Tag / Pastoral Ministry

by Michael

Questions, Papers, Interviews, & An Upcoming Ordination

“You haven’t seen the last of us.”  Those were the words of a member of the small group of people who interviewed me during the first part of last Saturday’s ordination interview.  I wrote three posts about my process toward ordination in the Evangelical Covenant Church, which you can read here, here, and here.

Well, my final interviews were Saturday, which followed up from my earlier session at the Conference level in the fall.  Saturday I met with a group of four people for an hour.  They had seen my profile and all my applications.  They probably saw the summary of my progress in the denomination’s classes and read through the experiences I had listed from the last four years.  They pulled my paper up on their laptops and read through their highlighted questions. 

I was asked about my calling to ministry and about my theology of human sexuality.  They wanted me to talk about my understanding of congregational polity since I came from an African American church that was not of the same governing structure.  They asked about preaching, after having heard my sermon sample and read the evaluation from my church’s Leadership Team.  We talked about rest and what that looks like for me.  They complimented my paper, which made my day.

After that, I left, they discussed me, and called me back a half hour later into a room with four times as many people.  We all introduced ourselves and they asked me to answer one of the previous questions I had already answered so that part of the Board could hear me answer a question–the one about sexuality.  Then they asked about my recreational life.  I told them that my son was often entertaining, not always but often.  That was my best answer in the moment. 

They said that my interview and process were favorable, that they were recommending me for ordination.  They smiled and I did too.  It was our way of acknowledging that much work had been done.  I was nervous, though, because ordination really isn’t something to congratulate a person over as much as it’s a reason to pray for a person!  That’s probably why that group of pastors and leaders laid their hands on me and prayed.

Then I hopped onto the Blue line, went to my office, talked briefly with my pastor about random church things, and met with an engaged couple getting married this spring. 

Upon reflection, I think the words from that seasoned colleague stuck out the most.  You haven’t seen the last of us.  Looking at what ministry I’ve already done, and imagining what’s next, those are searching and encouraging words.  To me they mean that the ups and downs of pastoral leadership, the moments when words can’t be said or won’t be said, the frustrating times when you feel or are misunderstood–during those times–there is a community of people around you.  A group of coworkers in the larger Church that you can look around for and find.

by Michael

Signatures Are Counted, Announcing My Intentions

Well, actually, no signatures have been counted concerning me, and I have no intentions to announce.  However, the pastor who I grew up under and alongside–the same pastor who gave me my first ministry post–wrote the other day, in his Facebook status update, that he was considering a run for the mayoral job being left by Chicago’s Richard M. Daley.  He asked, “What do you think?”  I commented that my short answer was no and that I’d need a couple days and a longer email to tell him more about my thoughts.  So I emailed him. 

Then I started thinking a bit more broadly, pulling myself away from Bishop Trotter in particular and toward the broader question of whether a pastor could be a politician in general.  I wasn’t altogether convinced that my Bishop was considering a run.  Knowing him, I left open the possibility that he could have been throwing out a good question, trying to get some feedback.  He, indeed, confirmed in his reply that he was teasing.  But the broad question of how a pastor might mix inside a political world intrigued and intrigues me. 

Now, my wife and a few of my closest allies will readily remind me that, in the past, I’ve nursed or jilted or turned over this consideration as a personal professional question.  So, I’m not distant from it.  But I’d like to make a few observations, especially given my last post about a pastor’s job description, and see what you think.  In other words, do you see the two roles working together in a person?  Have you?

1) Pastors are not new to serving and leading in the political arena.  In my city and state, for example, Rev. James Meeks (my wife’s pastor when she was a child) currently serves as a state senator.  He pastors one of the region’s largest churches, and it seems he’s found this balance for several years.  Rev. Floyd Flake leads a thriving AME congregation in New York, and for part of his pastoral tenure he was a sitting Congressman.  There are historical examples too.  Most noted, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. from New York led a church while serving in the US Congress.  There are many others.

2) It’s a good thing to have people of faith in politics.  Of course, the question is, should those people of faith be preachers in general and pastors in particular?  A pastor is charged to “feed the flock,” so says the New Testament.  And while the roles of pastors have changed over the centuries–to the point where we have specializations like pastors of this and pastors of that–much of the basics of being a pastor sits the same.  We preach and teach and pray and marry and eulogize and cry and fast and motivate people to follow Someone great.  And somewhere along the way the pastor has to gauge whether his or her commitments in one area conflict, diminish, or enliven commitments in the other.  I would imagine similiar questions could be raised for non-Christian spiritual leaders like rabbis, imans, and on through the line.

