Y’all, I heard it every day, many times over.  Server at the restaurant said “y’all” 4 times in 30 seconds. Favorite iteration, “How are all y’all doin’?”

Boom, it hit me: these people have a plural form of the word “you.”  We need to stop, drop, roll, and adopt this.  We need a Thomas Nelson “The Y’All Bible Translation.”

Because we often read the Bible falsely.  “Christ in you, the hope of glory” we read, hearing “Christ in you [singular you, as in me, myself, and I] the hope of glory.”  So that one of our contemporary worship songs makes it “Christ in me, Christ in me, Christ in me, the hope of glory.”

But the “you” is a plural you, y’all.  Christ in y’all, the hope of glory.  Christ in the gathered you, Christ in the communal you, Christ in the networked you, the hope of glory.

And this happens often when we read the Bible.  The “you” in English can be singular or plural.  But with our individualism lenses on, we almost always hear it as singular.

Can you imagine a more pernicious confusion?

Wonder why we have an I, me, my Christianity?  A consumer Christianity? A “What have you done for me lately?” Christianity? A church conceived of and engaged in as though it were a collection of individuals?

The South is a more communal culture for its use of “y’all.” And it’s no surprise that the South is also a more mystical culture. Because the mystical parts of the brain are the ones that connect the self to the beyond-the-self, as though the self in itself is perhaps the first hint of hell, and the self connected to the beyond-the-self is the first taste of heaven.

So pastors, when you’re reading the Bible or teaching from the Bible, get your bearings straight on the meaning of the yous.  When the you is plural, specify that it is. Adopt the y’all, y’all.  And see if it doesn’t change everything.

No, you don’t have to get off the grid to escape. Though the occasional day long (or longer) media fast, come to think of it, is a great idea.  I’m sure I’m less connected than you are, but here’s what I do to make a little more space for whatever it is that happens when I’m not checking email.  I’m working the art of sacred disconnection points through the day.  Training my brain to let me unplug from the digital machine.

1. No emails an hour before bedtime. Most of my anxiety producing communication happens through email.  You know the story–the tone, the freedom to speak one’s mind without regard for the emotions of the receiver, etc.  Train your brain, by repetition, over and over, until it’s habitual, not to check email an hour before bedtime.

2. Set up an electronic media free zone. A prayer chair in a prayer corner, perhaps.  A place you go to get off the the information highway.  Whatever you do in that chair, don’t have anything to do with anything that depends on binary code there.

3. Practice prayer at intervals through the day. Morning and night is an interval.  But the real  benefits come when you add a mid-day interruption–a pause in the action to duck in for a few minutes of prayer somewhere.  I use The Divine Hours, by Phyllis Tickle.  And yes, it feels at first like extracting a tooth–pulling yourself away from whatever it is that is occupying your thoughts.   But it gets easier with repetition and the act of pulling yourself away trains your brain to refocus.  And if your brain is not able to do that, my fellow pastor, you will be a sucker for any enslavement.

4. Practice a focusing prayer–like the Jesus Prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.”  First part on the inhale, second part on the exhale.  Over and over, meditatively, for oh, say, a minute or two–better yet five or ten.  Yes, your mind will rebel at first, running riot like a toddler past his nap time.  But every time it tries to focus on anything other than the prayer, you just gently and non-judgmentally turn your attention back to the words of the prayer.

Add these practices one at a time over time as you are able.  Pick one and insist on it with yourself.  Meaning, keep returning to it after forgetting until it’s habitual.  You know, habitual, like checking email when you’ve got a spare moment, or taking at peek at what’s happening on the Twitternet from your iPhone.

I know, it’s probably not called the Twitternet. But, hey! I’m a boomer, and at least I’m trying, so give me credit for that.

[What's a good book to help with this sort of thing,  you might ask?  Funny you should ask.]

Yes, I know we all have favorite books of the Bible to which we turn in a pinch and to which we return often. And yours may not be the book of Psalms.  But I’m going to dare say that you’re going to need this friend whether you’re drawn to him or not.

Pastoring is an immersion in the human–your own and others.

Jesus immersed himself in humanity by virtue of being born a human, by virtue of his stepping into the waters of baptism–a baptism of repentance for sinners, no less–and by making friends with the book of Psalms.

