Post Covid Questions From Beat-up Pastors #3

It was a small lunch meeting of a few experienced, thoughtful, regular guy pastors. 

No long-bearded whiz kids. No visionaries, empire builders, trail blazers or trend setting, careful dressing innovators at the table. These are the guys that actually answer their phones when people call at odd hours. They make middle of the night trips to the hospital to visit the sick, know how to sit with a grieving family, can talk with a mixed-up kid and because he seldom listens the first time, can get the little knot head out of jail a few days later. They dedicate babies, make a difference when officiating a funeral, juggle budgets and answer questions. Lots of them. All day long. 

Just regular, dependable church leaders whose real specialty isn't sermonizing or saving the world, but problem solving. They've heard the unoriginal jokes about preachers working one day a week hundreds of times and haven't once kicked anybody. These are nice guys.

Though hailing from different backgrounds and traditions and ministry approaches, all had surprised themselves by living through and limping out of the lockdown upheaval and messy aftermath with only bruises and lacerations - none of them yet fatal.

Banter, banter, banter, then light talk turned serious church talk. The unrelenting grind of it all the last three years was mentioned, as was lagging and maddening post-Covid attendance. We poked at the higher profile churches use of money, splash and prominence to 'corner the market', imposing their 'brand' on the community while other churches curtailed activities attempting the thankless juggling act of following public health protocols while keeping a church alive. A lot tumbled out: the law of diminishing returns that weirdly dictates making greater investment in media and digital presence that results in weakening loyalty to our churches. We marveled at the popularity and hard to explain attraction of copycat services by trendy churches that merely sell eye and ear candy with the thinnest sliver of a gospel lite nougat. We worried over the increasingly indispensable need for ever more tech savvy approaches to . . . well, everything.

Then, the unanswerables: Is traditional ministry shifting? Where do regular pastors fit in anymore?

A lot of voices are calling and cultural winds are ever shifting. While the trends may be new, the phenomenon isn't. Since Ecclesiastes at least, things have been in constant flux. 

Here's the thing - people will always need caring, competent shepherds. Human guilt will still invite agony, grief won't take a holiday, the lost will always deserve finding and, as always, the wounded will never wait. Ministry will never change and neither will the Solution.

The reasons the good ones get into church ministry remain worthy reasons. Serving Christ and serving hurting people whom He loves intensely will never go out of vogue. Those are timeless things that pastors do.                                                    

Here's my idea of traditional ministry - 

1. Caring for the poor and neglected and teaching others how to see people the way Jesus sees people  

2. Making followers of Jesus so effectively that they make followers who make followers                                               

3. Showing people how to have a longer than life conversation with a Relationship God who has already included them in His dance

Our God will always make room for called men and women who are willing to do these things well and you don't need a coffee bar, black ceiling tiles or muted lighting to make it happen.

Post Covid Questions From Beat-up Pastors #2

For church leaders, the post-Covid waters are treacherous. Bombarded with frequent reports of universal church decline, the rise of the 'nones', a loss of interest in organized religion and the exodus of millennials, tens of thousands of good pastors are treading water. Many pre-Covid attenders have not returned, having filled their weekends with sports, shopping, get-aways and maybe the occasional peek at the Sunday livestream. Some have made deals with the devil that will come due in unforeseen ways, possibly in the lives of their children, their children's children and their communities some years off. 

An unexpected threat from trendy, blandly tagged, over logoed start-ups, big box churches and wannabes has appeared. Dangling legs of vulnerable church leaders attract an especially rapacious predator: the nearby barracuda pastor is circling, sniffing for blood. With the latest copy of Fast Company on the nightstand, these t-shirted and single-minded visionaries eagerly impose their brand by building on the losses of discouraged brother and sister pastors.  Bleeding churches across the country, helmed by the walking wounded, struggle to survive Sunday to Sunday. Large numbers of exhausted, diminished churches and leaders, wearied from three long years of flailing and blood loss, slip unnoticed into the deep. No grave markers for these losers. 

