Grant us … in our direst need, the smallest gifts:
the nail of the horseshoe,
the pin of the axle,
the feather at the pivot point,
the pebble at the mountain's peak,
the kiss in despair,
the one right word.
In darkness, understanding.
Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold, (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 44
This week has included some of those small gifts in need for me: a conversation, the prayer, the one right word, the insights, the reminder: "We are all, every living one of us, doorways between the two realms, that of matter that gives us birth, and that of spirit into which we are born in death." Paladin of Souls, p. 385 (See last week's post about doorways...)
This past week I met with my association's representative on ministry and ordination. She asked, "How were you called?" Not, "where were you when you were called?" Not even, "what are you called to do or to be?" And not, "how are you confirmed in your call?" Those are all good questions to be able to answer, but they are not the first question.
People preparing for ministry or priesthood often get asked if they have "a call." For some, it's an embarrassing question. They think the pastorate or priesthood may be what they're supposed to do with their lives, but that word "call" suggests some kind of voice from heaven that corresponds to nothing in their experience. Perhaps it evokes memories of an old Bill Cosby routine about Noah's ark, in which a deep bass voice calls out from above, "NOAH! NOAH! THIS IS THE LORD, NOAH!" Cosby, a nervous grin on his face, looks upward and says, "Yeeeah! Riiiight!"
Is that what it means to have God call you? Could most of us imagine such a strange event happening to us?
William C. Placher, ed., Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005), p. 2
As I have been reviewing the facts, figures and stories about clergy and congregations, and in my own experience of being a part of the ordination process, something has become clear to me: in order to do "right" by clergy placement and retention, as well as by the congregations in which we minister, we need to provide ways and frameworks to understand, articulate and nurture our calls, both as clergy and as members of congregations, and as congregations as a whole.
How are you called?
In many traditions, calls—in the form of sounds—precede prayer, rites of initiation, spiritual healings, and major life events. The purpose of calls is to summon adherents away from their daily grinds to a new level of awareness, into a scared frame of mind, into communion with that which is bigger than themselves. The calls may come from bull-roarers, trumpets, rattles, wooden clackers, songs, bells, or the chanting of muezzins atop minarets.
In the primary creation myth of Western cosmology, the very first call came through the voice that said "Let there be light," and there was light, the words then becoming flesh. Every call since then has also been a call to form, a call to each of us to materialize ourselves.
Greg Levoy, Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), p. 2
What is your trumpet, your bull-roarer, your song? How are you called? Since I heard this song by Mary Chapin Carpenter in 2007, it has been helpful in the way I understand calling, perhaps as "stumbling and falling," but as something that is deep, that I can't turn away from, perhaps as something in my blood that I can't quite articulate, even though people still ask. It's not certainty or lack of fear—that I know, even though I would like it to be.
Deep in your blood or a voice in your head
On a dark lonesome highway
It finds you instead
So certain it knows you, you can't turn away
Something or someone has found you today
Genius or Jesus, maybe he's seen us
But who would believe us
I can't really say
Whatever the calling, the stumbling or falling
You follow it knowing
There's no other way, there's no other way
There are zealots and preachers
And readers of dreams
The righteous yell loudest
And the saved rise to sing
The lonely and lost are just waiting to hear
Any moment their purpose
Will be perfectly clear
And then life would mean more
Than their name on their door
And that far distant shore that's so near
They'd hear the calling
And stumbling and falling
They'd follow it knowing
There's nothing to fear
Nothing to fear
I don't remember a voice
On a dark, lonesome road
When I started this journey so long ago
I was only just trying to outrun the noise
There was never a question of having a choice
Jesus or genie, maybe they've seen me
But who would believe me
I can't really say
Whatever the calling, the stumbling and falling
I followed it knowing there's no other way
Jesus or genie, maybe he's seen me
But who would believe me
I can't really say
Whatever the calling, stumbling and falling
I got through it knowing there's no other way
There's no other way
"The Calling" by Mary Chapin Carpenter, album: The Calling