The psalms are an exploration of what it means to be a human being before God: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful and everything in between.  Angry human, fearful human, crowing human, vulnerable human, righteous human, thankful human,  sinful human, happy human, complaining human, praising human.  Because God wants to be near all of it, and it’s a good thing that he does, because it’s the only way the likes of us will ever be near God.

But you, as a pastor, will be tempted to be other than what you are.  You will be tempted to be what your are supposed to be before God, or what your fellow believers want you to be before God.  Which means that you will often be missing from God, hiding behind one of these personas.

The psalms, over time, will break you of that habit.  When you wish to be refined, a psalm will be vulgar–in it’s brazen hostility toward others, for example, or in its willingness to complain loudly.  Most of the time, the psalms will be more human than you are, or wish to be before God.

I spent a great deal of time arguing with the psalms and the tone they adopt, but I’ve given that up mostly and just accept the reality that they represent me better than I might wish to be represented.  It’s a humbling thing to realize that you need to enter the prayers of someone else to learn how to be yourself.

Over time, the psalms train us to accept our humanity as God apparently does. Which means they train us, over time, to accept people as they are, including ourselves.  And they lead us into the posture that Jesus had toward us fellow human beings: sympathy.

If we can only learn to be our human selves before God as the psalmists learned to be their human selves before God, we can begin to maintain a non-anxious presence before God.  We can learn to accept ourselves, in other words.  And there’s no maintaining an non-anxious presence before others without that.

I’ve found a wonderful way to cozy up to the psalms.  It’s called The Paraclete Psalter.  O my goodness, stop, drop and buy this thing.  It’s only thirteen bucks on Amazon– thin and leather bound, too.  It’s the product of an ecumenical community called The Jesus Community—survivors [Yes! Survivors!] of the Jesus movement that began in the late 1960’s.  When you can find a group, an organized group of Jesus freaks who have survived the turmoil that we baby boomers imposed on the Jesus movement, you know you have found something worth noticing.  These men and women have been praying the psalms daily for a long time and the psalms have become embedded in their spirituality, and this Psalter [collection of psalms] is the by-product.

I’ve been using this for the past month instead of The Divine Hours–the most accessible form of fixed hour prayer available.  I’ll go back to using The Divine Hours, but I’ll also return to this Psalter for a month at a time–or who knows, maybe I’ll just stick with it and The Divine Hours.

There’s just something about pausing to use these prayers of the insistently-human-before-God through the day, when you’re actually going about your can’t-be-anything-but-human business, that makes you realize God might want to be near this mess.

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….

Because we’re lazy; because we’re frightened by earthquakes and want to assure ourselves that it won’t happen where we live; and because there is a power of evil at work in the world who wants to cover up his/its real work.

We’re lazy. We prefer simple answers that we can grasp easily that seem to explain everything. This devil pact is a doozy on that front: why is Haiti in such a mess?  Because it was founded on a pact with the devil. What could be simpler? What could require less mental effort to grasp?

And we’re afraid.  To be going about your business one moment only to have the ground beneath your feet give way the next is a terrifying prospect.  If it could happen there, it could happen here. Fortunately, there’s a reason it happened there: a pact was made with the devil by the nation’s founders.  Our nation, by contrast, had a solid foundation. We’ve got The American Patriot’s Study Bible to prove it.  I kid you not.  Read it and learn how the second amendment was rooted in the book of Genesis.

And because there is a power of evil who likes nothing more than to cover up evil.  Haiti was subjected to the most brutal, cruel slavery by a Christian nation, France.  After the slaves overthrew the French, the developed nations of the time, ours included, made sure that Haiti paid reparations to their French oppressors, for about a hundred years–a crushing debt.   This is all conveniently obscured by the story of some Haitian slaves making a pact with the devil.

And lets not forget our hankering for cheap thrills. How thrilling it is to be let in on a secret.  Most people have a very difficult time explaining why these horrific things happen: an earthquake that costs 150,000 lives (and counting) and leaves a nation devastated.  Ah, but we have a juicy tidbit of insider information: the founders of Haiti made a pact with the devil in a back room somewhere on January 1, 1804, or whenever it wasn’t.