Beat-up pastors are asking some really hard questions 

Is God pruning the church? Is He pruning the pastorate? Where do regular, average pastors fit in anymore?

If this is pruning season, God's shaping of His church is nothing new. Neither is the idea that the visible church should be always reforming and refining. Ecclesia semper reformanda, popularized by super theologian Karl Barth, goes back at least to that 5th century stalwart and father, St. Augustine.

It may be that average pastors are being pushed and molded by the Spirit, but not to be a better version of themselves or to build character in the churches they lead. There's a misconception here. According to the more radical parts of the New Testament, trials come not to improve our character. They are the vehicle by which Christ is formed in us. As Oswald Chambers observed, the evidence of genuine spiritual formation is a strong family resemblance to Jesus Christ. A best version of me has nothing to do with it. It's all about Jesus living His life in us and that's a mind-blowing concept. Current trials may be a tool in the hands of the Master.

So, perhaps the current shaking will allow Christ to be formed new in some good and longsuffering leaders. 

But what about those predator pastors? They happily point to numbers as permission granted by church planting gurus, denominational leaders and the Holy Spirit to inflict injury on struggling churches and fellow pastors. Buoyed along by marketing strategies, algorithms, social media manipulation, denominational approval and confirmed by an appealing, very American but cynical, pernicious view of success, they are blind to their cutthroat church building tactics.

However, what they are building is no more durable than what they are building on. Lasting structures can't have poor foundations. Much of the current American church profile is confirmation of Rene Girard's insight that human behavior and most human desires are simply imitative. 

The tragedy will not be in the eventual collapse of copycat predator churches but in the lives of hundreds of thousands now sitting in cookie cutter services, enveloped in the essential blue haze, coffee in hand, eyes locked on the very bright stage, who will slowly or suddenly become disillusioned with it all. Once the overconfident pastor steps in it or the hype becomes tedious, they will quit. Wounded like so many before them, they will find the emotional and psychological barriers to knowing a God who desperately wants to be known much higher and harder to navigate. 

"An appalling and horrible thing                                                                                                                  Has happened in the land:                                                                                                                            The prophets prophesy falsely                                                                                                                    And the priests rule on their own authority;                                                                                           And My people love it so!                                                                                                                            But what will you do at the end of it?"                                                                                                                                              Isaiah 5:30-31

Overstatement? What if it's not and what if God meant it? Take heart good pastor. You're not the one being pruned.

Post-Covid Questions From Beat-Up Pastors #1

Making a case that churches and church leaders got an especially brutal pummeling during pandemic and lockdown would be a snap. Even in the long post-lockdown era the beating continues for many pastors. During the worst of it, criticism was of the unanswerable variety - "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Bruise-free quarterbacking from armchair safe spaces - always a favorite spectator sport of the ill-informed - slopped over into unlicensed amateur postmortems from every in-print and online publication, highbrow to low, loudly sacred to proudly secular. All children of Nostradamus confidently predicted, and sometimes welcomed, the certain decline and death of the deficient, deflated, defective American church. 

Led by smart kids in lofty think-tank high places, generously lotioned TV talking heads and cautious officials in shiny, tastefully decorated denominational low places, rising ranks of screeching church quitters, like all good mob members, grabbed pitchforks and muskets on cue, and in the best call-and-response tradition, laid all failures, declines and missteps of the American church at the feet of tired local pastors. 

After three years without much R&R or any hazard pay, this now punchy bunch, already carrying most of the baggage while dodging a slew of slings and arrows with no fortunes, outrageous or otherwise anywhere in sight, started cracking up. Sagacious pipers deafened by their own loud tune and their armed child followers predictably shooting their own eye out, somehow managed to unhear and overlook a lot of decent pastors and families in deep crisis. The same decent ladies and men dedicated to warning them of the unforgiving cliffs ahead.

