Category Archives: Theology & Culture

6 Ways Churches do Ministry like We are Dying Anyways… (or how keeping everyone happy is killing us)

February 12, 2015 The Rev. Erik Parker 10 Comments

When I talk to colleagues and church members it doesn’t take long to hear stories of congregations and churches fighting over the details of ministry: the style of worship, the number of staff to hire, the colour of the carpet, the need to have a Sunday School (even in churches with few or no kids).

Most of the fighting is about opinion and preference rather than issues of substance. Churches are great at having disagreements over the details and turning the details into insurmountable differences. A good friend of mine (also a pastor) has often said, “Church politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”

Church leadership, church boards, staff and pastors wring their hands and tying themselves in knots trying to keep churches happy. I know pastors who run around 7 days a week working themselves to death trying to be everywhere, do everything and make sure everyone gets what they want from church. It is almost comical that so many of us consider this “ministry.”

As I was writing my sermon for last Sunday, it occurred to me that a ministry focused on making people comfortable and happy is doomed. In fact, it sounds eerily like palliative care.

The amount of palliative care ministry that many congregations are doing is incredible.

Now to be clear, true palliative care for those facing the end of life, particularly with illness is very important work – holy work even. However, when the regular ministry of the church starts to look like the holy work of making people comfortable as they face the end of life, we have a problem.

Here are some examples:

1. Trying to keep everyone happy.

Hospitals generally try to treat illnesses and make people better. Schools try to teach and form students. But the only institution that I can think of, whose chief goal is keeping people comfortable, is a hospice or palliative care institution. Churches and Pastors whose primary aim is keeping people happy are basically doing palliative care.

2. Focusing exclusively on people already here.

Churches have become really good at focusing on insiders. Churches worry about what their members will think about new initiatives or programs. They are concerned about losing even a single discontent member and are constantly searching for any hint of displeasure among the rank and file. Churches like this worry about new people showing up and upsetting the established, delicate balance. Palliative care is about focusing on those in the program, not about seeking new patients.

3. Avoiding conflict at all costs.

When there is only a limited amount of time left, why ruin it by fighting? Avoiding conflict is rooted in the hopes that problems will just go away if we ignore them. And the reality ism in palliative care most problems do just go away eventually – you know, that whole death thing. Death is a great problem solver. When churches simply brush conflict under the carpet, they are hoping it will just go away. And yet, the only way conflict goes away in churches is if all those involved die… and even then it can linger.

4. Being comfortable.

Comfort is a big concern for those in palliative care. It is also a big concern in churches. Many churches want members, visitors, seekers, basically anyone who enters to feel comfortable. They say things like, “people shouldn’t have to work to understand what is happening.” “It should feel like you are in the comfort of your own home.” “Church should be casual and welcoming – make people feel comfortable in their own skin.” Last time I checked, comfort was not really on high on Jesus’ priorities. I don’t recall him ever praising anyone saying, “Your faith has made you comfortable.”

5. Everything becomes about preference.

Churches worry a lot of about people liking things. We fight over getting our own way when it comes to worship, programs, facilities, planning. How we worship, the bibles we read, the food we eat, the chairs we sit in, the paint colour on the wall all becomes a matter of preference. Pastors and leadership can start to worry whether they have provided the right mix of preferences for members. We become like a nurse asking if a patient wants more pillows or blankets, chicken or beef for dinner.

6. We talk a lot about decline and dying.

Maybe the biggest resemblance to palliative care is when churches begin talking a lot about decline and dying. Now, I am not saying we should avoid identifying trends and history. But unlike someone with a terminal illness, it takes a certain amount of hubris (conscious or unconscious) to think we are finally the ones who will kill all our churches. But more importantly, churches are not terminal patients. Imagine someone who gets to a certain age, starts getting a few grey hairs or wrinkles, maybe has some aches and pains, and then starts talking all the time about dying imminently. It seems absurd. Because it is absurd. Yet this is what so many churches are doing whenever they meet to discuss and plan their future.

As I said before, true palliative care and palliative care institutions do important work. They provide care and dignity to people who are facing their last days. Please don’t take what I am saying to be a condemnation of that work, but rather a lens through which to see how we as pastors, leaders and church folk are approaching ministry.

When our ministry as churches and congregations takes on the character of palliative care, we have lost the plot. We become insular groups of people, looking after our own and worst of all, waiting to die (even if we don’t know it).

But the thing is, God doesn’t do palliative care. As far as I can remember, Jesus never helps people die in the gospels. God is about Life. New Life. Abundant life. Life where there should only be death. God doesn’t make us comfortable as we die. God makes us uncomfortable so that we can live.

And I would like to say that I don’t have answers for how to turn self-centred ministry to our dying selves into life-giving God-focused ministry…

But I do know.

