"Hellboy" -- what a treat for a tired preacher! : comments [Confessions of a Liberal Puritan]

You see, I often come home after church on Sundays feeling like a bit of a slacker, because I usually resort to preaching recycled sermons for this tiny, tiny, elderly congregation (it's hard to get my 'juices going' to write a new sermon that maybe only six people will hear).

(Way overstepping, and I am acknowledging that freely: You have a lot of wonderful things to say. Maybe if your sermons weren't recycled, you'd bring in some new blood.)

Are you the senior pastor at this church? Are you also a full time professor, and a student (because although maybe new sermons would bring in new blood, with your schedule, even if you're only part time in any of your roles, I certainly understand the recycling. You've got to eat and sleep)?

And I was feeling especially useless when I drove home from the church after moderating their special congregational meeting Wednesday night

They let a minister moderate a congregational meeting? I take it this is a Presbyterian Church (and I don't know much about the Presbyterians). Is this typical of the denomination? (My church background involves congressionally goverened churches, and I've never seen a minister moderate congressional meetings. Moderator is usually an elected position in the churches I've attended/to which I've belonged.)

However, when I stood in the pulpit and preached from that old manuscript this morning, I discovered that about halfway through page two it turned into an exploration of how we can be united in love while still disagreeing about many things, and how Christian unity can't be the same as conformity or totalitarianism, but people must always be free to tell the truth and follow the way of love as seems right to them. In short [I know: "too late!"], it turned out to be a sermon about reconciliation in spite of disagreements and disappointments.

Heh. Did you happen to read my Easter ~~rant~~ meditation? http://www.livejournal.com/users/cindyamb/70558.html#cutid1

What can I say? I felt that I'd maybe been just a little bit useful, for a change, and I really enjoyed that rare sensation.

That's great. How long have you been there, two years? Was the former pastor there a long time? Our pastor has been with our church for 20 years (my family has only been there since June, and my husband and I just became members in March). I think between his initial reception, the growth the church has experienced during his tenure, the changes he's brought to the church (he actually preaches gospel, and believes what he preaches, which is less common than it used to be in the UCC), reaction to him has been all over the map during those twenty years. Now, he is quite popular (and I think a good human and pastor, and as sincere as the day is long), but I also understand we lost a lot of old timers (which might not be a bad thing, in all).

I worry about the church when he leaves. He will retire in the next few years. It is a hard transition period for a congregation, particularly when the departing pastor has been popular, and influential regarding growth and direction. I already ache for whomever fills his slot. S/he is sure to be rebound guy, you know? Did your congregation have problems accepting a woman as pastor? Have they had a female minister, prior? Do they get to "call" the minister, or is the minister just assigned by the denomination?

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Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my mini-rant, and yes, I did read your Easter piece on Christian unity, and found it very encouraging (that people other than ministers actually talk about these things).

As it happens, I'm NOT the pastor of this little church (where there really are only about 10 members still active in the church, and all but two of them over the age of 70 -- the other two are just punk kids in their 50's, but they're relatively new members) -- they just hire me on a Sunday-to-Sunday basis to preach and lead worship: "pulpit supply" we call it (for when the regular minister is on vacation, or when a church is without a pastor and can't afford to hire even a part-time interim minister). And since in the Presbyterian form of government, they MUST have an ordained minister to moderate any Session (governing board) or congregational meetings, they also pay me a little extra to do that now and then. As you can imagine, with no actual pastor to do visitation or community outreach on their behalf, and with such a small, tight-knit, and very elderly and ailing congregation, we almost never get visitors, and when we do, it's not the preaching that makes them decide not to come back -- it's the lack of programming and fellowship or educational opportunities.

If they had voted "yes" last Wednesday, Presbytery (the next governing body above the local church, usually made up of 50-100 churches) would have paid to fix up their building and given them a lot of help hiring and paying a half-time minister, so they might finally have a chance to grow. I would have been happy to move on to other churches, or even take Sundays off for a little while, if they got a pastor of their own. Before me, they were served part-time by a very elderly retired minister who suffered a series of debilitating strokes. They first started asking me to preach for them around Christmas of 2001, and because they like my preaching and I'm one of the few ministers actually willing to help them keep going, it's sort of developed into a regular thing, where I work for them any Sunday I don't have a commitment at some other church.

This church doesn't have a problem with me being a woman, and when I was a full-time pastor in Iowa, every church I served had already had a woman pastor or two BEFORE I got there, so it wasn't even a new idea. Here in Tennessee, I've frequently preached at churches that have never had a woman pastor before -- but which then go on to call one as their full-time pastor, after I show them it's not so bad!

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Oh, I am very sad for that little church. The elderly people in the church I attended as a child were fantastic, open, wise, and loving (and a lot more sane than the people in their 40s--that's a story for another day), so of course I'm picturing 10 of them all by their lonesome, and getting sad. However, most of them are dead, so um... yeah.

