Preachers and Politics

It's an election year and Facebook is full of less than informed, less than irenic political conversation.  From time to time, this conversation is inspired by some of my clergy colleagues, and I feel compelled to weigh in on the subject.

I certainly have political opinions, myself.  I came from a political family and my grandfather worked in three presidential campaigns as a speechwriter.  I follow a couple dozen news organizations on Twitter.  And yet, very few people know my political views.  Those who know me know that my silence is due neither to a lack of courage about speaking my mind nor a lack of opinion.  I'm a very opinionated person.

Still, I realize that as a pastor I am a public person and that I have given my life over to serve a very special purpose.  That means that in order to fulfill my calling, I must set aside certain things that are my right as a citizen.  I have given up many things to be a pastor, but I have received much more in return.  Whenever we try to hold on to one thing while we grasp the other, we are in danger of losing both.

Pastors certainly ought to weigh in on political issues when they touch issues related to the Gospel directly.  the silence of many white clergy during the Civil Rights movement is a black stain on the history of the church in America, for example.

But personality attacks on candidates of any party are unfruitful and unhelpful when they come from a pastor.  Name calling and sloganism does nothing to help the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Worse, pastors often fail to realize that they have congregants of every political persuasion among their people.  When they engage in partisans political debate, they necessarily alienate those with whom they disagree politically.

Pastors' words are more powerful than they often realize.  We are charged with speaking the words of God and proclaiming the Word of God.  We cheapen our prophetic voice when we use our voice to advocate for the most base of earthly pursuits.  We certainly lose the capability to be messengers of the truth when we use half-truths to condemn people of another party.  Pastors must not be in the business of calling the President a Muslim or calling Governor Romney a crook, no matter what we might think privately.  The way we talk about such issues ought to call our national conversation to a higher standard.

Pastors: Is the Gospel not offensive enough without adding the offense of converting to a political viewpoint on top of converting to the man who called us to take up a cross in order to follow him?

Pastoral Prayer on John 6 (The feeding of the 5000)

Most Gracious God:

You have told us to pray and to ask that you would give us our daily bread.  You have told us that we should ask, seek and knock, that whoever would ask would receive, whoever would seek would find, and to whomever knocks the door would be opened.  You have told us that we should not worry about what we will wear, what we will eat, and from where our needs would be met.  You said that God knows that we need these things and that it is his good pleasure to give them to us.  But you told us to ask.

Sometimes we do not ask--many times we give our prayer time to spiritual matters, to sin and redemption, to asking for mercy.  We ask for peace in our hearts.  You certainly desire these prayers.  We often think that we are being pious and spiritual and attending to things that truly matter when we leave the things of earth aside in our prayers.

And yet, you have desired to be a part of every part of our lives.  You have knit yourself to the mundane as well as the holy.  You have made the ordinary holy by consecrating simple bread, bringing new life through simple water, and filling us with you spirit through the moving of simple air.  You care about our meals, our bills, our car repairs, our pets, our to-do lists, our busy schedules, our children and grandchildren.  You care about the little things, because life is made up of little things, and you came to bring us abundant life.

So, Lord, we ask you to meet our needs.  Transform our desires so that our desire is to have our needs met and not to be given to ever increasing desire.  But feed us in every way.  And give us hearts that care about the needs of our neighbors, whether they live next door or on the other side of the earth.  For you hear their prayers, as well, and you call us to be the answer to our prayers and theirs. Amen.

On the Rock

Jesus said that whoever would hear his words and do them would be like a person who builds a house on a rock. The storms come and beat against the house, and the house stands.

We would have preferred that he would give us the magical spiritual formula to keep the rains away.  But Jesus does not offer us shamanism and rain dances.

We would have preferred that he would give us wind and rain insurance, so that whenever our house fell we could rebuild it quickly and easily and at no personal expense.

Instead, he gave us a foundation.  And he gave us a promise.  The winds are coming.  The rains are coming. But if we will build on the right foundation, when the clouds part, we will still be standing.

Home

Always I will be returning to an old place only to find that it is no longer home.

Or discovering a new place and struggling to make a home of it.

Occasionally, I will settle down and be comfortable for awhile and give into the illusion that I am home, that after life changes again I will still have a place to return to.

Since early nomads tried to quit wandering and began to plant seed for bread, we have sought a place. We have longed for home. We have not found it.

I can only find home in love. I can only find home in God.

