Up and Out
I saw this tweet going around for a while without seeing anyone making the obvious self-deprecating joke, so I went for it:
And of course it’s not really a joke. I mean no complaint by saying this, but it’s just a bewildering job whose circumstances are changing in the context of long-term trends that we really can’t do anything about. Which is like most jobs today. And in fact this is the opposite of a complaint, because I’ve been paid by gracious and generous people to do this job I really don’t know, in its full and protean extent, how to do. But, well, I love it and believe in it. Earnestness counts for something in this work and on a good day one hopes it is contagious.
One problem with ministry, and probably other fields too, is that in the context of a contracting field, the only way up, or maybe even ahead, is very often out. I was struck by this thought recently as I saw a promoted post from a mainline pastor and writer who was starting an online community for “spiritual misfits,” with some content and book club type stuff. I’m not going to mention this person’s name—you’ll either know who this is or it won’t matter to you—because I don’t want to knock them in a personal way. It just made me kind of sad. This is someone who founded an exciting mission church for not-conventionally-Christian folks (“spiritual misfits” if you will), got some good press for it (and ended up speaking at my synod’s professional leaders’ conference a couple weeks after my ordination, where we shared a lunch table and talked about sick kids), wrote a couple books, and then, for entirely understandable reasons, left the thriving mission church to do something else. The hard-to-digest part of this, for me, is that “something else” wasn’t the once-conventional step of going to another, maybe bigger church with more programs, or a struggling church in need of revitalization, or a new mission plant. It wasn’t going to a seminary to teach or to a synodical or denominational staff position to share knowledge and lead the leaders. It was just this freelance theological content production. A synodical call has been issued as “pastor of public witness,” but in what way is any of this stuff supposed to feed back into the scruffy, skin-of-our-teeth church communities in which this person got their start?
It’s a familiar pattern (which is part of why I don’t want to harp on this individual), but it has been a little late in coming to my church. And it’s an entirely prudent and rational move for the pastor with a big enough platform or online following to just step out of the structures of the church. It would surely be very difficult, and not a little risky, to bounce between talking to big venues and getting profiled in The New Yorker and going to a council meeting about the boiler at a church whose members don’t really care that you’re mainline-famous.
But maybe that’s what people should be doing anyway. This could sound like rationalization or even sour grapes coming from someone who has published, I don’t know, 200,000 words in books and newspapers and magazine articles over a decade without ever gathering anything so vulgar as a following or a platform. But having sat with this question and my own relationship to it over some years now, I have reached the sober and serious conclusion that I am in fact correct: a call to ordained ministry means, first and foremost, a call to the local church or to ministries that directly relate to the local church. The self-selection and self-dramatization inherent in calling for an online community of “misfits” is, however appealing and maybe even necessary for some people, ultimately a repudiation of any ministry that hasn’t been summoned by your own charisma or gifts or style. I’ve always suspected that it was demeaning to all the people who did this work over decades and generations in their churches and whose claim to faithful service is about a thousand times more plausible than mine.
But then again, you don’t need to step out of the confines of churchy churchliness to make that disdain totally explicit. This month The Christian Century (for whom I often write, full disclosure) published a dialogue between two eminent Protestant theological voices: Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon. Working separately and together, these two have for decades promoted a very high, sometimes almost separatist ecclesiology that has emphasized the extreme demands and world-contempt of Christian discipleship. Which is right enough as far as it goes. But the idealized church of this high ecclesiology is nowhere in evidence in the real world:
I’ve told seminarians that ministry defined as “meeting people’s needs” is dangerous in a society where the more affluent and privileged among us have solved with a credit card most of our biblical needs like food, housing, and clothing. So we move on to assuaging personal needs the Bible doesn’t give a rip about—meaning making, a purpose-driven life, balance, freedom from anxiety, or a sense of personal well-being. Fulfillment of desire becomes elevated to the level of need, and need gets jacked up to the status of a right.
Because my desires are a bottomless pit, no wonder so many clergy become exhausted rushing about in service to my right to be cared for. Running errands for the anxiously affluent is hardly worth a life.
This is, in the manner of Walter Sobchak, “not wrong.” It’s just…too laden with disgust to make any sense to me. Yes, we live in a narcissistic culture, and we’ve been able to democratize self-absorption and the felt experience of being in front of audience in a way that strikes me as enormously destructive and productive of real pain. I shudder when I hear a pastor say that he doesn’t really have a role confronting or critiquing this culture but just accompanying people through it. Still, I wonder at the disdain. We could just, you know, not do this if we don’t want to. If “running errands for the anxiously affluent” isn’t worth a life’s vocation, then surely sniping and grumbling at the comprehensive worthlessness of ministry and the people it serves isn’t either.