3) What comes first, the constituency before me or the God before me?  This may be an unfair question.  Here’s the thing about Christianity–and remember, that’s the place from which I offer my scattered ramblings–in this faith, we exalt the person of Jesus and all that he says for the world that he runs.  If Jesus is in charge, what he says happens.  Jesus gets what Jesus wants.  Of course, Jesus isn’t running for mayor or governor.  But if a follower of Jesus or, more pointedly, a pastor of one of Jesus’ churches is running, when and how does that person live into their responsibilities as a spiritual leader while living into those explicit responsibilities as a political leader?  They don’t always conflict, but they probably don’t always converge.  What would be that pastor’s first responsibility?  Would she or he compromise internally or externally on something that either God or the people expected, and when she or he made that compromise, what would that mean for her or his fit for leadership in either arena?

4) Serving the church.  Perhaps this is more of that third point.  When you serve the church, your hopes and goals come from a spiritual center.  The expectation in church leadership is that you’ll give yourself over to the agenda of the Divine, and when that agenda conflicts with yours, you will adjust.  After all, who is able to compete successfully with God?  Who in history picked a fight with God and won?  The same is true about serving God.  You do what God asks/expects.

I could likely go on, but I’m interested in what questions and comments come up for you.  What do you think about a pastor serving as a political leader?  Do you think that automatically brings compromises?  Do you have connections to people who’ve done this well?

by Michael

What a Pastor Does

I’m writing this post to clarify the long description that is the pastor’s.  Three things are in my mind as I blog.  First, there is a pastor in Florida whose actions are pushing a lot of people in my position to say, in other words, “Hey! We don’t do that!” 

Second, I’ve been writing or revising job descriptions since I first met with HR expert Bryan and his wife, Attorney Lashonda Hunt after I became the equivalent of a pastor with wide administrative responsibilities at Sweet Holy Spirit several years back.  I’m revising role descriptions now, including my own so this post is a reminder of sorts. 

And third, one of my mentors, my childhood-through-young-adulthood pastor, asked a really intriguing question, which I’ll talk about in the next post.  His status update is making me think about what we do and whether we can do this ministry while doing other things.

I’m interested to know what you’d add to this as you think about your pastor or spiritual leader.  For you who are spiritual leaders, contribute please.  Lincoln and Mamiya, in The Black Church in the African American Experience, said that the clergy and the church, particularly Black clergy and churches, “have carried burdens and performed roles and functions beyond their boundaries of spiritual nurture in politics, economics, education, music, and culture.”  I won’t be very specific going through these responsibilities.  In fact, I’m trying to be broad as I write these. 

Alright pastors…

1) Love people.  And not just people from our churches but plain people.  People we know and don’t.  People, we believe by our faith, that God knows.  This is the umbrella imperative to our work as religious leaders.  Without love, what we do can be summed up as pointless noise.  It means different things to do this, to offer love without condition.  It could mean staying on the phone with a person as he struggles with a problem.  It could mean sitting in a living room as someone repeats stories and recollections of a deceased relative’s life.  It could mean saying again the same thing you’ve said a dozen times.  It could mean remembering a detail, an important date, or a name.  Love looks a hundred and one ways.  It’s active in our work.  We don’t always love well.  We fail and sometimes more than we succeed.  We are subject to biases and wrongs like others.  But we must love or we should really do something else with our time.  Love lays the foundation for every other thing.  Like the cement floor in a home, love must be present, without cracks or blemishes, in order for the structure of our pastoral leadership to stand.  Indeed, those cracks and blemishes that decorate our attempts to love are remedied by time and pain and grace.

2) Promote the scriptures.  Reading is fundamental to most religious traditions.  There is history to learn and information to absorb and own and understand.  Of course for the Christian leader this means to read, study, reflect, and interpret scripture.  There’s no way to get around the fact that reading and interpreting and everything in between will produce a diverse reading of our scriptures.  But there is no stronger part of the job, so if we don’t do this, if we don’t do this well, everything else collapses.  One of my teachers said that the words of scripture are dangerous–because they intend to change us.  No one comes to them without either submitting to them or, being offended by them, wholeheartedly objecting.  A pastor is there, first, to put a person in front of those dangerous words.  Perhaps I should say a pastor is there, first, to put himself or herself in front of them.

3) Lead well with integrity.  Leaders lead.  We pull, push, and elbow those who follow us.  We move toward something, someone, some purpose or mission.  We do so with integrity.  Darlene Johnson is one of the women I think of when I talk about integrity.  She died last week.  I worked with Ms. Darlene.  She worked in the ante-chamber leading to my office at the last churched I served.  She was the first person I really greeted most mornings.  I hated to talk before 10AM or before that cup of tea, which I never found before 10AM.  Ms. Darlene heard what I said during my phone calls.  She saw my facial expressions when I met with people.  She watched me ignore certain folks and she sometimes explained when and if I wasn’t available.  Her presence tutored me in truth-telling and integrity.  Whatever I was going to say or do was heard and seen by someone else.  Of course, someone else always hears and sees, particularly since I believe in the Unseen One who is God, but Ms. Darlene was there, steps away, and her presence was no less divine.  She taught me to lead and serve by attaching truth to everything I did.  I already miss her smile and the melodic way she called my name while smiling.  But every time I open the door to my office, even at a different church, I remember what she taught me.  And everyday I leave my door open while I work as a reminder.