Don’t fall for this stuff.

Instead, do something immediately to help the Haitian people.  For starters, figure out how much money you make in a single day’s work, and give that amount to an organization involved in bringing relief to Haiti.  If you make 100,000 a year that’s, what? $400.  If you make 25,000 a year, it’s $100.

There is a universal gesture when confronted with staggering tragedy: we cover our mouths.  This is wisdom at work:  there are no explanations for these things.  The Bible bears witness to the reality of evil. The Bible reveals humans engaged in a struggle with evil.   The Bible, amazingly, reveals a God both sovereign over evil and affected, touched, bruised, bloodied by it himself.  The one thing the Bible doesn’t try to do when it comes to evil is explain it.  Neither should we.

The Bible is a book of the history of nations, in it’s own way. One particular nation, Israel, destined to produce the seed of blessing for all nations, Yeshua, from the line of Judah, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham, to whom a promise was given.  The book of Genesis is a book of inspired history.  The writers, whoever they may have been, moved by the Spirit to discern the key themes and motifs of our inter-generational connections.  Envy, rivalry, hatred between and among brothers being a powerful theme.  Written in a way to help us draw our own conclusions, not have some preacher reduce it all to a factoid. We read Genesis and wonder if we’re not  in the mess we’re owing to the way we treat each other and our grudge holding nature.  Hatred begets hatred, violence begets violence, and it takes an inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven to reverse the trend.  The Holy Spirit who inspired the book, moves between its pages and its readers of many generations, whispering its meaning.

What do we even know of Haiti’s history?  A French colony that was a cash cow for the colonial power: producing sugar for the tea of the wealthy on the backs of brutal slavery. A slavery so severe, the local slaves couldn’t replenish their numbers by reproduction (contrast Israel’s multiplication in Egypt under slavery–so it must have been more brutal than that.)  Leading to a new import: African human beings brought in to work the sugar cane fields of what would become Haiti.

A violent uprising of the slaves, overthrowing their white masters, the first successful slave uprising leading to national independence.  A threatening turn of events for the United States of America which had it’s own slaves and wasn’t too keen on violent uprisings even though it had one of it’s own at it’s birth.  It took 60 years before we recognized Haiti’s independence; Abe Lincoln was the man who finally did it.  But in the meantime, the people of Haiti were forced by the Western powers to pay reparations to their former masters, the French, even while laboring under a trade embargo.  U.S. troops sent in to quell violence and to enforce the repayment of the debt.  Yes, the debt that former slaves were paying their former masters–as reparation.

And on it goes.  So which of these facts of history do we select to explain an earthquake?  And which earthquake in which country?

I don’t have a clue.  My grasp of Haiti’s history is minimal.  Laughably inept.

Let us in the face of our ignorance of history remain silent in a time of tragedy.  Silent about causes and effects of earthquakes whose proximate cause at least is geologic.  The ground beneath our feet is shifting sand, as the hymn reminds us.  Our rock is not the one beneath our feet.

As Rich Nathan wrote recently in an Ohio op-ed piece, in the face of tragedy, we should shut up and find a way to help.  We should take a lesson from Job’s comforters, whose words were only more pain for their suffering friend.

A young couple approached me after church and said, you probably don’t remember us, but you saved our marriage.

Say what?  Yes, we came to talk to you after church about six years ago when we were newly married. My 57 year old memory started kicking in.  They were a very young couple, married after a very short courtship and they were in the ugly process of tearing themselves apart when I sat down with them in my office.  You said two things to us that turned us around.

So what were the two things, I asked–just to see if they were blowing smoke.  First, you told us that we were being really hard on each other and we needed to know that there is a line that two people can cross and once you cross it there’s no turning back. But the line isn’t labeled.  You only find out that you’ve crossed when you find that you can’t get back. You told us that you thought we were really close to that line.  That scared us, and we needed to be scared because what we were doing to each other was dangerous. And we stopped right then and there.   We stopped being so hard on each other like that because we didn’t want to cross that line.  Until you told us, we didn’t even know there was one.

So what was the second thing?  You said you thought we were still just getting to know each other when we got married and needed to give each other some space to build more trust. And so we did that and now we know each other a lot better.

