Tribal Church

Stories have always been important for humans, but they seem to be taking a new form and vitality in our culture. With our reaction to the information age and our longing for vibrant community, there is a revival of the narrative in our everyday lives.

I began to understand the importance of stories when I stood before the intergenerational group of men and women, leading a conference for an Episcopal Church diocese. I asked people in the crowd, “What formed your generation? What sort of music, technological developments, political events, religious movements and social trends helped to shape who you are today?”

It’s always a fascinating exercise, and that day was no exception. A journalist and church leader in her early twenties raised her hand, “Ever since I can remember, we’ve had the Internet. So, I’ve had every fact available—even news from around the world—at my fingertips.”

“Yes!” I yelled, with excitement. “Amazing things have developed.” I began to prattle on enthusiastically, until I noticed the concern on her face.

“No,” she stopped me. “You don’t understand. Every fact has been available,” she repeated, and this time I saw her furrowed brow. “It’s kind of scary.”

Her comment hides in the back of my mind, and every once in a while I invite it to the forefront so that I can roll it over, imagining the implications of growing up with news and data so readily available. How does this proliferation of information impact the ways in which we communicate? How does it affect our congregations and religious movements?

Looking across popular culture in a new generation, it seems that this crucial shift of information accessibility has made our stories more important. The business writer, Daniel Pink, makes the case in A Whole New Mind that with this inundation of data, facts have become cheap, and stories have more impact. We no longer vault our statistical information in ivory towers, waiting for some professor’s steadfast and dedicated assistant to set them free for the rest of us to consume in a scholarly journal. Now, research data can be readily procured, with a few keystrokes. “When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible,” Pink writes, “each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.”

I wonder if we’re learning about this important cultural shift in our preaching classes. In a time when much of our scriptural interpretation includes a long process of gathering facts and information, are we learning ways in which we can present them with emotional impact? Should that be a concern in our preaching? Or is too much emotionalism manipulative in the pulpit?

photo is by Bibimorvarid

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For those of you who are not Presby-geeks, I apologize for the series of posts that are about to follow… the short story is that Beau Weston wrote a paper for the denomination, which stated that we needed to Rebuild the Presbyterian Establishment.

I’m part of a group who responded to the paper. I joined the esteemed voices of Jose Luis Casal, J. Herbert Nelson II, and Cynthia Holder Rich, who are from various backgrounds, ethnicities, and positions in the church.

I’m white, and I’m a pastor. So as I thought about what I brought to the conversation, I figured that the one thing that I had going for me was that I was young (okay… so I’m 38… which means I’m really stretching this “young” label). I write about ministering to men and women in their 20s and 30s, so my responses center around that viewpoint.

Weston discusses my paper on his blog:

Merritt takes it for granted that the niche of the entire Presbyterian Church is to draw people like her – “writing as a woman who grew up a conservative Baptist and converted to Presbyterianism.” Her strategy for contextual evangelism is “in this particular time we can especially minister to those who are leaving politically conservative evangelical megachurches.”

Welcoming people who are leaving the Evangelical movement is not the core of my outreach strategy, it’s just one sentence from the paper, tacked on to a pleading hope that we “broaden our focus, from not only welcoming those who ‘know what it means to be Presbyterian,’ but also to inviting and accepting men and women from a variety of backgrounds.” So it seems a bit unfair to boil my position down to me wanting a church chock-full of people who look like me.

But, that’s okay. Pastors in growing churches often draw people with similar struggles and hopes. And, I suppose the same could be said for a certain latte-sipping academic white guy, who wants to make sure that the establishment is rebuilt with tall-steeple church pastors and executives. I mean, the last time I checked, most of those types are… well… white guys.

All snarky jabs aside though… reaching out to recovering fundamentalists isn’t a bad strategy. The fact that a new generation of Evangelicals is leaving their congregations goes far beyond my ministering from my small context and experience.

The Emerging Church movement is full of people who grew up Evangelical, and now they’re questioning what they had been taught. Sometimes EC gatherings feel like a Fundamentalists Anonymous group. UnChristian documents the negative attitudes of a new generation toward Evangelicalism. Christine Wicker reports a study that suggests that roughly over 1,000 people leave the Evangelical Church every day.

