Beating Myself Up to Gain Sympathy and Encouragement


Abstract:
This past Sunday we had the lowest attendance at our traditional worship service that we have had since I have been there. It is very hard not to take it personally.

Body:
Even though I have seen lives changed - I have seen people come to worship who have been victimized by church, who had themselves rejected church - low Sunday turnout makes me question my ministry. And it causes me a good deal of anxiety. If I can't do ministry here, I certainly can't teach it. We've managed to start a coffee house, create a new worship service, make disciples - why does it still feel like failure? I can preach the failure of Jesus on the cross - power made manifest in weakness - but it is much, much harder to live it. Weakness still feels like weakness. And when you look into a congregation that is half what it was just a few years ago - it hurts. I'm doing everything I know to do, in my personal life as well as my pastoral life. And still we keep dying.

All our models of ministry are based on strength and success and big numbers - Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, Easum and Bandy. (Is this the "Great Man theory" of ministry?) I know of none that take failure seriously. None. If they mention weakness, it's always because there is some hidden strength in there somewhere. The prostitute always has a heart of gold. The retarded child always has a special talent for playing the flute. There's never just failure. Never just weakness. Even when talking about Good Friday, they're already thinking of Pentecost.

There are days (like today) when I feel like quitting. What keeps me going is not a promise of success. It's not the sappy sentimentality of the "footsteps" poem. It's that Jesus failed and felt forsaken.

Sometimes you can do everything God wants of you and still fail. Sometimes you die and there is no promise of a surprise ending resurrection. I think faith only becomes faith when we no longer perform for a promised reward, but shrug in the face of a potentially indifferent universe and say, "it still matters." Not only believing in the absence of evidence, but believing in spite of the evidence. Somewhere in there is the difference between Kierkegaard's tragic hero and the knight of faith.

I'll still get up in the pulpit next Sunday. And I'll preach about the power of God made manifest in the broken Body of Christ, which we call the church. And maybe some day it will stop bothering me that I can't perform CPR on it. I sure wish that breath of God that blew through at Pentecost would breathe into this broken body. My breath won't sustain it. That much is clear.

Posted: Wed - May 4, 2005 at 12:32 AM           |

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