After Clergy Self-Care; the Point of View for My Work as a Public Speaker; In Memoriam

Kierkegaard references will continue until morale improves

Going Beyond Self-Care

The May issue of the Christian Century (subscribe for $10!) features an essay I wrote about what clergy can do after absorbing the wisdom and practice of self-care. Readers of this Substack may recognize some thoughts (and lines) that started taking shape last year in response to an irritating but widely read pastoral quitting post. One thing I appreciate about working for a proper edited publication is that the timeline forces me to push beyond my immediate reactions to specific instances (which will quickly be forgotten even by those few who encounter them). I’ll never be able to hear a colleague apply the term “growth mindset” to themselves without rolling my eyes again, but no one needs my rebuttal of the guy who said it first. So I considered both the insights and the limitations of the “self-care” mindset for clergy and proposed 1) an ethic of solidarity within and beyond our vocation and 2) an embrace of freedom and responsibility for our work as ways to got beyond the necessary routine maintenance of the self:

Survey data suggests that, the self-care revolution notwithstanding, American clergy are a pretty discontented group. When a Barna survey found that more than 40 percent of Protestant clergy had considered leaving ministry in the prior year, a number of us rushed in with explanations. Participation in religious communities is declining. Budgets are struggling. Expectations are often very, even unrealistically, high all the same, and in many congregations the experiences of decline and broader political polarization have instigated or entrenched some bad habits. We need good boundaries to survive, but “healthy boundaries will continue until giving improves” would be a nonsensical message.

A budding literature of lamentation and departure among clergy has grown up, too, especially since the pandemic. When these stories find their way to my social media feeds or my bookshelf, I often recognize their expressions of futility and emotional exhaustion, and I grieve over the mistreatment they sometimes recount. But there is also an unmistakable note of woundedness in these stories traceable, I suspect, to the ghosts of compulsion in our theologies. All this trouble, and God put us up to it.

This piece was a bracing challenge for me, and I’ve been gratified by some very kind responses from people with reason to know what I’m talking about. There is a hand-waving quality to the final turn in a lot of these sorts of arguments, a tendency to point to a better way that lands somewhere between a best-case scenario and a deus ex machina, and for once I felt compelled to resist it. My argument with myself is even preserved in the text.

Public Speaking: Institute of Liturgical Studies

Every once in a while, I get asked to speak at an event. It happens rarely enough that I always enjoy it and, since I don’t have any credentials as a speaker (I’m not a scholar or a prominent writer, and I’ve never pastored a cutting-edge or rapidly-growing church), I always feel obliged to craft something specific to the purpose rather than recycling an article or a book chapter. My goal, at least in Lutheran contexts, is to speak compellingly enough to get more invitations but not so movingly or profoundly that anyone nominates me for bishop at their next synod election.

This month I was a plenary speaker for the Institute of Liturgical Studies at Valparaiso University in Indiana. This event brings together some of the higher-liturgical folks in the Lutheran world (mostly ELCA but some Missouri Synod people), largely from the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, to learn about worship topics and experience some liturgical resources we might not otherwise encounter. The theme was “Creation, not Commodity: The Church’s Liturgy in a Consumer Culture,” and I decided to focus on worship and “content.” Sacraments in the catholic tradition have a commodity form in one sense: they are “undifferentiated goods” whose objective effect is independent of the character of any individual “producer.” My contention is that this kind of “commodity grace” has long been giving way to worship and sacramental life as a “differentiated good,” branded and packaged to appeal to people in various ways, and that this is especially true as digital content becomes a major way people interact with worship along with everything else.

Longtime readers won’t be surprised to hear that I’m ambivalent about turning corporate worship into “content” and unambivalently pessimistic about the ability of “content” to serve as a mode of corporate worship. But it was good for me, and I think helpful for the audience, to make a case not for shunning “content” but for characterizing church ministry as divided between “content” and “anti-content.” The livestream (fittingly, I guess, in light of my thesis) did not capture the Keynote slideshow cleverly edited by my middle child. Perhaps I’ll figure out how to compile the two into one file at some point.

The problem with not getting out a lot is that it is easy to assume that a speaking gig will feel and function more or less like preaching. I’ve become confident and fluent in my weekly preaching, certainly compared to when I started my internship back in 2007. I typically work from an outline in my head or minimal notes. But over a forty-five minute presentation in front of a crowd that mostly doesn’t know me, with an unfamiliar sound system and/or big-brained respondents¹ on hand, I may find myself suddenly stammering over an introductory section I expected to flow easily. That’s humbling. I’ve timed the video to start with the actual content, not the introductory throat-clearing that turned out to be much more halting and choppy than I’d planned (if you really want to hear a few laugh lines through the stammering, you can start at the beginning):

The last slide from the (invisible) Keynote presentation probably sums it up if you want to skip the talking:

In Memoriam: Bethel-Imani Lutheran Church

My ride to Valparaiso from Midway airport ended up routed along 63rd Street, which meant that I got so see some old haunts and point them out to my mother and daughter.² There was the nursing home with the hospice patient who thought I was a different person every time I visited her, until the last time when she asked if I was coming back (I think I lied and said I was). There was the improbably enduring “Eye Can See” Native American effigy/statue on top of what’s now a dental practice. And I was excited to point out the building where I served as intern in 2007-2008, Bethel-Imani Lutheran Church. When we got to Sangamon Street, I saw a building going up in what had been an empty lot in front of the church, and a big backhoe going over the place where the church had been. The land had evidently been sold and scraped.

