Tod Bolsinger

Community and Necessary Things

“So, Charlie, when are we going fix that wall that’s falling down?”

My good friend, Charlie heard the voice from the yard next door. Frankly, he hadn’t noticed that the wall was falling down.  Charlie is not the kind of guy who notices these things. But, Jim, the next door neighbor most definitely does. 

They’d lived next door to each other for seven years.  But until the wall fell down they didn’t know each other. 

When Charlie saw that indeed the wall was in need of serious repair, he assumed that meant that he and Jim would split the cost to pay someone to fix.  You know, be neighborly and cooperative. Jim had other ideas. 

The next week he was out digging up the foundation of the wall and soon, if nothing else besides guilt, Charlie joined in.  Together they replaced that wall with a fence.   Once that fence was finished, Jim noted that the rest of Charlie’s walls and fences were even worse than the one that had crumbled, and he offered to help him put up a new fence all the way around his property.  Charlie, who as a pastor and musician is not exactly skilled at this particular kind of labor, readily agreed.

So Charlie and Jim built some fences together.  And a friendship was born.  As they worked together to make good fences, they found out all kinds of things about each other.  Jim is a retired park ranger and former Vietnam vet.  He can cook as good a paella as he is handy with tools.  He knows a thing or two about good wine and classical music and great literature.  He grew up near the Mokulmne Wilderness in California and loves to backpack.  Jim and Charlie started going on hiking trips together.   Jim’s not particularly religious at all, but when his wife died, he asked Charlie to conduct the funeral. 

Now when Jim is on vacation, Charlie watches his house.  When Jim mows his lawn he also mows Charlie’s.  For seven years they were just neighbors who didn’t know each other.  Then the wall fell down and they built a fence.  In building the fence, they built a friendship. 

Recently, Jim suggested that they put a gate in the fence.  Which of course, you couldn’t do with a wall.  And they wouldn’t have even considered before they built that fence together. 

Wendell Berry wrote, “Community will start again when people begin to do necessary things for each other again.”

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Hemorrhaging Pastors

The Problem with “Going Pro”

What do Wayne Gretzky, Bart Starr, Isaiah Thomas, Ted Williams and many, many pastors have in common?  They were once great players who became woeful coaches. 

I know, it’s an interesting tidbit about the superstar athletes, but what does this have to do with being a pastor? 

In my last post, I reflected on the complexity of being a pastor and the toll it often takes on leaders.  In this post, I want to offer another piece of Pastoral Complexity:  We are mostly confused about our calling.  That is to say, we often become pastors without realizing what the job really is. 

Most of us who end in the pastorate do so because someone experienced our ministry skills and encouraged us to consider it as a vocation.  In short, most of us were about the best lay leaders in our churches, organizations or missions and somewhere along the way someone heard us teach, heard us pray, saw us at a bedside or were part of a successful ministry program that we headed up and they told us that we were so good, that we should “go pro.”  (And most often, was mostly about “preaching”.  If you could preach or teach the Bible better than most, then it was assumed that you were called to be a pastor.)

And so what did we do?  We headed off to “professional ministry school” (i.e. “seminary”) or took a job on a church staff with the assumption that now the only thing that was going to change was that we were going to be PAID to do what we used to do as a VOLUNTEER.  (And, really, what’s not to like about that?)  On top of that, once we got our “professional association card” (i.e. “ordination”) we then became the resident “pro” for all kinds of wonderful and meaningful family and community “religious events” (like weddings, baptisms, funerals, invocations and such).  For most of us, this seemed like it would be the best possible world.  Our friends and family were proud of us, our home churches affirmed us and we now got to be paid (ok, not much pay, really, but the “ego perks” were nice) and “freed” to “do ministry full-time.”  We were now expected to be the resident “pro”, the “star player”, the “free agent” who brought the “home team” great results.

But… there is one really big problem.  Being pastor really isn’t about being the star player.  It’s really about being a COACH.  When you get ordained, you don’t get on the playing field, you go to the bench.  You are not the “resident professional Christian” but the leader of a community of mission. 

And that leadership calling is very, very different than most of us expected.