The Anxiety of Influence
What’s true of clergy fitting awkwardly into the forms of church ministry in [choose your own adventure: postmodernity, late capitalism, advanced secularization] seems to be no less true of Christian intellectuals and influencers. Over the weekend, Orthodox blogger and gadfly Rod Dreher brought joy and mirth to Twitter by telling his story of briefly meeting Pope Francis, introducing himself as the author of The Benedict Option, and the Vicar of Christ giving him a blank look. It was funny, and it prompted a storm of imitations:
But it’s a sad story at heart. Dreher was evangelical, then he became Catholic, and feeling quite understandably crushed and disillusioned by the abuse revelations, joined the Orthodox Church in America. Then, for reasons I didn’t follow, he left the OCA for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. This is the Christian traditionalist equivalent of joining the Judean Popular People’s Front. But this restlessness has not prevented him from building a following, largely online, among conservative Christians who share his preoccupations. If you live your life online, you might even mistake this following for the sort of prominence that would get the attention of the Bishop of Rome.
But the problem with decamping institutions for the sake of media-driven influence is that no one really has to know your book. “How many divisions has the Pope?” is a cynical but real question. But he really does have more followers on Twitter and IRL than you ever will. You can submit to his authority, you can reject it, but you can’t really pretend that you’re sharing a stage with him. To go back to Walter for a minute, say what you want about the tenets of Roman Catholicism, Dude, at least it’s an ecclesiology.
We Don’t Have to Do This
A test I frequently run in my head (and sometimes out loud, for those people tasked with attending meetings with me) is whether I or anyone else really thinks this—whatever this is in the moment—is necessary. I do sometimes wonder what my colleagues think their job really is, and what would change if they just stayed home on Sunday and never came back. There are answers—many possible answers!—to this question, but that’s why I ask it. And woe to those of us who don’t have an answer for why we try to extract time and money and devotion from people who could just as well be watching a ball game or sleeping in or doing whatever people do. But nested within this test is the question of whether, or in what sense, this ministry needs me. No one needs another guru. Better to make an honest living doing something normal than to try to make myself indispensable.
I don’t have any prescriptions for how to straddle the reality of conviction and the fear of futility. If I come up with anything, I’ll let you know. I’ll try not to charge hundreds of dollars for online coaching on it, either. I place a high value on showing up to a particular place with particular people whose presence there has little to do with me personally and who can stand up and walk out or quit the vestry or give me a hug when they know I’ve had a bad week. That’s as far as I’ve gotten on ecclesiology or doing my job, which increasingly is the same thing.
Charlie Watts, 1941-2021
It had to happen eventually, but I was really sad to hear the news that Charlie Watts had died. His centrality to the Rolling Stones is affirmed in every obituary and profile, and his subtle, loping style made a marked contrast with the bombastic drummers of the high rock-and-roll era.
Much as I’ve loved the Stones since adolescence, I’ve only published one thing about them and it was a concert review (of sorts):
“Midnight Rambler” nearly broke to pieces; it was hot, but it was also one Charlie Watts away from sounding like some suburban dads screwing around in the basement after a few beers.
Here’s some amateur video of that song if you want to hear what I meant:
Charlie was gracious in interviews about the skills of his lifelong collaborators. Keith was “the heart” and Mick was the best frontman in music since the death of James Brown. And while those are surely sincere and not even over-generous words, Charlie always had a wry distance from the band, their output, and their mythos. He sketched the bed of every hotel room he stayed in on tour from, like, 1967 on. His work is really quite remarkable and together they produced something no one else could quite imitate. But as a drummer he was, so to say, fifth business. He facilitated. He was not the center of the story, but without him, there was no story.
Over time this becomes its own sort of persona. Stick around long enough, doing little things no one else can quite do, and your anti-charisma works just as well as what Mick or Keith does. When the Stones media team did Twitter-submitted fan questions before one of their big anniversary tours, there were handles for questions to Mick, Keith, and Ronnie Wood. Questions for Charlie, who had no Twitter account, were hashtagged "#CharliesTooCoolForTwitter.” After indulging it a few times, he politely but firmly asked the social media staffer to just drop the line. To be neither on Twitter nor too cool for Twitter is the higher wisdom.
Sermon: Self-Deprecation
Speaking of that Twitter gag at the top, I heard the Apostle James saying something to me this week: