Of Churches and GM Dealerships....

Scott Anderson of the Wisconsin conference of Churches posted an interesting piece from the USA Today, suggesting that 72% of “millennials” –the generation come of age after 2001—are “spiritual but not religious.” Some of the key findings: 65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either. 65% rarely or never attend worship services. 67% don't read the Bible or sacred texts. The expert quoted in the text warns “If the trends continue, "the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships.”

http://http//www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-04-27-1Amillfaith27_ST_N.htm

I give a little bit of a shrug, as it seems to me nothing new that the years from 18-25 are a time in which people distance themselves from the religious traditions in which they were raised. “Relevance” is a word that can wreck havoc in worlds of tradition, but as I read along in the article I found myself nodding, as well. There is something different about the times we are in, and in no small part I suspect it is because of our own failure to ground our children in a true spirituality before sending them off to discover their own. Generations may have felt a little constrained by the “thee’s” and “thou’s” of their parent’s spirituality, but I’m not sure we would find the level of indifference to core practices like prayer and some form of encounter with sacred texts. It’s one thing to leave behind King James for Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, it is quite another to wonder if this story, and the traditions that support it, have anything of value to say to me.

Then I flipped open the most recent Unte Reader (http://www.utne.com/daily.aspx), and the back page reflection by Eric Utne on his experience at a “MoveOn.org” experimental training camp. Utne found that it was as the core stories of their lives we shared that the conversation came alive and a real sense of community was engaged. His suggestion to the folks at MoveOn was that they try to think less in terms of organization around key issues, and more about developing community—“Organizing based not on hot-button issues, but on building relationships through deep personal sharing and active listening.”

Two thoughts came almost simultaneously to mind. The first is that this seems to be exactly the trap those endangered mainliners are in: organizing around hot-button issues! I heard Kendra Dean speak at the Presbyterian Covenant Network meeting last October, and one of the things that stuck with me was her assertion that it’s not that the mainline has lost or is losing the battle for the American soul, but precisely that we won. The result is what she calls a “passionless” Christianity that seems to be stuck in the search for that next big issue that will bring us all together.

One of the things I am increasingly committed to as I try to live into whatever is next in my life is the deep sense that the church needs to reclaim exactly what Utne was longing for at MoveOn.org: true community grounded in meaningful, thoughtful, caring relationships, and not focus groups that bring people together into “lifestyle enclaves” of like-minded folk who are looking for allies in the battles of life. But the simultaneous thought is that Utne really would not have to create a whole new grassroots organization to accomplish this if there were a church on the corner open to the gambit. What would happen to the churches that are at risk of terminal irrelevance if they swung wide their doors to hear the stories of this generation coming of age in this post-modern, post-9/11, internet, social-networking, frenetic, lonely world of the 21st century with arms open wide to welcome, to hear, to heal, to celebrate, and to tie it all back to that wonderful, wondrous, mysterious source of our faith, the love of God, shown in Jesus, witnessed in scripture, and lived around a Table?

The problem, of course, is that such a deep sense of community does not come cheap. It’s not a place you can drop in on when you feel like it, but one that demands something of you. It requires an honesty that is hard to muster in a world that judges by appearances and throws out fruits and vegetables if they are not picture perfect. Community means, by definition, you will meet people you disagree with, and not a few you’re not even sure you like. It will be messy, and it will be hard, and it may demand sacrifice of things you once thought essential…like being right. It would mean counting success in churches, not by the number of programs on the calendar, or the number of bottoms on pews on a Sunday morning, but by the depth and content of the relationships lived out in and through its walls, and not by the finely demarcated boundaries the faith is able to maintain, but by the web of redemption it is able to weave together precisely at the weakest points of the souls there gathered.

I just find myself, like Eric Utne, wanting more from this church that means so much to me. My bet is that if we got serious about that “more” we would tap something that feeds the next generation of believers, too, and leaves them hungering for prayer, for worship, and for their place in the continuing story of Scripture.

What Makes you Grumpy?

Last week I had the opportunity to spend a day at the Holy Wisdom Monastery just outside Madison. This is a unique ecumenical community that shapes its life around the disciplines of Benedictine community. Located on a hill overlooking Lake Mendota it provides a beautiful and spirit-filled retreat from the pace or life.

