Let's Start By Saying Ministry Is Relational

A pastor comes to terms with the church’s idols of Trump, money and power https://t.co/1Dn0mqSK8V

— Raw Story (@RawStory) December 30, 2022

By which I mean, it's not transactional:

With a halting voice, I told my congregation anyway how it felt when I watched would-be insurrectionists carry Bibles and Christian flags into the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, suggesting that their violent overthrow of a democratic election was God-ordained.

I felt vulnerable saying these things, but I also trusted that my congregation would listen. We had a shared bond, a shared trust, a shared relationship. I baptized their babies and stood vigil in my clergy collar at the local cemetery as a military band played taps and a veteran’s ashes were laid to rest. I led prayer at the local Memorial Day picnic after rounds were fired into the air, the names of lives lost were read, and children scattered into the street to grab the spent bullets.

They knew that I’d marched with clergy for racial justice after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin just six miles from my home. They hadn’t all liked it very much that their pastor was out there supporting “the Blacks,” as some people put it. But others sent me messages about their Black family members and the racism they’d faced in rural Minnesota. They were glad I was bearing witness on behalf of a Savior who did not come to redeem only white Americans.

We’d settled into an uneasy truce, my church and I. They tolerated my NPR and CNN appearances, but they preferred it when I quoted country songs in my sermons and we could joke together about my former career as a sportswriter. Gingerly, we trusted each other, forgave each other, and listened to each other.

But they didn't have a Damascus road experience when she told them how she felt.  Huh.

I was in the pulpit (still) on 9/11.  It was international news, I thought my congregation wanted to hear from me about it.

They didn't.

Not that I went full Wendell Berry on them (I knew better).  But I assumed they were concerned.  They weren't.  It was New York City; this was Houston.  It didn't touch their lives at all.  It was practically in a foreign country.  They had their own concerns, their own interests; mostly they were old (as I understand now, being "old" myself) and had seen violence before.  Basically, they were non-plussed.  Violence was the way of the world.  Not violence in their lives (that was another matter entirely), but violence on a grand scale in a far away place?  Meh.  It happens.

A part of me thought the very good Christians of my church’s little rural Midwestern town would take down their Trump flags on their own after the attempted insurrection. I thought they’d see the lives lost at the Capitol, the willful assault on American democracy, the shouts of the n-word at the Capitol police officers from the Trump-supporting rioters, and decide that simply wasn’t the association they wanted to claim any longer.

Like I said, I was naive. For many of the good white Christians I knew — not only in my church’s little town but across America, whom I’d interviewed for this book throughout 2018 — and for my dear friends and family members, January 6 was nothing to be ashamed of. Violence had always been necessary to sustain wealth and power for the white ruling class, and violence was also required to sustain the support of the rural white Christians who’d tied their fate to their economic overlords in New York City, California, and DC, with Rs behind their names.

Yeah, pretty much like that.

I will tell you for free: never tell your congregation how you feel, expecting they will sympathize with you and try to understand you.  They want you to understand them.  Their relationship to you is largely transactional (this is not a universal constant, but it's pretty nearly so).  Your pastoral relationship to them cannot be.  That's the vulnerability, and it's all on the side of the pastor.  Which means you cannot tell the congregation how you feel like you might tell a lover, hoping for a deeper relationship, for understanding and even a change of heart in the audience.  Large groups of people simply don't work that way.  (Individuals in the congregation don't work that way, either.  But that's another matter.) They are not one heart and one mind:  they are a collection of individuals, gathered into units and cliques and probably even families.  You, the pastor, are a stranger in a strange land.  Forget that at your peril.

Sorry, but that's the way it is.

The congregation is never going to see things the way you do.  That's not the fault of Constantine or capitalism or American nationalism or whatever cause you want to blame.  It's human nature.  It's human social order. Niebuhr understood it: an individual can be ethical, can even make decisions for self-sacrifice based on an ethic.  But do we expect a father to make such decisions on behalf of his children?  How many of us would countenance a father who refused his children medical care, vaccines, education, based on his ethics?  Now who is the ethical voice of the congregation?  Who gets to decide what they will hold dear and true? And how do you enforce it?

Yeah; not so simple in reality.

Ministry is relational.  Just because you pray with people and bury their family members and baptize their babies (I baptized the grandchildren of a family who worked very hard to run me out of my last church), doesn't mean you've paid the coin of the realm and now have a deposit of goodwill you can withdraw at your convenience.  You are the pastor.  Your convenience means nothing to your congregation; and it never will.

Sorry, but that's the way it is.

Some members will be kinder, gentler, more hospitable than others.  But the congregation will not change its collective heart and mind because you say what you think are the right words.  Indeed, the problem with congregations is that they are selfish; they expect everyone to think the way they do, and do as they would do.  Even though those are the expectations of every individual making up that congregation, which means each one of them thinks they think as the congregation does, and you as pastor should do as they (each person thinking they are the congregation) says and does.  And your words, your ultimately selfish ambition to get them to change for you, is not going to change them any more than they can get you to change.

It's a relationship; but it's a very transactional one.  What it is not, is a position of power.  You can represent your ideas and beliefs as best you can in the circumstances.  The congregation will cling to theirs.  Congregations have a culture, just like larger societies; and that culture is both virtually genetic (persisting over years and even centuries) and as implacable as stone, to steal a phrase from Sondheim.  Your tears will not alter it, melt it, erode it in the least.  Your shouts will not break it.  Your heart will not warm it, except for a moment or two; and then only for the occasion, not for the long term.

These are the conditions that prevail.