I’m not happy about this trend. It makes my heart ache, because most of those men and women are leaving Christianity, and leaving for good. So please don’t read this as some sort of sheep-stealing vitriol. (And, yes, I realize that there are PCUSA types who are Evangelical…)

It is just that my experience of the Presbyterian Church was different from the conservative Baptist Church in which I was formed. The leaders of my denomination showed me grace when I had been told that women could not be ordained. The church was there, giving me encouragement, education, and mentors to guide me. They taught me how to be a leader, even as a 22-year-old woman.

Not only that, but so many men and women surrounded me, as I wrestled with my faith, telling me it was okay to doubt, because my eternal salvation did not rely on my personal conviction from one moment to the next. I was held in a community of grace, and God could handle any question that I might spew at God.

It was such good news to me… and I have seen that it’s good news to so many others.

We have a strong and vibrant history of social justice and spiritual traditions. We have a connection with God and the world for which so many people long. And if I’m looking at the future of my beloved denomination, I’m not betting that efforts to rebuild its establishment is going to do much good. The world has shifted too much from the 1950s. We need a new strategy.

And focusing our efforts to reach out to a new generation–a generation who is ethnically diverse and longs to make a difference in the world–that is what gives me hope for vital ministry.

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Text: Luke 4:14-21

I’m starting on my third book now, and I’m writing about the experience of healing from religious abuse. Moving from the conservative religious upbringing and becoming a progressive, female pastor is a huge shift. I’ve spent a lot of time, sorting out my beliefs. Trying to figure out what has been damaging to my self-esteem, my sexuality, my friendships, and attitude toward others. I am thinking about the people who have come into my office during this past decade in ministry.

As I’ve thought back on my history and remembered the stories of others, I hold my breath as I think about the wounds that religion has caused in the lives of so many people, so many of my friends who have suffered abuse from fathers who demanded submission; gays and lesbians who felt that they had to choose between divine love or human love; people who felt emotionally manipulated into a conversion experience, or rejected by their families and friends because of the shunning that was encouraged by churches; women who felt subordinate to men because of the teachings that they learned in Sunday school.

But as I write, I also cannot deny that even though religion wounds, it is often the balm that heals as well. It makes me think of the ointment that was poured over people for medicinal reasons in biblical times.

There was a practice, called anointing. Anointing is an extremely old ritual that is used in all sorts of religions—Hinduism, Judaism. In fact, it’s a practice went back farther than that. It seems that in ancient traditions, there was a sense of life flowing through the blood and fat of animals. There was something sacred about the fat. So when a hunter killed a bear, and he wanted the bear’s courage, he would take the fat of the bear and smear it on himself, welcoming the courage into himself.

This sense that power or the qualities of a person could be passed from one person to another is evident in the Bible. In some cases, it’s almost like passing along an inheritance. For instance, when the great prophet Elijah ended his time here on earth, he gave to his spiritual successor, Elisha, a double portion of his spirit.

Anointing is used throughout the Bible, for different purposes. In the beginning of fledgling country of Israel, the act was used to set men and women apart. Prophets were anointed, and prophets anointed the new kings. Even before the king was chosen by the people, he was chosen by God, through this ritual.

Anointing was used in more ordinary ways as well—as an act of hospitality, the smell of the sweet oil would fill the home, inviting and comforting guests. It was used for medicinal purposes, as the oil acted as a soothing balm for wounds. And men and women anointed bodies to prepare them for burial.

It is important in the life of Jesus as well. One of his first acts of Jesus’ ministry (or at least the first that’s recorded in this gospel) was the one that we read, where he reads from the scrolls:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

As we think about this act and about Jesus—especially as we remember how prophets and priests anointed each other and anointed kings in these ancient rituals—it is interesting to note that Mary is the one who anointed Jesus, right before he died. Lavishing expensive perfume on him, and bathing his feet with her tears, Jesus turned to her, and said that the good news that Jesus preached would always be told in memory of her.

And it just might be true. After all, Jesus is called “the Christ,” which isn’t his last name. The theologian Paul Tillich says that we ought to saying “Jesus the Christ,” because Christ is his title. It means “the anointed one,” and from what we know, she is the one who anointed Jesus. She gave him his title.