When you become a pastor, your domain is away from the stadium lights and cheering fans and off to the “practice field” where you, in the words of Paul, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12). And let’s face it, many of us who are quite gifted at teaching, preaching, counseling and care are just not all that good at “equipping the saints” for teaching, preaching, care and mission. Like Bart Starr or Isaiah Thomas, we are much better at taking the ball into our own hands than we are at leading a team of players. 

For many star athletes, however, perhaps the hardest parts about the adjustment from “player” to “coach” however are the things “away from the field.”  Deciding who “plays” and who doesn’t, managing conflicts, developing strategy, motivating players (who are sometimes pretty unmotivated) and making personnel decisions for the overall health of the team.  Many famous athletes who were great in the game wither under the criticism of the press and the second-guessing of the fans, and grow weary of the “drama” of the locker room and front office. 

In the same way, when most pastors are interviewed about the hardest parts of their job, they talk about how seminary didn’t prepare them for strategic planning, conflict resolution, organizational leadership and staff supervision, (let alone personnel issues, building projects, and administering preschools and the like.)

Even more, this “equipping” and “coaching” ministry is often much more about conflict, change management, and attending to a relational “system” than it is about teaching the Bible or training eager lay people to “share their faith” or serve others.  Again, most pastoring (at least in congregations) is far more about LEADERSHIP than anything else.  And that is pretty different than what we signed up for.

If that wasn’t enough (and this is where it gets really complex….) The REAL players…the laity, would mostly rather that we DIDN’T coach or lead them either.  Most lay people, truth be told, don’t want to be players, they want to be “Fans.”  They want the “Pros” to do the ministry. (That’s why they sent us to seminary, isn’t it?).  They don’t want to suit up and take the field any more than we want to go to the bench and coach them. 

And so…soon, we all fail.  Before long the “coaches” start just asking to play (like pastors who only want to preach and teach and do visitation, you know “real ministry”) and the “players” become spectators.  And the mission of a community of God’s people who are seeking to live out the Kingdom of God is really what gets benched. 

Of course, there are some “players” who become great coaches.  And that “adaptation” is what I want to write about next time.

The False Dichotomy

Recently I was in a meeting where a speaker said something to the effect that the problem in our churches today is that they are all about being an "institution" instead of a "family".  It is the kind of statement that is made so  often (even in an "institutional" meeting like this particular one) that everyone just nods, agrees and keeps going without so much as a pause.

But thanks to some nudging through a "digression" in a recent post by Ben Witherington on the book The Shack, I want to suggest that we re-think this dichotomy for the sake of churches, institutions and families.

Witherington criticizes The Shack furthering what is simplistic "bumper sticker" thinking about the church, church life and organizations in general.  And I agree completely. When Young writes in his novel about God's presence in the midst of suffering, the eloquence and wisdom of the author is unmistakable.  But when he turns his attention to the church, he has Jesus offer bromides to the church-disgruntled lead character like, "“that’s because you’re only seeing the institution, a man-made system. That’s not what I came to build. What I see are people and their lives, a living breathing community of all those who love me, not buildings and programs…Not a bunch of exhausting work and long list of demands, and not sitting in endless meetings staring at the back of people’s heads…just sharing life” (pp. 179-80).

Witherington steps in and in his calm, thoughtful manner, responds with a quote I'd like to offer in full:

"It’s all about relationships, and not about religion, according to this approach. And while no one would deny it’s very much about living and loving relationships, the truth of the matter is that it is a false dichotomy to separate Jesus from religion, or for that matter organism from organization. Let me give an illustration on the latter point.

Consider for example a very simple organism indeed—the single cell amoeba a form of protozoa. Now the amoeba is nothing if not flexible. It can subdivide over and over again. But within that larger flexible entity there is organization—there is a nucleus for example, without which it could not exist. It also has pseudo-pods by which it moves and vacuoles by which it maintains its equilibrium. Without structure, order and organization it could not ever be even a viable living thing. This is in fact true of all organisms, and that includes the church, if one wants to call it an organism. That doesn’t mean that human beings aren’t capable of over-institutionalzing things, or ossifying some of the structures, but to pit organism over against organization, with one seen as living and the other dead, one God-given, and the other man-made is absolutely a false dichotomy when it comes to the church.