The thing is, they were beaming.  They were obviously deeply in love with each other and sincerely grateful for the counsel.

I wanted to stop, drop and thank the Lord that he allowed me to part of their story.  That he allowed me to be a pastor.

But here’s my point young pastor: what did I do immediately after that conversation?  I had another conversation, and another–you know what it’s like after church.  It was the Christmas program–my head was spinning as it always does when we do something like that.  Lots of people to catch and thank.  And then get ready for Christmas week.

But now I am older pastor and I realized how precious was the encounter I’d just had.  This was encouragement from heaven for me.  This couple waited behind, went out of their way to talk to me.  God had them go out of their way to talk to me. And I had better bother to listen to what they had to say.

I told my daughter without using names. And my wife.  And Donnell Wyche, our associate pastor.  I’ll tell my son, who is also a pastor next time I see him.  Why?  Because we need to capture encouragement any way we can.  One way to do that is to tell others–chosen others, not anyone.  People who appreciate what a gift it is to learn that one one does makes a difference every now and then.

This couple lives in another state and were just in for a visit.

It reminded me that our job as pastors is not defined by our own congregations.  Our commitment is to the kingdom of God.  People come and people go, especially in a high-transit town like Ann Arbor.  We are a way station for many who are passing through this University town on their way to whatever is next.

Did they put a check in the offering plate that morning?  Probably not.  They have their own church to support back home, one would hope.

Right. So, young pastor,  were you called to create the largest, most successful church possible?  Or were you called to be a pastor, an under-shepherd, a sheep dog for the master, a go-fer for the King of the Universe?  The same one who told Peter, “Feed my sheep.”

Do what you need to do to hold on to the encouragement that comes your way. Don’t let it roll off your back.  Don’t let it slip into the abyss while your brain laser locks on whatever negative thought it’s been obsessed with lately.

Gifts like this have a purpose: to get you through your day, your week, your year, your life.   Help them do their job.

Friedman was a family systems counselor and a rabbi who worked closely with pastors, rabbis, ministers and their families.  How I wish I’d read this book thirty years ago!

Friedman says we live in an age of anxiety, owing to the unprecedented rate of change in modern society.  Anxiety, according to Friedman, isn’t just a function of your inner deepies, it’s a function of systems (families, churches, societies) that are facing rapid change. In the face of change, people go on hyper-alert status.  They become more reactive than responsive, more fear driven than love driven, more hostile, more angry. Does any of this sound familiar?

In an age of anxiety, more people respond to leadership [that is a leader taking the lead] with various forms of sabatage, according to Friedman.  Sabatage is common and it often comes from members of the group who have poor self regulation skills.

The Limits of Empathy

Leaders in the modern era have been taught to respond to this  by exercising empathy.  Empathy is an attempt to feel what others feel; leaders try to feel what others feel in order to be more effective leaders.  Forget the fact that it is impossible to feel what others feel.  You and I can never know that what I see when I see “red” and what you see when you see “red” are the same thing.  You cannot experience my consciousness and I cannot experience yours.

We can feel with others (sympathy) but empathy (feeling what others feel) is, of course, impossible.  We can reveal what we feel to others, but others cannot get inside of us to feel what we feel.  When Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain,” in other words, he was mistaken.  The pain he felt was his own, by definition.

Friedman says that most of the stress experienced by pastors, rabbis and other congregational leaders, is not due to overwork but to the stress of seeking to empathize with those who are responding anxiously in the congregational system.

Self-Define, Stay Connected

The key to effective leadership, he says, is maintaining a non-anxious presence when surrounded by anxiety–staying connected, but not seeking to lead by trying to empathize with those who are upset.  Listen, yes.  Seek to understand, yes.  But do not attempt to crawl into another person’s insides in the hope that by feeling what they feel you may be of help to them. That attempt, according to Friedman, only serves to tap you into the anxiety that is running rampant in families, congregations, and societies.

Instead, according to Friedman, a leader should, after listening, and while staying connected, self-define.  State clearly what one thinks to the other.  Not autocratically, but directly.   Let the other be the other.  Remember that the other has a Savior, who is alone authorized to feel what the other feels and you, as an under-shepherd at best, are not that savior.