The elements of Benedictine spirituality include five central practices: Prayer, Study, Recreation, Work and Hospitality. It is the last one that I wondered about as I joined the sisters for lunch in their newly completed building, with beautiful open spaces for worship, prayer, and reflection. In the Rule of Benedict it is written, “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ, because He will say: ‘I was a stranger and you took Me in’ (Mt 25:35). And let due honor be shown to all, especially to those ‘of the household of the faith’ (Gal 6:10) and to wayfarers.” I wondered how this new building was affecting the community, and the delightful woman next to me, wise with years, said, “It makes me grumpy!”

It was, of course, the friendliest “grumpy” I’d ever heard, and her partner in community explained more patiently that the new space provided them with the opportunity to truly practice this fifth practice of hospitality. They could greet worshippers who joined them on Sunday mornings, and sponsor things like the art exhibition that was spread in the entry way. More people were finding them, and not surprisingly new potential for programs was constantly bubbling to the surface. But all this change has a definite effect on a small group of people who had lived together in a certain way for several years. Things aren’t where you put them, there are people where there once were spaces, and sounds where there was silence. I thought of the poster that hung in my room as a boy, of Linus, hugging his blanket: “I love mankind…It’s people I can’t stand!” They make you grumpy!

Evangelism is a very popular word in churchy circles these days, usually referring to the need to get more people into the pews on Sunday mornings. Programs abound to attract visitors, and you could attend seminars from now to the end of the year on strategies for getting them to stay. What we too seldom admit is that as much as we may long for more people to share in the work of our congregations, new people are inconvenient. They don’t know when to stand and sit, they don’t realize you want to sit in that pew just behind your best friend, and if you take the time to greet them you just might miss catching up on the latest news.

The fact of the matter is that practicing true hospitality is a challenge to community. Systems theorists wisely note that the entire group is different if a single member is added, and every relationship in the web effected. It’s simply not possible to say that you like things the way they are and that you want to welcome new folk to your table. They will make you grumpy! That, I suppose, is why for Benedict it had to be a Rule, and one, by the way, set well into the other disciplines of community and not the place you start.

I suspect the first real key of “evangelism” is to recognize that we are called to hospitality precisely as a way of challenging the cosy, comfortable ways that we’ve grown into. It is intended to shake us up a little, pushing us to patiently uncover the ways in which the “other” makes God present to us, and no how we make God present to the “other.”

If you’ve been reading here a while you know that Sarah Miles’ book, Take This Bread has played an important part in my journey this past year. She knows something about how real hospitality transforms community, and not always in the most comfortable ways. I leave you with a story from the book…a reminder that the real impetus of being church lies not in how well we insulate ourselves from the world, and welcome others in, but whether we find the courage and openness to let that world make us just a little grumpy as we, and it, are changed by God’s amazing, incalculable love for us all:

From Chapter Four:

One evening in St. Gregory's kitchen, after everyone else had left, I heard a confession from a pantry volunteer, who'd brought me what she said was a 'secret' in a shopping bag. She had a cast on her leg, and kept looking over her shoulder anxiously, and she made me close the kitchen door. Her boyfriend, who beat her up regularly, had been threatening to kill her, she said, swallowing hard.

"I thought, this is a church, it'll be safe here," she said, unwrapping a dirty dishtowel from around a huge .357 Magnum revolver. "I took out the firing pin."

That's what church was for, I realized: a place to bring the ugly, frightening secret you couldn't tell anyone else about. I checked that the gun was disarmed, and stuck it in a cookie tin in a locked closet beneath the pantry shelves. I didn't mention it to anyone from the Sunday congregation. The woman moved away, to stay with a sister in Sacramento. A month later I did tell Steve.

"You must be kidding," he said.

"Isn't this what church is for?" I said.

"Uh, yeah," said Steve. He looked scared, and like he wanted to laugh at the same time. "Whoa, that's a really big gun." We drove down to the local police station, and I walked up to the officer on duty. I was wearing a crucifix and a fairly respectable sweater. "Excuse me, I found this in our churchyard," I lied. "Can you please take it?"

There's nothing like being a middle-aged white lady, I told Steve as we drove back. The cops had gathered around the officer who unwrapped the package. "Holy shit," said of them. "Excuse me, ma'am." They passed it around, gingerly, and let me leave after I insisted I didn't want to make a report or get a receipt. "Can you imagine if we'd been two black teenage guys walking in with that?"