Jesus stood up at the beginning of his ministry and said that God had anointed him and she prepared him for the end of his life, pouring the oil over his feet, weeping tears, in this loving and tender gesture.

I know a little bit about anointing myself. We have similar ancient rituals. In other congregations that I’ve served, I have anointed babies when they were baptized. I marked their heads with oil and the sign of the cross, to note they are a part of the Body of Christ. A Christian, a little anointed one.

We do the same sort of ancient rituals when we lay hands on one another in ordination. When you think about it, it is quite amazing. The hands that surrounded you represent a chain that connects you with leaders who go back decades. The chain of arms connect you with men and women whose courage, creativity, and wisdom have kept this church vital for over a 150 years. It always gives me goosebumps when I think about it.

And I know about anointing on a personal level. This sort of thing happened when I went to my grandmother’s home in South Carolina. I had been called into my grandmother’s room, because she had stopped breathing, her heart stopped beating, and she was dying.

We took each other’s hands, made a circle, and began singing “Amazing Grace” and reading Psalm 23. I looked around at the women who were gathered. I could see them, a gathering of preachers and teachers, in some form or fashion. They had worked hard in their congregations. My grandmother had been a matriarch in her congregation. My aunt had cared for people as a nurse for years. My mother and my other aunt led a ministry with developmentally disabled people.

I’m pretty sure that all of these women, at one time or another, had believed that a woman should not be an ordained pastor. But we were gathered there, nonetheless, with our different ministries.

It was a beautiful moment. There was no oil there. But I could not help but have the sense that the strength that my grandmother embodied was flowing there. The bear-like courage with which she faced life was making its way from her, to all of us, from generation to generation. And, inexplicably, my mother turned to me and said, “You are an anointed one.”

The scene was so powerful that when it was over, the hospice nurse took my grandmother’s vital signs, looked at us, shook his head, and said, “Y’all just got her all riled up again. What are you doing? She’s not ever gonna wanna leave this room!”

I smiled. And something happened to me in the experience. I am not always proud of the religion that formed me. I am often ashamed that it is a tradition that often includes hatred and manipulation.

But something happened to me that day, because I was able to embrace my history, and acknowledge that even though my has been a source of pain, it has also been a place of healing. Like a balm, that was poured over wounds, that anointed the feet of Jesus. That gave him the title “Christ” and allows me to live as a Christian.

You are anointed ones. You have been called out to bring the good news to the poor, proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed.

photo by madbronny52

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We just released the first episode of the new season for God Complex Radio! Bruce Reyes-Chow and I have conversations with Brian McLaren, Abby King Kaiser, and Fritz Gutwein.

Please, take a listen and tell us what you think. Bruce, Landon, and I are really excited about it.

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I just got off the phone with Bishop John Shelby Spong. I interviewed him for the newly revised God Complex Radio. The podcast will be available on the 29th.

I had so many things that I wanted to ask him, so many things that I wanted to pull apart. I wanted to agree and disagree with him. But, with his disarming, cordial, and (it seemed, from our short conversation) loving demeanor, I mostly listened.

He wrote a new book, and his last book, Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. In it, he looks at death, and, it seems finds new meaning in life.

He talks about religion as an imperfect, human endeavor, and tells how he became more and more alienated from traditional church life…

Increasingly, I saw the church as an organization for the spiritually immature, as a body of children vying for the affirmation of the heavenly parent. I saw the church engaged in a medieval attempt at the manipulation of the divine, and all for our benefit. I saw it increasingly turn into a retreat into unreality. Worship became not communion with the power of life and love, but a drama in which clergy starred. God was addressed in the chanted language of the Middle Ages, language that enhanced little more than the clergy’s desire to perform. Church life seemed more and more dedicated to behavior control, and church politics was always about who’s out and who’s in.

It’s hard for me to read these words. Even though I agree with much of it, I also wear the title “Rev.” I work for the church, alongside many men and women who often have dispiriting jobs, face acute criticism, and are trying to find a bit of hope to share.

Yet, it’s good for me to read them. Bishop Spong is reading the ancient stories and examining the rituals in the midst of scientific realities and the search for truth.

