Gathering or Scattering?

According to tradition, the Book of Ecclesiastes expresses the wisdom of King Solomon in his old age. That makes sense to me, because Ecclesiastes is more about questions than answers. Although I certainly feel like I know more than I did when I was young, I also feel like I have more questions, and that my answers are not as sure as they once were. It seems that the older we get, and the more learn, the more we realize we don’t know.

Ecclesiastes is also a book that seems to resonate with the times in which we live, where a lot of old certainties just don’t hold any more. Old Testament scholar William Brown says that Ecclesiastes is about finding “God … in the details of the daily grind of living” rather than in some all-encompassing explanation of the meaning of life. Ecclesiastes reminds us that faith does not necessarily mean having everything all figured out.

The best-known section of Ecclesiastes (made doubly famous by 1960s song by The Byrds, “Turn, Turn, Turn) is found in chapter 3:

3  For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
² a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
³ a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
⁴ a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
⁵ a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
⁶ a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
⁷ a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
⁸ a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

Fourteen sets of polarities, each declaring that answers change with times and seasons. That seems especially true in these times – times of fluidity, uncertainty, anxiety, change.

At the Annual Meeting of Hamilton Conference May 25-27, I invited delegates to reflect on three of the fourteen pairs of opposites in this well-known passage in the light what we are going through as a church.

“A time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together.”

Nobody really knows what this verse means by scattering and gathering stones. But we know from experience that there are times when it seems right to gather together, and times when it seems right to scatter. Since the First Letter of Peter calls the church, a “house of living stones,” I wonder if we can find a metaphor for the church?

We usually think of church as gathering. The church is really the church when we are

together, strong and united, full and busy. When we go our separate ways, we’re done with church until the next time we gather.   

Except that, in Scripture, God’s power and grace often show up most dramatically in times of scattering. The Israelites scattered in the wilderness. The Jews scattered in exile. The Book of Acts says that the early Christians were scattered by a great persecution. Rather than stamping out the new faith, this scattering spread the Word far and wide.

We focus on how to gather the church – into worship, into programs and events. But what if we are in a time for scattering? After all, Jesus didn’t invite his disciples in to a sanctuary or

a building, he sent them out to witness to the kingdom and to prepare his way.

I asked Conference delegates to choose between two sentences and complete one of them – either “I believe we are in a time for GATHERING because…” or “I believe we are in a time for SCATTERING because…”

Sixty-three people said we are in a time for gathering.  Some of their reasons for saying this were:

·       

         Because we need to come together for mutual support – to be grounded in                            tradition, to share stories, experiences and common practices, to encourage                          one another in times of anxiety, challenge and aging.

·        

     Because people are hungry for intimacy, community and the love of Christ.

·         

     Because we’re going through a time of structural change and we need each                          other.

·      

         Because we need to imagine together a new way to be the church.

·      

     Because by gathering, we are equipped to scatter.

Ninety-six people said we’re in a time for scattering. Some of their reasons were:

·       That’s what God calls us to do.

·        As in the Parable of the Sower, we need to scatter the Word.

·        Because we need to get out of our sanctuaries and connect with our communities.

·       Because we’re going through a time of structural change and we need to get used to            being more scattered.

·       Because everything around us is being shaken and we need to learn new ways to be the      church in the midst of that shaking.

·       Quite a few people connected the image of scattering with other biblical metaphors,              such as “new wine,” “springtime,” “rebirth,” “pilgrimage,” “being the wilderness,” “yeast,”        “the hovering Spirit.”

The church is meant to be both a “gathered” people and a “scattered” people. That two-fold reality is maybe more true than it has been at any time in our history.

In my next post, I’ll look at “Embracing” and “Refraining from Embracing.”  

Who Are We?

Who am I? That depends on who you ask. 

When I was in Grade 9, I discovered that a girl in my class had a brother who was married to a former girlfriend of my older brother. “You should tell her you know me,” I said.

A few days later, she said, “Well, I talked to my sister-in-law. She said your brother was mean and horrible, and you were a little brat.”

Generations of Sunday School children have learned the story of Zacchaeus, the wee little man. Who is Zacchaeus? It depends who you ask. The people of Jericho, Zacchaeus himself, and Jesus all had different answers to that question.

Who is Zacchaeus? If you asked the people of Jericho, they would say that Zacchaeus is a tax collector, a sinner, greedy, dishonest, corrupt, cruel, a Roman collaborator. And on top of all that, he’s short!

