3 January 2018: Today, I Feel Like I Don’t Have Another Fight in Me

Day 3

Exterior Church Window with Stained Glass and Decorative Gables

Yesterday. Yesterday was, on the whole, really, really good. After my morning perseverations and fears, I got up. I made lunch for my leader. We dreamed together. I took care of one of my most intractably desperate church members. I found a GREAT book that is actually about the Bible that we could use for our Lenten Bible Study. I went to bed feeling—at peace. Feeling like I was well-used. Feeling like I was here for a reason.

Today. Today, I got up at 5-ish, knowing that both of my usual attendees to Office Hours at the local coffee shop were fighting ear aches and chest colds. I would go anyway, and read this fabulous book, and wait for the one person who said she’d come a little bit late and show up at around 9:30 or 10. By 9:25, I was ready to go, but I waited, because she said she was coming. We needed to get a date to have our card-making group meet. That, and she asked me how to put her podcast episodes on snooze so they wouldn’t play one after the other all night. I felt it my pastoral duty to wait it out until I could hep her with these two vital tasks. I waited. And waited. And waited. She showed up at 10:20.

She had some concerns about the emotional health of one of our members. I told her what I had done so far. We talked about the upcoming vote. I told her about my ideas of how to do the vote. How we would have discussion days where people could yell and scream all they wanted to, and get it out of their system. And then we’d have the vote, on another day. In the middle of the worship service. Maybe follow the vote with communion. That would be church, wouldn’t it? All of us, together, no matter what the outcome? Wouldn’t that be good?

But my companion’s head was elsewhere. Can people send in absentee ballots? Why shouldn’t they be able to send in absentee ballots? If somebody comes to church a lot, we ought to let them have an absentee ballot. Will the Florida people be back in time to go to the extra meetings? She wanted to go to the series of votes for our town’s purchase of a mountain located within our borders, but she also needed to go to her choral group practice. She wished they’d had absentee ballots. We ought to be able to accommodate people who can’t be there in person. A dark vision of what this will be like welled up in my consciousness. A fight. A fight about buildings and budgets, while the people are ignored. Why can’t this be easy? Why can’t these people just look at one another and fall in love. Why can’t they fall in love with the gospel rather than the foam insulation in the sanctuary walls? But, I know some of the players involved, and there will be bad feeling and animosity all around. I can’t do this. I can’t. I don’t have another fight in me. All of a sudden, I hated everything. I don’t want to go through the yelling, the screaming, the nastiness from my toxic nemesis. I don’t have another fight in me. I just don’t. I don’t want to fail. I’m so tired.

I didn’t do much today. I knew I should eat, but I didn’t want to. I knew I should exercise, but I didn’t want to. I feel fat. I don’t just feel fat. I am fat. I call this despair and discouragement. I live next to the north church. I went to the south church, five miles away, and changed the sign in the church sign board from Christmas to the January February service announcment. It says, “Need Hope? We Can Help!” and gives the time of the service. Need Hope? We can help? How ironic.

I went to the Town Budget Meeting to present one of the local library budgets for the coming year. Yes, our town has two libraries. One in the South Village and one in the North Village. I dutifully showed up, not having any clue what I was doing. Fortunately, another board member was also there, and he was able to address whatever minor issues the committee had. I came home to four phone calls. The North organist—my friend—wanted me to know that the North church water pipes had somehow miraculously defrosted and were once again functional. A deacon who is also a social worker called and helped me strategize about how to help our desperate member. One of my sick Office Hour attendees called and asked me to call and tell the guy from church who was going to fix her computer not to come. She wasn’t up to it. A friend called. My only completely non church friend, whose mother happened to have been my mother’s best friend when they were growing up. And then, I ate kielbasa and cabbage for dinner. I zoned out to Twitter for awhile. There was a lot of juicy news out of Washington today about Trump and Bannon and Nunes. After my eyes started fuzzing over from that tiny Twitter type, I plugged in my West Wing Season 2 DVD. I need, need, need to zone out today. And, quite possibly, tomorrow.