There is no such thing in heaven or on earth as an organism without organization, order, structure, form, otherwise it would have no distinct shape, purpose, or being. And that applies to God, the church, as well as to all created things—remember the story of how God created the universe in a very specific order with very specific properties? Well it’s always been like that. Creativity takes a particular form and shape, bring order out of chaos or a disparate group of elements. Spontaneity is not particularly more God-like than something that was planned before the foundations of the world and executed over a long period of time. And why we should think an organism like the church needs to normally be completely spontaneous in order to be ‘alive’ is a mystery. Perhaps it is an over-reaction to spending too much time in moribund or unwell churches. One thing I know about real works of art--- they take time to create, and care, and skill, and form, and substance. This is as true of a Matisse masterpiece as of God’s creation of the universe. But I digress."

Thank you, Ben, for digressing.  This kind of clear thinking is needed a lot these days.  The church will never become the organized communal life of Christ that the people of God were meant to be (like in 1 Corinthians, or 1-2 Timothy, for just couple of examples) until we start putting as much effort into making it a GOOD organized expression of "sharing life."  Churches, institutions, even families or any other type of relationship needs structure, boundaries, effort and especially thoughtfulness. It's not religion vs. relationship, or organization vs. organism, but good, healthy, fruitful and faithful "organizations" vs. bad, dysfunctional, pointless, fruitless and heretical ones.

Tragedy, Perspective and Witness

Doris Stephens, the wife of our church's unofficial "pastor emeritus" came into the prayer room before the second service yesterday to tell me that Malibu Presbyterian Church had burned to the ground in the recent California fires.  Doris' daughter-in-law, Valerie is the sister of Malibu Presbyterian's Pastor, Greg Hughes.  Greg is a friend and colleague going back 15 years. I met his wife, Kay 20 years ago at Forest Home.  And about 12 years ago I was the speaker for Malibu Pres' family camp. When Malibu was looking for a new Senior Pastor some years back, I had the privilege of being a reference for Greg.

Yesterday in two of our three services we announced the loss of the church and prayed for them.  After the service, I sent an email to Greg with my prayers and support.  Greg's leadership in this tragedy is unmistakable.  As he told the LA Times, “We didn’t lose any members. We only lost a building. We’re going to regroup. We believe God will make something beautiful out of ashes.”

Indeed God will.  What some may not know is that  Malibu Presbyterian Church has often been in years past the center of relief efforts when fires and floods have hit Malibu.  This church is known for being a true Christian community that cares for it's larger community and no doubt they will do far more than simply look after themselves.  The Mayor of Los Angeles has already commended Greg and Kay and the church for being the center of support for others.

I commend you also to the blog by the Children's director at Malibu Presbyterian (where I got the picture above), another honest and faithful voice of witness in the middle of tragedy.

Greg, Kay and all of the Malibu Presbyterian Congregation, may the peace of Christ that passes all understanding be with you.

UPDATE:  Greg Hughes on Fox News last night when asked what his church is going to do: Well, you know, we're an Easter Faith people, so you know on Friday, it looked like things were bleak for Jesus, but we saw that Jesus rose again. And our church is a resurrection church. We'll gather again. We're going to regroup again...and we believe we'll be stronger as a result of this.

2nd Update.  Here is a video link to Greg speaking on CNN, including some pictures of what the church looked like before the fire.

Diversity...Bad news, surprising news. Good News?

Bill Rice, an elder in my church sent me this article from the Wall Street Journal online that detailed a study by Harvard's Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) on the effects of diversity on community.  The result?  Arggh!  After interviewing 30,000 people in over 40 communities around the country they concluded that diversity leads to the decline of community.  The more diverse, the less community.  Not exactly what a lot of us who want both community and diversity were hoping for. Here is an interview with the Wall Street Journal article editor.

And if you listen all the way to the end of the interview, you'll find a most unexpected surprise.

  Do you know the one place where diversity seems to thrive within community?  You'll never guess.  And I'll bet that a lot of Harvard folks are shaking their heads about it.

