Honesty, Authenticity and Pastoral Office

Rachel Evans, recently blogged about pastoral honesty, exhorting pastors to tell the truth. It ilicited a long comment thread with numerous pastors saying they'd like to be but don't think they can, or more telling saying they had tried and found that congregations didn't want what the post she wrote and signed was encouraging. Adam S. McHugh at the Introverted Church had his own repsonse. In that he outlines the characteristics of a congregation that could receive the honesty Rachel Evans in her post was encouraging pastors to have.

I am of an age and of a subculture in which authenticity, being honest about who you are, being true etc. are all high ideals. Rachel's post, fits with my cultural assumptions and thus rings true, and Adam's Characteristics of a congregation also sounds to me like the ideal congregation, but....

My extensive "but" has to do with the pastoral office, and the truth that actually will set us free, which isn't our individual truths.

Honesty and authenticity must serve something else. A pastor isn't simply an individual person who gives a sermon on Sunday morning (or in my case evening). A pastor also cares for (shepherds, that is the etymology) the spiritual well being of particular gathered people of God and disciples of Jesus Christ. These gathered people come even in the most homogeneous of groups with differing level's of maturity, differing circumstances of life (much of it stressful or grief ridden.), differing levels of spiritual understanding and experience. A congregation that fits all the characteristics outlined by the introverted Pastor would be a congregation where all the individual members remarkably had such maturity, spiritual and personal, and/or such even keel personal histories as to never have a reactive thought or emotion, or the life experience and wisdom to immediately recognize such reactive thoughts and emotions within moments of experiencing them! On this side of Kingdom come (as some use to say) one will never find such a congregation.

My point is while I am sure many a pastor hides for the sake of the job, and as a disturbingly large number of comments in the comment thread show, congregations can be very petty in their response to any sign of weakness or doubt in their pastor, but honesty and authenticity can be wielded like a weapon, honesty and authenticity can become more important than the Pastoral Office. Honesty and authenticity need to serve the Gospel and the care of souls, and very rarely should be about the pastor.

As a someone who helped start the church I now pastor, and given the make up of my congregation I will admit there is little I feel I need to hide from my congregation. Even so, I am not honest in the ways Rachel Evans enjoins me to be honest. Not because I am hiding but because my opinions aren't supposed to be the point of my pastoral role. They inform what I do, but as Pastor I am to seek to submit my will (and opnions) to the will of God, and to the service of those God has given into my care. I am to lead the people of God entrusted to my spiritual leadership into the fullness of our relationship to God in Jesus Christ,by the power of the Holy Spirit. Sure there are opinions here. But rarely do my doubts serve that purpose. Mainly because my doubts are my own personal struggles with the call of God on my life through the pastoral office. I need a place to take these doubts and struggles, but that isn't the particular congregation, thus one reason why there is the wider body of Christ. The local congregation isn't the be all and end all of Christian community.

Lastly I learned a valuable lesson about the pastor and honesty in my stint as a hospital chaplain in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). Sitting with people in crisis in the hospital room recovering or before going into surgery, or when a loved one is in ICU or having just died, honesty about my doubts about the after life, or my theological struggles, or even my struggles with death and frailty only on the rarest of occasions ware comfort or of spiritual help to the patients or their families. Rather, what I was called to was to listen, and based on what I heard in the other to bring my relationship to God, my knowledge of theology and spirituality, my experience in life to bear upon their situation, by reflecting back to them their struggles their doubts, and to affirm that these things are okay, but not by telling them about me, but by being a presence with them in crisis. Most people have friends who can be "honest" with them, what people needed wasn't my personal honesty, but comfort with ambiguity, pain, doubt, death, and life. This I think is a type of honesty, but it is internal and silent, a speaking the truth with out speaking.

The reality is that pastors aren't just Christians who stand up front of the assembly, we are pastors, shepherds of God's people, or we should be. This requires being honest with ourselves, it may mean saying things that may make people uncomfortable, but it also may mean that we never speak to the congregation our deepest darkest doubts and struggles. In my view a congregation should rebel against some form of total honesty. Pastors must tell the truth but the truth their to tell is Christ, not their own individualized truths. According to my tradition I am a minister of the Gospel of Word and Sacrament. The truth I am responsible to proclaim has little to do with my opinions or struggles, but with what God has done and is doing in myself, in the congregation and in the world through Jesus Christ. In that truth telling, I am to follow the example of the one who did not break the bruised read, nor douse the smoldering wick. compassion for ones congregation needs to always be uppermost in a pastors mind. Being honest and telling the truth for a pastor means being acquainted with grief and the pastors own weaknesses not so that she may tell it all, but so she may out of this self acquaintance in love convey Christ to God's people and so that healed and being healed the people of God may being acquainted with Christ know their own weaknesses and in compassion proclaim the Truth Jesus Christ to the world. Due to a variety of realities getting oneself let alone a whole congregation to live fully into these things is a life long task.