We all know.

Stop talking about how we are dying all the time. Or at least recognize that our dying is only a part of God’s alive making.
Turn our focuses outward, stop worrying so much about people who are in the pews already and think about ministry to those who are not in the pews… yet.
Conversation. Dialogue. Talking. Communicating. We need to talk less about the things we like or don’t like about church (maybe forget talking about them at all), and begin talking about what ministry is happening. Talk about what God is doing in our lives and in our communities.
Do the hard work of living as a community, instead of dying. Living is uncomfortable, it is conflictual, it makes some unhappy at times, and requires us to live with uncertainty about what is coming next.

Ministry that looks like palliative care is killing us. Or least it us letting us as pastors, churches, and Christian hasten our journey towards communal, institutional death.

And worst/best thing is, we aren’t terminal.

Has ministry become like Palliative care in your context? Should we be focused on making people comfortable? Share in the comments, or one the Facebook Page: The Millennial Pastor or on Twitter: @ParkerErik

Sermon, Theology & Culture

What have you to do with us Jesus?

February 1, 2015 The Rev. Erik Parker 1 Comment

Mark 1:21-28

… a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!”… (Read the whole passage here.)

Sermon

Today, we pick up in Mark’s gospel where we left off last week. Jesus has preached his first sermon, “The Kingdom of God has come near” and called Simon and Andrew, James and John to be disciples.

Now the group of them head to Capernaum, which becomes the home-base for Jesus’ ministry. It is the Sabbath, the day of worship, and they go to the synagogue. Jesus begins teaching, as was the right of any circumcised Jewish man. Usually, it was local scribes or rabbis who preached but sometimes travelling preachers like Jesus would come by to teach.

As Jesus begins, the congregation notices something different. Jesus is not teaching like the scribes. The scribes who were like walking encyclopedias of religious knowledge. The scribes were experts in the law, in the teachings and interpretations of the Jewish faith. The scribes didn’t innovate or interpret, they simply memorized what had been interpreted and written down by rabbis and other authorities long ago. New teaching was dangerous and probably heretical. It was important to stick to what they knew to be tried and true.

Yet, Jesus was preaching something new. Something different. Jesus was preaching from his own authority. Preaching like he had some special access to Moses, Elijah and the other prophets. Like he had special access to God.

While most people weren’t sure what to make of this Jesus guy, who he was or where his authority came from, one person did. Or rather an unclean spirit did. While regular humans don’t see who Jesus really is, the supernatural unclean spirit knows. And the spirit knows that Jesus is a threat to the established order. The spirit knows that Jesus has come to turn things upside down. The spirit knows the world that he and the people around him are stuck in is the past. The comfortable systems, traditions and ways of being that they are used to are over. Jesus is going wreck things.

The spirit is the one who speaks.

“What have you to do with us? I know who you are!”

The man with a spirit might just be a man with an unclean spirit. But for Mark the man might also represent the ways in which that community, that world, was possessed by tradition. Stuck in past. Unable to introduce any change that threatens the status quo.

Sound familiar?

Churches these days often struggle with this issue. We often long for things to be as they once were. We long to have Sunday schools with 100 kids every Sunday, and services that are standing room only. We long for offering plates to beoverflowing, we hope for more baptisms than funerals. We long for the past, or at least the way we remember things to be.

As a faith community or as individuals we can be possessed by our past. We can fear change, block anything new, strive to keep things the same. As the old joke goes,

How many Lutherans does it take to change a lightbulb?

Change!??! That lightbulb was good enough for my grandfather, so it is good enough for us.

When the unclean spirit names the threat that Jesus is not only to the good deal that the spirit has possessing some poor man, but also the threat that Jesus represents the whole world of the people of Capernaum and beyond, Jesus will have none of it.

“Be silent and come out of him!”

Jesus will not be deterred by the anxiety and fears, or the unwillingness of the spirit or people to let go. Jesus is preaching a new world, Jesus is calling the people around him into the future, into a new way of living. Jesus’ new teaching is astonishing, radical, unheard of. And it comes from a place that people don’t understand, but that the unclean spirit gets. The unclean spirit knows that the old ways, that the established approved way of doing things is safe, is comfortable, it is known. The spirit knows that people would so often rather be possessed by trying to maintain the past than face the unknown future.

Be Jesus knows that God is calling us into something new and unknown. And Jesus knows that we need to be exorcized of our fears and worries if we are going to see God’s future. Because we are often possessed by maintaining our past, by trying to recreate what we once were. We hold onto the traditions, systems, and ways to doing things that were good for our grandparents and so, we believe, are good enough for us.

