Different Members, Different Needs

After some reflection I think I’ve been too hard on some church members, especially families, specifically those who are what might be called lightly to moderately involved in the life of the congregation.  All of us need instruction in the faith, an opportunity to worship, and some fellowship with other Christians, but I have been committing that churchman’s sin of equating a person’s church involvement with their Christian faith.  This realization has caused me to start asking what is essential and what is just extra in the life of a congregation?  Should we gripe at people when they aren’t interested in the extra stuff?  Should we even offer the extra stuff?  Should we realize that the extra stuff might just be our own pet projects, which doesn’t make them bad but would explain why we’re the only one who’s interested in it?  I don’t know the answers to these questions but I’ve been asking them a lot lately. 

Here’s where I’m at in the thinking process right now:

I have come to realize that paid staffers and retired church members need different things from a congregation than today’s average Christian family with kids at home.  To be honest, we paid staff members need to keep a job and, understandably, we need a sense that we are doing good work.  So what the staff feels is in our best interest is a busy and active congregation.  This is what you call “job security” and “life purpose.”  We church staffers get grumpy and worried when folks don’t jump onboard with the busyness and activity within the congregation.  We say things like, “Those darn young families and their mixed up priorities,” which may be partially true in the end, but usually comes not from in depth analysis but simply from an initial surface reading of the situation in light of our own needs, not theirs.

What retired (and often widowed) church members usually seem to need from the congregation are a sense of purpose and the company of friends.  They want opportunities to serve alongside one another, which fills both of these needs.  They don’t understand why everyone else in the congregation (i.e. the non-retired folks) isn’t jumping onboard with the busyness and activity within the congregation.  They join with the staffers in saying, “Those darn young families and their mixed up priorities,” which again may be partially true in the end, but here it also usually comes not from in depth analysis but simply from an initial surface reading of the situation in light of the retired folks’ own needs, not the families’.

Neither the staffers nor the retired members seem to understand (or are unwilling to understand) what the actual needs are for “those darn young families.”  We assume that everyone’s needs are the same as our own, that because as staffers and retired folks what is in our best interest is a busy and active congregation that this is what is in the best interest of all church members.  We project our own needs onto others.  This problem is exasperated by the fact that in pretty much every congregation I’ve ever been involved with, it is the staffers and retired members who are the decision makers for a congregation.  So the staffers and retired folks develop a church life that fits their needs and that doesn’t take into account the possibility that their model of church life minimizes, ignores, or outright condemns the needs of the families in their midst.  Those in leadership build up a church construct that is not in the best interest of a particular demographic group and then spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about why that demographic is absent from participation in the busy and active church life.  Those in leadership don’t realize that their leadership often is only providing for their own needs. 

 

Richard Rohr is fond of saying that whatever is received is received in the manner of the receiver, not of the giver.  This plays out when a staffer or retired church member comes up with a good, faithful idea for ministry or mission and then presents it to others, only to be surprised when a percentage of the hearers aren’t interested or are outright opposed to it.  “But wait a minute here!  This is good Kingdom work!  The staff likes it!  The retired members like it!  Why won’t the young families get on board?”  The answer is that whatever is received is received in the manner of the receiver.  As mentioned, the staff and retired folks are different “receivers” than the young families.  It doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.  It just means that it works for some while it doesn’t work for others.  What I’m starting to realize is that this has to be okay.  We have to figure out how to minister to different people who are in different seasons of life without looking down on others because their needs are different from our own.

Think about this: how often do we have an officer dragging into a meeting late, exhausted and often hungry, because they came directly from work to the meeting?  How often has this person spent their whole day at work and then their whole evening at the church building and they won’t get home until bedtime for the kids or maybe even later?  This happens quite often.  And then when it comes time to nominate candidates for officers we can’t figure out why the parents with kids at home aren’t willing to serve?  It should be obvious to us.  We have to ask ourselves whether or not the church should be keeping people from their families?  Should the church be adding to members’ workload, busyness, schedule, and stress?  Is that really the role we want to play in people’s lives? 

