TRINITY SERMONS
Trinity Presbyterian Church
Rev. Craig Hunter
July 25, 2010
My
sermon today is to some extent a journey into myself, and to a greater extent, a
journey into the life of our church and society. The last few weeks have been quite intense
for me, and I am still processing what I have encountered. But today I want to share with you some of
what I have seen, both in my participation at the General Assembly of our
denomination and in conversations I have had since.
General
Assembly was a wonderful experience and I am glad that I went. As I mentioned in the Trinity Greetings this
last week, I learned more about how our denomination functions. I worshipped with thousands of other
Presbyterians, raising my voice to praise the same God. I stood in humble awe as missionaries,
including our own Tad Hopp, were commissioned to go
out across the world as so many have done before throughout the centuries. I
reconnected with different people from our church, reconnecting with little
pieces of myself as well. One of the
elders from my home church in St. Augustine was one of the commissioners. I spent a lot of time with Doug Dicks, our
denomination's regional liaison in Israel/Palestine who I have known for over
10 years. And when I went to the
Princeton Seminary Alumni Reception, I had not yet even entered the room when
Chris Griggs, a classmate from seminary who I had not seen since graduating
nine years ago, came up to me and said, "Craig, you have to send me that
poem you read at open-mike night nine years ago, the one about God and the
woman and the beach. I have thought of
that poem literally a hundred times in the last decade." Turning to another classmate of ours, he
said, "I bet you didn't know Craig was a poet," to which she replied
matter-of-factly, "Of course I knew that." Those unsolicited remarks were the best gift
I've received in a while, and I was touched.
The
following week, as I attended lectures and worship in Chautauqua, New York, my
conversations about the church continued.
I heard stories from my brother-in-law about the church in Rhode Island
where he and my sister are very active, I met with my former supervisor from
the church in New Jersey where I did my first seminary internship, and I had
several other conversations with elders and pastors, Presbyterian and
otherwise.
It
was good to reconnect with so many family members, friends, and
acquaintances. But my experience wasn't
all cherries and chocolate almond ice cream.
As a matter of fact, some portion of my experience was cherry ice cream
with chocolate chunks in it. But what I
mean to say is that there was a darker side to what I heard and saw.
I
heard about the church where the autocratic pastor hogs the pulpit, never
sharing it with the seminary student employed as a youth pastor there, nor,
more shockingly, with the former moderator of our denomination either. I heard about a church where the large number of retired pastors in the congregation are viewed by
the pastor as a threat. I heard about a
church where the pastor repeatedly downloaded his sermons off the internet, and
after being confronted about this fact by the personnel committee, continued to
do so until they fired him. I heard
about a church where a young slick minister, someone I knew from seminary, used
the church for his own self-promotion professionally and financially, suing it
for $210,000 four years after arriving.
That church, with 1300 members not that long ago, now has
700 members and is run by an administrative commission of the presbytery. I heard about a church where another seminary
classmate of mine, whom I do not remember, inappropriately touched the young
teenage girls he was supposedly ministering to. The senior pastor didn't take the situation
seriously until the molestation continued, at which point the senior pastor was
more concerned with his own career than with justice and healing.
When
I say, "I heard about a church", I don't mean some church sort of
generally "out there," I mean churches with whom I have a direct
personal connection. These are churches
where I have lived or worked or worshipped or churches with whom
I have a direct link through a relative, friend, or former co-worker. These conversations tempt me to think that
the bar for successful pastoral leadership is disturbingly low -- if I don't
embezzle any money or molest anybody, it would seem I am three-quarters of the
way to a successful pastorate.
All
of this and I am conscious in the back of my mind that half of all Presbyterian
ordained clergy leave the parish ministry within five years of their
ordination. Half. Sit on that fact for a while. These are people who spent three years of
their lives pursuing a master's degree whose primary purpose is to equip church
leaders.
What
these stories and figures suggest, it seems to me, is that we have a crisis of
leadership in our church. I am not at
this point interested in pointing fingers as to who is to blame. There is probably more than enough to go
around, in any case.
One
area in which this crisis of leadership manifests itself is in worship. Before I came to Trinity, I spent a lot of
time in a lot of different churches, and I have heard many stories from others
since. While there are certainly many
powerful preachers and moving worship services out there, there are far too
many pastors who preach sermons without imagination and who fail to take risks
in worship, the pastor who consistently downloaded his sermons being a case in
point. Similarly, there are far too many
congregations without imagination themselves who fail to support imagination
and risk-taking in others. The worship committee
at my best friend's church even passed a motion prohibiting any change to the
liturgy. Such action is not only against
our denomination's book of order and our entire Reformed tradition, it suggests
a blindness and deafness to the work of the Holy Spirit in their midst.
With dull worship, dysfunctional
pastoral leadership and dysfunctional congregations, no wonder our denomination
is in decline.
The
last but not least witness to the crisis in leadership in our denomination came
from my conversations at General Assembly.