Now don’t hear Jesus wrongly. Jesus is not saying that the past is wrong or bad. Jesus is not saying that God wasn’t active in the past, or that God wasn’t working through the ways we used to do things. Often when churches and individuals face change, letting go of what we once were is so hard because it feels like we are dishonouring our forebears. It feels like we are saying our parents and grandparents were wrong, that they weren’t being faithful.

That is not what Jesus is saying. Jesus knows that God has been present among the people, among us the whole time. Jesus isn’t exorcizing us of our past. Jesus is exorcizing us of our holding on, of our resistance to change, of our need for safety and comfort. Of our fears and anxieties.

It is not the past that keeps us from seeing God’s future, it is our efforts to keep things the same, to recreate what once was, what we once were. And Jesus’s new teaching is really about showing us that new world. Showing us God’s future. Showing that God is coming to, meeting us in the future. God knows we cannot go backwards.

And that is what is so radical to the people in the synagogue in capernaum, so radical for us today. God is not a God of the past, God is not about keeping things, keeping us the same. God is about resurrection, about turning death and forces that hold us back, into new and abundant life.

Let us pray,

O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Theology & Culture

Is Unfriending the Christian thing to do?

January 27, 2015 The Rev. Erik Parker 5 Comments

We have all heard the advice. “Don’t feed the trolls.”

And yet, many of us complain about the content that gets shared on our social media timelines. We have all followed or friended that third cousin, twice-removed who posts the most annoying content just to get a rise out of us. Or worse yet, he/she actually believes that nonsense. As social media evolves and changes, figuring out what to do about people we don’t actually want to hear from has created a new buzz activity in 2015.

Unfriending.

Last week, I heard an interesting interview on CBC Radio’s “The Current,” which made me think of my social media experience. The interview was about the Unfriending Movement in Germany. In our social media world, unfriending/unfollowing has new meaning. It used to be that ending a relationship meant “breaking up”, or just ceasing to spend time and energy on people who drained, annoyed, angered, or frustrated you. Now we can just click that button to unfriend or unfollow.

Jimmy Kimmel has even made a video giving us the rules for how to unfriend.

And sure, social media is full of people who post too much, post too inanely, post pictures of food too often, post too many selfies, live tweet things we don’t care about or post cryptic statuses inviting “concerned” friends to beg to know what is going on.

But the heart of the unfriend movement in Germany is about unfriending those who have a particular type of political view, particularly those who oppose the presence of Islamic immigrants in their country.

And that has made me think.

Is it a good idea to unfriend people who have different opinions and views than we do?

Social media is a place to interact with friends, both IRL ones and online ones. It is a place to see that cute kitten video that has gone viral today, or find out trending pop-culture news. It is increasingly becoming a place to share and read articles, blog posts, watch videos and obtain information. I was glued to Twitter during the shooting in Ottawa a few months ago… and I confess I muted the World Cup hashtag from earlier in 2014.

In the early internet, primitive social media, like chat rooms and message boards, use to be places to find in niche groups of like-minded, like-interested people. But as social media use becomes more ubiquitous, and it is the norm for people to be present on social media, it is now about connecting to diverse groups that cut across socio-economic and geographical/national boundaries.

Unfriending those with whom we disagree means we limit our exposure to different ideas and opinions. And yes, sometimes muting, blocking, unfollowing or unfriending that person who posts a lot of offensive content is necessary. It isn’t worth seeing their content clog up your feeds.

Yet, I think there is a caution in being too zealous about unfriending those who have different politics, faith practices/beliefs, or opinions than we do.

(Full disclosure: I regularly cull the list of people I follow on Twitter. Less often for Facebook, but I still unfriend on occasion. I also mute people on Twitter and unfollow people on Facebook.)

Do we really want to create social media worlds where we only interact with like minded people? Do we only want to hear others share content, ideas and opinions that confirm what we already think?

Unfriending may be the new buzz activity of 2015, and it may even become an effective social change movement. But our In-Real-Life worlds are not limited to only those who think and act the same as we do. Limiting our social media worlds (which are becoming more and more important social circles) to only like minded folk will limit our exposure to a diversity of ideas and opinions.

As a christian and a pastor, my thinking about the world and my understanding of my ecclesiological neighbours, my cultural and international neighbours has increased dramatically because of social media. It used to be that I only talked to Americans or other world citizens when I was travelling. It used to be that I only interacted with clergy from other faith traditions once a month, at best. It used to be that I lived in a pretty white, Canadian, Lutheran world. Now I read, talk and interact with people from all over the world and from all over the map of Christianity everyday.

And I am better for it.

As our social media behaviour becomes more and more integrated with everyday life, the temptation to mute, unfriend or block-out the diversity of the world might be high. We all have limited energy to spend these days. Yet, I seem to recall a guy we like to talk about in church, who often broke down barriers and took the time to seek out those who were different than he was. Those with whom he disagreed, those whom practised different religions, those who took time and energy to deal with.

