ken wilson online

It happened again a few nights ago.  A news story on ABC World News Tonight.  Lead in video montage of a woman with eyes closed and hands raised in worship, cut to a group of three Southern Baptists standing outside of a SBC seminary: a white man, a youngish woman and a youngish African American man, all dressed up as if for church.  So they were trying to put a positive face on these Southern Baptists. The interviewer asked them all: “Do you think Sarah Palin is ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?”  They all nodded enthusiastically.  Then the follow up: “How would you feel about a woman serving as a pastor?” They all frowned and shook their head, no.  Somehow, according to their reading of the Bible, it was just fine for a woman to command the most powerful military the world has ever known, with a enough firepower to wipe out humankind, but it was not fine, and decidedly so, for a woman to pastor a church.  Despite Deborah, despite Priscilla, despite a woman being first witness to the risen Jesus, commissioned by him to take the message of his rising back to the other apostles, making her the apostle to the apostles. Throwing his lot and the lot of his religion in with a woman from the get go–entrusting her with the most authoritative message ever delivered by a member of humankind to humankind.

The views of the three Southern Baptists are representative of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, second in size only to Roman Catholicism (which similarly prohibits women from serving as pastors), and more to my point, the church home of the leading evangelical of our time, Billy Graham.  I ask you, if you were a thoughtful and inquiring young woman who had not been raised with any particular Christian convictions, how would you feel about attending an evangelical church in the hopes of learning more about the founder of Christianity?   Houston, we have a problem. 
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Young pastor, prepare thyself for the not-so-local church. You grew up, perhaps, in a local church, or you were drawn to pastoral ministry through your experience in a local church (if not, get thee to one pronto, unless you plan to give away what you haven’t experienced). You may have been to seminary and taken classes on leadership in the local church–teaching, managing budgets, working with boards, and all that. These leadership classed may have been based on the assumption that the local church is led by local leaders. But the local church has changed, and it has changed rapidly and dramatically. It’s not so local anymore. And that means that you, pastor, aspiring or actual, are not in the same position of leadership that pastors once were. You will find within the local church, the powerful influence of leaders you don’t know and will never meet, some of whom you admire at a distance, others who make your skin crawl, and here’s the kicker, most of whom work at cross purposes with each other.
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This is what I’ve learned to love about my hometown. Coming out of the Little Caesar’s Pizzeria with my hot & ready, and there in the parking lot is a lady–soccer mom kind of look–stepping into her Volvo with a bumper sticker, just one, carefully placed, black background, white letters: i’m already against the next war. I could drive through other cities, maybe even states and never find a bumper sticker like that. And I could drive through yet other cities and yet other states and find ‘em pretty easily. Places are particular. And if you happen to be a pastor in a particular place–which I personally think is the best kind of pastor to be rather than a roving one–it’s good, I think, to learn to love the particularities of your city. Even if maybe there are things about those particularities that rankle, I think it’s a good discipline to talk yourself into seeing the best in those things.
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Paul, the old guy, advises Timothy, the younger guy, to be careful about empowering “new converts” too much too fast in the leadership department because they are more prone to “conceit.”  As Bob Dylan sang, “there’s a whole lot of people dying tonight, from the disease of conceit.”  Defined as “a high opinion of your own qualities or abilities, especially one that is not justified.”  And there’s the rub, right?  When we’re young, we’re worried about our qualities and abilities.  We fear that our qualities and abilities are inadequate for the pastoring task. Which means we crave confident assurance that we’re wrong about our fears regarding ourselves.
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“The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.” — Dave Barry

That is word for word perfect.  And it’s the reason many, many, and might I add an increasing number of many people are keeping their distance from things like, oh, say, churches.  Because they know this to be true or at least true enough, which is, to say the least, too true.
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Man, do I feel optimistic lately.  Why?  Because of my kids.  They have a different take on the world, and it’s a take the world is due.  We baby boomers have taken things as far as we can with our current Oldsmobile. Our battles lines are firmly fixed, but from their perspective, wearing thin.  Now it’s time for us to listen to their take on the world as much as we’ve been yammering on about ours.  Then, having listened and learned, we’ll be able to see what we’ve been through in a new light and offer, not more information (they can get it faster than we can generate it)  but what they actually crave from us: wisdom, the one thing it takes time and experience and trial and error to gain.

The culture wars are boomer wars.  We inherited them from our fathers who lived in a binary world of good and evil neatly separated by geographic boundaries.  The evil empire was over there, far away from our fields of presumed good. I actually played cowboys and Indians assuming the cowboys were the good guys.  Pick up sides and duke it out; we boomers did it every day all summer long playing baseball in the streets.  May the best side win.  One side fits all.  Side in. Side out.  Are you on our side or the side of our enemies?  Neither, says this newer take on the world before us.  Maybe it’s time for us boomers to sit down, shut up,  and take off our shoes.
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