Leading Congregations

This summer one of the classes I am taking at Luther Seminary is EL3517 – Media and Technology in Religious Education. While some of my classmates may be taking the class to meet the core requirements of two education classes, I have already completed my core requirements and I’m engaging this class wearing a different hat. I am one of the students in Luther’s CML Cohort, a group of MA and MDiv students focused on Congregational Mission and Leadership, and this is one of the classes where I can explore ideas for leading congregations in new ways.

Whenever we begin an education class we are asked to reflect on our “knowledge competencies” and assess where we are now. At the end of the course, we’ll reassess and see where we have grown and identify where are growing edges continue to be. Cognizant that I want to reflect on my learning in the context of congregational mission and leadership, I have chosen these two competencies as the foci for my work this course:

• supporting theological and biblical reflection in a variety of contexts, and with a variety of people involved
• supporting intergenerational learning

I chose these because I believe they are rooted in how we tell the story - how we can engage people so that they recognize themselves in the biblical story and provide opportunities for people to respond and participate in a faith community. One of the most valuable aspects of technology and particularly social media is its ability to forge connections across distance, both physical and generational. It provides opportunities for us to hear from more voices than our local sphere and learn from one another.

Do all Dogs go to Heaven?

When I was little, I read the story of The Littlest Angel which told the story of a little boy who lived in heaven, a place of white fluffy clouds and gold streets. After my husband’s grandmother died, we laughed and said thunder was Nanny rearranging the furniture in heaven. And if I sing along with the song that describes rain as teardrops from heaven, the words still catch in my throat.

All of these memories point to a heaven somewhere up there. Is heaven the celestial heavens? Is it some place in another dimension beyond the stratosphere, beyond the planets and our known universe? And who gets to be there? Good people, bad people, babies, violent criminals, domestic animals, vermin, gnats?

Is heaven only a place we talk about when we suffer loss? When I was working as a hospital chaplain, a nurse caught me in the hall and asked me whether our pets go to heaven. She’d heard a story about a place called Rainbow Bridge where pets go and wait for their companions. Again and again grieving families ask for reassurance that heaven will reunite us with everyone we have loved and lost.

My granddaddy died some years ago with no great convictions about God. I don’t think he was an avowed atheist, just disinterested. If heaven only admits believers, he won’t be there. Many families have similar stories and the fear is overwhelming when a loved one is dying. “Chaplain, you have to help us get Jane saved before she dies.” I wanted to tell them that Jesus’ words to the dying weren’t to pray the sinner’s prayer.

Over the past several years, I have had less confidence in an other-worldly place where St. Peter sits at the gates or where we come before God’s judgment. Perhaps heaven is a metaphor. “Our Father who art in heaven…thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” Is heaven actually here on earth? Is it where we find ourselves when we live in relationship with one another as God’s creation and live out God’s vision for God’s kingdom? Or is it something else? And who is there – only humanity? all creation? Does it transcend anything we can understand or express?

These questions resurface each time I brush near death and while I have too many reminders of just how finite our human lives are today, it isn’t only the loss of human lives that make me ask the questions.

The week before Easter my family volunteered to be a foster family for a family of kittens. It’s kitten season and shelters are overrun with babies. At last count, one shelter had more than seventy kittens to care for. We took in a mama and an unknown number of kittens. We set them up with food, water and litter and kept our distance so mama wouldn’t stop producing milk. And then we watched them die one by one. All together, we took four tiny bodies to the cemetery. Then, blessedly, the mama settled into nursing the remaining two kittens and now they are five weeks old. But facing the first four kittens’ deaths and struggling to understand why the mama rejected them meant facing questions about created life and death up close.

In an absurd twist on the same afternoon that the fourth baby kitten died, our beloved chocolate lab Heidi chased a ball too far and ran into our quiet street where she was clipped by a truck that was passing through. She lost a lot of blood and had a broken femur and pelvis. As I sat with her in the veterinary office, I just marveled at how she was wagging her tail, full of herself and happy to be held and cherished, despite immense pain. I joked with her and the technician that Heidi is a believer in the axiom that life is meant for chasing lacrosse balls, and surely everyone’s good and right purpose is to play catch. Are there fenced yards or dog parks in heaven? Luckily, Heidi’s leg could be rebuilt and she is now four weeks into her recovery. She’s a little puzzled at the disappearance of the more than thirty tennis and lacrosse balls we hid away before her homecoming from the veterinary hospital, but she is happy and whole and here on earth and our questions can wait a little longer.

am ha-aretz

Preface: I wrote this reflection in November. I did not publish it then because within a few days, fuller accounts of the woman’s life were published and family members gave a more complete picture of this woman as a full person. I publish it now because we are called to love our neighbors (Matt. 22:39) and loving our neighbor means recognizing another as fully human, fully God’s creation regardless of whether they look, think, work or live like me. In A Spoke in the Wheel, Renate Wind wrote that it was in prison where Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood “that people who were shaped neither by Christian faith nor by middle class education could be wise companions in the struggle, thoughtful and ready to help….” (166)

November 2010

Friday afternoon a homeless woman riding a bicycle without lights or a helmet was hit by a car and killed. Saturday I saw her friends gather grief-struck as they learned what had happened. Together we shared a moment of silence to remember her.