The most beautiful thing about the writing and about our conversation was that emanating love. Bishop Spong has found meaning in the mystical tradition that seeks union with God. Instead of imagining God as “other,” God is the ground of our being.

We talked about being at the bedside of our parishioners. What do we say? Though Bishop Spong does not think that religion should offer meaningless words of comfort, we are often there holding the hand of the dying.

I remember being at the bedside of a woman—a truly beautiful person (and I’m not just saying that because she’s dead). She drew me to her and asked in a whisper, “What’s going to happen?”

I replied, “When you die?”

She said, “Yes.”

And I told her that I didn’t know. I told her that I was not compelled by golden streets or crystal fountains. That imagery did not suit me. But, drawing from Eckhart, I thought that the love of God, from whence she emanated, would surround her and embrace her. Nothing could keep her from the love of God. Not life and not death.

“I see pools,” she replied.

And I never heard another word from her.

I think that Bishop Spong’s new vision is similar. God is the source of love and the source of life. The goal of the church should not be to make us more religious, but to make us more human.

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I wanted to give myself six weeks from my shoulder injury before I started blogging again. My doctor said it would take that long to heal. Although I didn’t believe him, he was right. It took that long to heal.

The pain has been gone for a little while. My shoulder just reminds me that something is wrong every once in a while with sharp jabs that last for a few seconds. And I’ve had some overwhelming exhaustion. But, the great news is that I haven’t had any more problems with the shoulder dislocating, so it doesn’t look like I’ll need surgery.

Actually, now the pang I’m feeling is guilt, about writing “great news” on a day like today.

In Haiti, the devastation is overwhelming. People are trying to dig men and women out of the rubble with their hands. I am getting emails from people who don’t know if their friends were caught in the quake. Thousands are dead.

Being a religious person in this sort of situation gives me some hope in humanity, because we find out about the many people who have been working there, trying to make things better for a poor country. Often they are there with a church group, or because of their faith. As soon as the disaster hit, I could think of a number of friends who have dedicated their lives to the people of Haiti.

It’s almost enough to drown out Pat Robertson’s remarks. But not quite.

Are you looking for a way to help? Here is a list of relief organizations that my husband put together. I have a friend and member of our church who has been working with the Quixote Center. I have been impressed with their work. Give and pray. Give and pray.

photo by Jan Sochor

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Text: Philippians 4:4-7

I saw the car commercial, just slightly in my vision as I was walking through the basement. I was doing laundry, but I could tell that the ad was showing footage of a beautiful, expensive, luxury automobile, zooming at high speeds around the highway curves. And there was some sort of prattle going on, I don’t remember the monologue, but I think it was a man talking about how he was going to his holiday family reunion, and he was going to show them how successful he had become.

I smiled. The messages of this season are so interesting. You can show people how much you love them with a diamond. Your can make your children happy by buying them a video game. Now, you can finally let your brother and sister know that you got the biggest piece of the pie. You own the most toys. You won the ultimate tug-of-war, because you have a shiny car. Not only can you buy emotional security for your spouse, happy memories for your kids, but you can win the final grand victory for your sibling rivalry. In fact, if we believe the commercials, the only thing that money cannot buy is poverty.

In this season, the idea that money will buy our happiness seeps into just about everything we do. And in this time when we are grasping for joy, we almost believe it.

Joy is part of our Christmas season, and it is a theme in the Bible. The command to “Rejoice” was repeated in our Scriptures and it is peppered in our hymns. And so we gather around, in this time when we know we ought to be joyful, with this expectation that we will be happy. We even read the command from Philippians this morning: “Rejoice!” the author, Paul, says, “And again I say Rejoice!”

And yet, let’s be honest, often with the shorter days, gloom and depression can set in. This is a time when expectations run high and money can run low. It is a season when we can be surrounded by people, but feeling utterly alone. It is a moment when we long to be with our families and our friends, and yet we find ourselves working overtime and attending those parties that we really ought to be seen at.

So, with this command in front of us, and with these holiday pressures all around us, we have to ask, “What gives us joy?”

When I think about joy, two vivid scenes from the last couple of years pop in my mind. And please forgive me, because they are both bathroom scenes: one from a movie and the other from a book.