Who is Zacchaeus? If you asked Zacchaeus himself, he would say that he was disliked, confused, misunderstood, disrespected, ashamed, tired of feeling like an outcast, searching for a better way to live.

What about Jesus? What did he see in Zacchaeus? A man with the potential to change, the capacity to give, not just take; hungry for belonging and acceptance, a dinner companion – meaning an equal – and, in Jesus’ own words, “a son of Abraham” – part of the family.

According to Gil Rendle and Alice Mann, “Who are we?” is one of the basic questions every church should ask itself. What if we were to ask this question about our churches from a variety of perspectives -- the community, ourselves, and Jesus?

Who are we? What would the community outside the church say? We might be surprised. I was going to a meeting at a church in a small town. It was pre-GPS days and I didn’t really know where I was going. Three times, I stopped and asked a passerby, “Do you know where the United Church is?” And three times, I received the answer, “No idea” If we asked the community who we are, they might say, “Beats me,”

  

I once heard an Anglican priest describe attending a neighborhood BBQ. “What do you do?” one of his neighbors asked. “I’m a pastor,” he replied. “Wow, it must be hard to be so closed-minded and judgmental all the time,” the neighbor said. Is that how people outside the church see us? 

.  

I know the answer the community would give about my former congregation. “That’s the church with the great flea market every April.”

Who are we? What would the members of our church say?

Statistically, it’s likely they would say “We’re friendly.” All churches think they’re friendly. Or “We’re a family.” Many churches say, “We’re aging.” Or, “We aren’t what we used to be.” Almost all churches would say, “Flawed.”

Recently, I led a workshop at a church and asked them to describe their main strengths. They came up with answers like, “loyal,” “devoted,” “caring.” Then I asked them to describe their weaknesses. They said things like, “superficial,” “judgmental,” “afraid to change.” Isn’t it interesting, I thought, that they would say all those things about themselves at the same time. We love our churches and we’re proud of them. But we also know how deeply imperfect our churches are, and how far short we fall of who God calls us to be.

Who are we? What would Jesus say? 

Scripture gives us some ideas about that. First of all, Jesus would see us exactly for who we are, with no illusions. He had no illusions about his disciples, and he has none about us. He knows us better than we know ourselves.

But Jesus sees us as God sees us, created in God’s own image. Jesus sees us  differently from the way others see us, or we see ourselves.

The First Letter of Peter was written to scattered, struggling churches whom Peter called “exiles.” They didn’t count for much in the world’s eyes. They felt inadequate and discouraged – like many of our churches.

But Peter wanted them to see themselves as God sees them. So here’s what he said:

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,^[c] in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people,
    but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
    but now you have received mercy.”

Who are we? How different Jesus’ answer is from that of the surrounding culture, or ourselves. 

 

We are invited to find our identity in Christ, to see ourselves as Jesus sees us.  Because that’s the deepest truth. We are precious, valued, beloved, called and chosen. It’s that identity that identity that Jesus wants us to embrace, and it’s out of that identity that Jesus wants us to live.

Lessons from the Monastery

I read a story in The New York Times about the crisis facing a Trappist monastery. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/trappist-monks-mepkin-abbey.html) In the 1950s, there were 55 monks praying and working at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina. Now there 13, most of them in their 80s.

I experienced a sense of familiarity when I was reading this article. Although a Trappist monastery and a United Church of Canada congregation are very different in many ways, the basic issue is the same – the passing of a form of religious community and commitment.

The Trappists have it worse than us. There was a time when young men were eager to take a lifelong vow of prayer, silence, manual labour and celibacy. It was viewed as a high calling, and a heroic way of life. And the essence of that way of life – seclusion from the world, resistance to change – makes it all the harder.  

But when you get right down to it, our problems are fundamentally the same. The number of people – especially young people – who find it spiritually and socially meaningful to commit to weekly participation in a congregation is dwindling. Our world operates according to rhythms that make that way of life very difficult. And increasingly people want to chart their own spiritual journeys without the burden of institutional forms.

The irony is that we live in a time of intense spiritual longing. People are feeling fragmented and dislocated, lonely and confused. The dramatic rise in mental health issues, addiction and stress-related illness is testament to the malaise of our culture. People are longing for connectedness, community, purpose, and meaning. They are aching for compassion and rest.

And so here’s the interesting thing about Mepkin Abbey. While the monks are getting old 

and dying, the monastery’s retreat centre is fully booked months in advance.

(The monks have also found that the Abbey grounds are a stunning location for a wedding.)

What this says to me is that, while the specific form of religious observance and commitment is becoming  unsustainable, there is something about the place and what it has to offer that still speaks to people’s souls and draws them to the Abbey.