"You just made the high point of my career as a parish administrator," said Steve. "I never imagined I'd show a cop something that could make him say 'holy shit.' "

"Yeah, well," I said. "I guess this is what you call the Christian life."

The Grace that Leads us Home

Charles T. Hein was the younger brother of my father, and one of the exotic birds of my childhood that flew in occasionally from far away lands, and just as quickly flitted off. Two of my father’s siblings found their way into international mission work: Uncle Chuck and Aunt Gaby in Africa, and Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted in India, and so the life of extended family when I was growing up was something like a Russian novel, with pages and pages of rambling set-up punctuated by flurries of activity when one or the other, or on the oddest of occasions, BOTH were “on furlough.”

Dad was clear that I was not “named after” Uncle Chuck, and indeed was insistent that my true namesake was Charlie Priest, whom dad had met in work for the Polio Foundation, and went on to build a solid career with Goodwill Industries in Milwaukee (Mom always equally insistent that I not be called “Charlie” but “Chuck”!) Still, Uncle Chuck stood tall in my childhood imagination, always nearly hyphenated with Aunt Gaby, whose gentle manner and lilting French accent provided such a marked contrast to the rough and tumble Hein way. Uncle Chuck was a man of ideas, of vision, one who would engage as 12 year old in a serious conversation and respect what the child had to say. You saw the Hein in a patience that could be quickly tried, and a perfectionism that could be exasperating, but in Uncle Chuck it seemed always tempered by a broad acceptance and easy manner that I came to associate with “the African way.”

Uncle Chuck was strong, and active, so as news of health issues started to surface it was hard for me to take it all too seriously. It was Uncle Eugene’s Facebook post of his visit that got me to thinking seriously about the need to this time take the roll of the exotic bird, and flit my way down to Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, and light on his bedside. Shorn of excuses of my own busy-ness or professional responsibilities, I could do that most un-Hein-like thing—leave without knowing exactly when I would return, to spend time with no greater purpose than to be together with loved ones.

The Chuck I met as I came to his hospital room was a stark study in contrasts. His mind and spirit were every bit as strong as I ever remembered. His voice quivered a bit under the oxygen mask, but still carried graceful authority. But his physical frame was diminished and diminishing. In hours of conversation spread over four days we moved from branch to branch, two odd birds, sometimes talking about Africa, sometimes the perils of the church in today’s world, sometimes remembering his childhood, sometimes reflecting on basic theological doctrines from incarnation to grace.

It was in one of these conversations, as Uncle Chuck remembered a time of study at Hartford Seminary in which he was first introduced to the theology and spirituality of Orthodox Christianity that we lit on the Lord’s Table, and the sad impoverishment of Reformed theology that resulted from a diminution of the place of the Saints in the life of the community of faith. So strong on the Word, we sometimes lost track of the Sacrament—the visible sign of an invisible grace.

As I’d grabbed what I thought I needed for the journey days earlier my book of Occasional Services and my bible had nested into the front pocket of my computer bag, and I wondered if we might find a time to make that invisible grace visible. Gaby whispered the question to Chuck as we were leaving on Saturday night: “Do you think you would like to have communion?” “That would be lovely!” And just as quietly, Gaby approached her pastor after service on Sunday morning. “Charles was wondering if you might be able to come and share communion with us.” Lovely, indeed.

Monday morning was set to be a difficult moment of transition. Dan and Karen had arrived, and the doctor was to come first thing to clarify just what this move to Hospice meant. The doctor was so blessedly kind and direct. That diminished body had reached as far as it could in this world. There would be morphine patches, and Chuck would slip away. Lungs scarred by dolomite in the Masai lands of Kenya could no longer sustain him. Chuck understood, and held Gaby’s hand firmly. It was time to trust in God.

Pastor Tom came not long after the conversation was ended, and the doctor, with a hug and a tearful smile went to write the orders. Setting bread and cup neatly in order, he invited us to share just what it was that we were coming to table with and for. Chuck spoke of his ordination, and of the deep and abiding sense of God’s presence that filled him. He talked of the privilege of breaking that bread and sharing that cup himself, and leading the people in remembrance. Gaby shared of her delight in the journey, and Dan of how this table had become for him a place of reconciliation and peace. I recalled a story of my mentor, Bruce Rigdon, that for me has always made the table a place where the saints are gathered.

