What I've Learned (1)

Section One of this series dealt with what I miss now that I am doing "secular" ministry after thirty years as a parish pastor. Section Two was about what I don't miss. Section Three is talking about "secular ministry."
Links to earlier sections:
Introduction
1. What I Miss: Part 1, part 2, part 3
2. What I Don't Miss: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Interlude
3. Secular Ministry: Part 1, Part 2
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Before finally getting to the point of all this rambling- what I would do differently if I went back into parish ministry- I want to lay another foundational layer that comes as a result of working and living these past three years outside of the institutional church. It’s time to talk about what I have learned – about the church and about life in the non-church world.

Actually, my learning process goes back about 18 years. When I discovered that I am an alcoholic I began attending various 12-step meetings in and around my community. Most of the time, as is appropriate for anonymous organizations, most people didn’t know what I did for a living. Even in a relatively small city it can be surprising how few people really know who you are and what you do.

So the first thing I learned from all that was humility. I was not the center of attention in the city just because I was a pastor. Even in other situations when someone would find out I was the “Moravian pastor” even long-time community members might ask- “And where is the Moravian Church? I’ve never heard of it.”

Ah, the power of humility. The church is not the center we thought it was. Yes it may have been, but that humility was an important step for me- and should be for the church. If we think everyone knows us, we are going to miss a lot of information and opportunity to grow and learn about the people around us.

In those 18 years I have also worked and talked and shared lots of fellowship with people who are not church connected. A goodly number, in fact, have very little good to say about the church. Don’t get them started or you will be sorry. They taught me that the church’s grandiosity and self-centered message turned off more people than brought them in the door.

One of my closest friends over the years was a self-proclaimed “agnostic” who nevertheless had a remarkable spiritual life. One day we were driving to a gathering and passed a church with one of those cutesy message boards. This one said something like the saying:
No Jesus, No Peace. Know Jesus, Know Peace or
Life without Jesus is life without meaning.

They don’t know me, was his first response. They don’t know a thing about what I feel or know or how or where I find meaning. How arrogant.

All I could do was agree- because I knew that he was a man of deep love and meaning and would go out of his way to offer a hand to someone in need. I never agreed that he was an agnostic. It was his way of separating himself from the church-people. No, he wasn’t a Christian or even religious. But he did have a spiritual life that gave him peace and meaning and joy.

Or there was the other close friend who was Jewish. I learned a great deal about the breadth and depth of spirituality from him. His most memorable line to me was about driving east to work in the morning.

Sometimes I have to turn off the radio because the sunrise is so loud.

I knew exactly what he meant. Life took on a joy and a meaning thanks to these caring spiritual friends. They didn’t need to know Jesus to teach me something about God and faith and life.

The arrogance, grandiosity, self-centeredness of the church and many of us as Christians was painful to learn. These are signs of illness, of addiction, of potential personality disorders like narcissism and even anti-social personality. I would often fall in humble contrition before God when faced with such awareness from people I trusted and liked so deeply.

But at least many of these people paid some attention to the church and religion, even if it was to react against it. The second thing I learned which I will talk about next week is the way that a significant minority of those we meet have no interest at all in what we in the church do and have basically ignored us and received a very biased view of us.

But to learn that I had to first go through the humility of these earlier years.