Bethel-Imani was formed in 1999 out of a merger of then Bethel Lutheran Church and Imani (itself a merger of at least two earlier congregations, St. Matthew and Faith). Bethel had once been pastored by one of the looming names in Chicago ministry, a workaholic white man who had stayed through the neighborhood’s racial transition and was remembered, as I somehow recall, for wearing cowboy hats. Its first pastor after the merger—my supervisor—was a New Orleans native and a true force of nature. He had a wider dynamic range than the pastors I’d come up with, from exceedingly generous to stern and directive to outright confrontational. But above all he was determined. He cared a lot about the youth of the neighborhood, many of whom appeared like sheep without a shepherd, and he made the church constantly available to them. There was Bible study twice a week (no summer break) and Hammond-powered Gospel worship every Sunday, both of which pushed me (and sometimes other participants) beyond my zones of comfort or at least familiarity. A routine after-church meal would be the biggest and best coffee hour I’d ever seen, by a mile. My friends and family came in force when I preached, and without exception they loved it.

But the kids were my biggest (and sometimes harshest) teachers. It so happened that I recently came to read some of my journals from that year. They make me cringe, of course. I had all the right politics but I suffered from main-character syndrome. But I rejoiced to be reminded of details I’d forgotten. Somehow, the teenagers at the church had baited me into playing basketball in the parking lot half-court. Even then, when I was 28, my paltry playing days were way behind me. One of the kids made me a craft cross for protection. It was humbling.

I knew the congregation had dwindled in the years since I was there, but I had the impression that another worshiping community was using the building. I was sad enough that a vibrant, if perennially threadbare, congregation with 60 to 80 or more in worship every week was almost gone within about ten years of my time, but seeing that the building itself was demolished was an unexpected gut punch. I shouldn’t have been surprised (if you read the article I linked above, you’ll get an idea of what it looked and felt like even then), but there it was. This was a place that formed me. More than anything else, it made me a pastor. I will always judge my work by its standard as a resource and presence for a community with immense problems.

How do you measure the impact of such a place and its loss? People try, and good for them. A few of the people I knew and loved there are still with me thanks to Facebook, but I wonder about so many others who worshiped or hung out or briefly sheltered there. I hope they found other places to experience something of that love. For me, it’s just the melancholy of a piece of my own past winking out and the path not taken that haunts me more than any other. Eternal rest and light perpetual.

Other Things to Read

“Experiencing the Total Eclipse” by Jonathan Malesic at Commonweal:

I had read that you see a hole in the sky, with blazing, but not blinding, light behind it. This is accurate. The sky was not completely dark. The space where the sun should have been was completely dark. Around it, yes, a perfect, silver ring, and then what I understand to be the sun’s corona, a wispy blur much, much larger than the black hole.

Tears filled my eyes, doubling and then tripling the image. My mouth quivered. I do not cry frequently. Had I not been in public, I would have utterly broken down. “I had never seen anything like it”: another cliche. Also true. I had never seen anything like it. I could have looked forever.

“An Open Marriage Manifesto?” by Dorothy Fortenberry, also in Commonweal:

Someday, surely, probably someday soon, someone will write the book that More was marketed as: an upbeat, sassy, tale of a woman’s sexual awakening and how great opening her marriage was for her. In the meantime, we are left to wonder why people were so eager to see victory in a story with so much suffering, why the story of a woman’s relentless capitulation to male desire was sold as a feminist feat.

“Can the Left be Happy?” by Ross Douthat in The New York Times (I’d grant more influence to the clout of social-media doomerism but it’s an argument worth entertaining):

The secularization of left-wing politics has made the kind of Christian-inflected cosmic optimism that still defined, say, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign seem increasingly irrelevant or cringe-worthy. Meanwhile, the revival of Marxism and socialism has not been accompanied by any obvious recovery of faith in a Marxist science of history…. Instead you have a fear that when “late capitalism” crashes, it will probably take everybody down with it, a sense we should be “learning to die” as the climate crisis worsens, a belief in white supremacy as an original sin without the clear promise of redemption.

1. An Oxbridge classicist really took me to task for my expansive, Tocquevillian use of the term “democracy” in a paper for a Cambridge workshop and I felt duly chastened until I remembered that I’m an American and we fought a whole war so that I could ignore opinions like his.

2. On the rare occasions when I get invited to speak somewhere, I have always brought either my wife or one of the kids. This was finally my daughter’s turn.