Budgets and attendance took a hit and many shell-shocked church leaders haven't seen a bounce-back even close to pre-Covid levels. As former church attenders, now out of the habit, stubbornly stayed away, many pastors walked away. Some who still remain live with the daily near nausea of fear and self-doubt that's part of going down with a sinking ship. Many more would quit if they could and tens of thousands will end up quitting even if they can't. Walking away from a life's work will exact a crushing emotional and psychological toll on good people who've been lifelong learners, acquiring specialized and often undervalued skills, typically at great personal cost. The ripple effect on families and communities is not measurable. The loss of spiritual capital and plain old know-how will likely have a crippling effect that can't be contained within church walls.

This is the very real backdrop to questions beat-up pastors are asking each other. I know because I talk with them. 

• Is God pruning the church?
• Is God pruning the pastorate?
• Is traditional ministry shifting or is it dying?
• What will happen when many pastors, like many attenders, simply quit?
• Can the American church survive? Should it?
  

In a few posts, Toto will join me as we grip the curtain with our teeth, pulling it back so you can see something important you're probably missing and may be contributing to - the frantic flailing of the little wizards who are trying to hold things together at the church down the street.

On This Compelling Environment I Will Build My Church

Popeye said "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em", and so I will.

I'm giving up disciple making, hospital and shut-in calling, crisis counseling, fasting, preaching, extraordinary prayer, mentoring and spending lots of time with people. I'm also backing off study time, reflection, journaling and anything else I incorrectly imagined was part of pastoring.

I'm a church consultant now.

I'll be advising leaders to backlight the stage, using plenty of muted blues while darkening the room so everyone is blind as a bat, terrified that any shifting could put them on the floor and knock out a row of chairs. I'll be careful to point out the value of selecting an indeterminate, geometric design for the backdrop that has only the meaning you give it. I'll advise they get a band and install suspended speakers cranked loud enough that nobody can hear themselves singing except the musicians with those little thingies in their ears. I'll sell them on the idea that vocalists should know how to moan convincingly and stop at just the right time to deliver extemporaneous remarks carefully worked out in the previous week's nightly two-hour rehearsals. It ain't worship until it's perfect. 

I wouldn't be worth my chips if I turned an up-and-coming church loose in the highly competitive, barracuda infested marketplace that is contemporary worship without advising pastors to invest in heavily wrinkled, high dollar catalogue clothes appropriate for a camping weekend. Rips that give the appearance of a wolverine attack are a plus. Be original, man!

Strike out on your own is what I always say so I'll do them a favor by selling them pre-made, sure-fire sermon package subscriptions (always in a series and always automatically renewing for the customer's convenience). Included is a slightly inspired, word-for-word manuscript written by some of the most anointed seminary drop-out turned advertising wizards anywhere. It's all ready to be loaded onto video monitors seen only by the pastor so he/she never misses a word. They will even be coached about where to pause and gesture for effect and the best times to pace the stage with head lowered and how fast. It'll look so easy that anybody could do it! Song lyrics, take home coloring pages and snazzy graphics are included. It's essential in today's church to keep all eyes glued to the big screen so the folks don't miss the worship producer's cut-away twelve-foot-high close-up shot of the same people standing in front of them.

It won't be enough to tell them to serve coffee. Everybody knows you'd be stupid to have church without it. I'll show them the proven wisdom of having a coffee team. These serious folks will research the best cup sizes, sleeves, stirrers, ministry logo, team t-shirts and of course the trendiest, earth friendliest, hard to get coffee along with obligatory flavored creams and additives. Everything is ministry, you know.

From time to time I get questions about the expense of fog machines in making things especially spiritual. I do have some thoughts. But this blog is free and that sort of thing is reserved for my upper tier customers. Those select pastor/leader/visionaries who understand that in creating the compelling environment we're all chasing that money is a minor consideration. Special effects are high-level stuff among us church planting consultants.

Move over Apostolic Fathers, Azusa Street, Martin Luther, the gates of hell and good church people, pastors and martyrs of the last two thousand years. The church consultants, the cavalry you've been waiting for, have arrived and they're ready to show you how to do Jesus' job for Him and build the church on the cheap. 

You just gotta create a compelling environment.