The monks, God bless them, are trying to change. They are beginning to offer short-term monastic experiences – one month, a year – that don’t require a life-time vow. They know that, even though the supply of novices has dried up, there is still something they can offer.

This provides an analogy to our churches. There are things about us that are unsustainable. 

But are there also things about our churches that people are longing for? Can we find different and imaginative ways to offer those?

Recently, I conducted a workshop at a congregation. I invited people to answer the question “Why don’t more people come to church?” That’s a good, open-ended question.

But then I said, “What if we turn that into a closed question and ask: Are people coming to church? Is it true that they're not coming?” Well, not as many. And not so much on Sunday mornings. But they’re still coming. There might have been 300 and now there are 60, but that’s still 60 people.

And it turns out that people are coming to lots of other things at the church – study groups, community groups, dinners, events. The church is actually a hive of activity all week. 

We seem to be fixated on one single metric: How many people are in worship on a given Sunday.

Not to say that the rapid decline in this number isn’t significant. And not to say that showing up to the monthly community dinner is equivalent to being a fully committed member of the church.

But I believe that, hidden in the interactions the church has with people outside of Sunday morning, and in the connections members of the church have with neighbors, friends, co-workers and strangers, might be clues to how the church will evolve in the future.

We need to explore those connections at a deeper level, and ask how they could provide opportunities to do what the church is really called to do: witness to the liberating power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Like the monks of Mepkin Abbey, we have something precious to share for which people are desperately hungry. The future could be right under our noses – if we have the faith and imagination to follow the clues.

Questioning Our Questions

The question I hear most frequently asked in churches is:

  

How can we attract more people to our church?

This is a challenging question with no easy answer. But sometimes before we can get an answer, we need to probe the question itself. We need to “question our questions,” as Warren Berger puts it in his great book A More Beautiful Question.

What are we really asking when we say, “How can we attract more people?” What if we dug beneath the surface of that question by putting to it another question: “Why?” Like this:

Why do you want to attract more people?
            “Because there are fewer of us and we’re all getting older.”

Why does that matter?
            “We need people to do the work and support the programs.”

Why?
            “Because if we don’t have enough people, eventually we’ll have to close.”

Why does that matter?
            “I’d be heartbroken. I really love this church.”

Maybe you’ve had that conversation in your church. The thing to notice about it is that the answers are mostly about the church. They mostly have to do with our desire to sustain something that matters to us.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t come to your church. How would this conversation sound to them? It begs another question: “Why would they come? Why should they come?”  

Could we ask that question in a different way? Could we ask it so that it has more to do with them and less to do with us? Could we start by asking “Who are these people we wish would come to our church?” Who is moving into all those new houses being built? Where have they come from? Where do they work? What are their lives like? What are their hopes and fears? What gives them joy? What do they struggle with? How could we get to know them? How could we build a relationship with them?

The number one reason why people come to a church is because someone they know invites them. It’s not catchy signs or websites or flyers dropped in their mailbox. It’s a relationship. So instead of focusing on what they can do for us, what if we focused on how we can get to know them, how we can show them we care about them as more than just potential givers or volunteers?

A different version of this question is: “Why don’t people come to church?” We think about

our kids and grandkids, our neighbors and co-workers, and wonder why so few of them make time for church.

Common answers to that question are:

Too busy.
Sunday sports.
Working weekends.
Overprogrammed kids.
Not committed.
They just don’t care.

But that sounds a lot like blaming them for not caring about something we care about. It makes their absence from church their problem.

Could we ask that question in a different way? Could we reframe it so that it has more to do with us than with them? Could we ask it in such a way that it would move us to look at how we can become more welcoming? To look at whether we are putting up barriers that might be keeping people away? Instead of saying, in effect, “What’s wrong with them that they’re not coming to church?” could we ask how we could strengthen our practices of hospitality, spirituality, worship, community, service?

We can’t control the choices people make about their lives. We can only create the conditions that will make our church a more inviting place to be.

When we ask about attracting people, we should think first about them – who they are, what they need, what are seeking.

And when we ask why they don’t come, we should think first about ourselves – what we could do to make it easier for people to come to church and inviting enough that they’ll want to come back.

Sometimes these questions seem like dead-ends. But maybe we could reframe the questions themselves so they open us to new possibilities.

Different Worlds

My son Aidan makes his living as a musician in Vancouver. He has a regular gig in the lounge at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, a high-end downtown spot with a stunning view of the water and mountains.

