Messy Churches
Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 6:00AM One of the realities about churches is that they are messy. Even - especially - the good ones. I've always liked what Eugene Peterson said about pastoring:
Pastoral work consists of modest, daily, assigned work. It is like farm work. Most pastoral work involves routines similar to cleaning out the barn, mucking out the stalls, spreading manure, pulling weeds. This is not, any of it, bad work in itself, but if we expected to ride a glistening black stallion in daily parades and then return to the barn where a lackey grooms our steed for us, we will be severely disappointed and end up being horribly resentful.
There is much that is glorious in pastoral work, but the congregation, as such, is not glorious...I don't deny that there are moments of splendor in congregations. There are. Many and frequent. But there are also conditions of squalor... (Under the Unpredictable Plant)
If you're like me, you sometimes get discouraged by this. But we shouldn't be. These, Peterson says, are the people the pastor is called to serve:
...this haphazard collection of people who somehow get assembled into pews on Sundays, half-heartedly sing a few songs most of them don't like, tune in and out of a sermon according to the state of their digestion and the preacher's decibels, awkward in their commitments and jerky in their prayers.
Not to mention all the other challenges: the extra-grace-required people, the critics, the marriages in crisis. This is the nature of pastoral ministry.
What got me thinking about this was Spurgeon, who seemed to actually argue for more mess in churches in his Lectures to My Students. Spurgeon argues that pastors should release control and lead from a position of respect, rather than by trying to lead a well-run church from a position of control. Read the first sentence thinking of all the church business meetings you wish you hadn't attended:
For my part I should loathe to be the pastor of a people who have nothing to say, or who, if they do say anything, might as well be quiet, for the pastor is Lord Paramount, and they are mere laymen and nobodies. I would sooner be the leader of six free men, whose enthusiastic love is my only power over them, than play the dictator to a score of enslaved nations.
Maybe I need to enjoy the mess a little more. Maybe I should even start to enjoy business meetings. Although that could be taking things a little too far.
Reader Comments (6)
Enjoyed this item. It's where I live.
Thanks for the reminder. One of the things I love about my church is the mess. We're all in recovery from something or other and the "recovery meeting" ethos permeates the body. I think if I tried to suggest in prayer or sermon that I was somehow the guy with all the answers and none of the problems, I'd get booed off the stage (so to speak - we have no physical stage). In teaching on adultery and lust, I was able to share from my own experience with marriage, divorce, and the trust that was broken due to our pre-marital sex.And yet, it's hard work. It would be so much easier to slap on a veneer and go back to pretending. It would be so much easier to see people as issues and put them all in neat little cubby holes. It would be so much easier to run everything through an algebraic equation instead of recreating the wheel every day, every conversation.I confess it's tempting. There are times I want it to stop being messy and just be "nice." I want easy answers that can be applied across the board irrespective of persons. But that's not the calling, is it? And the truth is, hard as it sometimes gets, I love the beautiful mess.
But why is there so much glorification of messiness nowadays?
Trish, why do you have to ask such pertinent questions?
I suppose it's a common theme today because for a while the trend went the other way. We have to be cautious of the pendulum effect, but it certainly is a biblical emphasis.
That last comment is priceless. It reminds, in reverse, of a well-known radio precher who recently said that you can't teach those 'dum-dums'. Pastor's who deisre free men who love are much better than those who consider the lowly follower a 'dum-dum'.