Faith Works 2-8-20

Faith Works 2-8-20

Jeff Gill

 

Beware the De-legitimization Project

___

 

Last week I talked about dealing with the "worship wars" as akin to meeting a rattlesnake on the path.

 

Fairly or not, I think it's an issue that both fascinates and horrifies all at the same time, so we can't help but lean in even as we (or at least most ministers) try to stay away from getting bitten.

 

A few years ago an otherwise intelligent and thoughtful online blog talking about church life said "the worship wars are largely over." For once, I just enjoyed reading the comments for the next week on that post and kept out of it. Apparently in this preacher's neck of the woods, or at least in the quarters he wanders across, the debate is over, but that's not true in the rest of the country.

 

I'm reminded of a seminary professor I had, a very intelligent and perceptive man, who said in class in 1985 that congregations no longer had expectations of ministers' wives in church activities. He quickly backpedaled to "well, not what they once were" but quickly conceded he had spoken out of turn, and from a lack of detailed awareness. Maybe he was right in certain areas, but in many churches . . .

 

Peter Drucker, the management consultant, famously said "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." In religious communities, this is the crux of how change does and doesn't work through a system: you can bring in outside consultants or send members out on field trips or hand around books or worksheets or outlines 'til the cows come home, but congregational culture, like any organizational culture, is real, and while often not the same as the governance documents, even more binding. Church culture eats vision strategies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. How do you change church culture? After nearly forty years of ministry, I will admit: I have no idea.

 

You may have noticed I have yet to tell you, dear readers, which form of Sunday worship is the right one. The previous column noted the vast amount of ink and/or pixels that were spilled over a church in Minnesota under ambiguous circumstances trying to change from traditional to contemporary worship styles. I said then, and will say again, I think the vehemence of the reaction to the very idea of doing this (and the stern resistance to hearing the narrative change as new elements of the story came out) is the real point of interest here.

 

I will say, as a practicing parish minister: you can do traditional worship well and faithfully, and a church can do it poorly and without any spirit or Holy Spirit present. And I equally affirm that contemporary worship can be done in a powerful and witnessing sort of way, and it can be canned and tinny and lifeless for all its outward energy. I don't think there's a "right" side on this debate.

 

The question is two-fold for any congregation: what is the best way to worship the living God in your setting, in our current now, where you are located with the history and congregation you are working from – and if the life and spirit is seeping out of your gathered praise and thanksgiving, who decides and how do you go about changing your worship design?

 

In some polities (governance structures), it's simple. The minister or priest or presider has the last word. In others, the congregation or delegated representatives have the ultimate say. Even there, though, if the leadership sees a path opening up in the Holy Spirit in a certain direction, and a group says "no, not that way" then there's a clash of cultures ahead, and a challenge for the church to navigate.

 

What I most dislike in any of these tussles I've been within earshot of is the tendency to defend one's preference by trying to de-legitimize the alternative as awful, un-Christian, even evil. This is the besetting sin of our current political round, to not defend your own best sense of where we should go as well as you can, but to pour your energy and assets into demonizing the other side. I call it the "De-legitimization Project" and it's engaged in all manner of social debates and competing world views.

 

Let's not do that in worship approaches. There's room for both in the Christian landscape, and I would argue a need for both. For each church, though, there's a need for a healthier approach to how we do our discernment around when and how we make even the smallest changes, let alone the big ones that sometimes have to come.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's probably not done on this subject, but you knew that. Tell him what you've wondered about worship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 2-6-20

Notes from my Knapsack 2-6-20

Jeff Gill

 

My voice, public and private

___

I've been asked about this enough in the last few weeks I thought I'd write a bit about the situation regarding my voice, and the spasmodic dysphonia (SD) that is affecting it.

Yes, I still have SD. It's not something that goes away, you just have to learn how to work with it. It's a neurological disorder, not organic/physical damage to the vocal cords. In fact, my vocal cords are just fine! It's the response of the muscles that work the vocal cords, the spasms of spasmodic dysphonia, which is my disability.

In normal functioning, it comes and goes. SD is most problematic in the normal speaking voice. Ironically, singing -- which uses a different neural pathway -- is almost entirely unimpaired. So I can sing, and I can hyper-project (also known as bellowing) in a normal vocal tone. But there's a price to pay, as normal as it sounds, once I'm back to speaking in a softer tone of voice. In fact, the quieter I try to be, the more likely the spasms will take over.