And we prayed. And we supped. And I cried. This exotic bird, who had come in and out of my life at such odd intervals was now to fly on ahead. The nurse came in and affixed the patch, and I went out of the room to compose myself, wash off my face, and try to find equilibrium. As I looked in the mirror, at that face that mirrored so closely the one lying in the bed a few feet away, it occurred to me. That exotic bird was now taking flight once more, but if I listened carefully, I would still hear his song. And that song, mixed, and purged, and purified by the chorus of the saints, would, indeed, lead me home.

We are blessed, aren’t we? By those who share our journey…as much by those who cut us as by those who mend us? We’re all sinners, trying to make our way home, every now and then given hints, in a morsel of bread, a sip of wine, that there is so much more to this world than it lets on to. Uncle Chuck prayed me out of that room, though right now I am afraid I cannot remember a word he said. Within 24 hours, he’d made his passing; quietly, peacefully, I am told, with words of psalms and thanksgiving on his lips.

What a gift to share the hours I did, to be so powerfully reminded of the God who holds us most firmly when He seems the furthest away. What a gift, to share bread and cup, and know that each moment dwells in eternity, and eternity in its fullness is to be found in each moment.

Was it William Blake who wrote it? “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

Wasn’t it Jesus who said, “Well done, good and faithful servant…enter into the kingdom that has been prepared for you!”

Too comfortable?

About the time that things were coming to an end at Memorial I had a conversation with Ed White, the consultant from the Alban Institute who had come to Appleton in January, 2009 to lead our annual Officer’s Retreat. It was Ed who first provided the “frame” around my experience, suggesting that in anxious times congregations sometimes mistake personnel shifts for the systemic work that needs to be done in order to maintain the health of the community, while anxious leaders can sometimes personalize the conflict, allowing what are systemic issues to grow into a challenge to their leadership. It was helpful at the time and still rings true today.

In the course of that conversation, Ed pointed me toward a book I am quite certain I would never have picked up in other circumstances. The Forgotten Ways, by Alan Hirsch, is a probing critique of the ways in which the mainline denominations have or have not dealt with the unique challenges of the 21st century—a topic near and dear to my heart! Hirsch is an Australian, and according to the back cover blurb, he is “the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network. His experience includes mission and church planting to the marginalized as well as leading at the denominational level.” That denominational grounding for Hirsch is Pentecostal—not a tradition that would normally have drawn me in, but Ed thought it was an important book, and so I read.

At the core of Hirsch’s analysis of the growth of Christian movements is what he calls “Missional DNA”, and for the most part the book is a fleshing out of just what this “M-Dna” is. It might be worth a series of reflections on what this is all about, but what pushes my pen along right now is the closing chapter on “Communitas not Community.” One of the central ideas he works with in this chapter is “liminality”, an idea he borrows from anthropologists to describe the way in which most cultures have rituals that push young people beyond the walls of the community before they receive them in as adult members (think in terms of Native American “Spirit quests” for example). It is understood, Hirsch explains, at the limits of our comfort zones that real growth takes place.

The problem with so many congregations in the 21st century is that they seem committed to avoiding the uncomfortable or unpredictable places where any real growth can occur. The sentence that struck me was “equilibrium is a precursor to death.” (The italics are Hirsch’s.) Striving for institutional survival, instead of adapting to the environmental changes and threats in the world around us, leave us literally defenseless. Hirsch has the church as institution squarely in his sights for the majority of this book (and I admit that as I read and appreciated his critiques I was never quite able to understand what might take its place that was not just another iteration of an institutional church) but I think he deserves a lengthy hearing at this point:

“In so many churches the mission of the church has actually become the maintenance of the institution itself. This was never Jesus’ intention. Our goal in organizing as a people is not to set up, preserve, and maximize an institution over its life cycle, but to extend God’s mission into the world. Our primary aim is not to perpetuate the church as an institution, but to follow Jesus into his mission in the world.”

I’m not ready to jump ship just yet, but I do think we need to take a good long look at just what it is that we are working so hard to maintain, and just what the relationship is between the astounding Good News of the Gospel and what it is that churches are about in this world. I suspect that if it does not draw us beyond our comfort zones, if it does not challenge too-easy community with a transforming and radically inclusive communitas, if it sees the fundamental dynamic of mission to be pounding the world into a church-shaped mold rather than allowing ourselves to be molded into whatever shape God might need in order to bring light and leaven into the world, then whatever it is that we are about will ultimately be frustrating and frustrated.