Alone in silence we write otherness

The end of the Midwinter conference was significant. Since Thursday night I have attempted to write about it. This is a post from my silence, from this moment of being alone. This is an articulate silence.

There is a limit, that I have placed on my self, a limit that I have long practiced: That which is inchoate in myself, things yet still in formation I do not speak except in the safest and most private of spaces. And even at times even then I keep silent.

Last Thursday I met with a spiritual director at Midwinter. It was a good session, a needed session. The spiritual director told me I was not being in the moment. Not necessarily the general moment of the now, but a particular moment in my own self, a moment I usually try to avoid at great cost. In this moment I have few words. It is a moment of isolation, of being alone (even if in a large group of people) of being myself before others and the Other. I avoid this moment for in it I am consumed by my own awareness of my otherness, of difference, of distance. I read Derrida in part because in his philosophy I find a companion in this distance.

This moment is being alone with others, at this moment being in this moment is to allow myself to be other, even to myself.

This was my experience of the end of the conference. An experience of being alone, standing out, being other. In this moment thoughts swirl and then are silenced. A sense of movement forward, and yet standing still. In this moment I wait. I Wait alone, in silence, and the rush of thoughts, and possibilities. I wait here alone for the other, wait to speak, wait to write, waiting for the other to speak that we may write between each other, and speak our difference together in the space between us and the Other. I Wait to take in what will rewrite our very thoughts, showing us that it is in the other that we are, and in our otherness that we speak truth.

Racial Reconciliation -Midwinter 2011 reflections - part 3

Yesterday I had one of the more potentially transformative and moving workshops I have had at Midwinter. Velda Love and Peter Sjoblom lead the workshop designed for us to take seriously that the Christian Tradition and the Bible all are resources for confronting Racism and a Racialized society through the act of seeking racial reconciliation. They also created a space where we could as those committed to Christ and the Gospel come together and speak our stories of race and racism, out of the intention of hearing one another and not merely asserting our perspective. In all it was a humble, humbling and rejuvenating time, because Truth and truths were spoken that often don't get or aren't allowed to be spoken.

We were in Three groups around three tables, and in our groups we were to speak to each other from where we were and who we were around the issues of race and racism. The first discussion was to tell our stories through what influence our theology, who wee the people, the scholars the circumstances that inform who we think theologically and live theologically. The first person to speak a confession and the pain of the struggles of his own congregation. He spoke of the pain of coming to this realization and the pain that he did not know what to do for his congregation, yet knowing this was a barrier to so much good that could happen there. And that was simply the beginning, so many stories of pain but also hope. Hope mixed with pain, and the complexity of living and resisting in large and small ways this system of racial division and categorization, allowing the different groups to have opinions of the other that are in the least inaccurate if not completely false and for the sake of keeping those categorized as White with the wealth power and privilege. I found it interesting that the stories on all sides often included a theme of prejudice concerning the other, and either being taught that prejudice was wrong through the actions of others (Friends, parents, grandparents, or the experience of grand parents and parents). There was also the understandable theme of, for those of races other than white, struggling with seeing all people of European descent as one monolithic group of people who have done one wrong (not entirely false but not entirely true either).

For me a great breakthrough moment in the workshop was when a Hispanic pastor who pastors among First Nations, challenged the framing of workshop along lines of White and Black (though to the credit of the facilitators they sought this framing as exemplary but not exclusive). This felt like an exclusion despite the attempt at inclusion. this lead us as a whole to struggle with the paradigms of race that we continue to use to dismantle Racism and a Racialized system. I feel that rose up in that moment was a cry against continuing to use the classification and linguistic system of an oppressive system. while struggling with the reality that we also have to fact the system and its language and confront it on its terms for we are also part of that system. It was an amazing moment as we were confronted with the reality that our own story's don't necesarily fit so easily into the mythology and construct and classification of the system, even as the system itself attempts to address the racial realities.

Velds Love said two things that have remained with me: one was in part in responce to the above protest and renunciation, that she when she is asked to describe herself says she is a woman by birth of African descent who chose Christianity. She explained that this is deliberate way of describing herself that she believes opens up for encounter, for it frees the other to similarly self-identify. The other thing she said was that we need people willing to deliberately and carefully cross boundaries and barriers to encounter and build relationship with others. It occurred to me that this was largely what my German missionary grandparents did. They left Germany as missionaries not to bring Germany to China, but to meet and have relationship with the Chinese for the sake of the Gospel. I am told that until his death my grandfather, (Vati we called him) burped after every meal as was the custom and polite in Chinese culture of his time. Vati went to China and took on Chinese custom and social norms to reach out and relate to the Chinese, and he perhaps (unconsciously) told everyone he ate with that they would have to cross a boundary, that he was not easily categorized, in that there is great redemption I feel.