I’m tired. I’m fat. I’m failing. I don’t want to fail.

2 January, 2018 Cathedraphiliacs and Philadelphiacs

Day 2: Thoughts and Feelings:

I woke up at around 5 this morning–thinking, as usual, mind racing, the usual feelings of fear, discouragement, uncertainty, pain of failure at the edges of my consciousness. Tossing and turning—reviewing the many missteps I have made. Obsessing over what careens out of my control. Looking at every angle at each interaction with the recalcitrant and reactionary and passive. Worrying over those who do want a spiritual community in the future—who want to move ahead. How do I help them move forward into a churchless future? And raging at the people who settle for what looks to me like a sorry excuse for faith. Maybe they have some sense of spirituality, somewhere. Something I do not see or understand. In spite of Jesus’ direction to “judge not,” my thoughts about them lead to blistering, white-hot judgment.

Who knew? There are people out there who call themselves Christians who really do worship buildings; who bow to brass crosses and treat their low-income neighbors like shit. There are people who call themselves Christians who really only want someone to bury them and take care of their family when they die. They don’t care about what comes after. There are people who call themselves Christian who simply want me to get rid of “that brat” in the sanctuary. “That brat” is a sweet little four year old boy. The only child we have in our entire church. I do not call these sorry souls “Christians.” I call them Cathedraphiliacs.

I made up the word Cathedraphilia to describe those who love their church buildings more than they love Jesus Himself. Those whose faith seems to be in the varnish on the pews, the stained glass, the brass cross, the tracker organ that hardly anybody knows how to play anymore. Cathedraphilia is the word for all the people who worry that if the church lends its folding chairs to any community group, they’ll come back scratched, or, heaven forbid, maybe even dented. Cathedraphilia is the word for people who defend their Constitutional right to toll their church bell every single hour on the hour, sleeping babies or local insomniacs be damned.

But the word Cathedraphilia goes beyond simply mistaking the church building for the Gospel of Jesus. The original meaning of the word “Cathedra” was “easy chair.” isn’t that fascinating? The church coopted the word to describe the grand building where the “Bishop’s Seat” was located. The bishop’s easy chair. Cathedraphilia is the word for church goers who love to sit. Cathedraphilia is the word for people who sit comfortably in the pews every Sunday and who spend the rest of their week sitting comfortably in judgement of those on the margins. Cathedraphilia is the word for churchgoers who simply love to sit. Oh, they’ll have their ladies teas and their men’s breakfasts. But they aren’t going anywhere. And their churches aren’t going anywhere.

Cathedraphiliacs are the ones the prophet Amos was writing about when he said, in the fifth chapter of the book that bears his name:

21 I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. 22 Though you offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. 23 Take thou away from me the noise of your songs; for I will not hear the melody of your viols. 24 But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Cathedraphiliacs exist, and I can’t do anything about them. I have to turn to my Philadelphiacs to make anything happen. Philadelphiacs== people just overwhelmed with love for the world community. The people who actually want to engage in God’s grand scheme of love.

Actions

I had one of the younger leaders over for lunch today. I told her my hope that we’ll make the next five months the BEST EVER . That, if we’re going to go out, we’ll go out with a BANG. I had the idea that we could maybe create a musical. I told her that there were tons of parables and passages about rural life—agriculture, really. Lots about seeds and harvests and growing things. And why don’t we get our most creative people together and write a musical called “Grow!”? So, that’s what we’re gonna do. I’ve already called a bunch of them.