SD is very in keeping with something you might have heard of: spoon theory (you can look it up on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory). In spoon theory, you have a finite number of spoons or spoonfuls you can use during the day. I have received some training in how to work around the SD, after the spectacular failure of the Botox treatments injected into the vocal cords that marked the last two years of my vocal recovery. I can with attention and effort make my voice fairly normal . . . up to a point.

But after I use up enough "spoons," even the vocal therapies I've been taught run into the wall of the spasms that are the issue in having SD. I can sing, but it uses up some of those spoons; I can shout and call out loudly, but it burns through spoons. And the total amount of speaking, plus the amount of stress in the day, uses up spoons to where I'm out of options, and the spasms are most of what you hear.

As I've said to many who've asked: the great thing about SD is that in the entire medical history of the world, no one has ever died of spasmodic dysphonia. So it's poorly understood medically, and has few treatment options. That may change in the future, but I'm told not to get my hopes up. I just have to balance out my use of my voice, and how, as well as manage stressors to mitigate the impact on my vocal cord muscles.

Compared to many other disabilities, I am very blessed. This is a small price to pay for age and exertion and likely overuse. But it creates its own problems: foremost being people worrying, when my SD is in full flower, that I'm sick and contagious with something. Sometimes it's that people get the impression I'm getting choked up about something, even though we're just talking about casual matters.

I am scaling back, and making choices, day by day. My speech therapist says it's not likely to get worse, and I'm not doing damage to my vocal cords (even if it sounds like I must be), so I can carry on. It's not painful as much as it is simply uncomfortable to speak sometimes, and that itself is a reminder to be careful, to be cautious, to count my spoons and use them wisely. For everyone who has asked how I'm doing, thank you; for those who catch me in a good moment and assume it's cured, sorry but no; and for those who are helping me deal with this unexpected complication in a highly verbal life, bless you all -- I have more to say, I just have to think through how to say it, and when.

 

Such as in columns such as this one!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's saying "no" a little more often, and hopes you don't take it personally! Tell him how you deal with limitations at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-1-20

Faith Works 2-1-20

Jeff Gill

 

Where the news is not the news

___

 

"Rattlesnake on the path."

 

When I was hiking with our Philmont crew in the New Mexico mountains, our lead person shouted back down the trail those four chilling words.

 

Fortunately, he'd seen the snake before stepping on it, and stayed to help the rest of us heading up the steep and rocky path give the rattler a wide berth.

 

Except we didn't. The people ahead of me, and myself, I walked away from the rattlesnake, but not as far as I could have. I wanted to get a good look at it, but stay safe. So I edged around, in a tight circle, looking it over from darting tongue to faintly buzzing rattles.

 

That's kind of how I feel about discussing the story recently all over social media about a Methodist church up in Minnesota. The initial story was that the wider church was closing down the congregation and telling the old people to go away, so they could re-open a few months later as a re-launched congregation, in the same building.

 

It came out in a local paper, then the state capital media picked it up, and then . . . it caught fire. Every online platform, it seemed, picked up the story and intensified the pain and injustice, upped the indignation, and passed it along for two, four, sixteen, 256 blogs and webpages to continue the story. It went viral, as the phrase goes.

 

And like so many viral stories, it turns out to have another side. A couple days after the initial eruption (65,536 and so on of posts and tweets), a few major news outlets sent reporters in to dig deeper, and found out there was more to the story. Also worth noting: in the Methodist church, unlike many other traditions, the local congregation does not own their building, nor pick their pastors. Lots of misunderstandings around that subject, as well.

 

But I'm not as interested in the sad, not surprising "rest of the story," a narrative which I kind of guessed at, as I read the first fifteen messages I got asking "what do you think about this?" And I've been fairly low key on social media and in the church where I serve in my reactions to the story.

 

Because I think the real story here is how so many people all over the country leapt directly into the anger and angst and worry over small churches with mostly older worshipers getting closed, or worse (note: #irony) having contemporary worship forced upon them. The original narrative of the viral story was a perfect combo of those horrors: old people pushed out AND the new church having contemporary worship.

 

Look, I am all too aware of how in cases right in my neck of the woods, an organist of thirty years service (and a good one, I would note) meets the new pastor and is told over the first (and last) handshake "thank you for your years of faithful service, and you can enjoy worship now from the pews because we're going in a new direction." I've picked up new members that way. Also by people having their familiar worship overnight becoming very loud and extremely unfamiliar. It's painful at best, and at worst it can be very badly handled . . . though I will say in some ministers' defense that after you've learned there's no upside in a cautious approach, the temptation is there to rip the bandage off in one quick rip.