Midwinter 2011-Reflections- Worship and a Blizzard

I had thought I might make it out to the Hyatt O'Hare for the morning sessions of the conference this year, they made the latter in the morning 9 a.m. this year instead of 8 a.m. but that is still early when you are traveling out to O'hare from the north side of Chicago. So it feels a little weird since I also missed the evening session since the storm picked up greatly while in the afternoon session of the workshop I attended today.

Today the conference was more or less the workshop on worship. Turns out I had met Geoff Twigg the presenter at another conference in the fall last year on the history and present relationship between the Covenant Church and the Augustana Synod/ELCA. Currently I am feeling a bit bewildered by the workshop. I enjoyed it and think I got something from it, but now sitting down and reflecting on it I don't really know why I enjoyed it and even put off meeting a friend of mine because as I told him "I need to be at the second session of the workshop." I remember feeling this way, I also found the second session engaging, but now I can't quite put my finger on any thing about it.

I think one reason this may be is that the way he wrapped up the workshop, doesn't relate to me. though I realize now that if I had paid attention I should have realized this is where he was going. He wrapped up the workshop talking about the role of the Covenant Affirmations for "our" worship and what meaning and possible implications they may have for worship in Covenant churches. I had been of course thinking about all this in terms of Reconciler which is not a Covenant Church, and relating to a great deal of what Twigg was saying and even from some good challenges of what Twigg presented form other participants to Reconciler and how we chose and continue to choose to approach our worship life. However, while thinking about worship in terms of the covenant Affirmations made sense to me as a Covenant pastor there wasn't really a way to relate that easily to Reconciler.

Midwinter 2011- Reflections- Part 1 John M. Perkins

This week is the Midwinter ministers conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church, I am there all this week, and will be blogging my thoughts and experiences there this week.

The speaker at the opening worship service was John M. Perkins who encouraged us to not see justice as something tact on to the Gospel, but as the very Gospel itself. In saying this he was calling for a reorientation of our thinking: God's justice is found in God's action to redeem a sinful humanity, thus God's justice (and love) is revealed in the cross. For Perkins love and justice go hand in hand.

He also talked about the silence of the prophetic voice against the system of greed that pervades our Nation, and hear things got a little sticky. He called on the church to lay claim and live out the full Gospel, to live it out, to bring God's love to the world as the church should. But as he was speaking about the church sometimes he would slip into speaking about America as a Nation. He did so in such away that it was unclear if he made a clear distinction between the two. In this he spoke truth the history of slavery and racism and segregation in this country contradict "We hold these truths self-evident that all men [people] are created equal..." He also pointed out the contradictions between our nations democracy and its support of tyrants and dictators like Mubarak and our willingness to prop him up when the people of Egypt have risen up against Mubarak. On one hand he wanted the encourage us as part of the Church to speak prophetically to the nation on the other hand he called us to identify with the mythology of this great nation of ours that proclaims itself as the "City Set on a Hill" bringing light to the world.

This lead me to a clarified idea that has been tossing around in my head since the State of the Union Address last week and the uprising in Egypt and Tunisia. It seems to me that Nation States and Nations simply will act in their self interest, that the point of our current form of Nationalism is to create a sense of a particular people with a particular mythology and self-interest as a group that is not only different but stands over and against other nations. The point of the United Nations is to ostensibly be the place where these competing interests may be worked out peacefully and diplomatically, and thus prevent wars which is the other way nations with competing interests solve these conflicts of interests.

In my mind the problem for Perkins in not clearly distinguishing between church and the nation of America, is that his preaching against self-interest and greed, which is Gospel, runs counter to the very logic of the Nation, which is to represent and defend the interests of a particular "people" with a particular character (we wont get into now that these "people" are inventions and themselves deny a plurality and diversity that actually deconstructs the mythology of the "people" of the nation, including the people of Egypt). What I feel Perkins proclamation should have Gone but didn't, is that the Gospel actually calls for the church in the U.S. to declare its independence from the American Nation. For us to work for the church to work for the"good of the City" it must recognize that it is an alien people. For us to work for immigration reform is to recognize that we are from another nation and authority that we are immigrants always already. We don't belong to any nation, or state or people, for God is forming a new people out of all nations and peoples. In so doing God creates resident aliens in all nations and among alll people. The prophetic voice that Perkins said is silence I believe is partially silenced because we Christians in the U.S. want to be citizens of the U.S. and Citizens of the City of God. History points it seems to me that while such dual citizenship may be able to work for a time, it has a corrupting influence on Christians, and it leads us to attempt to shore up the state and Nation by attempting to make it fit the Gospel, and live out the Gospel, in the place of the Church. The church can only carry God's just love to the world, when it recognizes that it is an other people, alien to the kingdoms and nations and peoples of the world, and a foretaste of God's transformation of all things including kingdoms and nations and peoples.