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Diary of a Plain Pastor: Dirty
The mistake she made wasn't to fight dirt, sure enough, but to try and do away with it altogether. As if that were possible! A parish is bound to be dirty.
{Diary of a Country Priest}
If you were to take a quick tour of our home, you'd find an upstairs door with a hole, crushed by a seven-year-old known as "our little hurricane." You'd discover swaths of blue (or is it green now?) goo permanently melded into our nine-year-old's bomb shelter (aka "room"). You'd find sketches scribbled across their (previously white) ceilings, just above their loft beds. And their bathroom - please, for the love of all that is holy and true, do not go into their bathroom - brings their mother to tears.
But of course, each of these scuffs and smells marks the presence of a boy we love, a son that has come, in such inexplicable ways, to mark our own life, our own hopes. The one thing worse than having all this chaos would be not having this chaos.
Churches are too enamored with cleaning up the chaos. Pastors, myself included, are too bent on getting the family (and this is what a church is, of course - a family) polished and scrubbed clean. A parish is bound to be dirty, at least if it's going to have any life happening within it. Living always kicks up the dust.
The work of the church -- the life of the church, that's better -- is to be a place where all the things we hide, all the things that undo us, all the things that frighten us have space to come out into the open. The church is the community where people discover what it means to live well, to love well - to be loved well. But this takes time. Rarely does it happen with a 40 Days Toward Cleanliness campaign. If my pastoral aims point at getting our church to have the right image, then I've abandoned my call - and I guarantee I've also run roughshod over people in making it happen. I've missed their stories. I've manipulated friendship. I may have managed a campaign, but I haven't been a pastor.
Shame gets results. Brute force gets results. So does a cattle-prod. But grace - a life of walking alongside someone toward Jesus - and prayers and true questions (ones that say I want to know you, not I want to work you) offers the possibility of more than a sparkling clean image. Grace transforms us; but it's a messy thing getting there.
{Diary of a Country Priest}
If you were to take a quick tour of our home, you'd find an upstairs door with a hole, crushed by a seven-year-old known as "our little hurricane." You'd discover swaths of blue (or is it green now?) goo permanently melded into our nine-year-old's bomb shelter (aka "room"). You'd find sketches scribbled across their (previously white) ceilings, just above their loft beds. And their bathroom - please, for the love of all that is holy and true, do not go into their bathroom - brings their mother to tears.
But of course, each of these scuffs and smells marks the presence of a boy we love, a son that has come, in such inexplicable ways, to mark our own life, our own hopes. The one thing worse than having all this chaos would be not having this chaos.Churches are too enamored with cleaning up the chaos. Pastors, myself included, are too bent on getting the family (and this is what a church is, of course - a family) polished and scrubbed clean. A parish is bound to be dirty, at least if it's going to have any life happening within it. Living always kicks up the dust.
The work of the church -- the life of the church, that's better -- is to be a place where all the things we hide, all the things that undo us, all the things that frighten us have space to come out into the open. The church is the community where people discover what it means to live well, to love well - to be loved well. But this takes time. Rarely does it happen with a 40 Days Toward Cleanliness campaign. If my pastoral aims point at getting our church to have the right image, then I've abandoned my call - and I guarantee I've also run roughshod over people in making it happen. I've missed their stories. I've manipulated friendship. I may have managed a campaign, but I haven't been a pastor.
Shame gets results. Brute force gets results. So does a cattle-prod. But grace - a life of walking alongside someone toward Jesus - and prayers and true questions (ones that say I want to know you, not I want to work you) offers the possibility of more than a sparkling clean image. Grace transforms us; but it's a messy thing getting there.
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