 

What is leading to this sorry state of affairs, though, is that traditional worship is struggling in this country. I see various statistics, depending on who's making their case, but it's well known: more churches are having to shut down their pipe organs for lack of players at any price, going to keyboards and simpler music; choirs are more rare, whether in frequency or if they exist in a church at all; outside of liturgical traditions, informality has become its own rigid orthodoxy.

 

Full disclosure: the church where I serve is hybrid "relaxed traditional" but clearly the latter, with hymnals (yes, I've gotten the post about keeping hymnals, only forty-eleven times) and a choir and bulletins with the service outline across two pages. We've held steady in attendance over the last five years, which is good compared to many of our peers, but not something I'm comfortable with entirely.

 

The truth, though, is that in general traditional worship has seen staggering losses in attendance over the last decade or two. Yes, there are exceptions, and usually it doesn't take long to figure out the exceptional circumstances at work. And if you want to reach younger people (yes, I know there are exceptions, rare but they exist) you need contemporary worship.

 

This has created over the last few years a huge tension in churches of all sorts and denominations and non-denominations alike. They don't want to die as a church, but if growth looks like that, then…

 

Which is where, God willing, I'll pick up next week!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been mostly a traditional kind of guy for most of his life, but he's curious, too. Tell him what you've wondered about worship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

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Faith Works 1-25-20

Faith Works 1-25-20

Jeff Gill

 

When home and church are the same set of rooms

___

 

Preaching is, if you'll allow me to say this in a hard working community, work.

 

I know, the joke is we work one hour a week; well, we have two services on Sunday mornings at my church, so I work at least two hours a week. What I mean, though, is that the simple physical act of preaching a sermon is physically more than just standing around talking.

 

Our choir director is stepping back to the organist part of her worship responsibilities, and to help her celebrate this transition, the choir asked to do an "anthemfest" where I didn't preach, but they would sing a bunch (it ended up being eight) of their favorite choral anthems.

 

It was a hit with everyone, and I believe the word was preached, and I heard from a number of choir members that just doing three anthems in a row left them physically spent, so we spaced out the service so they only did that many at a time. A couple said "I see why you are worn out at least a bit after the service is over!" which I appreciated. There really is a spiritual as well as physical transfer of energy in delivering a strong message and speaking of matters of the spirit in front of a group.

 

The most rewarding and challenging pastoral experience I have each month is trying to create a worship experience in an assisted living facility. The dozen residents who come are so incredibly attentive to what's sung, what's said, and hungry for the contact and interest Pastor Karen (our associate minister) & I bring when we come.

So we delight in that ministry, we really do -- and yet we worship at a busy intersection, if you will, with other residents crying out at intervals walking back and forth through the middle of our group, another group of residents just a few feet away talking to each other as only the hard of hearing can, and even a wall between us the staff cleaning up from lunch and shouting at each other . . . bless 'em, often coming out the door in mid-holler, always looking startled and abashedly apologizing and backing through the door, and I feel bad that they feel bad for just doing their jobs. The PA often has an announcement of some sort, and the front door has a buzzer and staff bustling through to code them in or code them out, and usually the visitors come in chatting and often talk right through the middle of the 14 or 15 of us gathered together, singing, praying, me preaching.

I've done chapel services in prisons, jails, swim meets, and Scout camps -- they're all easier to manage and deliver at than being a regular Sunday afternoon service provider in a care facility, and that's at any assisted living center I've ever done it at. You can talk to staff in advance (if you can catch them) but they forget that it's going on, or they have what they have to do; there are arguments for different locations but the centrally located spot is usually best for residents, while aurally the hardest to make work. Each place I learn how to turn off or down the ubiquitous TVs (and put them back in service before I go), and where the controls are for the overhead piped-in music (whether I'm supposed to turn it off or not). But the ambient situation is always tricky, and your audience is always hard of hearing.

Yet we can't stop doing this. It's important. We've cut back from two a month to just doing this one, and the requests still come in a few a month to add them, as activity directors plead and our members and friends move to facilities where the word goes out to "ask your pastor if they'd just consider doing only..." I cannot imagine doing none -- I've done at least one a month like this somewhere for over thirty years now. What I worry about is how new assisted living and care facilities are popping up, and the need for those rooms and beds are real, but the number of churches and clergy who will bring a message and a prayer to them continues to shrink. Of all the community losses a decline in church presence creates, this could be the most subtle, the least widely noticed, but I think it could also be one of the most tragic.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he'd be happy to tell you who to contact, but any care facility would probably be happy to hear from you! Tell him about your worship experiences in a different sort of space at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.