Here’s my guess for today: the church God is calling us to be in the 21st century will be found in the messy in-betweens of the world and the church, and not in the hard and fast walls we manage to construct between the two. It will be as we engage in the crisis of our identity, and walk out into the wilderness, that we will begin to see the outlines of the new thing God is doing in our midst. And, if my wager is correct, the result will not be a church-less society, but rather a society in which the church has grown into its own as a tool of God’s saving work.

Taize Friday

At the risk of this becoming a running narrative of my toe-dipping at St. Joe's, I feel like I need to balance Ash Wednesday, and what might have sounded like a depreciation of "intimate" worship experience.

I've long been drawn to the unique worship that grew out of the community of prayer that began as Brother Roger and a few associates sought some refuge from the horrors of WWII Europe in Taize. It's simple, it's ecumenical, and it is grounded in Spirit. It allows for silence, and at least for me invites a deep attention to the movement of Christ's passion and the words of Scripture that are spoken.

No surprise that I would want to attend when it was announced on Ash Wednesday that there would be a time of Taize prayer on Friday....4:30 P.M. "to make it easier those who don't want to go out at night." No surprise, either, as we made our way into the dark sanctuary that there would be none of the searching for seats that impressed me on Wednesday. A pianist, cantor, reader, and maybe a dozen other souls sat quietly, waiting for that moment of beginning.

Maybe one of the things I find powerful about this service is that I somehow am able to abide my own brokenness as the quiet chants, and the breath that sings them, fill me in ways that accommodate the slow leak--the quiet hissss that singing Taize feels like to me. I am peripherally aware of the other worshippers, and at times my mind flits to what it is that they seek in the sounds and silence of this place and time, but I spend a good part of the service with eyes closed, aware of myself in the dark.

I'm never quite sure what will touch my soul, but there are very few times that I have been a part of Taize prayer that there's not been something. Yesterday, it was a chant I'd sung a hundred times...."Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." It was clear from the first notes that I would not croak along with this one--it was to be sung for me. Aware of that thief who hung beside Jesus, with Wednesday's reading a sort of echo (as Jesus was questioned as to how he could possibly eat with tax collectors and sinners) I wonder why I for so long have tried so hard to be somehow worthy of God's presence in my life.

Felix cupla! Blessed fault! It is just that brokenness, and our need for healing, that draws God close, yet in that quiet place I feel the quickening of my reformed, Calvinist pulse. Yes, it is our sin that draws God close to us, oddly at the very moment that we seek to pull away from God! But what chokes me mid-chant? "Jesus, remember me..."

It's one thing to be found by that God who leaves the 99 to find the lost 1. It's another to ask to be remembered. and I'm not even all that sure what the difference is. I know that the rock-solid witness of the Gospel is that God will in no wise forget us. Not a sparrow falls to the ground that God does not know. "Forgetfulness" was the fear that haunted and prodded the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and I guess Heidegger resonated so deeply for me because the fear of being forgotten--"left behind"-- has been so palpable for me. "Jesus, remember me."

This particular Taize service ends with a longer time of chant, as people are invited to pray at the cross in silence while those gathered create something like a sound-fort around them: "Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray, watch and pray." This week it was just fine to be part of that Greek Chorus that chanted along. Maybe that's why community is so very important to the Christian journey: because when you are on the verge of forgetting, or fearing that you are forgotten, there's someone a few pews back staying, remaining, watching, praying. It doesn't take a church filled to the last row of the balcony. A couple handful of praying folk, gathered for whatever mixed motive will do.

It's not a Taize tune, but it was in my ear as we stepped back into the twilight:

I will never forget you,
My people
I have carved you
on the palm of My hand
I will never forget you
I will not leave you orphan
I will never forget My own

Ash Wednesday Thoughts

There's no great shock that the beginning of the season of Lent attracts considerably less attention in the broad world than the beginning of the other great fast of the Christian tradition, Advent. The malls will not be decked for some time, though I guess at some point an Easter Bunny will appear for photos with the kiddies, but Lent just does not sell the way that days before Christmas do. You can only eat so many Peeps, I suppose.