I was disappointed to read Sunday’s newspaper account which reduced her to what was known about her from public records – her age, her criminal record, and her last residence.

Why is tragedy more palatable when we imagine the victims are anonymous, disconnected and forgotten? Surely, her death is no less tragic because her mistakes were more public than my own; surely, her life is not worth less because it was darker and harder and colder than mine. Yet, that is what the world would have us believe.

But I know better. The portrayal by the newspaper was fiction. It was imagined. The reporters didn’t even try to discover who she was. In life, she was a mother, a fiancée and a friend. She was kind and loving and she will be missed by the community that knew her.

As we welcomed advent today and look to the promise of Jesus’ birth, we remembered Elizabeth and Zechariah, the parents of John the Baptist. We talked about the am ha-aretz, “the people of the earth”, who demonstrate their faithfulness to God in the every day and about those who sought power and dominion over them and who lived in excess at their expense. I believe the woman on the bicycle is one of the am ha-aretz and, contrary to the newspaper account, her life was not disposable just because it was not comfortable, because she was homeless, or because she had made mistakes. She was created by God and loved and forgiven by God.

The Extraordinary

“I love ordinary time because that’s where I live.” This is a quote that is attributed to Matt Skinner, a Luther Seminary professor, on Working Preacher, and it echoes in my thoughts as I read and study. I think most of us live in “ordinary time”. So, how do we recognize the extraordinary in our everyday lives?

I found a starting place in another idea spoken by another professor at Luther. That is the idea that we are called to “concrete, fruitful ministry to a cross-section of people”. These are words that I scribbled on a sticky note and hung from my bookshelves more than a year ago after a conversation about vocation and discernment. For me, these words define full-time ordained ministry.

“Concrete” evokes images of plain, hard day to day work and a willingness to get my hands dirty. “A cross-section of people” demands some risk – to be in ministry with people who may not be like me, who are more representative of the world at large, whose stories reflect different ages, genders, ethnicities, socio-economic and religious backgrounds. “Fruitful” represents hope and the promises we find in Scripture, that lives lived following Jesus ‘bear good fruit’. It is in this kind of work that I think we uncover the extraordinary lives around us.

Searching for a way to practice "concrete, fruitful ministry to a cross-section of people", I discovered a day center for the homeless where I can volunteer a couple of hours a week. It’s open every day, year round, for five hours each morning. There, people can find showers, soap, shampoo, razors, washcloths and towels; laundry services; hot food and coffee; telephones; mailboxes; containers or lockers for valuables; over-the counter medicine and vitamins; secure storage for checks and prescription medications. Staff help clients address needs like obtaining identification and educate people about housing, employment and transportation resources. At night, staff reopen to distribute blankets and sleeping bags.

No one is invisible there. Everyone checks in and we learn their names and ages and where they slept last night. This morning the youngest I met was 22 and the oldest was 60-something and there were whites, blacks, Latinos, men and women. The temperatures were in the 50s last night, and most of the people had slept on the street. There, I discovered the extraordinary - extraordinary people facing extraordinary times with extraordinary courage and poise.

Invisible People

Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist who wrote about the lives of working class poor in Nickel and Dimed. More recently, she published a collection of satire exposing divisions and inequalities that Americans, particularly the working class poor, experience in the workplace, home ownership, healthcare and religion. Sharply critical of both red and blue, right and left, Republican and Democrat, her essays are biting assessments of modern American culture and society.

Sometimes, her assessments read more like rants and I wonder if she doesn’t stray into hyperbole some of the time. What kept me reading were the poignant stories she provided from everyday life:
• an unemployed man, three years too young to collect Social Security but vulnerable to age discrimination in hiring practices, who chose to commit a non-violent robbery so that he could find a bed and food in prison
• enlisted personnel in the Unites States Armed Services who were enrolled into food stamp programs at enlistment because their entry-level pay grade does not provide a living wage
• the uninsured patient whose routine procedure was billed at a cost nearly five times that of an insured patient, driving that uninsured person even further out of reach of financial stability, let alone security

While I appreciate satire’s role is to hold up human behavior for exposure, ridicule or scorn, I think it acts as a megaphone and, by itself, is an inadequate way to motivate anyone to take action and actually pursue or implement changes that will help us better meet the needs around us. How do we work with people who are experiencing poverty here in our neighborhoods and communities? How do we create opportunities or provide services that help span the gaps that exist, so people don’t have a reason to find incarceration more livable than freedom and others don’t die of treatable illnesses because going to a doctor costs too much? How do we make the plight of “invisible” people more visible, without sacrificing integrity?