The Word in Community

Today, at our church, a vigil will come to an end.  It is part of our "For Love of God and Neighbor Campaign".  It has been meant to be a week of spiritual discipline for anchoring our church's mission in the words of Scripture. It is the first time that we have done something like this, but I sense it won’t be the last. 

Last Sunday at the end of our last service of the morning, a elder in our church stood before the congregation and read aloud from Genesis 1:1-5, we then dismissed the service and a small group of junior high students and their young adult leaders sat in a circle and took up where the elder left off.  For the next five days, from early in the morning until late into the night, there has been someone reading, aloud, from the Chronological New Living Translation of the Bible as we as a church community work our way through the entire Bible.

Tonight, at 7 PM a group of leaders in our church will gather together to read the last chapter of Bible, Revelation 22.  We have asked four readers to lead us, with a child reading the penultimate verse and then in call and response fashion the leaders of our church will read the last verse together.

Five days, 1441 pages, 76 hours of reading and an amazing experience.

I was signed up to read with my wife early in the experience.  I assumed that I would only read once. My son, who had already read with the Junior Highers tagged along because he wanted to do it again. I listened as my wife read about Passover and the slaughter of the first born Egyptians because of Pharaoh’s stubbornness (with my own first born son listening on). Then I read the passage where because of Israel's own stubbornness (how quick we forget!) God had to punish them in the wilderness.

Throughout the day, I remembered that while I went about leading the church staff in meetings, preparing for events, meeting with people, there was someone reading the word of God aloud in our sanctuary.  It was like being in a musical, but the music was the voice of God through the voice of his people.  Tuesday afternoon, I snuck in the back of the sanctuary for a few minutes and listened as our church receptionist read all by herself, her friendly voice that greets people when they call the church, filling the sanctuary with the word of God.

Tuesday night after a Sanctuary Remodel Committee meeting,  I joined a group of young adults and a homeless women who were gathered reading about Solomon's building the temple. A long passage about so many details, it made me grateful for the committee that is paying attention to our sanctuary details, so that in the words of 1 Kings 8:60, "Then people all over the earth will know that the Lord is God and there is no other."

I left at 10:15, but the young adults carried on through the night, moving from the pithy wisdom of Proverbs through the blush-causing Song of Solomon and into the prophets.

On Wednesday morning my ten year old daughter Ali asked me to get her up early so that she could read before school.  We arrived at 6 AM where one of my colleagues was already in sanctuary.  From 4 AM - 6 AM he had walked alone circling the inside of sanctuary and reading the psalms of praise.  Then I listened as my daughter's sweet voice told of the sacrificial love of the Messiah from Isaiah.  She finished by reading Isaiah 59:21: "And this is my covenant with them," says the Lord. "My Spirit will not leave them and neither will these words that I have given you. They will be on your lips and on the lips of your children, and your children's children forever.  I, the Lord, have spoken."

This morning, I returned again.  At 4 AM I joined with a Marine dressed in his uniform who sat in the darkness under a huge picture of the Good Samaritan on our chancel with only the glow of the lights for reading illuminating the scene.  We read from the gospels (after so many hours we were finally in the New Testament!) taking turns for two hours until both daylight and the friendly face of a 70 year widow and elder in our church lit up the morning.  As we gave the scriptures to her, her Texas drawl added depth and warmth to the story.

I prepared to leave the vigil to her strong voice, so that I could see my kids off to school.  As I left the sanctuary I heard her reading the words of Jesus, “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me.  Remain in my love. When you obey my commandments, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.”

I know that my Texan friend turned the Bible over to a retired lawyer who loves the Scriptures.  I smiled to think of his booming, confident voice taking up the task from her quiet confident drawl.  And throughout this day, more will read, more will listen.  A homeless woman has probably heard more of the Bible this past week than any of us.  A family brought their preschool aged boys just to listen and be part of something they really don’t understand.

We have needed the whole body of Christ to take on this task, we needed single adults who had the freedom to read late into the night, stay-at-home moms and retirees who could fill the working hours, children who could bring laughter as they giggled through trying to pronounce Hebrew names and working folk who would begin and end their days “in the world” with a time “in the Word” reminding us what all these writings are really about. 