For the past 14 years this first day of the fast has been marked in what is politely called an "intimate" service at the Lord's Table. I simply learned not to expect more than 10-15% of the congregation to trudge out in the middle of the week, in order to hear the "invitation" to examine our lives, and prepare for the wonder and mystery of the Lord's passion.

So it was a little bit of culture shock when we drove up to St. Joseph's parish last night. The sanctuary was nearly as full as it had been on Christmas Eve (though admittedly the great hall next to the sanctuary was not outfitted with the video link it had for that service.) We ended up in the balcony--a great vantage to see hundreds of the faithful line up to receive the imposition of ashes.

I understand that the church is in trouble when it allows itself to be drawn into a numbers game, but I admit to being impressed by a corporate sense of piety that seems to draw believers together, not just for the highest of holy days, like Christmas and Easter, but at these beginning moments of the story. One dare not guess the motives of all those gathered, and I understand that something like a "holy day of obligation" can still tug at people's hearts long after they've shaken loose any need to listen once they're there, but the mood and spirit of that worship service (by the way, one of three announced at Mass last Sunday) suggested at least to me that there was something very right going on.

I'd decided some time back that the impostion of ashes was not something I was comfortable with in those "intimate" services that had become the rule of life for the congregations I served. It always felt like "playing with symbols" that we were not really ready to embrace. Don't take the ashes, I thought, if you were not going to commit to the walk of the season, and truly engage the Fast. As I watched from my bird's eye view as women and men, young and old, infants, adults, seniors, all stood quietly as their forehead was smudged with a reminder of their mortality I realized how much we'd lost along the way.

A good friend started my Ash Wednesday with a lovely call to the Lenten discipline: "Go forth into the period of Lent as the humble people of God. And may the ashes of our grieving become the soil for our growing, the footsteps of the Christ be seen in the earth before us, and the Spirit be found beside us on the way." As I stood myself in front of someone I'd never met, and felt the ashes smudge my brow, I wondered how hard it would be to grow a faith without this soil. The celebration of Nativity just passed reminded me that the work of salvation began in the most meager of human settings. I realize today that that seed grows, not in the sterile clay of holy vessels, but in the living and dying loam of life.

There is much about where I find myself these days that makes me a little crazy, but I am only thankful that I had the space in my life last night to be where I was. "Turn away from sin, and believe the Gospel." Indeed!

The Banality of Decency

Don't ask me why, but Utne Reader seems never to make it out of our house once it comes in, which is only a partial explanation of why I happened to be paging through an old issue (March-April, 2006, to be precise!) when I stumbled upon this most exquisite phrase--"The banality of decency."

You might guess that it had something to do with a play on words taking off from Hannah Arendt's famous evaluation of the defendents in the Nazi War Crimes tribunals, and the "banality" of their "evil." The article I stumbled upon was by one Sam Smith, writing for the on-line Progressive Review, but reprinted in the Utne from DESIGNER/Builder, which the end note indicates is "environmentally driven and socially conscious."

Pause for just a moment to respect the absolute serendipity of me quietly reading in my living room in 2010 from a periodical from 2006, quoting the September/October, 2005 reprint from an obscure architectural magazine with a social consience...and note that on the website of DESIGN/Builder is the sad note: "Due to the untimely death of beloved publisher Kingsley Hammett, further issues of DESIGNER/builder magazine are on hold until further notice." How DO ideas bounce around in this universe, anyway?!

Back to the article, by Sam Smith, reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and wondering what it is that we learn from evil. Smith ambles through his first experience of the horrors of the Nazi death machine in a 1956 Social Studies class. I resonate with his reflection: "The concentration camps were gruesome, but the movies Nazis had made to celebrate thmselves were in some ways even more horrific, depicting millions of Germans voluntarily surrendering their souls as millions of others involuntarily lost their lives."

I nodded in appreciation how Smith's journey had led him through William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free. There is an unsettling truth in observing that it does not take extraordinarily evil people to accomplish extraordinarily evil ends. Just about anyone will do, if you can so structure the odious tasks that no one really has to take responsibility.

But then, this exquisite paragraph:

"If you watch good people closely, you see that their good comes as naturally as evil came to Eichmann. It does not have to be propped up with memories of great wrongs; it is just the everyday unconscious behavior of those graced with honor: the banality of decency."