This Land is My Land, This Land is Your Land

While I resisted the allure of the local AAUW’s book sale last week, I succumbed when I received the list of books required for my daughters’ summer reading and my own fall coursework.

One of the books my oldest daughter is reading in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Ms. Angelou grew up in Arkansas in the 1930s and tells the story of growing up there amid blatant racism, discrimination and abuse. I am reading her book alongside my daughter.

Living in the south, with memories of being bused across Norfolk when schools were being desegregated in the 1970s, I am not naïve about our region’s history and I know it would be foolish to say that racism and segregation have been obliterated. Racial bias has become more subtle, but our communities are still segregated. What I admit I don’t yet understand is how that changes us.

This fall, I will be taking a seminary class titled “Dismantling Racism”. In our faith communities, it commonly is recognized that Sunday morning remains the most segregated day of the week in many parts of our country. Tied into the question of how we worship with one another, or don’t, is how we live and work with one another, or don’t, and the related issues of race, segregation, discrimination and immigration. While I don’t hear or see people mistreated the way the blacks were in Arkansas eighty years ago, I know people are hurting anew now, and I hope to understand how we can care more deeply about each other as God’s children.

The first assigned book I am reading is Searching for Whitopia – An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. The author, scholar and commentator Rich Benjamin recounts his experiences as he lived and worked in three “whitopias” - thriving communities “that have posted at least six percent population growth since 2000 [and] the majority of the growth …is from white migrants.” (Benjamin, 5) Sharing his experiences, Benjamin is careful to describe the people he encounters as three-dimensional characters. He presents stories that reflect people’s fear, hurt and anger and as the reader, you may agree or disagree, but there is no doubt that the people he meets are real living, breathing human beings, not three-eyed monsters that media headlines and soundbites create.

Benjamin’s observations echo my own: “The majority of whites in predominantly white communities across our heartland are endearing and kind….Direct interpersonal racism is no longer acceptable.” However, he tackles what goes unsaid in too many of our communities: “Discrimination and segregation do not require animus. They thrive even in the absence of prejudice or ill will. It’s common to have racism without “racists.” (emphasis mine, Benjamin 184-185)

And recognizing that actions can also contribute to deeper division, Benjamin is candid about the consequences of some of immigration policies and stances taken in the U.S. He acknowledges how numbers about population shifts have stoked fears. He writes about the vicious cycle that was set into motion when we stigmatized all Latino immigrants, both legal and illegal, though, reflecting that the indiscriminate writing off Latino youth led to indignation which in turn produced greater scorn by whites. Benjamin writes, “Whether or not our country treats these youth like its bastard stepchildren, someday they will become its full-blooded heirs.” (Benjamin, 83)

Dr. Benjamin’s statements ring in my ears, and I reflect on how his and Ms. Angelou’s words speak to our lives today. I wonder what it means for how we live together in creation, when we acknowledge that we are all God’s beloved children, and, celebrating the 4th of July and the freedom Americans have, what we mean when we sing, “This land is my land, this land is your land”.

Summer Reading

For the first time in more than two years, I'm not enrolled in any coursework this summer. The respite is welcome and I hope it will be restorative. I have completed the first-third of seminary, clinical pastoral education and three semesters of fieldwork. During the summer, I want to read some theology unrelated to any particular course, but for May, I really am on a hiatus and enjoying reading far less provocative books.

To meet my fiber cravings, I read Jennifer Chiaverini's A Quilter's Holiday only to discover I've missed a few books in the series since Greek and Hebrew replaced novels on my bookshelves. I also read Maggie Sefton's Dropped Dead Stitch.

Avoiding tuning out academics entirely, I read Paganini's Ghost by Paul Adam. Like Iain Pears' treatment of art history in his mysteries, Adam threads classical music references through this novel.

The plan for the rest of the month includes reading more of both Chiaverini and Sefton as I continue to knit up a prayer shawl, finishing Dan Brown's Lost Symbol, reading Adam's Unholy Trinity and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

Delightfully, the other reading I'm indulging in is measures of tab as I recover some long-neglected old-time picking skills on my Morgan Monroe banjo.

For now, happiness is a dog-eared book and the twang of bluegrass.