Reading aloud the scriptures, listening to them they way they were read for centuries, in community, hearing the grand narrative of God’s redeeming love for the world, letting it soak into the life of our community as we seek to live out the “powerful play” that goes on. 

I feel sadness for those who missed out on this experience.  I feel some sadness about times I have missed out on what may have been equally powerful and meaningful because my life schedule didn't permit it.

But for those of us who have been part, and for our church as a whole, I can only imagine what this might do to us.

"When I discovered your words, I devoured them.  They are my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, O Lord God."  (Jeremiah 15:16)

[Update: Sheryl France-Moran a reflection on the Scripture Vigil at her blog, too. ]

"An Environment of Honesty"

Scot McKnight writes a post filled with wisdom in response to the Ted Haggard news. Here is a snippet, but please read it all:

...evangelicals need to work hard at creating an environment of honesty. It is dishonest to the human condition to pretend that Christians don’t sin; but as long as we are afraid to confess to one another we will continue to create an unrealistic and hypocritical environment.

The Fellowship of Kindred Souls

Agur and Jon, two friends from SCPC, both Marine officers serving in Iraq, get a chance to connect for a few minutes while a long way from home.  This heartwarming picture is a good reminder to all of us of the sweetness of Christian fellowship.  "It is grace to be together."--Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (If you want to keep up to date with one of the Marines serving in Iraq, Jon blogs almost daily at http://jarhedjon.blogspot.com/  (Jon, thanks for the picture!)

Liar, Liar, Pew's on Fire

I am off this weekend for a retreat with 50 Junior highers and leaders for our bi-annual Confirmation retreat.  This great group of young people are finishing up a ten week class preparing them to write a statement of faith and join our church as members.  This weekend, I will be hanging out with them with basically three messages: 1) We are all members of one another. 2)This is your church, too. 3) I am your pastor and not just your parents' pastor. 

One of joys of my church is how deeply connected our youth and young adults are with the rest of the congregation.  We are becoming a genuinely multi-generational church.  I also know that many, many churches in our culture today would do about anything to have either 50 kids even hanging around their church or anything near that amount of people joining their church at all.  I don't take lightly that we are in a wonderful season of blessing in our church and I feel the responsibility and joy of being a steward of that blessing very deeply. 

Further, the joy is all the more for me because this group of junior high students includes my son Brooks and his friends.   I have known some of these kids since they were in preschool and now I get to be with them as they prepare to join our church.  It is a real rite of passage moment for both the young people and their pastor (who is also a parent of one of the young people!)

I mention this for two reasons. 

1) To ask you to please pray for the weekend.  If the "children are our future" then I want them to become more deeply committed to Christ and the body of Christ for both their good and the good of the future of the church. 

2) I am profoundly aware that we must continue to make disciples and not just church members and attenders. It's not enough to get people to "show up and join up", we all must continue to "grow up". A recent article in Christianity Today magazine points to the amount of self-deception reported by Christians when asked a simple question like, "Did you yourself happen to go to church this past week."   According to the article, the Gallup people have been asking that question for decades and the answer is always the same: about 40% of Americans say that they have, in fact, been in church that past Sunday. But when that self-report study is matched up against church reports of attendance, the number of actual people in the pew is closer to 20%.  So, 1 out of every five people in the poll are lying about being in the pew.  Embarrassing really and sad, too. But what else do we make of that?

For me, this is a most interesting issue.  At exactly the time that many people are saying that church membership and attendance are increasingly irrelevant, there is still within our culture a great deal of internal pressure (the poll is anonymous) to be church goers.   Parents encourage their teenagers to join the church, teenagers at our church are encouraging their friends and we see our numbers swelling as a result.  People want to be in church, and think that things like worship and church membership really are important, even if they aren't living up to their own, even stated, intentions.

But, people like George Barna have rightly pointed out that the difference between good intentions and good discipleship is often quite large and made worse by our own tendency to think we are doing better than we are. 