How do you articulate your call or calls? Call is mysterious. Call is scary. I often think of the prophet Samuel as a boy, wakened from sleep, hearing his name called, "Samuel, Samuel!" and thinking that it was Eli whom he served, he ran into Eli's room: "Here I am, you called me?" Eli said, "No, I did not call. Go back to sleep." This happened three times, and then Eli, who was a priest, realized that perhaps some more powerful call was happening, a call from God, and told Samuel that if the call came again to answer, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." God called again, and Samuel answered, "Speak, for your servant is listening." God then told Samuel what would be happening to Eli's sons because they were not fulfilling their hereditary priestly duties. [1 Samuel 3]
Most of us though don't get the kind of call that Samuel got: God's voice speaking to us in the night. Or maybe we do, and we don't have an Eli nearby who tells us to listen and respond. Or maybe the Eli in our life doesn't appear for a long time. When I was a girl, I pretended that our high backed recliner was a pulpit and I was the preacher. Even then I felt silenced by the church where I was raised that didn't ordain women or even have women deacons, because I never preached a sermon aloud, only in my head, looking out the window. Was that God's call? Over the years, I forgot that I had ever stood behind the chair imagining…
God is patient, … and persistent. After college I left the church, sure that it had no place for the person I was. For a while, I stopped being involved with music and singing because music was and is a pathway to God for me. I sat at desks and computers and looked at numbers and systems and was disgusted by corporate politics. I learned to make presentations, and became more comfortable with public speaking. Then, one Easter Sunday, on a whim, I went to an ecumenical sunrise service in a park near where I lived. The minister was a woman who had brought along a portable tape player for music. Even at 6 a.m., I could sing out, "Christ Arose." I think the minister was surprised, because she only expected a mumble from the dozen of us there, as was I, for different reasons, that I found that song in my heart and memory. And, after a while, I joined a community chorus and started singing again. A year or so later I started going to church, mostly to sing in the choir. I left that church to look for one that felt more like home. My church home became a small, welcoming Baptist congregation with an emphasis on inclusive language and lay ministry among other social justice concerns. Once there, I began to participate in worship leading, and then occasionally as a summer preacher.
My Eli came along nearly 35 years after standing behind the high backed recliner in my parent's living room, in the person of Harvey Cox, theologian, author, professor at Harvard Divinity School, and member of that church, who came up to me after I preached one summer Sunday. "Nancy, do you know why you are walking funny?" I may have looked down at my shoes to see if I'd lost a heel or something. "No. Why?" I asked. Harvey replied. "It's because God is kicking you in the behind to get you to go to seminary and do this work that you are called to do."
"Speak, Lord, your servant is listening."
Who is your Eli? How do you articulate your call or calls? How are you called?
How do you nurture and clarify your call, as clergy and as a congregation? This is the work of the Spirit, perhaps the work of the church—to begin to know and understand what we really are to do, and then to do it. Frederick Buechner is often and aptly quoted,
The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've probably met requirements (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you are bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, San Francisco: Harpers, 1992, p. 185-6
We need to find ways to know or find our deep gladness, our passions, and our joys, and then find ways to hear and understand the world's deep needs and hungers. In an individual, we might ask what are your gifts, and I turn to Ephesians 4: 7-14 or Romans 12: 2-8 for a list of the gifts given to members of the body of believers. From there, in a congregation, we might use a tool called appreciative inquiry, and appreciate those gifts.
Through structured interviews the process identifies the healthiest, most life-producing aspects of a congregation and then builds upon those strengths to create a new future. … Appreciative inquiry poses questions that ask us to attend to the best of the past and present to ignite the collective imagination of what might be. The aim is to generate new knowledge that expands the "realm of the possible" and helps members of an organization envision a collectively desired future. It enables them to carry forth that vision in ways that successfully translate images of possibility or intentions into reality, and belief into practice.
From the work of David Cooperrider, Appreciative Inquiry Consultant's Manual, quoted in Dennis Campbell, Congregations as Learning Communities, (Alban Institute, 2000), p. 27
What are your gifts and deep gladness? Where are your strengths? How are you called? I'd be glad to hear your comments about your calling(s).
