A new minister

Thoughts on a New Minister

Written by Dan McDonald

 

          There have been a number of thoughts swirling about in my head lately. Some thoughts have been of hopes and dreams of future pursuits. Some thoughts have been of a close relative suddenly bed ridden battling and struggling with acute leukemia. Some thoughts have been of my tendency to procrastination and how I have so many tasks I have put off for far too long. Some thoughts have been of how I need to get back to taking care of my body with healthy eating and working towards an exercise regimen, which of course makes me think more about procrastination. In the midst of these swirling thoughts the church I am part of is getting ready to welcome a new minister. I want to be happy about it. I want to be excited. But part of me dreads a new minister. I am pretty sure the dread comes like shingles as an eruption of an old sickness not fully cured but simply suppressed until the time was rife for the illness to take over once after years of suppression.

            Many years ago I came to the church where I now am. I needed peace and quiet at a time when I felt as if my faith was nearly exhausted and depleted. I had been a member of a church where we had a series of ministers who took the Scriptures seriously and sought to proclaim their message with careful hermeneutics and application. But something happened along the way. We began to be a church that felt superior to other churches. We were sure we had the Biblical understanding that others needed. We began to imagine that if someone didn’t see what we had to offer it was probably their own lack of spirituality. We got in the habit of warning people who left from our midst because they were turning their backs on a church with Biblical order.

            Looking back I see things so differently than I did then. We were all too often pompous and arrogant believers who thought too highly of ourselves and too lowly of others. But we were really believers. I can look back and see how something Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his book Life Together captured the essence of what happened at that church. We had what he described as a wish dream, an image of an ideal we wished to impose on the people of our congregation. We imagined our ideals to be the best of ideals. To paraphrase a modern politician we were going to build a great church. But Bonhoeffer spoke of how the wish dream of an ideal to be imposed upon a church is in idol that God must ultimately smash into the ground. Then it happened, a family or two families at a time. People who thought of our church as some wonderful ideal church woke up one morning feeling disillusioned and perhaps even offended by the arrogance that we swam in. We would wonder at what had happened when people we thought were wise turned on us and wanted out. At the end there were only a handful of people and three families at the church. One day instead of choosing to keep going, an elder in our midst said “it’s over. We are going to close the doors.” Those of us who had been there for years all felt the same thing. It was over. We sold the church to a people excited about proclaiming the gospel from this building. We distributed the monies from the proceeds to varied Christian charities. Afterwards we all went to different churches. Over the years we would find people on Facebook that had been part of the experience. I think often there were similar experiences. While there were some close friendships that had been built in the aftermath of what went wrong, there were more situations where there was not great animosity towards others but there was a desire to keep others at arm’s length because our association with one another had left us feeling a sting of pain that was still alive in the dormant wounds of a disease that ran deep into our souls.

            I found gradual healing at the church I went to, where I am now. Our minister wasn’t a powerful preacher and often did not work hard enough to exposit the Scriptures to his ability. He saw himself as a fat preacher that could not be the reason why people would attend the church. Instead he would point to the table from which Holy Communion would be served. To him this was the focal point of the church, where Christ made his presence known to us in the body and blood, the bread and wine of the Eucharist. He could have been a better preacher. There were times when he prepared diligently and in those times his preaching was markedly different from the times he just winged it. I remained there despite his preaching. I remained there because he believed that God loved us in Christ and despite or perhaps through his weaknesses our minister helped us believe that God loved us in Christ.

            In my previous church we had learned that the world was dangerous. The world was not a friend to the Christian. I brought that perspective into my new church. I was given the opportunity to teach an adult Sunday school class. I had become a member of a church with a different tradition from my previous church. I asked my minister to supervise my teaching. I wanted to be sure it fit into the rich tradition I had entered. In the Anglican tradition we see the teaching of the Scriptures to fit into a tradition where for millennia the Church has proclaimed Christ, has received agreed upon creeds and have understood that Christ is present in the sacraments as well as the Scriptures. So I hoped my minister would watch me to see where I needed improvement. Instead he said, “I trust you. Just have fun.” Nothing could have been further from my understanding of how a teacher should approach teaching God’s people if that was what we were called to do.

            But over the years at this church I began to feel greater freedom to push out from the harbor of my parish and to explore the world in which we lived. I began to listen to Christians from varied backgrounds and with diverse perspectives. After a while I began to rejoice in what seemed like an orchestra of many varied pieces. I could hear different sounds and similar notes. I knew there were dangers in voyages of exploration but I also had fallen in love with pushing out from the shore until the land disappeared and we were out at seas looking for new vistas. I am pretty sure I could have still used a shepherd who knew how to oversee my tendencies to explore the world. Sometimes I began to push against the boundaries and sometimes I no longer felt I knew where the boundaries were so I kept sailing. After more than a decade under this minister it came to an end because there is a time when after seventy years or if due to strength eighty years we return dust unto dust and this happened to my priest. But I was a changed man by this time. Now I was more afraid of never exploring than I was afraid of the dangers of exploring.

            This weekend I went to a movie and one line especially summed up for me what it means for a Christian to be able to explore the creation within our faith in the Creator. The movie was “The man who knew Infinity” There is a line that sums up so much of life and it is expressed in the trailer here. The line that I see expressing the wonder of a Christian life is the line which says: “We are merely explorers of infinity in the pursuit of absolute perfection.” This combines our place in the present creation with the expectations of the faith we have been taught by grace. We are presently wanderers in the infinity of our God whom we know only in part. We are wanderers in the expanse of a creation that sets forth in its tapestry the attributes and qualities of the invisible God who brought this creation into being. We are wanderers who like the one we call our father Abraham was a wandering Aramean who left his city of idols to seek a city and country built without hands. I am a wanderer. I am at times a wandering lamb in need of a shepherd to help me recognize the boundaries of my exploration.

            The relationship between a minister and his people is a mystery of simplicity combined with complexity. I know I need a minister. I know I need boundaries. I also know I need to explore. I worry we might not be on the same page, my new minister and I. I worry about a minister who will be more diligent than the preceding minister but will he make us feel that God loves us in Christ?

            There are different kinds of relationships in the world, but there are similarities to every meaningful human friendship. In every relationship there are different characters with distinguishing elements in their human composition, differing vulnerabilities, and differing strengths that need encouraged even as the differing vulnerabilities need understood and protected. In the end I suspect the ministry of our arriving priest will be established or destroyed by how we work together as priest and parish members. I feel a sense of the agony of my past but I look for something better even as I feel the agony of my past. I finish with the posting of an insightful meme that summed up what it is that makes a successful marriage partnership. It seems to me that there are similarities in how a successful ministry comes into existence between a congregation and its minister.

 

 

            I do look forward to a new minister. It will take work building the understanding. I need someone to help me recognize boundaries. I need someone who realizes we human beings are an adventurous lot who are busy merely exploring the infinite in search of absolute perfection. In the end the wish dreams we would impose on congregational life are dangerous not because they expect too much but because they blind us from the so much more that we are really offered and called to when God calls us to discover him in his Son, and we take up wandering with our crosses as we pursue a perfection beyond us but promised us in our destinies when one day we shall see him and be like him. We, therefore, are now wanderers and explorers in search of a city built by God. We are also weeping wanderers looking to a day when someone will wipe away our tears and the former things shall be no more. We have been stripped of at least some of our illusions but we are content to explore and know we need a shepherd in our explorations.