Here we go!

I had a professor who would begin his four hour lectures with these words, "Here we go!"  They seem appropriate as I transition from being a full-time student and nonprofit fundraiser to being the full-time vicar, or intern pastor, at a local congregation. For the past four years, I have been in seminary preparing for this move, and now it's here.

One of the gifts that internship gives me as a seminarian is a time of discovering more about living life in public Christian leadership and who I am as a pastor. Gathering up wisdom from the people who have gone before me, I am reminded of Robert Fulghum's All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten, where we discover our lives together are rooted in some basic, simple truths.

One of the basic truths I learned from that same professor was, "Take regular breaks." He could be mid-sentence, but at ten minutes to the hour, we stopped and took ten minutes to walk outside, breathe or re-caffeinate. It didn't really matter what we did as long as we got up from our desks and did something else. He didn't want to talk more than fifty minutes in one sitting and I doubt any of us wanted to listen for more than that. Another professor makes the same suggestion when she hits a wall in the process of sermon writing: take a break and do something else for 15 or 30 minutes. Don't just keep staring at the empty screen or tablet of paper. Whether it's preparing a sermon or teaching others, taking regular breaks will benefit everyone involved.

From my grandaddy, I am reminded, "Take care of the patient, not the illness." A doctor at a teaching hospital,  he saw too many new residents who never really saw the patients as real people; instead they attended to the disease and diagnosis, and overlooked the living, hurting human being who stood there. Our congregations and communities aren't numbers on offering envelopes, or statistics for the annual report - numbers on a page - they are living, breathing and hurting human beings.


Getting to know real people means having real conversations, but what those conversations look like has changed a lot in the thirty plus years since I was in kindergarten. When it comes to our conversations here and on Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets, a United Methodist pastor in Indiana shared these guidelines which advocate, "Avoid harm, do good, be connected and help others connect to God." Pastor Keith Anderson, formerly of Woburn, Mass. and now in Ambler, Penn. writes about weaving social media and ministry, too, and a group of folks who regularly chat about church and social media using the Twitter hashtag #chsocm dove into questions of boundaries and authenticity on June 26 (here's the transcript).


I will be sharing what I am learning throughout the year in future posts and look forward to our conversations.