If they had voted "yes" last Wednesday, Presbytery (the next governing body above the local church, usually made up of 50-100 churches) would have paid to fix up their building and given them a lot of help hiring and paying a half-time minister, so they might finally have a chance to grow.

Is this offer at all open ended? Because, wow. What are they going to do, just let it die? Assuming they all die off, does the church and all it's property revert to the Presbytery, anyhow? How are they paying you, and paying for upkeep? Are they living off of an endowment or something?

As you can imagine, with no actual pastor to do visitation or community outreach on their behalf, and with such a small, tight-knit, and very elderly and ailing congregation, we almost never get visitors, and when we do, it's not the preaching that makes them decide not to come back -- it's the lack of programming and fellowship or educational opportunities.

Yes. They need some young families, and young families need Sunday School, and a nursery staff, and maybe DVBS in the summer, and a youth group. Of course the young families have to do a lot of the work involved in all that, but with no existing programs in place, they're never going to be able to draw them. Your role in leading them is really limited to, since you're a hired gun.

when I was a full-time pastor in Iowa, every church I served had already had a woman pastor or two BEFORE I got there, so it wasn't even a new idea. Here in Tennessee, I've frequently preached at churches that have never had a woman pastor before -- but which then go on to call one as their full-time pastor, after I show them it's not so bad!

Triple YES! That's all good to read. See the alluded-to 40 year olds in my church when I was a kid/teen. Picture me (and granted, that's tough, since you don't know what I look like) standing up when the church had a panel on women's roles, and telling them I was a Christian first, and female second (as in 'In Christ there is no...'), and if God called me to the ministry, were they going to tell me (They'd known me since I was 3, and I was a very good kid, and active in the church) that it wasn't really God. (Picture my sweet, old people smiling and nodding. Male and female. Created. He. Them. /rantlette)

Are you looking to Pastor full time again, or are you focusing more on teaching, now?

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As far as the offer from Presbytery being time-limited, yes, it was --because it was all conditional upon the church agreeing to let the Presbytery have a 99-year renewable lease on their land for $10 a year and build a big new office addition onto their church. I think they were right that Presbytery would have been coming out ahead on the deal, but my feeling was, why NOT help Presbytery out (since "they" are really "us", and we're all supposed to be working toward the same goals, right?) and give them a chance to show a little gratitude and good faith toward this church that they've tried to forcefully close down in the past? The alternatives they're discussing include the possibility of taking out a bank loan themselves using their very valuable (and still unencumbered) land as collateral, in order to fund new pastoral leadership and outreach programs. Right now, the contributions of the few members and the rents they get from allowing new churches of other denominations to use their building (they've been the 'nursery' for a lot of successful new churches over the years, most of which have eventually grown to the point of being able to afford their own building) are their only source of income, and that income doesn't quite meet the costs of building maintenance and utilities plus my minimal preaching fee each week.

As far as me and full-time pastoral ministry is concerned, I don't think I could or would ever go back to that. I never thought I'd be able to do something like that, being so introverted and shy, but I DID do it and was quite successful at it for a while. But once I'd proved to myself that I COULD do it, I found that I quickly became bored. I'm glad I had that parish experience, and I'm very glad for the lives I was able to affect for the better during those years, but the only parts of it that I continued to find interesting and in any way satisfying were the teaching and preaching aspects. I found out that I need a LOT more mental stimulation and a lot more chances to USE my intellectual gifts than parish ministry normally affords.

Being the "hired gun" (as you so aptly put it) actually suits me very well. I've even thought of having little cards printed (a la Paladin on that old Western TV show) saying "Have Robe--Will Travel". Partly, I enjoy the variety of being able to move around frequently between churches (if I had stayed in full-time ministry, I would have had to become an accredited Interim Minister, I think, in order to have an excuse to change churches every 6 to 18 months, rather than staying put for the minimum of three years that a called pastorate entails), and partly I enjoy the sense of freedom -- knowing that I come to work every Sunday purely by my own choice, that I can leave anytime I want, and that what I give to the church is a gift of love (since pulpit supply fees are more of an honorarium, rather than a salary). For me, professional full-time ministry began to feel a bit too much like prostitution -- being paid to 'love' people, whether I felt like it or not, and having too little freedom to choose. Now, instead of being "Mom" (the person who's supposed to take care of everybody's needs, read everybody's mind, and endure everybody's bad temper without ever indulging in any of my own), I get to be the "cool Aunt"--the person who dashes in, stays for a short while, makes everybody feel extra special, and then leaves before her welcome runs out, with no sense of owing anybody anything.

If I could teach at the college level during the week and preach as a hired gun on Sundays (pretty much as I'm doing now, only actually being paid a living wage for my teaching!), then that would be for me the best of all possible worlds.

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Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

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I just do 'pulpit supply' these days

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Small churches, big hearts

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