First, this poem from Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley, (Hyperion, New York, 2003).
From Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
I've been reading in two books about congregations this week. Journalist Gary Dorsey explores of the dynamics of a church in New England in Congregation: The Journey Back to Church (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995). Dorsey attempts to figure out the relationships between ministers and a congregation and answer questions such as: what is church, why go to church, what makes a church work; by spending a year as an observer, then as a participant/observer. This is a good read if only because it makes clear how complex the relationships are, and how a church cannot be all things to all people, and how when church is working it draws people in. Being an intense description of the life and work of one congregation and Dorsey's own journey back to church, it offers a basis for comparison for our own congregations and journeys.
The other book I'm reading is Israel Galindo's The Hidden lives of Congregations: Discerning Church Dynamics (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2004). Galindo, like Dorsey but with a broader sweep, explores congregations as organisms, in relationships, as communities, not as just "organizations." Looking at churches through the lenses of Bowen family systems work, Galindo provides a good summary of a number of models of understanding church dynamics. In the chapter I just finished reading he writes: "The five organic relational dynamics that are at play during the lifespan of a congregation are: Systemic Anxiety, Energy, Organizing, Controlling, and Relational." (p. 52) Every congregational organism has some of each of these at play, and depending on whether there is too much high anxiety, too little good energy, not enough organizing, too much controlling, or not enough relational activity, one congregation will die and another with different dynamics will thrive. Recognizing those dynamics will make it possible to understand them and perhaps to change them toward a healthier way of being in relationship.
The usefulness of this book for my study is in and of itself, but also as background to understanding what might be the dynamics in making decisions about pastoral leadership. What dynamics would need to be in place for a congregation to handle or welcome a woman as minister, or to thrive with a pastor who is not like the perceived norm for a clergy person? In the line from the poem above, how do we risk a new love, something outside the box, how do we "take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach?"
The intersection of pastor, congregation and God is a complex relational dynamic. Where might congregations learn about managing the steps of the dance of engaging/having a new pastor, and where do clergy learn that about congregations? I'm thinking that the third player in the triangle is perhaps not consulted enough in this work: where is God in all this? Tony Pappas, Executive Minister for The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts wrote a response to the Pulpit and Pew study, What Do Lay People Want In Pastors, (referenced in March 1 blog posting) that starts to get at this question, "Where does the Spirit come into play? Or, to phrase it differently, without passion what good are all our procedures and practices? … What if we were to focus on matters of the Spirit? What if judicatory staff were to deliberately attempt spiritual interventions? What if incoming pastors were to concentrate on matters of the Spirit before launching off into the busy-ness of programs? What if local congregations were to seek God’s face with even half the energy they have heretofore invested in preserving the status quo?" (p. 42)
My prayer is for the Spirit to be with congregations who are seeking leadership, and with pastors who are seeking congregations, as well as those already engaged in working together, that we all work toward relationships that might carry not only the jubilant juice of the peach but the entire orchard inside us.
It was a good thing that I had finished my essay for the American Baptist placement services before I read the study from Pulpit and Pew reports highlighted/excerpted below. I'm never going to be a "married man with children, under age 40, in good health, with more than a decade of experience in ministry." Demographics aside, though, I regard myself as strong candidate for what congregations say they want according to this study—which is not necessarily what some of them really want. My call to ministry embraces change, my being a minister is a change from the desired demographic, and as a species, human beings most often prefer no change, so even though congregations may say they want a change, what they describe through demographics is not change, and the demographic they want is what was the norm in the 1950's and certainly does not describe me or many of my classmates in seminary.
As often happens, things weave together. In my CPE (clinical pastoral education) IPR (interpersonal relations) group sessions we have been talking about the boxes that we put one another in, and the assumptions we make about people because of the labels they give themselves or that we give them. We have devoted several sessions to working on our boxes and assumptions, and how now with that work and a facilitator it feels safe and accepting to be an evangelical, a Roman Catholic, an interfaith minister, an ordained lesbian, a straight white male, or a chief financial officer finishing seminary, all of us doing and supporting one another in ministry.