The first was from Slumdog Millionaire. I know that there has been some controversy about the portrayal of people in India and anger about the name of the movie itself. But, I must say, I liked the movie. There was this unforgettable moment in it. A little boy was in an outhouse, and his brother wanted him to come out of it. Just at that moment, a helicopter came flying over their heads, and news spread that a celebrity was visiting the city. His brother locked him in the outhouse. The boy wanted so badly to see the man that he escaped the only way he knew how. He fell into the excrement.

Then the boy went to go meet the famous man, without wiping anything off. And the crowd of people, who were surrounding the celebrity, moved out of the way for the little boy. He smelled, and they were all afraid that he was going to touch them!

And the celebrity gave the boy his signature.

The boy yelled and jumped for joy. The elation, the pure happiness of this moment, when this boy is covered from head to toe in filth, was an amazing moment.

I found myself, during the whole movie, rooting for such simple things for these children. A home. School. Food. Safety. I thought that it would be a happy ending if they could only have these basic things.

The second bathroom scene that stayed with me this year was much different. It was from the book Eat, Pray, Love, when the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, was on the clean bathroom floor of her suburban home. It was a beautiful house, with new furniture. Gilbert had everything that a person could want, everything that we strive for—a great career, a successful spouse. And yet, she would find herself, late at night, on the floor of the bathroom when she should have been sleeping. She was fighting a wave of overwhelming depression, and trying to talk herself out of hurting herself.

We talked about Eat, Pray, Love at the women’s retreat. We turned it over in our discussions, how the book has sold millions of copies. And we realized that it must be because a lot of people relate to the story–that story of finally having everything that you want and realizing that you’re miserable in the midst of it.

We see this unfold in the news all too often. We see the perfect “family man,” the sports star or politician, they seem to have everything together, then we watch them destroy their lives and themselves. And we scratch our heads and ask, “Why did they do that? They had everything that they could have wanted.” We look at their amazing spouses, and we realize it has nothing to do with what they already have.

Then, as the sordid details of their secret lives come out, we realize that men and women do not just cheat on their spouses because there is someone better who happens to be available. Sometimes they cheat because they are miserable. There is a giant vacuum inside of them that needs. And when they try to fill it with money, power, success, and accolades, and then it’s still there. So they grasp on to sex try to figure out if there is something else that can fill it.

Back to the two scenes, they contrast in my mind, and make me wonder—what is joy? Why does one person experience it in the midst of a slum and another person cannot find it in the midst of luxury? There are studies out that say that in this time and age, even before unemployment got so high, when men and women had many more comforts of life, that we were more depressed than ever before in our country.

Is it because we have too much money? About 15 years ago, I did some work in Kenya, and people in the villages would dance and sing all night long, completely outlasting my 20-year-old self. And after these long nights, my friend Grace would tell me, “We are poor people, but we are rich with happiness.” I never doubted it.

The experience had an effect on me. And I began to have this romantic notion that people who lived in poverty were somehow happier. On top of that, I had a sense of religious asceticism, and believed that when I gave material possessions up, then I would be satisfied. And when I left seminary, I decided to go to one of the poorest areas in the country to pastor in a very small congregation.

But, after living for a few years under the poverty level and realized that there is nothing satisfying about not knowing how I was going to pay for my student loans, or where my next mortgage payment was going to come from. The marital tension was overwhelming. And I quickly became a failed ascetic.

I am not so shallow to think that material possession can buy us happiness, and I learned that giving them up didn’t work for me. But I do wonder, where does joy come from? What sort of things need to be in place so that we might experience joy? Paul ought to know about joy in all kinds of circumstances, he is writing this from prison—and he is telling the community to “rejoice.”

There are things that we can learn to do-eat well and exercise. There are also spiritual disciplines that I have learned in my own life, and things that I have seen others going through as well.

Now, if you are experiencing chemical depression, then do not hesitate to get the help that you need. Often there is a chemical imbalance within our minds that physical and mental exercises will not resolve, and it’s important to get the help that you need.

But, aside from that, there are some things that we can do.

First, we can understand that God loves us and wants the best for us. I know that this might seem trite. It might sound like a bumper sticker on the car of someone you would not invite to your holiday parties, but it is a powerful truth when we can internalize it. For some of us, we get God all mixed up with our parents.