So, while understanding and hopeful by even the desire that many people have to be a good church folk, I recognize that there is still much, much more to do with we want our church's on fire with genuine renewal.  Who knows? Maybe, this future generation are the "little children" who will lead us.

K is for...

Back when Beth and I lived in Altadena, California, just down the street from us was a bakery called "Patticakes."  It was one of those amazing places where everything looks as good as it tastes and virtually every breakfast item included chocolate.  But make no mistake, nothing there was cheap.  Everything was delicious, beautiful and frightfully expensive.

I remember sitting there one morning eating a chocolate muffin and drinking a latte while a young couple came into to get a quote for a wedding cake.  The owner pulled out a book that featured articles from Bon Appetit praising her wedding cakes, showed them spectacular professional photographs of cakes she had made in the past, and then finally the price sheet. 

I watched this all and smiled.  The bride was looking at the groom pleadingly.  Her face saying, “Honey, wouldn’t this be beautiful?  This is exactly the kind of wedding cake I have always wanted.”  He looked like he was choking.  Being a guy, I know what he was thinking as he looked at that price sheet, “A cake?  How about a killer big screen TV?  It’s about the same amount of money.”  But he was a smart boy; he kept his mouth shut, even as he tried to calculate how many months salary would be gobbled down by people in less than 15 minutes. 

And right at the very moment when the unspoken tension was the highest, the bakery owner appeared with a tray of assorted pieces of wedding cake that they could sample. 

Two bites later, eyes rolled back in his head in chocolate induced ecstasy, the cheapskate groom was ordering this cake for everyone he had ever met. 

You see the difference was in the tasting.  Once we taste what we really want, the cost is not the issue.  Once we learn that we don’t have to settle for the life given to us by thieves and bandits who only want to sell something to us, use us, manipulate us, market to us, or make us live out their vision of life, we are able to really listen to the one who offers us entryway to the life we really want. 

For the life that God intended us to have.  For the life we were made to have.  For the life that Jesus came to bring us, and died to secure for us.  For the life of security, freedom, and well-being.  For the life that is both eternal and abundant. 

My friends, church is for getting a foretaste of the kingdom.  It is community that whets our appetite for new creation.  It is where we get a small sliver of the wedding cake of the feast of the lamb that will be for all of us who enter eternal life through him.  And the communion of the church is the taste that should linger on our lips as we live for Christ each day.

For the last of my alphabetical list of qualities that make a church a church I want to skip to the letter K and the most nebulous, perhaps the most important and at the same time, most humbling characteristic:  K is for Kingdom Witness.

In the Presbyterian Church Book of Order, we affirm that the church is “the provisional demonstration of God’s new humanity.” In other words, the church is to be the gathering that is a foretaste of what God intends for all the world. 

For the church to be the true church it must faithfully point beyond itself in both its faithfulness and its weakness. it must be a true "foretaste" of the reign and rule of God and at the same time acknowledge that the wedding has not come.

Just like Jesus himself both proclaimed that the Kingdom of heaven had come near with his appearance, each church proclaims by its life together that a new day has dawned and the new creation is upon us.  But, in the same way, that Jesus work is both “accomplished” but not consummated until his triumphal return, the church is the unconsummated and incomplete foretaste of the reign of God to come.  Each specific church and the one universal Church exists to witness to the “now, but not yet” reality of the Kingdom of heaven that has been inaugurated in Jesus Christ but will not be consummated until Christ’s return.  The church is the taste of the wedding cake from the eternal feast. 

It is the “now but not yet” quality to the life of the church that reminds us that the church is both intended to be something more than just an ordinary human gathering, but will never rise above the frail humanity that requires saving in the first place.  It is not a gathering of all the “most committed” or “most like me” or “most helpful to my Christian walk” people.  It is wheat and weeds growing in one field but still revealing the abundant feast of the bread of life that will come from it. 

The church that is the true church knows that it is an incomplete church.  It is a witness to a reality that is not yet fulfilled.  It points beyond itself to the reign and rule of God.  In the new creation, we won’t need churches because all of creation will be church. But a true church knows that its job is to give a taste that will make all of creation hunger for the feast and settle for nothing less.