4) Pray with and for others.  One of the best things we do is talk to God.  Of course, this talk can seem delusional to some, but connecting with the Sacred, speaking to and with the Holy One, is central to loving and doing and being.  Talking to God with and for others is hard and pleasing work.  It grounds me, anchors me, and reminds me of something so easily forgotten–bidden or unbidden, God is present. 

5) Support the community where he lives.  I don’t use he to describe anything other than my own gender.  Along with the great men and women of my denomination, I gladly affirm the only real thing I’ve ever lived, that sisters are just as called and gifted to do anything, at any level, a man can in pastoral leadership.  That said, pastors live and serve in a place.  If we’re not present, where we are, our support and strength and leadership in that place goes lacking.  That’s my problem when we pastors go everywhere except where we’re called, where we’re planted, where we’re stationed.  It can be a strong temptation for a pastor to leave his post to do something else, perhaps, something more glamorizing, or, even better, something easier.  But in my book, it’s a stronger work to affix your heart where you are and to stay.  Staying takes courage and fortitude and stamina.  Now, my experience allows me to expand or at least define what I mean by community.  God defines the community a pastor is called to.  So, I don’t intend community to be the geographical boundaries named for me by legislative districts or neighborhood names.  I mean community the way one wise preacher did when he said that the world was his parish.  The world is a pastor’s community most broadly.  But a pastor’s particular community is the placed to which he or she was called, was told to go, was summoned by God to serve.  We must support those communities and do so ferociously.

If you’re interested to reading about a pastor’s role, my friend David Swanson gave me in 2002 the best book I’ve read in my so-far-still-short years of ministry.  It’s called The Reformed Pastor and it’s by Richard Baxter, a Puritan preacher whose language is of a more seasoned English tone than mine.  It’s a great, thoughtful, spiritually compelling read that points to the beauty, depth, and disciplined rigor of what it means to be a church leader.  Much is quotable in Baxter, but I’ll end with these lines (from pg. 75):

The whole course of our ministry must be carried on in a tender love to our people.  We must let them see that nothing pleaseth us but what profiteth them; and that what doeth them good doth us good; and that nothing troubleth us more than their hurt.  Yea, the tenderest love of a mother should not surpass ours.  We must even travail in birth, till Christ be formed in them.  They should see that we care for no outward thing, not money, not liberty, not credit, not life, in comparison of their salvation; but could even be content, with Moses, to have our names blotted out of the book of life rather than that they should not be found in the Lamb’s book of life.

by Michael

I Hope They Ordain Me, pt. 3 of 3

As I said in the first post, I am working on a paper as a part of my ordination process.  I like papers.  I haven’t always.  In fact, it took a conversation and a graded essay from Dr. Timothy Boddie, then English professor at Hampton University, before I started to like writing.  Dr. Boddie told me something simple but life-changing.  He said–and this isn’t spectacular literally–that I was a good writer. 

I couldn’t take his words too far.  It was my first semester.  I had many more essays to write.  He knew that.  He knew that he was first complimenting or commenting on the work in front of him.  He was speaking more to potential than to evidence.  But.  That conversation changed the way I look at myself and at writing.  Suddenly it was something I could do.  Writing was something I was maybe even good at.

I’ve written a few papers since that conversation as a freshman at Hampton.  As I look at this essay for my ordination, I’m thinking, “I’ve done this before.”  I’ve done it in seminary and other places.  So I look forward to pulling thoughts down next week into some form.

It’ll give me another chance to articulate what I think, why I think it, and how it looks in the context of a church setting.  I’m not working in the academy but in a congregation.  In the congregation, everything a pastor does–not quite everything–should has some meaning, significance, or relevance to the mission of that church.  Knowing for the sake of knowing, producing knowledge alone, doesn’t work.  Knowledge ties to doing and being.  So I’m looking forward to those paragraphs between next week and the September 1 deadline.

If you had to summarize what you believe–about faith, about life, about love, about anything that matters–how would you start?  What stories would you tell?  Who would be the indispensable characters in those stories?

by Michael

I Hope They Ordain Me, pt. 2 of 3

I started these posts by talking about a few reasons I want to be ordained.  This short post goes into some detail about how the ECC (or the Covenant) goes about ordaining folks.