I associate William Sloan Coffin's name with the thought that in the long-term a Christian cannot help but be optimistic, which means in the short term she can be nothing but a pessimist. There's no doubt but that left to play by themselves you will see people act in thoughtless, mean, calculated, and yes, sometimes even evil ways. Want proof? Drive the speed limit in the left lane next time you are on the highway! Take away their food, their homes, any sense of hope, and it may well be that people will act in ways that offend our human sensibilities. But before you just throw up your hands in frustration over this great human experiment, notice what Smith named: that uncanny, unrehearsed goodness that seems just as present in the world you move through from day to day.

For me, this morning, it was the waitress who "promised to bring the Promise," the salesperson at Barnes and Noble who humored me with an introduction to their e-book reader knowing I already have a Kindle, the server who cleared my plate at the Rotary meeting on Tuesday, who, in a room of 150 people who probably could not have cared less how she was, had that tone in her voice when she asked if she could take the plate that made me know she really did care if I wanted or needed anything else. Yes, yes, they're all told to be nice and helpful. But if you watch people closely, you see that the goodness comes naturally.

Sure, that goodness is in the envelope right next to the one that opens with fear, suspicion, malice, self-justification, and there's just as much danger in thinking people are essentially good as there is in thinking they are essentially evil. We're mixed beasts, moral mongrels all for the most part looking for our next meals, but always, the teacher from Ecclesiates reminds me, with that "hint of eternity" planted within us. If we could only nurture it, cup it, like a communion wafer in our hands, warm it with our breath and take it into our hearts.

I want to give good Mr. Smith the last word:

"The frightening thing about Auschwitz is not that some would deny it but how real it still seems. The frightening thing about Auschwitz is that our leaders go to honor it while still denying Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and Palestine. We will know that we have finally learned the Holocoaust's lessons when we no longer hear new echoes of it."

Or maybe, better, when we hear the echoes, with all of their bitter dissonance, with ears tuned to a deep, broad, long, even eternal touch of decency that sees and acknowledges, yet neither condones nor forgives the evil that is its banal brother.

Ruling and Teaching

http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2010/10108.htm

I don't always find myself agreeing with Joe Small--nor do I know why i should!--but in this press release I find his thoughts right on the mark.

For context, a lot of my reading in the past couple of months has waded through materials on leadership and its challenges in the 21st century. One of the things that has impressed me along the way is the extent to which effective leadership is so often undermined by over-reaching. Knowing the limits of your role, and how to use especially the edges of authority in order to move people into truly creative change, is I think one of the most important facets of trying to lead just about anything these days, from a community organization to a church and beyond.

What Joe suggests is that Pastors have been encouraged, and allowed themselves to be increasingly defined in ways that would look an awful lot like the Executive Director of a modest Nonprofit organization. Guilty as charged. Knowing where all the lightbulbs are, what line of the budget accounts for the paper supplies, and where to order chalk might not be the best use of a seminary education. It can keep things moving with some efficiency, but is it faithful?

He then harkens back to language that slipped away from Presbyterians through merged mergers: "teaching elders" and "ruling elders" with I think a really nice highlight: "ruling as in measuring". "Ruling elders measure the congregation’s “fidelity to the gospel” and the “spiritual health of the congregation.” Well put!

Of course, if you take Calvin as your model, that teaching role can be quite forceful. There's a reason he got run out of Geneva the first time round! Calvin used pulpit and lectern to create a new and radically different image of what a church could do and be, and we're still living into all the implications of that on the Reformed side of the Christian house. Teaching is decidedly not telling people what they want to hear when they want to hear it, but in this unique Presbyterian way Joe Small set my mind to pondering, it is always set alongside the "rule" of those ruling elders.

I suspect the impact would be great if we, as a church, sought to live back into the roles that tradition carved out for us, while pushing them into the future instead of trying to make the present fit old paradigms like a size 10 foot in a size 8 shoe. It's that balance I want to hold in my mind for just a bit: finding the new possibilities in old language and categories without letting that old language bring with it all the baggage of the old world that birthed it.