And if we had a father who was never satisfied no matter how hard we tried. If we had a dad who was always absent from our lives. Or a mother who seemed so wrapped up in her own depression to be there emotionally for her child. Or parents who regulated the amount of money or food they gave to us according to how much we were getting along with them. Or if we had parents who abused us. Then, when we pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” we might have the tendency to get the parental metaphor and God all mixed up, and we might imagine that we have a God who can never be pleased, who is never quite satisfied with what we do. Or we could even think that we have a manipulative God who dispenses joy and good things only as God is pleased.

But, if we can begin to imagine a God who loves us, who wants us to have abundant life, who wants us to have a deep abiding joy. If we can begin to imagine a God who will love us and hold us, who thinks that we are good, and delights even in the very smell of us, we can begin to heal from those wounds of our past.

The second thing is to make a gratitude list. Listing everything that we are thankful for. Paul seems to be pointing to this practice when hw says “whatever is whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

It is a rare thing to have everything that we need all at one time. If our job is going well, sometimes we do not have the relationship that we want. If our health is good, then we do not have the job that we want. If we have the career that we always dreamed of, then suddenly we realize that we miss that time with our family that we used to have.

If you are human, there will always a point of dissatisfaction in your life, a place where things seem unbearable. And yet, if we are able to take a few moments to step back, and remember all that we do have, then it’s like getting an injury when we are basically healthy. We can overcome it a lot easier.

The third thing that we can learn to do is to help others, even with our weaknesses. Going back to this retreat, we spent a lot of time talking about archetypes. We looked at the archetypes in the great myths, some that Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell pointed out, and as I was preparing, I noticed that archetype of the wounded healer.

It is a powerful metaphor. I have a friend who was sexually abused as a child, and I asked her one time how she was so resilient. How she was able to live such a productive life. I knew people who were in her same circumstances who were not able to get over the trauma. And she told me that she had learned to use it as a source of healing. Through her work as a counselor, she had been able to talk to people who had gone through similar circumstances, and she had been able to show them that they could live abundant lives. In some sort of emotional sense, it was like she was like she was able to show them her flesh, and to tell them, “Look, the scars will heal. They feel like they are gaping right now, and the pain seems too much to bear, but I have proof that they can heal.”

This is a season when forced happiness surrounds us. And it is a time when we are reminded of the spiritual discipline of rejoicing. We can learn to drink from that deep well of contentment that can fill us. When we are able to use our wounds as a source of healing for others, when we are able to focus on the good things that surrounds us, and when we are able to trust and rest in the fact that God loves us and wants us to have an abundant live.

May we go out in this season, with an overwhelming sense of joy.
To the glory of God our Creator,
God our Liberator,
and God, our Sustainer. Amen.

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Kind of literally. Yesterday, I dislocated my shoulder and spent the morning in the emergency room. Now I’m home, but my left (dominant) hand is in a sling.

So, until I’m back in action, you can read my latest post at Duke’s blog.

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Last week, I helped to lead a Moderators’ Conference on the blessings and burdens of technology. There were so many things that were fascinating about the dynamics of the meeting. It was a conference for the moderators of middle governing bodies (Synods and Presbyteries, if you’re conversant in Preby-ese).

Usually, when I teach conferences, people show up because they want to know about the topic. But this was different. People needed the Moderator training, and that’s why they were there. The technology stuff had very mixed reviews.

It was invigorating in so many ways. There were people who did not know the possibilities that social media presented. So when we talked about evangelism, and how congregations are using web 2.0 to reach out through sermon podcasts, blogs, and review sites, a light went on for many. All of a sudden, that command to reach the ends of the earth became a palpable reality.

In fact, we not only talked about this, but we saw it happen. At one point in the conference, there were about 150 Moderators in the room, but we were Ustreaming the event, so 940 people were watching it over the Internet.

Other people were not learning as much, but they were sharing what they were already doing in their own congregations, giving me great insight into what’s possible.

When we talked about being able to communicate with each other, about the meeting possibilities, we heard how people used to drive three and a half hours for an hour meeting, and then got in their cars to drive another three and a half hour drive. Now men and women can use Skype to meet with each other, and they can save the seven-hour drives for special occasions.