Staffers and retired folks often want and need busyness and activity at the church.  But families are already busy and active, and perhaps most importantly they are at a time and station in their lives during which their lives, identities, and emphasis are outside the walls and busy schedule of the church.  Staffers and very often retired folks gain our identity and value from our participation in the life of the church, and understandably so.  However, families usually gain their identity and value from their participation in home, school, activities, work, and church.  Therefore, what families may need from the church is very different from what staffers and retired folks need.  Actually what they may need from the church is the complete opposite of what staffers and retired folks need.  A busy and active church life may not be in the best interest of families.  This doesn’t mean that the church shouldn’t be important to families, but it does mean that the church may need to minister to these families in different ways than to retired folks and based upon where they are in life and not where the decision makers are in life.  It seems to me as both a staffer and a member of a young family, that what families seem to need is support, rest, and to be equipped to live out their Christian faith not within the life of the congregation (like staffers and retired members) but at home, at school, at the ball field, and at work.  Because they have different needs, the families get grumpy and don’t understand why the staffers and retired folks keep harping on them to jump onboard with the busyness and activity at church, ideas which have usually come from the staffers and retired folks who are in charge.  For families—which is the demographic all the churches want to attract—a busy and active church may very well be the last thing these folks need.  To them, a busy and active church often just feels like more work, more stress, less rest, and something that makes their life worse, not better.

The Christian life is a 24/7 lifestyle.  The Church is meant to facilitate that Christian life, but not to take its place.  The truth of the matter is that Church is not life.  God is life, and this life is present everywhere and at all times, whether we are in a sanctuary, at the grocery store, in the bathroom, or on a cruise ship.  We have to be careful not to replace Christianity with what has been dubbed “Churchianity,” which is defined as “any practices of Christianity that are viewed as placing a larger emphasis on the habits of church life or the institutional traditions of the church than on theology and spiritual teachings; the quality of being too church-focused.”  The church isn’t supposed to be an end in itself, but a means to the end of guiding people into and equipping them for a relationship with God in Jesus Christ and to infuse every aspect of life with that relationship.  The church should not be church-focused.  The church should be Christ-focused.  Those are often two very different things.

So let’s start thinking about what is essential around here and what is extra.  Also, let’s begin to understand that staffers, retired folks, and families may need very different things from the church and subsequently may be able to offer very different things to the church.  Finally, let us think about whether we are operating in ways that are church-focused or whether we are fulfilling our purpose by operating in ways that are Christ-focused.

Now there’s some food for thought.

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Everett

Gain Some Perspective

This past week my alma mater, Oklahoma State University, made headlines for something negative that happened.  The Cowboy men’s basketball team was supposed to be a top ten team and they have fallen into a terrible skid, losing several games in a row, some of those to much worse teams.  This past Saturday the same thing was happening in Lubbock, Texas where the Cowboys were about to lose to the Texas Tech Red Raiders, a team the Cowboys should be able to beat by 15.  With a few seconds left, Oklahoma State’s star player, 19-year-old Marcus Smart, tried to block a shot and ended up falling into the crowd.  As he was getting up, a so called “Red Raider Super Fan” who is about fifty years old or so, said something to Marcus Smart.  Whatever he said made Smart so angry that Smart pushed the fan.  As Smart was being pulled away it appears that he is saying, “Call me a n----r again and see what happens!”  Smart immediately told the refs and his own coaches and fellow players that the man had called him a n---r.  Smart was given a technical foul, the Cowboys lost, and the incident has now been the lead story on Sportscenter for three days. 

Some have called for Marcus Smart to be kicked off the team and say he has marred the reputation of Oklahoma State.  People have talked about how he has disgraced the university that is giving him a free education.  Free?  Since when is working fulltime year round, bringing in millions of dollars of income for an institution, and then receiving something in return for that called free?  He just doesn’t get paid in checks, but in his tuition, room, and board being waived.  That’s called work; that’s called a job; that’s called payment for services rendered.  Marcus Smart isn’t getting anything for free, and I do not believe that he has disgraced my alma mater. 

Marcus Smart still claims that the fan called him a n----r, but the fan says that he didn’t use a racial slur but did call Marcus Smart “a piece of crap” as he was getting up.  The fan has voluntarily agreed not to attend any more Texas Tech basketball games this season, which is a big deal for him because he is not your average fan; he’s a “super fan.”  The Big 12 conference suspended Smart, but his first game back will be against Texas Tech on Oklahoma State’s home court.  Hopefully the Cowboys fans won’t take out their frustrations on the Texas Tech players when they come to Stillwater, Oklahoma.  The players didn’t have anything to do with it.  Smart has apologized and a national conversation has begun about how college athletes are treated.  I want to participate in that conversation.

