Clergy: Be Brave And Be Bold In A Burning Time

How is everyone?

I didn’t preach yesterday and actually cancelled my travel plans so I could rest and read. I read a lot. I read about ISIS and the situation in Syria and the Middle East all day. I stayed quiet and then went to a friend’s birthday party.

I want to write soon about how little clergy can afford to be drawn into petty squabbles right now; a blog post inspired by a thread I followed the other day at the RevGalBlogPals Facebook page about parishioner complaints about their ministers revealing their unpious, human side. The world is burning. Religious leaders need to be grounded, strong, sane and learned. We and our staff members and lay leaders need to stay the course and have worthy things to say, to be and to provide in an extremely unstable time. Those who drag any of us backward into the kind of squabble that might have seemed important at some point (“My pastor SWORE” or “My minister didn’t attend the concert because he was too busy writing a Huffington Post article about terrorism and faith/income inequality and violence that will only maybe be read by 30-40,000 people and I NEED HIS ATTENTION!”) must be informed that it ain’t like that any more, sorry,
love ya,
we have bigger issues to address.

A LOT needs to be said about this. It is insane to hear of a pastor being berated because she posted something about going home, getting into her sweats, and wishing she didn’t have to go back to church for a meeting. The answer is not to create a fake persona on social media or to refrain from using Facebook. The answer is to address this bizarre, outdated, controlling, ridiculous kind of scrutiny of ministers and to end it. A friend of mine who recently left the parish ministry said that he often felt as though his people loved him because he was religious FOR them and they could absorb a kind of vicarious piety through him. Good God, that’s got to stop wherever it’s going on. Clergy must take the lead and calmly redirect this outmoded instinct. How to regard the role of the minister is, actually, the minister’s job to help their congregations or communities clearly understand. You are the person in the profession. You are the one in the organization who knows the history of the role and can explain how it has evolved over the centuries, and where it stands now. Do not expect anyone to do this for you — it’s your job. It is not a personal thing, but institutional. People follow tradition and local culture in this wise unless you educate and work with them to evolve their understanding.

Another thing that can sap ministerial energy and spirit…

Those of you who are living in This Doesn’t Really Concern Us Land: No, you are not crazy or wrong to feel sick and frustrated by the murmurings of “such a shame” while people go about their comfortable lives. If people can’t see how interrelated all of these bloody issues of global climate change [thanks, Judy – PB], poverty, hopelessness, racism, violence, occupation, fundamentalism, extremism, greed, nihilism and human dignity are — well, may God forgive them their avoidance and denial and help you, awake minister, to find a more juicy vineyard in which to labor. We are not called to serve the comfortable and assure that their well-oiled machines of empty ritual and Sunday-only spiritual pangs never break and never run out of members or money.

Find a community that wants to do more, be more, even at the risk of confusion, unknowing and failure. Find a community that doesn’t have a Victorian Pastor Fantasy but wants to work collaboratively alongside someone who is faithful, authentic, smart, hard-working, honest, visionary, creative, articulate, compassionate, emotionally healthy, angry enough but not enraged, strong and self-differentiated. Then be that person and go to it. Stop worrying about fulfilling some traditional archetype. You’re not a saint and no one cares. You need to be a reliable and good LEADER.

Loving people does not mean being paralyzed by niceties and traditions that mask over an iron-clad control of the minister and the minister’s message and vision. The world is burning. You know what I’m talking about and you know you’re going to have to be braver than you thought.

Well, this may be the actual post after all.