Law” and everything else on TV that made the legal profession look glamorous. People were proud to have lawyers in the family. But the preachers depicted on TV were comic relief at best and psychopaths at worst. I had ambivalent feelings about my own pastor at that time. I belonged to an independent church. It had many strengths, but the pastor treated it like his own personal property.
When I finally realized that God was not going to drop the subject, I told my parents. They tried to talk me out of it. They loved going to church, but they didn’t want me to be a pastor. They wanted what was “best for me.” When people asked me what professions I was looking at, my parents would cringe and stutter when I said ministry. My friends begged me not to throw away my life. Even the pastors I spoke to would sigh and say, “Well… you still have plenty of time to change your mind.” These pastors clearly were not enjoying their work. That’s too bad… I think this job is all kinds of fun… when done properly.
In short, I didn’t get much positive affirmation. Actually, I got none. Notice that none of the objections I faced had anything to do with real questions of call. They all had to do with societal expectations, stereotypes, and misguided notions about the American Dream. To make matters worse, in that era, many pastors and DCOMs had a strong bias in favor of older candidates. I was told that someone my age simply couldn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. My response: “What do my wants have to do with this? I wanted to be a lawyer.”
Is it any wonder that so many people say no to God? Virtually every pastor I know who entered the ministry mid-career will confess that they actually heard the calling when they were teenagers. They succumbed to societal pressure.
I feel very strongly that young candidates need to be affirmed at this stage. Testing the call of someone dealing with denial is harmful, and yet we keep doing it. Thankfully, we do seem to have gotten better at this. We now make a point of affirming that all people are called by God to ministry of some sort. But we still seem to default to the assumption that most candidates are, in fact, called to something else. Balderdash!
If you’re reading this, and you’re in denial, take heart! You’re not crazy. God is calling you, or you would not have made it to the end of this far-too-long post. The good thing about denial is this: It doesn’t last forever. No one can deny the truth indefinitely.
I have numerous complaints about the way our denomination handles the candidacy process:
First: We’re terrified by the knowledge that pastors sometimes “break.” When they do, they tend to do so in spectacular ways. Unfortunately, our denomination has never found a way to deal with at-risk pastors in a constructive way. Rather than intervening mid-career, we’re attempting to find unbreakable pastors by making the screening process difficult. There are no unbreakable pastors. If you push us hard enough (and they keep pushing harder) we’re all capable of “going Jim Jones” on some poor congregation.
Second: Our process attempts to weed out people with questionable callings, psychological problems, inappropriate theological orientations, and a host of other issues. It does not succeed at any of these things. It does succeed at weeding out people who cannot handle extremely high levels of stress. The result is that we’re hand-picking the most tightly-wound, paranoid, pressure cookers on the face of the planet. I’m proud to count myself among their number!
I hope to use this series of articles to cast a vision for a better path.
In my last post, I wrote that being called into the ministry is like being diagnosed with a fatal disease because, in order to accept the calling, we must first grieve. Every time we start down a path, at some level, we must grieve the loss of the paths not taken. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression/fear, and finally (hopefully) acceptance/peace. In this article, I want to talk about the first stage most of us deal with: Denial… the refusal to believe the truth.
There was a movie in the 1950s titled, “A Man Called Peter.” It was not about St. Peter, but about the Rev. Peter Marshall, a famous Scottish-American preacher of that era. According the film, when Peter Marshall first heard the voice of God calling him to the ministry as a young boy, he rushed home to tell his family. They were overjoyed that one of their own had been blessed with such an honor.
My experience was nothing like that.
I didn’t tell anyone for a very long time. In fact, God and I had a lot of arguments over it. I had other plans. My dad thought I’d make a great lawyer, and so did I. (I like to argue with people.) Lawyers are people who get stuff done. (This was the ‘80s, and the legal profession had not yet fallen from grace.) I watched “L.A. Law” and everything else on TV that made the legal profession look glamorous. People were proud to have lawyers in the family. But the preachers depicted on TV were comic relief at best and psychopaths at worst. I had ambivalent feelings about my own pastor at that time. I belonged to an independent church. It had many strengths, but the pastor treated it like his own personal property.
When I finally realized that God was not going to drop the subject, I told my parents. They tried to talk me out of it. They loved going to church, but they didn’t want me to be a pastor. They wanted what was “best for me.” When people asked me what professions I was looking at, my parents would cringe and stutter when I said ministry. My friends begged me not to throw away my life. Even the pastors I spoke to would sigh and say, “Well… you still have plenty of time to change your mind.” These pastors clearly were not enjoying their work. That’s too bad… I think this job is all kinds of fun… when done properly.
In short, I didn’t get much positive affirmation. Actually, I got none. Notice that none of the objections I faced had anything to do with real questions of call. They all had to do with societal expectations, stereotypes, and misguided notions about the American Dream. To make matters worse, in that era, many pastors and DCOMs had a strong bias in favor of older candidates. I was told that someone my age simply couldn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. My response: “What do my wants have to do with this? I wanted to be a lawyer.”
