The Space that is Monday

It is my day off. So, what am I thinking about? Church, of course!

I've discovered a couple of things during my time as a pastor. The first is, I really do just think about God and church and such a whole lot, so I guess I'm in a good vocation. The second thing is, much of my week as a pastor involves "getting things done," i.e., working through a list of tasks that just need to be finished. Meetings, worship orders, visits, answering emails and phone calls, writing the next sermon, and picking up the odds and ends of church life take up a huge share of my time. That is okay; there's a reason why it's called "work." Often, there just isn't much space left for thinking about the big picture.

However, as a pastor (and as a person), keeping the big picture at the forefront is absolutely necessary for me. I need time to reflect and dream. My brain craves that time, hunts for it between the typing press releases and the planning of consistory agendas - and finds it lacking.

It's on Mondays, when I set the tasks aside and declare a moratorium on Microsoft Word, that the parts of my mind that have been pushed into corners creep out and start to play. And despite the fact that it is my day off, they really like to hop and skip around the idea of church, and what I think the church could be.

I think about my time at Camp Fowler, and the kind of community that is formed there, and I imagine a community with similar values and commitments, not hidden away in an Adirondack paradise, but integrated into a world full of people who don't yet share those ideals - but who might see in those values and commitments lived out something they longed for even before they knew it existed.

I think about the people I see in the bars every week, and I imagine a gathering of worship and fellowship where they would feel not just accepted, but wanted, and where they wouldn't have to learn a new language or adopt a new dress code or put on a happy face to feel welcome.

I think about this weekend's wonderful Harvest Festival, and I imagine holding such an event next year not as a fundraiser for the church, but as a service to the community.

I think about a quote I read from Rob Bell: "I love everyone, and you're next," and I imagine what I might do and where I might be if I stopped worrying about criticism and other people's perceptions of me.

Today, my brain has space, and I'm imagining possibilities. Some of them glimmer as a small but growing part of what already is, and some of them seem very distant indeed. But they're there, and I'm glad for Mondays if only because I can let them pay me a visit.

Evangelism?

In college, I participated in an evangelical Christian organization. I guess there's more background to that; I came into this group after having one of those sudden, blinding light conversion experiences. The people in this organization were the only people I knew who openly identified themselves as Christians, so I figured that I should be one of them. Their description of themselves as "evanglical" was no joke; they were very focused on sharing the Gospel and convincing people to make a decision for Christ.

No one needed to see the results of my spiritual gifts inventory to see that I was a natural in that part of their ministry. I like to talk, and when I'm excited about something, it tends to come flying out of my mouth pretty much continuously. So, when I got excited about God, God was suddenly all over my conversations. I'd call it the zeal of a convert, but ten years later, I'm still pretty much the same way. Anyway, the people in this organization tapped into this, and encouraged me to be intentional about evangelism - and I was. I learned Romans Road and the cross/bridge illustration and about a thousand other popular Gospel-sharing methods. I studied apologetics, acquired tracts, and started giving my testimony at various evangelistic events as well as in conversation. I started teaching other people to do these things as well.

However, many of these things started to make me really uncomfortable after a while. I didn't mind being intentional, and it certainly didn't bother me to talk about my experiences with God or my belief in Jesus Christ, but evangelism with all of those scripts and tactics started to feel gimicky. Also, the other people in the group didn't seem to think I should actually be friends with people who weren't Christians. I was supposed to cultivate friendship only insofar as it would give me an "in" to tell them about Jesus. If they didn't "make a decision for Christ," I wasn't supposed to hang out with them anymore - and God help me if I didn't press them to do so within our first two conversations! So, I began to wonder whether what we were doing was really proclaiming good news. I started learning to be myself as a Christian, and myself was someone who just talked to people in a natural way, and who tried to share God's good news in a way that didn't feel like I was trying to market something.

Eventually, my 'unorthodox' approach to evangelism (among other things) led me to leave that organization. It was a long time after that before I could start to say the word "evangelism" without cringing, let alone think of it as something I should do.

But that doesn't mean that I stopped talking about Jesus. Of course, now I'm a pastor, and I talk about Jesus all the time with people in church. But I'm also someone who rarely has a conversation without it turning at some point to the spiritual and theological. This is as true in a bar as in a Bible study - sometimes more so, because the Christian-ese spoken amongst Christians still brings back the pain of breaking with my first Christian community.

I guess I've just been thinking a lot lately about evangelism: what it means, and how I go about it. I wonder sometimes now if I'm intentional enough about encouraging people to "repent and believe the good news," because I'm still extremely hesitant to say anything that resembles the Bible beating approach I used to take. It's hard for me to find a balance between listening to and valuing people as they are (which I do), and yet communicating that I believe they need Jesus (which I also do). I also wonder about the ways that my life reflects my faith, especially when so many people seem to perceive a pastor who goes to bars as an irreconcilable duality, but I guess that's a topic for another post. What it comes down to is that I'm just trying to figure out how to be faithful to my calling (and I mean "calling" in a holistic sense, not as just my calling to be a pastor) in all the areas of my life. I don't have it all figured out yet, but then, who does?