Then we talked about The Vote. The Vote, both dreaded and anticipated, which will either bring us down and lead to division and despair, or send us soaring into a new way of being church. When will we do it? How will we do it? We drop whatever recommendations we have to offer on April 8th. We will have an informational meeting on that afternoon after church. We will let people ask questions and absorb the info over the next few weeks. We’ll have our first “Town Meeting” style meeting in May, at which time the two sides can scream at each other to their hearts content. We’ll have a final conversation on June 10th. June 17th is Father’s Day
. On June 24, we’ll have a worship service. In the very center of the worship service, not before, and not after, but right in the middle, we’ll take the vote. And then we’ll continue worshiping. In fact, then we’ll have communion. Wow. That’s the plan then. I like it.

After the meeting I had with this young leader, I got a call about a woman needing help with heat, and so I went to check out the situation.

One of our musicians wrote the tune to a song that we can sing this weekend, rather than an “Introit.” It’s a Song of Welcome. I still have to write the words. I haven’t heard the song yet.
I ran into a fringe attender at the grocery store while I was getting groceries for this desperate member with no heat in her house (It was 24 below zero this am. Oh, god, I won’t even go through what my experience with her was like today). The fringe attender said she was coming on Sunday, because she had heard I was changing up the beginning of the service (referring to the Introit switcharoo) and she thought she’d come to lend me “moral support.” 🙂 Love it!

1 January 2018: The Beginning of the End

Day 1 — I have been serving two dying congregations in rural New England for almost 4 years now. How I got here is a mystically marvelous story. I’ll tell it at some point. Not now. The circumstances of my arrival here do serve as an encouragement to me. In spite of my failure to reinvigorate these two churches, I still feel like God’s hand is in this process somehow. The churches’ stories might be coming to a rapid end, but my faith story isn’t. This is simply a chapter, sad and discouraging as it may be. But I tell it to encourage you. So many pastors and churches are in this distressing situation. You are not alone. Deaths are known to be followed by Resurrections. Perhaps we can help our congregations live all the way until they die.

Shortly after I got here, I realized that doing one service for eight people scattered around the back rows of a sanctuary that seats 200 only to dash up the road to the other church and do the exact same service for 10 people in a sanctuary that seats 180 was really, really not going to get us anywhere. I wasn’t getting to know the people in the church with the early service. And, really, this situation would do nothing for church growth. Who was going to feel like a church with eight people was a lively happening place? So, we started meeting for one service, alternating between our two sanctuaries, roughly following the school year (not that we had any kids in school). Three months in one sanctuary, three in the other, then back for three months in the one. That got us through September through May, with Christmas in one sanctuary and Easter in the other. In the summer, we did a six week in each church “hiccup” to reset the schedule so, the following school year, whoever had Christmas the year before had Easter, and vice versa. It worked out well, for the most part. Members of each church got to know one another. We didn’t even have many people squawking about the change. Now our rare visitors experienced a sanctuary with, not eight or nine people, but with 15, and then 20 or 25.

What has occurred here has been, at times, wonderful; at times, heartbreaking; at times encouraging;  at times infuriating. All along, I have tried, tried, tried to bring in new people and to re-energize the current members. Last May, we had a new member class of 9 people. It took me forever to build that group! It was amazing to bring them on board! I have interacted with the younger, active people in our communities. I have tried to get new programs going. I have tried to be a part of multigenerational activities. The arts community. The high school community. The retiree community. I have worked so hard to bring in new members. People who will want the friendship we have to offer. People who will be “doers.” In the meantime, some of our old doers moved away. Got new, more demanding jobs that took them away from church. Some more of our old doers died.

Turns out, no matter what I do, our potential “doers” aren’t coming from anywhere. We all know that American communities are sorely lacking in “doers.” Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, bowling teams, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, are all folding because people are turning inward in response to the overwhelming demands and information overloads of modern life. Religion has become anathema to many in the modern world. People just don’t want to bother with it anymore.