We went to hear Aidan play while visiting him and his brother after Christmas. I was perusing the beverage menu looking for something that wasn’t too overpriced, when I came across this:

                        Balvenie 50                                       2600/5200

From the beverage menu
Pacific Rim Hotel

“Hm,” I wondered. “What does that mean?” I realized fairly quickly that it meant that a 1 oz. glass of Balvenie 50-year old Single Malt Scotch Whiskey sells for $2600.00!! If you want a double, it’s $5200.

“Do people order this?” I asked my son. “All the time,” he answered.

Clearly, there are people who will shell out $2600 for an ounce of Scotch. But, equally clearly, they live in a different world than I do, a world I can scarcely comprehend.

But it’s becoming more and more like that, isn’t it? For all our connectedness, we feel like there are worlds of people out there whose lives we can’t even imagine. We are becoming more and more isolated from one another, inhabiting social, economic, political and cultural bubbles, and interacting less and less with people from other worlds.

One of the best books I’ve read in a long time was Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.  Vance is a Yale educated lawyer, but he grew up in the subculture of Appalachia. His grandfather had moved from Kentucky to Ohio in the 1960s to work in a

factory, but he brought with him his tight-knit hillbilly culture which is the world his grandson J. D. grew up in.

Vance wrote the book to provide a window into the much-maligned and mocked way of life. Reading it really helped me understand people I am quick to dismiss – and to understand why those people helped to propel Donald Trump to the White House.

Our churches say that they welcome everyone. But if that is true, why do our congregations look so much the same? It hard to venture out beyond our comfort zones and encounter people from worlds very different from our own. It takes courage, effort and imagination.

But the ability to do that will become a more and more vital skill, not only to save our churches, to but keep our world liveable.  

As Christians, we need to reach out to people from different worlds. But the reason we must do that is that we affirm another, more profound truth: for all our differences, we all inhabit the same world.

“We are not alone. We live in God’s world.”

This is the crucial and counter-cultural message of the Gospel. In spite of everything that divides us, we share the most important things in common:

We are all made in the image of God.

We are all broken (by what Scripture calls sin).

We are all in need of healing.

We are all loved and forgiven through Christ.

We persist in believing and affirming these things as true of all people, whether they share our faith or not. And these beliefs shape how we live and behave.  

As our world becomes more dangerously fragmented, Christians have a sacred calling to both to encounter people from different worlds, and to announce that we all live in God’s world.

All of us, Even those who can order a $2600 glass of Scotch.

The Gift of Unwanted Change

Recently, at a workshop I attended, a young pastor made this observation:

“People in my church want transformation. They just don’t want change.”

What a profoundly insightful comment, I thought.

We want things to be different. But we don’t want to change the way we do things. We want the outcome – transformation. But we don’t want to pay the price – change.

We dream of how our lives – and our churches – could be different from what they are. We imagine our problems solved, our deficits turned into surpluses, our weaknesses transformed into strengths, our past mistakes wiped out and failures overcome. But ask us to give up old habits, to set out on a new path, to break out of the familiar and comfortable – not so much.

The Israelites cried out in their misery and oppression. They hungered for freedom. They longed for transformation. But when they found out that the road to the Promised Land led through the desert – heat, hunger, thirst, danger, uncertainty – and all they had to trust in was the faithfulness of God – they demanded to go back where they had come from – to the slave camps of Egypt. The security of the known and familiar, no matter how unpleasant, trumped the risk of freedom.

Like them, we too long to be transformed. But we can’t be transformed if we insist on keeping everything the same. This is an important message to hear in these times of uncertainty.

But let’s not be too superficial about it. Let’s not talk as if the changes we’re facing – from Presbyteries and Conferences to Regions, for example – are some bold and courageous venture in to the unknown. The truth is that we are where we are because for at least 40 years, we’ve insisted on doing what we’ve always done, and resisted the deep changes that might have led to a transformed church.

But here’s the thing. God knows that we don’t like to change. God knows that, sometimes, we need to be pushed. And change that is forced on us, even though it is deeply unpleasant, can be a moment of great opportunity.

I recently read a book about the desert narratives in the Hebrew Bible by the Jewish scholar

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. (Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers.) She pointed out something interesting. When we read the stories of Israel in the desert from Exodus or Numbers or Deuteronomy, they read like tales of unfaithfulness and failure. But later generations of Jewish rabbis interpreted them as stories of spiritual transformation. What the rabbis saw in these narratives was that God had never been closer and more real to Israel than in the desert – in spite of their stubbornness and backsliding and complaining.

