Church, I think we’re gonna be okay

The past several years of my life have been building up to a three and a half hour stretch of time this morning from 8:30 am to 12:00 pm: my interviews for full ordination as a United Methodist elder. I have anticipated this moment with dread, paranoid about getting torpedoed by someone with a chip on their shoulders over one of my blog posts. What actually happened was I sat in a room with human beings who love God, who pray, who have made mistakes and learned from them, and who genuinely seemed to want the best for me and for our church. They not only took seriously their duty to evaluate my effectiveness in ministry but also acted the way that pastors are supposed to act in making me feel loved and safe in their presence. I don’t want to diminish the legitimately troubling experiences that other pastors have had in the ordination process. Neither do I want to minimize the injustices in our church. But experiencing the peace of the Holy Spirit when I expected to face a firing squad, God put it on my heart to say to my fellow Methodists that I think we’re going to be okay.

My friend Zach Hoag wrote a piece earlier this month that continues to weigh on me as I reflect upon how toxic it is to live our lives in blogosphere cyber-war zones instead of being rooted in flesh and blood communities. He writes, “It’s time for the Christian Internet to recover a love for the church – to produce rooted, relational content that actually fosters restoration in God’s world… It’s time to live whole lives in the kingdom and see the Internet as a means to expressing and experiencing good news.”

When I evaluate the state of the United Methodist Church from the vantage point of clergy facebook groups, we appear to be a miserable, hopelessly divided culture war battleground that would do best to split over our stances on gay marriage. Anybody who reads my blog knows how passionate I am about that particular issue. The more time I spend engaging other people anonymously online over that issue, the more I divide the world between pro-gay and anti-gay and categorize Christians as being either Jesus’ true disciples or the modern-day “Pharisees” who have hijacked His church. It’s a toxic way of viewing the world that I’m not proud of.

The Hebrew and Greek names for our one true enemy are satan, which means “accuser,” and diabolos, which means “bomb-thrower.” When we interact in disembodied social media trench warfare, we are being children of Satan. Every pastor in those clergy facebook groups where we presume so much about each other is someone who prays, someone who loves, and someone whom God is using to build His kingdom. If we all had a retreat together in person and didn’t try to conclude based on haircuts, race, gender, and age who was on which side, then I’ll bet we could actually worship God together and be taught by people whom we are accustomed to dismissing as renegades without any integrity or heartless curmudgeons.

There’s something holy about Blackstone, this brick and mortar, somewhat dilapidated Virginia conference retreat center with a fraying carpet and broken heating system. Because every time I come here, the Holy Spirit reminds me that the whole point of this thing called church is ekklesia: “to gather,” which means holding hands and praying together, breaking bread together, appreciating the richness of each others’ stories instead of reducing identity to ideological and demographic categories. The Eucharist at the center of our lives as Christians reminds us that church is not church unless it involves physically touching and sharing flesh and blood with each other. I honestly haven’t met any pastor face to face in our Virginia conference with whom I could imagine ever breaking communion.

When I sat at a table with my colleagues this morning who asked me to share the lessons of my journey, I did not see people on “my side” and “the other side,” even though the haircuts and ages and accents let me know we were a diverse group. These were truly my elder sisters and brothers. And I couldn’t say that a single one of them had an agenda other than caring for me and the well-being of the church that we share. Maybe we’ve got a unique thing going in the Virginia conference. I’ve often wondered that when I hear stories about other conferences. But I suspect that places as different as Seattle and Birmingham and Boston and Houston are filled with Methodists who share a longing for God’s kingdom to reign and for the people within their communities to know the sweet deliverance of Jesus’ cross and resurrection.

More importantly, the Holy Spirit reigns and is constantly shepherding us as pastors similarly to how we do when factions threaten to rupture our congregations over things like the color of the carpet. We might not see how we can stay one body. But God has pastoral skills and tricks that transcend anything we could come up with ourselves. And God is constantly strategizing about how to bring us into a more perfect communion with Him and each other. The voice of despair that accuses and denigrates and dehumanizes is the voice of Satan. Stop being his mouthpiece and I’ll try my best to do the same. Let’s stop throwing wet blankets over God’s holy fire. It’s going to be okay. We have a good God who knows how to handle us.