Many church leaders are conducting Bible studies on Facebook, allowing for busy parents to get the faith formation that they need. And when a pastor found that the elderly women in his church no longer wanted to brave driving in the dark for a study, he taught them how to set up a Facebok page and talk about the Scriptures there.

And of course, we talked about the ability to form communities and tribes through social networking. How our face-to-face communication is enhanced by Internet contact. I certainly found that as I was leading the conference with two Twitter friends. I had never met Melissa DeRosia, but I felt like we were old friends, because of our online interactions.

Even though there was this very exciting part of the conference conversation, there was also a frustrating undercurrent. People were worried about not having control over photos, comments, and content. They wanted to know who had oversight over the Presbyterian gathering in Second Life. People wanted their Presbyteries to have social media policies in place before they experimented, and some were shocked that I hadn’t set up rules and regulations before I jumped in.

I shrugged and said, “Well, I guess we’ll come up with the policy when we run into problems.” (This is when I’m reminded that I was not born and bred Presbyterian. I was raised by an inventor, which makes me approach technology differently.)

Other people were very angry over what they perceived as a generational issue. There was an idea that this was all for the “young folks” and once you get to a certain age, there’s no reason to learn it. They were angry that I would even suggest these tools for people who were over seventy.

It reminded me that the digital divide is not only between the rich and poor, but can also be with people of different generations. But…actually…it’s not really about age. There are people much older than me who are very wired, and people who are younger who hate looking at a screen after having to look at one all day at work.

After all was said and done, I took great comfort in Byron Anthony Wade’s words. He kept reminding me, “We’re just sowing seeds here. Some will grow. Some won’t.”

Good words to hear.

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Recently, we had a continuing education event at our church on responding to the economic crisis. As we all know, even though the markets are up, and things seem to be stable, the unemployment rate is still high. While the general population is moving on with their Christmas shopping, a huge percentage of our country is still unemployed, trying to get a job in an incredibly tight market. So the needs in our congregations, as well as the level of anxiety and depression, can be quite high.

So we gathered, with two counselors, to find out how to best support people who are suffering during this time–our friends, our loved ones, our members, and often ourselves. One pastor began his question, “When we counsel people who have lost their jobs….”

And the counselor stopped him and said, “You don’t counsel people who have lost their jobs. You are not counselors, you’re not therapists. You can free yourself from that notion.”

It was a relief, in a sense. There are many times when I realize the huge difference between the relationship between a pastor/parishioner and a therapist/patient. When a patient sees a therapist, and then runs into that person in the grocery story, the therapist is not allowed to speak to her patient. The boundaries are set and clear.

When the therapist says something that angers a patient, the patient may discontinue the services, but it probably won’t hurt the therapist too much.

However, when someone comes to see us, we are not in a position to speak truth for an hour and say good-bye. The boundaries are a lot more fluid than that. We always greet them in the grocery store. We are intimately involved with the births, deaths, weddings, and sicknesses in their lives.

I’m not sure that we have the ability to speak the truth in the same way. Although we usually have more trust built in our relationships, we have to live with the consequences in a much more profound way. For instance, most of us have heard of pastors who counseled a spouse to leave a marriage, and then they were forced out of their jobs, or suffered retaliation within the congregation as a result.

All in all, it’s messy. But I don’t know that we can divorce ourselves from the notion altogether.

In Louisiana, pastors did a lot of counseling because it was a rural town, and there were no therapists available. In Rhode Island, pastors did a lot of counseling, because it was a pretty traditional place, and people were often more comfortable talking to their pastor than they were going to a professional counselor. In DC, pastors do a lot of counseling because a visit with me does not show up on medical records or a security clearance.

Also, you don’t have to wait a month to talk to a pastor. We are available, when people need us. The person does not need insurance or even money to talk to us at the moment of distress.

In different parts of the country, in the wealthiest areas and the poorest areas, there was usually a reason why people went to their pastor. There are just many times when we are the counselor. And I feel equipped to be—at least—a gateway to more professional care. And I know that I can provide things that many counselors cannot—like prayer and spiritual direction.

So what do you think? Should pastors be counselors? Are we counselors whether we like it or not? Is the relationship too enmeshed to really do any good?

Photo by dm74

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