The question we tackled last week is, is it enough for one of us or each of us to feel safe only in the small group, or are we called both by God's justice and by our relationships with one another to work toward full acceptance in the wider world? This perhaps is the work in education that must be done in congregations—not when confronted with a crisis in the community but as a part of being church in a community. How can we be "church" in the best sense of that world when we confine ourselves only to our own safe group, inside our own walls, with a narrow notion that leaders of churches must fit one single demographic?
My version of "go ye into all the world and preach the gospel" surely includes this kind of love, respect and acceptance, welcoming the one who is foreign to you—the stranger, as well as caring for the poor, the widow and the orphan—those who have been neglected or abandoned by tragedy or misfortune. It takes a fair amount of confronting our own fears and stereotypes before we can not only accept but welcome those who are different from us. How do we begin the conversations to bring congregations outside of their own boxes? I hope in this study that I begin to find ways to bring people into that process or at least into that conversation.
What Do Lay People Want In Pastors?
Answers From Lay Search Committee Chairs And Regional Judicatory Leaders
by Adair T. Lummis
www.pulpitandpew.duke.edu
Duke Divinity School, Durham, N.C.
© Duke Divinity School
Pulpit and Pew Research Reports, No. 3, Winter 2003
• Gender, race, marriage, and sexual orientation of clergy. Lummis finds among other things that male gender still remains a criterion for most search committees, even in denominations that have ordained women for the past fifty years or more. Typically, search committees want pastors who are married men with children, under age 40, in good health, with more than a decade of experience in ministry. Such criteria are often not expressed to regional leaders but remain unspoken just beneath the surface, particularly in liberal mainline Protestant denominations, where lay search committees know it is unacceptable to refuse to accept a candidate because of gender, race, or ethnicity.
• Age, experience and job tenure of the pastor. Laity often want a young married pastor as a way to draw in young families, but also a pastor with experience. The dramatic increase in older, second career seminarians, however, has changed the relationship between age and experience. Rather than having 20-years’ experience, many middle-aged pastors today may have just received their M.Div.
Other things lay people say they want (see the whole study for details):
• Demonstrated competence and religious authenticity.
• Good preacher and leader of worship.
• Strong spiritual leader.
• Commitment to parish ministry and ability to maintain boundaries.
• Available, approachable, and warm pastor with good “people skills.”
• Consensus builder, lay ministry coach and responsive leader.
• Entrepreneurial evangelists, innovators and transformational reflexive leaders.
The second half of this Pulpit and Pew study deals with the issues of a perceived clergy shortage or shortage of adequate pastoral salaries. Continuing my analysis of The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts, I graphed the available data for weekly attendance in churches vs. the number of years the pastor ( by gender) has been ordained. In Massachusetts at least, the churches with over 300 in weekly attendance are historically black churches. You will note that women don't appear to move up into bigger churches the longer they are ordained, but rather stay in a band of churches under 100 in weekly attendance. The available data for churches' weekly attendance and senior/solo pastor's year ordained yielded this sample of twenty-five women and twenty-six men. In this sample, the majority of churches under 100 in weekly attendance are pastored by women.
The study suggests that in order to provide an adequate salary churches need to have over 200 or more active members. I am not quite sure of what the relationship between active members and weekly attendance is here in Massachusetts, but I know ABC clergy in congregations where the weekly attendance is between 45 and 90, who do have working spouses. That suggests that one clergy salary is not sufficient. The one single clergyperson I know has rental income as a supplement. What this graph says is that in Massachusetts American Baptist women have not moved into larger, more prestigious or more lucrative churches, and that in fact they may be facing economic discrimination because they are predominantly in smaller churches who cannot afford to pay an adequate/livable salary. Salary numbers are not available in this data set.
My prayer this week is to continue to pray for movement out of the boxes, both those I put others into and the ones others put me into.