More McLaren

Having mentioned the book Generous Orthodoxy a while back, my thanks to Scott Anderson of the Wisconsin Conference of Churches for posting this interview with the author, Brian McLaren. I think many of my "wonders" about him stand, but I hear in this interview some good cogient thinking on what we're facing as Mainline churches, and it resonates with some of what I read in things like A Failure of Nerve and The Leadership Trap about how easy it is to mistake a technical challenge for a true moment of change.

http://www.faithandleadership.duke.edu/multimedia/brian-d-mclaren-denominations-do-invaluable-things

In-Between Times

In-between times sometimes put you in in-between places. For me, yesterday, it was the service counter at the Piggly Wiggly, mid-afternoon, in search of a copy of their coupon flyer. I was “pardoning their dust” which meant there was not a real, discrete line to stand in. The service counter, it seems, is Lottery Central, and so waiting for a flyer meant waiting for people to make their selections, but one woman probably in her mid seventies stood directly in front of the case, two hands clutched to the top of her purse, the bright red scarf on her head reminding me of every woman who had stood in line beside my mother when I was a child.

When I took my place in the non-line her eyes darted from the plastic wall separating her from rolls of tickets with a flash that hovered somewhere between fear and anger. The clear message I took was, “don’t you DARE step into line before me!” The gentleman before both of us finished his business—half a dozen eggs, a pack of generic cigarettes and four lottery tickets, and it was Red Babushka’s turn.

Her purpose was singular. “One number four, and…”she paused… “number seven…how much?” “”Five six and seven are $3, eight is $2” the clerk replied. Babushka fingered the top of her purse and pulled out a matching red pocketbook, nervously tallying the bills neatly arranged in the last compartment. The eyes in the back of her head cut through me once more. Apparently her assessment of me was of a slightly aged and balding gang-banger ready to snatch her purse. She let me know without words that she was ready for any eventuality, but her warning served as something of an invitation to voyeurism, as it obviously took her longer to assess her options than it would have taken me to do a complete census of the presidents in my slim wallet.

“Two eights and a five,” she said crisply. “$14.” Slowly, but without malice of forethought, a ten and a five were plucked from the pocketbook and handed directly to the clerk. A slightly ragged single and four bright cards were returned. The single slid in at just the right spot among her bills, and the red clasp shut tight, the pocket book returned to the purse.

It was when the four lottery cards were sifted into that bag, and the bag firmly tucked into the shopping cart Babushka was protecting, that I felt a different aura—a lightness of being—as if somehow the slim hope contained in the few moments in which the edge of a coin would scrape those cards to reveal fate’s slight of hand was just enough to lift the burden of years. She might even have smiled.

I picture Babushka home, purse neatly set in the center of a kitchen table with yellow Formica and aluminum legs, the meager groceries put in shelf and freezer, maybe a cup of coffee poured with just a drop of cream. She pulls out the chair, sets the radio to AM 1150, sits, sips, and then reaches for that lucky quarter she has in a small glass candy dish right next to a 4” statue of Mary. There’s no prayer. She knows better than that. But for about 15 seconds, repeated four times, sum total of one minute, her world is boundless possibility.

What would she do if she won? Start another account at the Credit Union? A splurge in her lexicon would probably be a second old fashioned when she went to lunch with the girls. You can only have so many perms. It probably wouldn’t matter! Each grandchild would get a crisp $100 bill, that she knew for sure. But it was not about the winning. It was about 60 seconds of possibility.

For the record, the butter I searched for was on sale at Pick & Save. My purchase was hot dogs and buns (coupon employed!) and one pound of margarine. The pay off, probably Linda, who remembers me from Church and the time the Very Special Arts Choir came to sing, and how I was kind when her uncle fell from the roof of his house, and who edged into my office one December to offer a gift of a candle with a golden angel affixed. She works there now, and was going to go to a dance with one of the boys she met at work, but he got cold feet…. “planned for two month and three days before he gets cold feet!!”

“Go anyway, Linda! Have a ball!” “Yeah, maybe I will.”

Is it all a lottery? Bright tickets and lucky quarters scraping away the metallic crust, not so much because you want to win, but because even 15 seconds of possibility can lift your soul? Yes, I know, the same possibility becomes a trap, and the hapless middle-aged guy in the line behind you becomes a threat to be monitored, instead of a fellow traveler. I have never gotten completely comfortable with the State sponsorship of what amounts to a shell game, in which for the most part those who can least afford it spend money they don’t really have to dig our way out of fiscal irresponsibility. But at least yesterday I wondered what else Babushka really would have done with $14…whether $.25/sec is too much to pay for possibility?

In-between times you find yourself to in-between places, and sometimes, it makes you see sideways.