The denomination educates ministers at North Park Theological Seminary.  For folks who study there, the process is slightly different.  For people in shoes like mine, there are other steps.  Part of the Covenant’s process includes taking classes ( 7 of them when I started, though that’s been changed to 4 classes nowadays) to orient people to the denomination; participating in particular experiences like retreats and conferences; reading books; attending Annual meeting and Midwinter; and connecting with other pastors inside the denomination.  People are also expected to be supervised by a mentor who is already ordained and serving in the denomination.  I should also say that to be ordained to what’s called “Word and Sacrament” in the Covenant, you need to have a MDiv.  That’s a thorny issue for some, but I’ll come back to that in a few days.

As I said, these steps are a bit different if you attend our denomination’s seminary, but since I went somewhere else, I had to take supplemental courses and so forth.  The classes were good because I knew nothing about this denomination before accepting my role at New Community.  I was familiar with a few Covenant churches but that was it.

Further, the process above is very different from the one I went through in my first experience of ordination.  Each denomination is different.  Some ordinations are done through the local church only (like my first ordination).  Usually Baptist and independent churches are in this category.  Others are through connectional systems, also known as denominations, like the United Methodist Church or the Church of God in Christ.  The Covenant is an example of the latter.

If I have a successful interview, if my paper doesn’t raise too many red flags, if all the reports and signatures concerning me come back positively, I will present myself before our Conference (a collection of churches in geographically close states) in the spring, talk about myself, and they will hand me off to the Annual meeting to be voted in.  I’m omitting one or two things, but those are the basics.

Perhaps this post is completely irrelevant to you, and if you read it only to find that irrelevancy, you’re a great visitor to this blog!

by Michael

I Hope They Ordain Me, pt. 1 of 3

I was ordained in my home church the year I finished graduate school and one year before I entered seminary.  I didn’t really want to be ordained.  I got convinced by a few people that it was something to do.  I think back to that decision, to that time, and laugh at myself because I went kicking and screaming.

Now, I am finishing up the process of ordination for our denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church, and my attitude is completely different.  Because I’m in a new denomination, I had to pursue its ordination in order to serve.  Well, I didn’t have to.  But it was very clear to me that ordination was a good idea. 

 As I prepare to write my paper describing my understanding of the “Central Affirmations,” along with several of my own theological understandings of the church, the role of a pastor, and the person and work of Jesus in both of them; as I look forward to an interview in October and piecing together my profile and “examples of proclamation” for the various committees and departments, I think it’s healthy to remind myself why I do the things I do.  And I’m sharing them with you.

I realize that everyone who works at a job, who serves in a particular role, doesn’t feel called to that job or role.  But I encourage you to think about why you’re up to the things you are.  Whether you do feel a sense of call or conviction for what you do.  Whether you should even.

Here’s an example of some of the things I need to spend the next couple weeks fleshing out for my process:

  1. Ordination has to mean something.  I’ve been ordained before, by a local church, and if ordination hasn’t taken on deeper meaning for me, that’s a problem.  Being a professional religious person has its benefits but it has pitfalls.  Sacrifices come.  Often.  As I say yes to ordination, I do so with a better understanding that’s come with a few more years of pastoral ministry.
  2. I’m made for a congregation.  As much as I enjoy writing and talking to people about solutions to problems, I think the best place for me to do that is within a church.  I’ve struggled for years to find contentment in the church as  a staff person.  I’ve felt comfortable in other settings, and still do.  But even though I’m comfortable doing other things and even with my struggles, I get to serve in a general way, inside a congregation, that captures what I enjoy.
  3. I love people.  I love to serve people.  I love to see people change, even when that change takes a long time.  One of the books on my desk is titled, “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.”  It’s by Eugene Peterson and it’s a book about Christian discipleship.  It describes how slow following Jesus is, how tedious looking at Jesus and following his steps, if you will, can be.  It’s a reminder–just the title–that what I do is slow work.  But I love it.
  4. I don’t always love people.  When you love and don’t love people, the best place for that movement is the church.  If there is a place where I should be honest about my feelings about the people I work with and for and alongside, it’s God’s church. 
  5. Other people think my being here is a good idea.  This can be slippery, but I’ve lived my life hearing or ignoring a community’s affirmation of my purpose.  When I started working in churches, I asked people whether they thought I was suited for it.  Even though I didn’t follow my mother’s first advice to not work in the church, I have listened to many others along my way so far.
  6. Invoking God never gets old.  I am not the type to say what God told me.  Least not often.  It sounds suspicious and presumptuous.  It’s easily misunderstood, that language.  Then, again, I do feel an inner sense and conviction that God has summoned me for ministry.  Made me for it.  And how do you argue with a person who believes they hear from the mostly unseen Creator of eveything that is seen?