First of all, Marcus Smart had to be held accountable for pushing the fan; that cannot be allowed no matter what the guy said.  With that being said, I don’t blame Marcus Smart for pushing the guy.  Actually, I think the guy is lucky he didn’t get his nose broken.  Marcus Smart is a 19-year-old world-class athlete.  He is under an extreme amount of pressure.  His team is losing and he isn’t playing very well.  Then some jerk calls him either a n----r or a piece of crap.  I can tell you without hesitating that when I was 19- years-old I would have punched the guy in the face, probably more than once, and I would have ended up in jail.  What would happen if that same guy walked into anywhere else and called a strong 19-year-old young man a piece of crap?  That guy would be lucky if he survived the beating he’d get from a lot of young men.  When I was about that age I was kicked out of an intramural basketball game for throwing the basketball at a guy who kept fouling me and the ref never called it.  Over time I have matured, growing emotionally and spiritually to a point where anger like that is not an issue for me anymore, but when I was 19 it was a big issue.  I don’t think Marcus Smart is a bad person or a thug or a disgrace or anything else he is being called.  I think he is a young man who got justifiably angry and made a mistake, but an understandable mistake at that.  He’s owned up to it; he’s taking his punishment; hopefully he’ll learn from it.  You and I are just lucky that our mistakes aren’t played out on television in front of millions of people. 

Now, however, I want to address the fan.  The fan is not a 19-year-old young man under tremendous stress.  The fan is a fifty-ish guy who has been caught on video flipping off opposing players and who brags about traveling to 31 different states to watch the Texas Tech basketball team play.  The former coach at Texas Tech says that the fan would wait for hours after games just to talk to the coach and players.  Plus, this fifty year old man either called Marcus Smart a n----r or a piece of crap as the young man was getting up from trying to make a hustle play.  This guy did not make an understandable and isolated youthful mistake.  This seems to be a lifestyle and this man should know better.  To me, it shows us something that I have thought about quite a bit in the last few years: how ridiculous it is that grown people invest so much of their life, identity, money, and self-worth in young people playing a sport.  This, in my opinion, is terribly sad and I want to say to a lot of folks, “Get a life.”

I have always disliked what cultured despisers of athletics say about sports.  “It’s so barbaric,” they say.  “It’s such a waste of time.”  I understand why they feel that way but as someone who has played sports and enjoys watching them I disagree with them.  However, I do think that grown people thinking it’s okay to call anyone, let alone a young man who is trying hard and who is someone’s son, a piece of crap or a loser or whatever, says way more about the fan than it does the player.  As Jesus says, "What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles."  If non-Christians act this way there is only so much we can do about it, but Christians cannot act the way many fans do.  We are supposed to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world. 

First of all, I do not believe we should feel good about spending large amounts of money to follow a team of 19-year-olds around the country (unless maybe one of them is your kid).  It is obscene the amount of money we spend on sports.  Everyday 30,000 children around the world die of preventable causes but we spend our money on being fans?  How many Christians spend more money on tickets and merchandise to support young people playing a game than they give to charity, than they give to the ministry and mission of their local church?  I’d guess quite a few.  Jesus said, “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also.”  Our hearts follow our money.  Where’s your heart?  With those in need?  With the church?  In the basketball arena or football stadium? 

Secondly, grown people think they can say whatever they want to players or about them just because the fans paid money to be there.  That’s ludicrous.  James writes, “No one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison.  With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.  From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.”  Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”  Next time you watch a ballgame or attend one check your tongue.  If you are a Christian, you have to remember that every player on that court or field, every coach, every referee, and every other fan is a person made in the image of God for whom Christ died on the cross and whom God has commanded you to love as you love yourself.  

Third, there are times when I wonder what must be missing in the lives of these so-called “super fans,” not just the guy at Texas Tech, but the crazies at Ohio State, Notre Dame, North Carolina, and yes at my own Oklahoma State and elsewhere.  Why is it that grown people are willing to act like complete buffoons and sometimes even treat other people horribly because they are so invested in a game being played by 18 to 22 year olds?  I have often thought about how these folks seem to lack perspective.  There was a time in my life when I acted like that: when I was 18 to 22.  Then I grew up.  As Paul writes, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”  Please enjoy the sports but come on, folks, gain some perspective.  When all is said and done whether you were a Cowboy, Buckeye, Sooner, or Wolverine won’t make a lick of difference.  That will die when you die.  What will live on are your faith and your love.  But I do believe that we will have to answer for the way we have treated other people, 19-year-old basketball players included.

