ken wilson online

Here’s a myth about pastoring that will crush you if you mistake it for truth: when a pastor is doing his or her job, the church will be calm. Like any myth, this one endures because it distorts a truth: that good pastoring helps a church manage conflict, tension, and turmoil better than bad pastoring. (And that bad pastoring can generate enormous turmoil in a church.)  The myth hides the reality that we pastor now in an age of very high anxiety, owing to a rapid pace of change all around us.

Step back from the trees to see the forest. The chart of global population looks like a hockey stick.  Many of you were born when the population of the earth was 6 billion and by the time you die it will be 9 billion.

Layer over this, the rate of technological change.  The speed of computing doubles every 18 months.

Or hear the witness of an old guy. When I started out as a pastor, I had to respond to three forms of communication: face to face conversation, land-line telephone conversations (before answering machines were commonplace–so no one could leave a message), and letters delivered by the U.S. Postal Service five days a week.  Yes, in my lifetime.

Now we have to keep track of communications from all of the above plus cell phones on our person, email, and text messages  (not to mention Facebook and the rest.)  Imagine how peaceful your life would be if you didn’t have to deal with phone messages, cell phones, and e-mail.  I remember sitting in my office thirty years ago, having completed all of my tasks and wondering what to do next.  I kid you not, I actually that experience now and again.

With the increased communication comes increased activity between and among people and increased expectations–all of which adds enormous anxiety to the system.

Thirty years ago, most Christianity was practiced within the context of relatively old institutions.  Doctrine was relatively static and institutionally defined. Clergy were trained in institutionally coherent seminaries and pastors were people who managed relatively well defined and stable systems.

All that has changed as we have entered the post-denominational era.  Church institutions have weakened enormously, placing much greater pressure on local churches to deal with virtually all of the big issues.

I entered pastoral ministry at the beginning of the post-denominational era, without seminary training or a solid institutional framework.  The church I pastored had to figure out the big issues more or less on its own.

And there were big issues to resolve.  The church that began in my living room in the 1970’s was composed exclusively of people under the age of 25.  Few were married.  None had been divorced.  We expected that every marriage would be lifelong and there was no reason a Christian would need to get divorced.  I realize how naive that sounds.  But it means that we had to decide ourselves, with the Bible, and the Spirit, and reason, and experience (which was, for along time, in short supply) how to respond to divorce and remarriage.

We had to process the tsunami of the feminism (it was a movement back then) and decide whether the pastorate should remain a men-only club or not.  And we had to engage this almost exclusively within the resources of the local church.

Now we face issues just as controversial as these (f you’re a young pastor, you probably can’t imagine that these old issues were controversial.) But we have to do so with more anxiety in the system than we had back then, owing to the unrelenting pace of change. To simply engage these issues–ask open-ended questions, for example–raises the collective blood pressure.

Think about it: There was no Religious Right or its equivalent when I got into pastoring.  Evangelicals elected Jimmy Carter, a pro-choice Democrat.  No one identified Christianity with one political party.   No a.m. talk shows organized around politics, no cable news networks, nothing like the news-entertainment-radical political brew that saturates the airwaves today. Oh, and no Internet access either.  No forwarded emails from prophetic ministries before Presidential elections pronouncing prophetic curses on those who don’t toe some party line.

Edwin Friedman, in A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, says that pastors and rabbis are facing incredible levels of anxiety within their congregations because we live in an age of anxiety.  The system is saturated with anxiety.

To lead in such a time requires leaders who can maintain a non-anxious presence in an anxious system.

Let that sink in, young pastor.

The key to leadership in an age of anxiety goes deeper than anything you can ever learn in a book on leadership methods. It goes beyond any data driven decisions you can generate.  It goes beyond leadership techniques, or organizational models.

It presses into the sanctuary of your inner life: your capacity to be at peace in a swirl of turmoil.

More on this in future posts….

Tags: anxiety, change, Edwin Friedman, leadership, population, post-denominational, technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 11:46 am and is filed under advice to young pastors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.