I was disturbed by what I heard time and time again. There is an almost toxic sense of chronic
anxiety that is all too prevalent. When
it came to issues such as the
After
returning from my trip, I finally picked up a book that had been on my reading
list for a while. Titled, "A Failure
of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the
Quick Fix," it is written by Edwin Friedman, the author of a classic in
the field of church systems theory. His
book is not a religious book, rather it is about systems and organizations and
sets of relationships, whether that be families or churches or businesses or
society as a whole. This book is one of
the best books I have read in a while, and I highly recommend it. Reading this book in light of my recent
experience has sent mental sparks flying in all directions. He writes in the introduction to his book,
"I believe there exists throughout America today a rampant sabotaging of
leaders who try to stand tall amid the raging anxiety-storms of our time. It is a highly reactive atmosphere pervading
all the institutions of our society -- a regressive mood that contaminates the
decision-making processes of government and corporations at the highest level,
and, on the local level, seeps down into the deliberations of neighborhood
church, synagogue, hospital, library, and school boards. It is 'something in the air; that affects the
most ordinary family no matter what its ethnic background. And its frustrating effect on leaders is the
same no matter what their gender, race, or age. . . It will be the thesis of
this work that leadership in America is stuck in the rut of trying harder and
harder without obtaining significantly new results. The rut runs deep, affecting all the
institutions of our society irrespective of size or purpose. It even affects those institutions that try
to tackle the problem: universities,
think-tanks, and consultants."
Later
in his introduction, he share what he calls the universal law of
leadership. "In any type of
institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or
creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than
encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true one hundred percent of
the time, regardless of whether the disrupters are supervisors, subordinates,
or peers, is that the person at the very top of the institution is a
peace-monger. By that I mean a highly
anxious risk-avoider, someone who is more concerned with good feelings that
with progress, someone whose life revolves around the axis of consensus, a 'middler,' someone who is so incapable of taking
well-defined stands that his 'disability seems to be genetic, someone who
functions as if she had been filleted of her backbone, someone who treats
conflict or anxiety like mustard gas -- one whiff, on goes the emotional gas mask,
and he flits. Such leaders are often
'nice,' if not charming."
This
description of the tyranny of conflict-avoiders fits much of my own experience,
and, more to the point much of what I saw at General Assembly and have heard
about many congregations. Friedman
suggests that is in increasingly true of our society as a whole, that we are
chronically anxious and emotionally regressive in how we deal with
conflict. I must confess I find his
arguments persuasive. Although I have
not finished reading his book, he goes on to suggest that we are in danger of
losing the power of our imaginations and our spirit of adventure. In its place, our decision-making processes
are increasingly characterized by a herd mentality, blame displacement, and a
quick-fix mentality. These elements are
evident in the way that boundaries are eroded, in the way that togetherness
becomes an overarching value at the expense of knowing what one stands for, in
the quickness to sue and to blame others, in the focus on safety rather than
adventure, in the quest for certainty and in a whole host of other ways.
Chronic
anxiety -- Herd mentality -- quick fix orientation -- blame displacement -- I
don't know about you, but that sounds like a fairly accurate description not
only of the state of our society, but to some degree at least, of the state of
our denomination as well.
I am reminded of our Biblical text from
Ezekiel this morning, and indeed, of the prophetic tradition of the Bible as a
whole. These were people who knew how to
take a stand. The prophets that made it into the Bible didn't go around
sticking with the herd, they didn't go around telling everyone what they wanted
to hear, that all their problems were someone else's fault, they didn't offer
some magic potion or remedy to solve the society's problems quickly or
easily. No, these were people who in
times of crisis had an imaginative vision of the future and were willing to pay
the price to live their lives according to that vision.
It
strikes me as no accident that so much of the Bible is on the move, it is about
people moving from one land to another, from Iraq to Turkey, or Israel to
Egypt, or Israel to Turkey, or whatever, they couldn't stand still, early
Christians were called the followers of the Way before they were called
Christians, all of which is to suggest that there is something boldly
adventuresome about the life of faith, and I believe that God still calls us as
individuals, as a congregation, as a denomination, and as a society on similar
adventures. It may be easier for me to
say this in a relatively healthy congregation such as this one, but our task
has never been to live safe lives where survival is the goal, but rather to
live faithful lives, lives without fear that witness to a trust in God's mercy. That also seems to be part of the message
from Paul's letter to the Romans. As he
writes in verse 4 of our Scripture lesson for today, "Therefore we have
been buried with [Christ] by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was
raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in
newness of life." That old
anxiety-filled way of living -- that's gone in Christ, don't waste your time
with that any more, its power has been exposed as hollow. Or, to put it as Martin Luther did, "Sin
boldly", life with gusto, don't be afraid of making mistakes or of failing
or anything else, because, as Luther went on to say, "sin boldly but
believe more boldly still."
Friedman,
who, incidentally, is a Jewish rabbi, closes his book with this story. "On the third day of Creation, just
before all forms of life were about to multiply, the Holy One said to his
creatures, 'I see that what some of you treasure most is survival, while what
others yearn for most is adventure. So I
will give you each a choice. If what you
want most is stability, then I will give you the power to regenerate any part
you lose, but you must stay rooted where you grow. If, on the other hand, you prefer mobility,
you also may have your wish, but you will be more at risk. For then I will not give you the ability to
regain your previous form.' Those that
chose stability we call trees, and those that chose opportunity became
animals."