What was his name again?

Oh yeah…

Jesus.

Does it mean that Jesus took the abuse and never called anyone out? Hardly, in fact Jesus fed the trolls on more than one occasion in order to make a point. But he knew where his limits where.

So in 2015, think twice about unfriending those who disagree with you… and then when you are quite sure you don’t need that drama in your life – click away!

But don’t unfriend just because people think differently than you do.

What do you think about unfriending? Do you block or mute people on social media because of their politics or opinions? Share in the comments, or one the Facebook Page: The Millennial Pastor or on Twitter: @ParkerErik

Theology & Culture

2014 in review

December 31, 2014 The Rev. Erik Parker Leave a comment

So WordPress helpfully created an annual report for my blog. The most amazing thing is that you folks reading have visited 230,000 times this year. Wow!

Thank you! You are the best. Enjoy the report below!!!

Ps. I will be on holidays for a few week, but get ready for some regular blogging in the new year!

“The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog”.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 230,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 10 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Theology & Culture

6 Things Pastors Actually do Love about Christmas

December 24, 2014 The Rev. Erik Parker 2 Comments

It seems odd to be writing a post on Christmas Eve day, and yet as we approach what are likely the biggest services of the year, it is hard not to think about all the stress and all the preparation that has been undertaken over the past few weeks.

As a pastor, Advent and Christmas can be seasons to dread as everything ramps up, as the struggle to keep Christmas from overtaking Advent is a daily chore, as the Christmas parties, visits and extra planning fill all available time slots. Pastors work longer hours in an already busy time of year, pastors are called on to provide extra services and find ourselves at centre of the Christmas rituals of many, rituals that are often full of demands and expectations about the perfect Christmas.

I have written about my frustrations with Christmas and there are other pastors out there blogging and writing about the struggle of trying to provide the most wonderful time of year to a lot of people with high expectations.

And yet, Christmas still is a time to love. Despite all the extra work and high expectations, there are still are a few surprising things that Pastors do love about Christmas.

1 Getting to tell the real Christmas story.

For roughly 2 months before Christmas proper, the world is full of sweet Christmas carols, sentimental nativity scenes, nostalgic holiday movies that paint an idyllic version of the Christmas story: A gentle Joseph and Mary giving a painless and calm birth in the most sterile and picturesque of barns stalls, with friendly animals and shepherds. Yet, the real Christmas story is full of scandal like teenage moms, and unmarried couples having babies, and homeless immigrants squatting in the same place that animals east, sleep and empty their bowels.

2 Preaching to a full house.

Even if church is full because grandma wants the grandkids in church at least once a year, or that people have come just for Silent Night by candlelight or to see the kids dressed up like shepherds, angels and animals, seeing a full house when looking out from pulpit is just a little satisfying. Knowing that what you are about to preach is going to be heard by such a large crowd reminds us that we haven’t totally faded into obscurity.

3 Finally saying ‘Merry Christmas’ for the 12 days season.

One of my favourite things it to offer a Merry Christmas until January 5th. When you get to greet people with Merry Christmas well after New Years, it is a fun way to catch people off guard and use the opportunity to remind people just when the actual season of Christmas is. It is allows us to plan fun things like 12th night parties, complete with Christmas tree bonfires.

4 Getting a zillion cards.

While Christmas cards themselves can be a little cheesy or corny at times, the fact that many, many people take the time to write kind messages and show they are thinking of you is nice, especially considering that pastors aren’t the only busy and stressed people at Christmas.

5 The music, the decor, the festive spirit.

Sometimes church can be routine or sombre. Some Sundays just feel like the same old same old. It is nice for pastors, too, to sing those familiar carols, see the sanctuary decorated, to enjoy friends and family in this long season of darkness (for us northern hemisphere folks). Even when we try to make everyone observe Advent, when Christmas does finally roll around (Dec. 24th, not November 1st), it is a special time of year to enjoy.

6 Spending time with family.

Pastors have family and traditions too. We open our presents at certain times, cook certain meals, do certain activities with extended family. And once the Christmas Eve and Christmas day services are over with, it is nice to take some time (when usually no one at church is needing your time) to enjoy the Holy-days.

I know that sometimes I can come across like a Christmas grinch to those around me. And I know from colleagues and pastor friends, that Christmas is a super stressful time of year. And yes, there are moments when I, and I am sure others, just want it over with.

Yet, just like anyone else, Christmas is a special season for us. Even with the all the stress and extra work that comes along with being a pastor at Christmas.

Are you a Pastor with strong feelings about Christmas? Have wondered what Christmas is like for your Pastor? Share in the comments, or one the Facebook Page: The Millennial Pastor or on Twitter: @ParkerErik