So maybe change that is forced upon us has the potential to lead to a richer outcome than change that we are able to carefully manage and control. Maybe its in those perplexing and uncertain times when we can’t control the outcome that God is nearer than ever.

May we have the eyes to see this time of disruptive and largely unwanted change, which is making us all anxious and afraid – may we see it as a moment in which God is very near.

And may be have the courage to embark on the spiritual journey of change that is the path to transformation. 

Lonely and Confused, Open and Welcoming

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Pope Francis. His Holiness doesn’t tweet very often – not nearly as much as (ahem) certain other world leaders -- but when he does, it’s almost always worth reading.

Recently, the Pope tweeted this:

“How much openness is needed to welcome those who feel alone and confused as they search for a meaning in life!”

I found this such a succinct, powerful description of what the church should aspire to do and to be, it bears repeating.

“How much openness is needed to welcome those who feel alone and confused as they search for a meaning in life!”

Let’s start with the second half of the sentence which describes our culture.

People are lonely. In an age when everybody is more connected than ever before, how

strange is it that we suffer from an epidemic of loneliness. The British journalist George Monbiot recently wrote that “The Age of Loneliness is Killing Us.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us

In Japan, elderly people are lying dead in their apartments for weeks or months because no one notices they are missing. Young people have hundreds of Facebook “friends,” but no real friends.

It’s hard for those who have rich, busy lives with lots of social connections to remember just how desperately lonely many people in our society are.

People are confused. In an age of unlimited choice, people don’t know which way to turn. In an age of conspiracy theories and “fake news,” they don’t know what to believe or whom to trust. They are bombarded by so many competing and colliding voices telling them what to do about their jobs, their relationships, their health, their education, their money, their sex lives, they are bewildered and overwhelmed.

People are searching for meaning. Old certainties and securities are crumbling.

Everything is up for grabs. Traditional sources of meaning and stability like career, family and church have been called into question. Who am I? Where am I going? What am I here for? What’s the point? Many people are haunted by these questions every day.

The second half of the Pope’s sentence I hear as a challenge to the Church. We, whose lives are a witness to the Good News of the Gospel, are called to reach out to those who are lonely, confused and searching for meaning.

What Pope Francis says is needed is two things. Openness. And welcome. 

The Church is called to be open. Rightly or wrongly, many people see churches as cozy clubs or closed cliques. Most people think of a church as a building (“That’s First Church on the corner.”) There was a time when those buildings created visibility. People looked at them and knew what they were, and what they could expect if they opened the door and went on inside of them.

Today, those same buildings have become fortresses of invisibility. People have no idea who is behind those walls, or what they stand for, or what strange things go on inside of them.

But they also have a sense, rightly or wrongly, that churches are filled with people who think they’re better than others. Tony Campolo describes a conversation with a sex worker who said she wanted to change her life but didn’t know where to turn for help. “Why don’t you try going to church?” Campolo asked. “Church?” she said. “That’s the last place I would go. I already feel bad enough about myself, I don’t need to feel worse.”

It’s not our intention, but we church people often give the message that we’re mainly focused ourselves, that not really interested in people as they are, we’re only interested in them as potential volunteers or donors. Or we’re only interested in them if they get their act together enough to “fit in.”

We need to understand why people think that, and what we can do to change it. We need to find ways to communicate genuine openness to people’s struggles, learning to listen, to really listen, to their stories without presuming to judge them or fix them. And we need our churches to be safe places where people can be open about what they are going through. Sadly, many people do not feel they can be honest about themselves in church.

The Church is called to be a place of welcome. Church consultant Kennon Callahan says, “All churches are friendly churches – to those who attend them.” But if we were to put ourselves in the place of someone who visits our church– someone who had perhaps not been to church for a long, long time – we would find that we’re not as welcoming as we thought. I’ve had the experience of visiting a church full of lovely, friendly people – who acted like I was invisible. If I, who am totally comfortable in church, find that experience unnerving, imagine what it’s like for someone who has mustered up the courage to come to church and has the feeling they’ve wandered into somebody’s private family gathering.

Hospitality is more than a handshake, a bulletin and an announcement to stay for coffee. 

Hospitality is about creating a culture of welcoming that touches everything from the way our building looks to our announcements to our worship services to the way we greet people and let them know we really are glad to see them.

One of the things I hear in churches most often is, “How can we connect with new people? How can we reach out to our community?”

I can’t think of a better way than to take this one sentence from Pope Francis, to memorize it, to adopt it as your mission, and to figure out what you need to do to put it into action.