Pastoral Prayer for the Sunday After Independence Day

Holy God:

On this week in which we celebrate the founding of the nation in which we live, we are especially grateful that our freedom to worship you according to the dictates of our own conscience is guaranteed in law. Forgive us for failing to realize how rare this privilege is in our world. We ask that you would strengthen and support our brothers and sisters who are singing your praises this day in places in which they must worship in secret and under threat. We also confess that we have too rarely taken advantage of our religious freedom—give us a heart to respond to you completely and to work for the drawing near of your eternal kingdom in our world.

You have told us to lift those in authority over us in prayer. And so we remember our President, Barack Obama, our governor, Robert Bentley, our Mayor, Al Kelly, and all our elected national, state, and local representatives. Help them to serve with honor and as servants of the public good rather than from personal ambition.

We also remember all who serve on our behalf in civic life—teachers, law enforcement,  fire and rescue workers, and civil servants. Especially we ask that you would protect and defend servicemen and women in harm’s way.

You have taught us to pray for our enemies, so we ask that you would bless those who curse us and make our enemies into friends. We pray for the peace of Jerusalem, for peace between the nations, and the strength to work for your promised day when swords would be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, nation would not rise against nation, neither would they learn war anymore.

Many in our nation and throughout our world are suffering from economic troubles, so we ask that you would help us. Help each person who desires to work to find meaningful employment and the capacity to support their families with dignity.

Open our hearts on this, your day, to hear your word, to be shaped into your disciples, and to submit our lives wholly to your Lordship. Bring your healing to those we love and those of our family of faith who are sick, bereaved, and broken in spirit. Amen.

Holy Space

Less than a few weeks into my new life as the pastor of a mid-size church, I feel compelled to think through some of the terrific lessons I learned from the last place.  I had a unique opportunity to try new things and push the boundaries of ministry in interesting ways.  Some of the things I learned might be helpful for others.

One of the great adventures of my time at Montgomery First UMC was the development of the Cloverdale School project.  Cloverdale School is a closed down junior high school that had been only slightly used since Huntingdon College bought it from the school district in 2002.  During my time at Montgomery First, the church leased a major portion of the building and put me in charge of filling it with ministry and programming consistent with its Long Range Plan.

Though I was given a big building in poor repair and a lot of rope, I was not given staff support or the money necessary to hire out renovations.  Everything was done by volunteers, and all the furnishings were hand-me-downs from the main campus.  I administrated the facility while I maintained all my duties at the main campus, so whatever I did had to be on the side.

Cloverdale School has been a part of the life of the community since 1922, so we quickly decided that we needed to approach the use of the facility in a way that made the building available to the neighborhood.  We needed to celebrate the history of the building's role in community life and give it back to the neighborhood as a resource for the fulfillment of the community's dreams for itself.

When word got out, we quickly found that there were people in the city who had good things they wanted to do and were only limited by the lack of a place to do them.  Two different ballroom dancing groups began to hold dances there.  The city's fencing club began to use the facility weekly.  Three non-profit organizations moved their offices there.  A support group for folks with Parkinson's disease began to meet there, as did Alcoholics Anonymous.  Impact Alabama, an organization that develops creative initiatives to combat poverty, partnered with Huntingdon College to teach students how to prepare tax returns for the working poor.  The school began to use the facility, too, for worship, concerts, dances, even cheerleading practice.  Some students brought their theology books and computers up there to write papers all night during crunch time.  Those are just a few of the things that happened that had nothing to do with church programming in the building.

Here's what it taught me:  If the United Methodist Church has anything, it has a lot of dead empty buildings.  And there's no reason for those buildings to be empty.  Ever.  If a dead empty junior high school can fill up with people of all types doing all kinds of activities at all times of the day with no staff support and no facilities investment (not even a janitor to empty the trash), then there's no reason that every building in the United Methodist family can't be full, too.  So why aren't they?

I think our buildings are empty because we think that they should be used for church activities.  We had church activities and trustee oversight and all that at Cloverdale School, but we put a premium on letting the community know that the reason we leased the facility was to give it back to them.  So they came.  And relationships were established.  And it took a whale of a lot less time and effort than it would have taken to plan and staff those activities if we'd organized them ourselves.

All of our buildings were consecrated when they were opened.  That means they were set aside to be used for God's purpose, not ours.  They don't belong to us, and they don't belong to the United Methodist Church.  That's why we call them "trustees"--they hold God's buildings in a sacred trust to make sure they are used for God's purpose.  And God has shown us how he works by becoming a human being and giving his life away as an expression of his great love for the world.

Cloverdale School was maybe the best example I've seen of that kind of theology being lived out in the way facilities are used.  I think if we all learned something from what happened there, we could see the Kingdom of God actualized in some very cool ways.  The building is not ours.  It belongs to Christ and he wants to bless the world and give it away for the good of the community.