But don’t take my word for it.  I’m just repeating what I read in an effort to understand it better myself.  Now I’m on to Friedman’s earlier book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue.

Read this gem, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, for yourself.  Stop, drop and read it, but only if you are an anxious young pastor.

Have you noticed that when you’re out to eat and order a Coke, the wait staff will often says, “Is Pepsi OK?”  That’s because they’ve been trained to make it clear that Coke and Pepsi are separate brands.  In trademark law, the owner of a brand has a responsibility to enforce the brand’s identity.  If someone is selling a different product under the name of your brand, you can lose the trademark to that product if you don’t take legal action to enforce the trademark.

Yes this branding metaphor has roots in a consumer culture.  In such a culture trademarks are important. Samsung can’t make and sell something called an iPhone.

Is this a legitimate metaphor to use when talking about communicating the gospel?  I think so.  We are called to communicate the gospel in the language of the culture in which we find ourselves.   We may pretend that we don’t like being in a consumer culture–even as we consume more than any other people in the world or the history of the planet. But here we are, all of us profoundly affected by this consumer culture.

Brand = Name = Reputation

And there is a concern in Scripture that corresponds to the consumer culture concern for trademark.   A person’s most precious possession is his or her name.  God goes to great lengths to protect the integrity of his Name.  Using his name in vain is, in the language of our culture “trademark infringement.”

A name is something that often precedes a person.  You live you life and gain a reputation, and people who don’t know you personally have heard of you.  They know your reputation.  Your name precedes you.   They are inclined to receive you or not, based on your name.

Like it or not, Christianity has a name in our culture–a reputation that precedes it before people engage it personally.  And this reputation powerfully affects whether people are inclined or disinclined to receive it.

Why shouldn’t it be so?  Jesus himself said, “Ye shall judge them by their fruits.”   Isn’t it fair to judge a religion by the reputation that those who carry the name Christian have?   We certainly judge other religions by that standard.

Who Establishes the Brand Identity in the Public Sphere?

So what is the most powerful force in American Christianity over the last thirty years?  Evangelical Christianity, hands down. All the sociological surveys indicate that it is so.  Politicians cater to it and it pays when they do. This means the evangelical Christians have a powerful impact on the reputation of Christianity in this place.

As insiders, we can believe all the good things about this movement that we want to.  We would be justified in doing so.  The warmth of the people, the concern for missions, the good deeds that go unnoticed all over the world, the money given to good causes, the volunteer hours for good deeds.  It’s all there and it’s real.   But alongside all that is another public face that powerfully affects our reputation in this place.  His reputation too.

For decades evangelicals were known for avoiding involvement in the public square. They didn’t vote as much as other groups.  It wasn’t cool to be involved in politics.  Then something shifted in the 1970’s.  A number of very high profile evangelical and fundamentalist leaders decided to get involved in the public square.

What was the name of the first multi-denominational organization devoted to this?  The Moral Majority, named by a political operative named Paul Weyrich.

Is this how Christians are to be known in the public square? As the Moral Majority?  Wouldn’t it be great if we were known as moral people? But is it wise or biblical or representative of the Spirit of Jesus that we should call ourselves, “The Moral Majority”?   Especially when President Nixon used the term “The Silent Majority” to refer to all those who supported his policies, while he was busy breaking the law.  That was the cultural precursor to the term, “Moral Majority.”

What if instead of calling ourselves, The Moral Majority, we called ourselves, The Friends of Sinners, or The Broken Majority?

The Moral Majority waxed and waned and was replaced by another organizition: the Christian Coalition.  But the Christian Coalition was a politically conservative organization made up of Christians.  Is that the reputation of Jesus we want to promote?  Jesus the Conservative? Jesus the Liberal?  Jesus the Libertarian?  Jesus the Socialist?  Jesus the Facist?  Jesus the Republican? Jesus the Democrat?

This organization waxed and waned and was replaced by Focus on the Family–founded by Dr. James Dobson as a resource for marriage relationships and parent-child relationships, etc.  But over time it became increasingly political, and when the Christian Coalition tanked, it formed a political arm called The Family Research Council, another politically conservative organization made up of Christians.   Against abortion, gay marriage, gun control, the science behind global warming–the usual hodgepodge, some good, some bad, some debatable, depending on your point of view.

While this was happening over the course of ten, twenty, now thirty years, most pastors in evangelical churches–myself included for too long–didn’t notice how powerful the cultural impact was becoming.  We were like the frog in the pan of water that rises slowly to a boil. We were convinced of the dangers of a secularity that wasn’t as tolerant as it claimed to be.  We felt marginalized by a residual disdain for faith in some institutions–the secular university for example.  We felt like a minority group within society, even as we were becoming something very close to a majority.   And we were and still are concerned about abortion on demand through six months of pregnancy and with a broadly defined “health” exception well into the ninth month, right up to birth, as the  law of the land–the most libertarian approach to abortion in the world, perhaps, the least legal protection for unborn life, less legal protection than many European nations.

And there were very shrewd politicians who took advantage of us.  Richard Nixon being the first, but not the last.  He even snookered Billy Graham, our chief spokesperson.

The Religious Right

And we became allied with that movement called “The Religious Right.”  By we, in this context, I mean mainly white, suburban evangelicals.  Talk about a branding problem!  By an unfortunate coincidence when the brain hears “right” it doesn’t just think, the opposite of “left.”  It thinks the opposite of “wrong.”  Put this together with the first evangelical-fundamentalist political organization of note, The Moral Majority.  Is it any wonder we gained a reputation as self-righteous, as people who proclaim themselves to be righteous?

And slowly but surely we began to lose effectiveness in the one thing we were commanded by our true founder to do: preach good news to every nook and cranny of creation, including the one we find ourselves in.  People on the outside of our faith stayed away in droves.  Yes, we gathered our own into larger and larger churches.  Along with them came people who didn’t mind the reputation that we had gained in the wider culture, or were willing to ignore it. But many others bothered by the reputation that preceded us in their perceptions of us wouldn’t be caught dead in an evangelical church. And not because they are disinterested in Jesus of Nazareth, whose reputation, remarkably remains pretty good as soon you make the obvious point that the founder isn’t always well represented by the followers.

Colorado Springs, We Have a Problem!

Now we’ve got a problem and a big one: a branding problem.   And we have a problem in our own communities, because perfectly devoted and wonderful believers also happen to be politically conservative, rather than politically liberal if forced to choose between those labels. They are conservative for many different reasons–a distrust of big government, a belief that we need to reemphasize personal responsibility, etc.

How do pastors say, “The Religious Right” doesn’t represent all Christians, without sounding like they want to replace the Religious Right with the Religious Left?  Especially when many evangelical Christians have been socialized not to consider that there might be a difference between Christian and conservative or between Christian and liberal?  That this might be a very complex combination of identities, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not.   Pastors who object to the identification of Christianity with the Religious Right are branded by many conservative believers as liberal, outsiders, bad people, traitors.    So we tend to keep our concerns to ourselves.

The fog is lifting, but it’s still a real mess, and pastors don’t like messes.  But there’s a lot at stake: the name of Jesus for starters.  And we will answer to him for how we face this problem, which we cannot do by minimizing it.

“A bruised reed he will not break, and smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” Our master is like that.  He is the master of gentleness,  extreme gentleness.

And where is such gentleness especially called for?  Remember the woman caught in adultery?  The religious leaders full of zeal for righteousness nabbed her in the act and brought her to Jesus for a ruling.  They were within their rights.  She was wrong.  They were right. Her deeds were an offense to God and the community and to them.  They had Scripture to back it up.

But when they brought her to him, he knelt down and wrote in the sand. Doodled, maybe. He refused to look up at her or them.  He refused to speak.  He refused to engage them in their display of righteousness, because it wasn’t true enough for him.

In fact, in the whole account, he NEVER spoke to them about her,  as though she were none of their business.  He had something private to say to her. Presumably we only know if it because she told someone when she was ready.  They were not privy to this.  No doubt they went about declaiming how soft he was on sin, being a sinner himself.

In our culture-war mode we can afford to rail against this and that and the other.

Not pastors when it comes to the people who would be regarded as the sinners of our day–the people on the outs of conventional religion.  And not evangelicals who seek to represent the friend of sinners.

Gentleness means not speaking before you know what you’re speaking about.  It means holding your tongue often when you DO know what you’re speaking about.  It means listening carefully to the experience of others with a view toward understanding their struggles. Can you see what they are facing from within their own experience, alongside your own outside view?

In my early days as a pastor, I was sometimes more concerned with being right than being gentle.  And in my being right I was often most wrong because the righteousness I manifested was not good enough.  Not pure love enough.  It was ordinary religious righteousness.

Young Pastors Take Heed

Can you think of any group of people whom Jesus would long to engage through the church in extreme gentleness?     Thirty years ago the church began to relate to divorced people seeking remarriage with this gentleness, even though many of them were divorced for the wrong reasons in the first place, making any remarriage a simple matter of adultery by any reading of Scripture.  By the consensus of the church a hundred years ago, rare indeed was the divorce that could legitimately result in a remarriage. People divorced and remarried and quietly quit their religion.

Not too long ago, annulments in the Catholic church were very rare. Today they are common.  Not too long ago, Protestant churches weren’t so hot at making room for divorced and remarried people.  We forget that the great apologist, C.S. Lewis was married late in life to a divorced woman, Joy Davidman.  There’s hardly a church in the United States that would blink at his marriage today, but in his day–not so long ago–it was outside the bounds of the Anglican church.  Based on their best understanding of the Bible, mind you.

I had a nice tidy understanding of that issue–divorce and remarriage. I studied the Scripture on this issue more than any other pastor I know, actually. But human life is messier than the neat and tidy categories I derived from my study. But with experience, I wrestled with the Scripture touching on these questions from a different perch, based on a more informed understanding of what people go through when their marriages are messed up or when they are messed up within their marriages.

We’re not just accountable for our interpretation of any given text of the Bible. We’re also accountable for the perch we adopt when making our interpretation.

What Informs our Pastoral Approach to Divorce and Remarriage?

Do you think our approach to divorce and remarriage is just a simple matter of deciding what the texts mean?  Or is our approach also affected by knowing people–and loving people–who are in bad marriages or married to bad people or are struggling with their own intractable human weaknesses?   There isn’t an evangelical pastor in the United States who doesn’t know and love someone whose divorce and remarriage wouldn’t pass the Scripture test.  Many of them are evangelical pastors, board members, prominent leaders.  Is this good or bad?  Perhaps it’s both, perhaps it’s mixed, perhaps it will be revealed by One who knows better than we do,

Is this fraught territory?  It sure is.  We want to uphold marriage and keep married people, especially those with children, from giving up on their covenant promises too soon or for the wrong reasons.  But we’ve managed to find our way to a gentle approach to this issue and for good reason.

Are there other groups of people we just don’t know?  Or don’t care about?

Jesus wasn’t gentle with everyone though, was he?  Sometimes he was quite ungentle with his own disciples, especially when they wanted to keep the circle small.  He was extremely ungentle with the religious leaders of his day–but his assertive, sometimes scathing rebukes, were in the service of his strategy for dealing with sinners.

We need to get our gentle back.

How Do We Get Our  Gentle Back?

How DO we get our gentle back?  This doesn’t happen by figuring out how to think correctly about gentleness or the balance between gentleness and severity.  It doesn’t happen by arriving at the correct view of whatever behaviors bother us.  Oh there’s work to be done there, for sure–serious wrestling to be done.  But that does not get our gentle back.

Gentleness happens by meditating on Scripture, by spending time in the Presence, by allowing the Presence proximity, by silence, by communion with God, by facing one’s own stuff in relationship with others. It happens as we  step through the portal Jesus has opened for us into the love of Abba, Father.

The more we have anything to say on these issues, the more we must be pickled in this love.  And I do mean pickled.  Sitting in the love of the Abba, Father like cucumbers submerged in brine, soaking it in.

Advice to young pastors: get thee pickled in love.  Praying isn’t enough.  Study isn’t enough.  Thinking clearly isn’t enough.  You must be pickled in love.  Wasn’t this what made Jesus gentle, without turning him into a wimp?  Wasn’t this what drew the sinners to him like tweenage girls to the Jonas Brothers?  Isn’t this the Jesus who has healed us whenever we’ve been healed?

We need to get our gentle back.