At year 2.5 of my tenure here, during the course of a single week, four members of one of the two churches died. That was a real crisis, because we didn’t have enough help to put on all of those funerals and receptions in such short order. One of the few remaining younger leaders—probably around my late-middle age—said she thought it was time for us to begin exploring a merger of the two congregations. We had been worshipping together for about a year at this point, and some newcomers had only experienced our congregations as one. One church has lots of money, but few members. The other has little money, but more members (although they’re in their 70s, 80s and 90s, for the most part). The few willing workers are spread between the two congregations. One of the congregations has some very belligerent, nasty members. That congregation also has several people who are not interested in merger, and are actively fighting against it. The Buildings are a Big Deal. The Million Dollar Endowment is a Big Deal.

We went ahead with merger talks anyway. We probably shouldn’t have, because the one church council very grudgingly went along with the younger leaders to move the proposal forward to the other church. The other church is the one with a cadre of over-my-dead-body-will-you-merge bullies. Really, my deepest self told me ‘way back then that this was a lost cause. I didn’t listen, because I want with all my heart for there to be a future for mainline, progressive, spiritual community in these parts. So, foolish as it may have been, with whatever faith I could dredge up from my inmost parts, we forged ahead.

We have been meeting for over a year now. Our vote on merger is coming up in 150 days.
I have been down and discouraged about this for almost a year. I’ve tried to escape—to get a job elsewhere. Closer to home in Chicago, where I grew up, where all my friends are. Three times I snared interest from my resume, three times, I got to a second interview. Each time, whether because of my age, or my long-distance attempt to get a job, or for some other unknown deficiency on my part, I have failed to land the job. For a few days this summer, I thought, “I’ve cast my lot here! I must stick this out! I’ll do whatever it takes to make these churches survive!” I signed up for a year-long program with Brian McLaren that I thought would help us supposedly revitalize, renew, and excite new ways of being Christian. Because I don’t have enough of an energetic team to carry out Brian’s wonderful ideas, this has been, pretty much, an expensive bust.
As of this summer, I tried to get certain Dream Team members together to review each church’s respective Bylaws. They nodded and said they would. And then they didn’t, and they kept not getting together, and at this point four months have gone by. I tried to get them to look at each other’s budgets. One member bitched loudly that that was “too much work.” Each church budget is about a page and a half long. How the hell is that a lot of work? We’ve been meeting once a month. We found out most church merger teams meet twice a month. With enormous grumbling, we started meeting twice a month. Some people still only come once.

We put out a suggestion box, and got ZERO suggestions. We asked for questions at services, and got none. After several attempts to get people to talk to us about the upcoming merger vote, we finally decided to send our folks out, one on one, to talk to those NOT on the Dream Team. As of three weeks ago, we discovered that many of the old people in both congregations are not actually willing to merge. Two of the people on the Dream Team have become unbearably negative. I hate the whole process. I feel angry and hurt and misled. As of today, barring any miracles that I truly and sincerely do not believe are in the offing, these churches will die in six months. I will leave and go . . . somewhere. I don’t know where. I will do something . . . I don’t know what.
A couple of months ago, as the realization of impending doom was truly sinking in, I resigned these two churches to the terminal prognosis that they so richly deserve. I pulled back even more, realizing that they are refusing further treatment, and there’s nothing I can do for them.

And then I realized that there IS more that I can do for these two sad, terminally diseased congregations. I can give them hospice care. A good hospice team asks the sick patient what their goals of life are for the time they have left. I can ask them what their goals for life are for the next six months. What will imbue their last days with meaning? What gifts can I give them? What thank you notes can I get the community they have served to send them. I just need enough energy to do give them a great send-off for around five or six months. And then I leave. That’s all I need. Six months.

This gives me a weird burst of energy and, strangely, hope. I really and truly think these two churches are doomed. I will be their last settled pastor. I don’t have any hope for their survival. But I do have hope that they can truly live until they die. I can help with that. So, this blog is about the end that is surely approaching. The end of these two little congregations that have chugged along one for over two hundred years, the other for almost two hundred years. It is about ending their ministries on hope and celebration.

Requiem aeteram dona eis, Domine.