Is it any wonder that so many people say no to God? Virtually every pastor I know who entered the ministry mid-career will confess that they actually heard the calling when they were teenagers. They succumbed to societal pressure.
I feel very strongly that young candidates need to be affirmed at this stage. Testing the call of someone dealing with denial is harmful, and yet we keep doing it. Thankfully, we do seem to have gotten better at this. We now make a point of affirming that all people are called by God to ministry of some sort. But we still seem to default to the assumption that most candidates are, in fact, called to something else. Balderdash!
If you’re reading this, and you’re in denial, take heart! You’re not crazy. God is calling you, or you would not have made it to the end of this far-too-long post. The good thing about denial is this: It doesn’t last forever. No one can deny the truth indefinitely.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Power in "Hell Week"
This is a crazy-busy time of year for me...we have a month to go in the semester (and after all the snow in January and February, things all got pushed back and squished together! We're all running on hyperspeed right now!) and it's Holy Week. Now...for many people, Holy Week is something that is observed when we remember that we might go to church 4 times in 8 days (Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday)...and some traditions also throw in there an Easter Vigil on Saturday. This year, you might even go on Thursday so you can receive communion 2 times in one week! But for a student pastor, this week is also becoming known as "Hell Week" (referring to the drama term the week before opening night...) I had 6 classes between Monday and Tuesday, lead Bible Study on Wednesday, and then have services Thursday, Friday and Sunday. Oh yeah. And I agreed to go on Easter to the Sunrise service at my home church before leading my own 2 services at the 2 churches I'm pastoring. (I don't know what made me say "yes" to my mother...temporary insanity). "Hell Week" it is.
But "Hell Week" is an appropriate name for this week in other ways. Besides leading up to the holiest of days in the Christian year, it's a time when Jesus Christ descended to Hell to pay for our Sin and our sins so that we do not have to suffer come Judgement Day. And somehow, we've managed to turn this Hell Week into a "Holy" Week?!?! I think we like to romanticize religion too much. (But that's another post for another day).
Whether we call this week "Holy" or "Hell," it has Power. Not power, but Power with a capital "P." Power in it's meaning, significance and symbolism. Power in Pilate who can with one sentence change the course of history. Power in the Roman soldiers. Power in the kiss from Judas. Power in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Power over Sin. Power over death. Power.
Power can be used for good or evil. Judas' kiss was used for evil. But Jesus' sacrifice was used for good. The same is true in the life of a pastor. Pastors, by the very nature of their position, have a considerable amount of Power. I've seen pastors who use this Power for good, to help further the Body of Christ and help to make faithful disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. I've also seen pastors who, because they are human and because we live in the "already, but not yet" realm between Jesus' victory over Sin and death and the final victory when all believers will feast together in the Heavenly Banquet, these pastors abuse and misuse their Power.
I've become very sensitive to my use of Power in my congregations this Hell Week. How am I using my Power? For good? Or for evil? Am I constantly seeking God and God's will in everything I do...or amy I doing some things for my own glorification? As a just-turned-23-year-old pastor, I may have Power because of my position, but I'm working on the authority. I'm a new pastor, young, female, with lots of passion. But authority is earned through the proper use of Power. Judas had Power. Jesus had both Power and authority. Which one do I model my life after? How about you?
May you journey towards the cross with me praying that we all use Power appropriately so that we may earn authority as Disciples of Jesus Christ. +
But "Hell Week" is an appropriate name for this week in other ways. Besides leading up to the holiest of days in the Christian year, it's a time when Jesus Christ descended to Hell to pay for our Sin and our sins so that we do not have to suffer come Judgement Day. And somehow, we've managed to turn this Hell Week into a "Holy" Week?!?! I think we like to romanticize religion too much. (But that's another post for another day).
Whether we call this week "Holy" or "Hell," it has Power. Not power, but Power with a capital "P." Power in it's meaning, significance and symbolism. Power in Pilate who can with one sentence change the course of history. Power in the Roman soldiers. Power in the kiss from Judas. Power in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Power over Sin. Power over death. Power.
Power can be used for good or evil. Judas' kiss was used for evil. But Jesus' sacrifice was used for good. The same is true in the life of a pastor. Pastors, by the very nature of their position, have a considerable amount of Power. I've seen pastors who use this Power for good, to help further the Body of Christ and help to make faithful disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. I've also seen pastors who, because they are human and because we live in the "already, but not yet" realm between Jesus' victory over Sin and death and the final victory when all believers will feast together in the Heavenly Banquet, these pastors abuse and misuse their Power.
I've become very sensitive to my use of Power in my congregations this Hell Week. How am I using my Power? For good? Or for evil? Am I constantly seeking God and God's will in everything I do...or amy I doing some things for my own glorification? As a just-turned-23-year-old pastor, I may have Power because of my position, but I'm working on the authority. I'm a new pastor, young, female, with lots of passion. But authority is earned through the proper use of Power. Judas had Power. Jesus had both Power and authority. Which one do I model my life after? How about you?
May you journey towards the cross with me praying that we all use Power appropriately so that we may earn authority as Disciples of Jesus Christ. +
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