forget how to walk

I want to start out by saying that I agree with Landon about 99% of what he says, but that 1% of disagreement kept me up last night.  It kept me up thinking about how to respond in a way that acknowledges that I’m disagreeing on a small but powerful part of his argument.  So I have to respond, and I do so in a few questions knowing full well they can cause more problems than they are worth sometimes.  It’s not finished and it needs more thought to be fully digestible and more than a stream of consciousness, but it’s a start with more to come.

Why should I, as a young (25yo) person entering the ministry be consigned to poverty while people my parents age sit comfortably in their churches?  Why should I choose to engage the denomination that I so love at all if it doesn’t value and want to support the innovate ideas I may or may not have?  What does it say about the future of the church if the old system fails to recognize its own limitedness and respond accordingly? I’ll try to respond in what way I can.

Truthfully, I don’t think it is right to consign those called to ministry to poverty and life without stability just so we can pursue the ministry to which God calls us.  Now, that isn’t to say that ministry shouldn’t require sacrifice.  Quite the opposite, if it doesn’t then it probably isn’t ministry.  The world is changing, much faster than the church, and if the church really wants to live into this new world it has to be willing to support the future endeavors of the church, even if they look totally different from what they have in the past.  If my parents, and their parents, really wish what is best for their children and grandchildren and for the churches they have come to love, they have to embrace that the world may not necessarily desire with the voracity it once did the flavor of Christianity they have to offer.  This isn’t to say that their practice is somehow wrong, simply that the “times they are a changing.”

The second question is to me the most difficult to conceptualize.  I am a lifelong Presbyterian.  I have been fostered by the church from infancy, it has shaped me, formed my theology, crafted my worldview.  It has also contributed to the great and overriding question that occupies much of my time as I consider what is to come after seminary.  I am a person called to ministry, someone called to serve God by ministering to the people of God.  I am not called to do it while being a lawyer or teacher, I am called to do it full-time.  It is something I am called to as a vocation.  So, I engage in this long period of study in seminary.  Yet, when I come out of seminary I am supposed to adopt a style of worship, ministry, and community life that is in many places life-sucking rather than life-giving.  It is stale and lifeless for me.  Yet, it is only through denying myself and my own spiritual needs in such work that I will have any hope of providing for myself and my future family.  Because, if I dare to strike out and seek a new way of doing ministry I’m likely to face opposition from the system, and thus be forced into an economically unsustainable situation.  Am I the only one to see the problem here?  Either I drink the Kool-Aid or I can barely survive.  If the system isn’t willing to support the ministry to which they have acknowledged a call, why should I engage with that system?  That is a question I don’t see people answering much.

I understand Landon’s push against trying to keep the economics of the old church in a new church.  But let’s be honest, economics do matter.  Pastors have already lost valuable ground against comparatively educated people in this world.  So, asking for even more ground just isn’t doable.  So yes, I think it is fair to ask the old system to be a part of birthing something new.  If there aren’t benefactors wiling to get behind a new ministry and fund it until it can fund itself then we might as well give up and close our doors.  Somebody had to fund everything, someone funded XYZ Presbyterian Church when it was a new church.  So XYZ Presbyterian Church ought to do the same thing today, especially if they say they take seriously the ministry to which they’re called.  I don’t think this is primarily and economic argument however.  Sure, money matters, and it’s a lie to say otherwise, but so to do faithfulness.

A woman I work with, Loyda Aja, once said “Are we willing to let something die so God can make something new?”  Maybe the old system needs to think about this a bit.  I mean the old system challenged has done some amazing things by challenging the world.  They have fought battles for equality, and continue to fight those battles, and I am amazed by that.  But everything has a lifetime.  Everything passes from this world.  Every ministry, even the ones founded today, will eventually cease as God speaks in a new way.  If we are to step boldly into the world as God’s called and chosen people, we have to be willing to use the abundance God has gifted us with, both financial and human, to speak in new ways that may never give back to the system that birthed them.  Is that unfair to the system, for sure, but it’s part of faith to give without any hope of fair repayment.  Isn’t that what God does in Jesus?  Gives us grace with no real expectation that we’ll be able to give equally back?

You know every once in a while something pops up that reminds you so much of home.  Not the place you necessarily call home now, but rather that place where you were formed, where your dearest memories were made, and where your heart will always be.  For me, that deep down place is the town I was raised in.  Though I love the city, there is a magic to the small town in Indiana that shaped me.

This magic also always carries a twinge of pain when realized.  As we move through life the connections to the magical place become less strong.  Sometimes it is simply time and distance that separate the bonds and other times they are severed forcefully.  In either of these there is sadness in the realization of life and bonds that were or could have been but are no more.  In my instance my heart yearns for the strong connection I once had to my home town and the people in it, connections that have disappeared in both ways.

In seeing visions of home, of a life that was and will never be again, we find things to inspire us.  In the gentle tears that come from deep within our souls we find ourselves.  For to live to win and to lose, it is to embrace where we are and where we are from.  It is to realize that a part of us will forever be where and with whom we were first home.

-T

That dark place.

That place where things go

and they never come back.

Thats dark place

it swallows the past

crushing and destroying.

The crushed and destroyed

somehow always still real

somehow forever visible.

In that dark place

where no light can penetrate

where no sound can escape

where no air moves

where nothing is…memories exist

Memories full of light and sound and air and life

Memories full of the richness of experience

Memories engorged

on their cellmates,

our other memories.

Locked forever in that dark place

where no light, nor sound, nor air can exist

where nothing is,

there are our memories.

A couple months ago, I mentioned that on the inside of Taylor Swift’s new album “Speak Now” she talks about the things we don’t say, the things we leave unsaid for some reason.  I pondered why we don’t say them.  I had a couple ideas, from fear to simple unwillingness to put one’s self out there into the wild unknown.  Something else came to mind in the past few hours though, what about once we can’t ever say them again?

What happens to the things we leave unsaid once lives cross enough thresholds that they can never be said? What happens when the lives the necessitated the unsaid become so divergent that to say it would be doing an injustice?  I for one think that these things ultimately end up stuck in a sort of limbo within ourselves.  We will always know what should have been said or done, where we erred and we will always have to live with just that knowledge.  Any other thoughts?