Maybe when you were nineteen you were the kind of person (like I was) who would have given that fan a black eye and a broken nose.  Maybe not.  Maybe you were the kind of person (maybe you still are) who would call a young man a piece of crap or a n----r.  Hopefully not.  Remember what you were like when you were 19 and don’t act like that anymore.  Chances are if you are reading this post you are an adult.  Act like an adult.  Give up childish ways.  Also, chances are if you are reading this post you are a Christian.  Act like a Christian.  Treat people with the grace and peace offered to you by God through Jesus Christ no matter where you are or who they are.  If you are a fan, be a fan who acts like a Christian adult.  And if you are a so called “super fan," I am here to tell you that there are other areas of life that need your attention.  If you feel the need to be a fanatic about something, be a fanatic for wiping out preventable childhood diseases, be a fanatic for visiting lonely senior citizens, be a fanatic for eradicating the sex trade, be a fanatic for loving your children and spouse.  As Jesus said, "Seek first God's kingdom and righteousness," or in my words, "Please, gain some perspective."

Grace and Peace… and Ride ‘Em Cowboys!

Pastor Everett       

February Daydreams

Okay.  That's enough snow already. It has ceased to affect me in any positive way.  No longer do I have the capacity to say, "Wow, look at those beautiful snowflakes.  Isn't God's creation wonderful?"  I am now at the point where I say, "You've got to be kidding me!  More snow?  Are you serious?"  In many parts of Ohio we have nearly doubled our normal snow total for the entire winter, yet we still have more than a month of winter left.  Ugh.

What this winter has caused me to do is to daydream a great deal about life in the islands.  I keep telling Danielle that I'm going to do some continuing education at the Seminario Evangelico de Puerto Rico, which is a PCUSA affiliated seminary in Puerto Rico. Apparently she's not okay with that. Then I tried to convince her that because there are so many parallels between baseball and faith that I need to go do continuing education during spring training in Arizona or Florida.  She wasn't on board with that either.  Come on, this is the Lord's work we're talking about here!

So here is what I am going to do today so that I'm not the only one who keeps getting lost in daydreams that look a lot like a Kenny Chesney song a la "No shoes, No shirt, No problems;" I'm going to facilitate and resource your own daydreams, but I'll do so in a pastoral and churchy kind of way.

Did you know that in the PC(USA) we are not required to baptize by pouring or sprinkling water? We can do full immersion if we want to, even in the ocean!  So let's do it.  Any takers?  If you haven't been baptized yet and you want to fly me to the Bahamas to baptize you I am more than willing to do that as a service to you, to the church, and to the

Lord.  Just think about it, okay?

Already baptized? That's cool; I do weddings too. How about Tahiti.  I hear it is a beautiful destination for weddings.  Already baptized and married?  I've been told I do a great funeral.  Maybe I went too far with that one... but just keep me in mind if you decide to be buried in the tropics.

So, no takers on the beach baptism, wedding, or funeral huh?  How about this? Let's do a joint service with some of our Presbyterian brothers and sisters at Mililani Presbyterian Church in Hawaii. They look like good folks and I think we could really grow through some time together.  What do you think?  Remember Jesus' prayer for unity among believers.  Also, while I was on their website I noticed that they are looking for a pastor.  Hmmm... I'm not sure my salary would stretch as far in Hawaii as it does in south-central Ohio.  

Okay, okay.  Let's quit thinking about ourselves and think about others for a change.  Our faith, if it is real and mature, is supposed to drive us out to serve others.  One way that we often do that is through mission trips.  But what we have begun to understand about mission trips is that they often do more harm than good. The reason for this is that we "rich" Americans swoop into a place and do other people's work for them instead of helping them to do their own work.  While trying to help them we actually hurt them by stealing their dignity.  Also, we often do not get to know the people whatsoever.  They are projects to us instead of people who are our equals.  So what we need to do is to go somewhere and just hang out and get to know the people.  So here's what I'm thinking: we need to get to know the good folks of the Pacific Islands.  I really think we could learn a lot from them and maybe help them do something while we're there.  Maybe they have a drastic surplus of fruity drinks with umbrellas in them.  We could help them solve that problem.  It's just an idea.

Well, it was worth bringing up, but it looks like we're still here in snowy Ohio.  I guess we can serve God here too, even if it is 87 degrees in Acapulco right now.

Stay warm,

Pastor Everett