I’m back. I have wanted to resume this web log for a long time, but this blogging activity is hard to work into an already full life.

I’m going to try again to write fairly regularly because I want to record my journey in leading Faith Church through an incredibly difficult transformation. I hope many folks from Faith Church will resume reading. They did a great job of keeping up with me in my sabbatical. And I hope I can regain a larger readership, because the insights of others outside my viewpoint will be invaluable. So here goes.

God is in the business of remaking Faith Church (and most of the other American churches as well). The first phase feels like loss; the second phase feels like confusion; and the third phase feels like possibility. Faith Church is not at phase three yet.

The losses take us by surprise because they are so easily masked. Just as economists are unwilling to declare a recession until long after the country has experienced subtle signs of downturns, churches can miss the early signs that conditions have changed. Once the evidence is unavoidable that conditions for ministry have altered considerably, we can look back and say, “Well, this trend started six years ago.” Or, “We had an uncomfortable feeling but didn’t know what exactly was going on.”

I think the reason I could hardly stand to blog these last four months is because it is so uncomfortable being in this unknown territory. Today I shared my malaise with a group of local pastors. I described my spiritual struggle against anxiety and my resolve to try to live for now in the present, and leave the uncertainty of how to lead the church into new forms of ministry in God’s hands. “Please pray for me to abide in Christ and to be content in that relationship.” To a person, as we went around the room, every other pastor said, “Ditto. I need the same prayer, because I am just as anxious and uncertain as Rick.” It is consoling to know I am not alone.

Although I resume this web log in the dark, I am totally confident how things will turn out in the End. It’s the next couple of decades that are so perplexing. I think it will be a wild ride, and, once we get beyond the discomfort of loss (phase one), maybe even exhilarating, as we experiment under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I am writing in order to record what will likely be a fascinating journey, for me and for the church.

Day One of my return to Faith Church felt sort of like starting a new job, except that I already knew the people. There was so much to absorb. I even had to learn how to use the telephone; a new system had been installed while I was away.

I discovered that the church was not sitting idle while I was gone. There were incredible stories of spiritual growth and mission adventures. The elders made some changes. And a major building renovation was launched and is halfway complete.

Most importantly, the word missional is on people’s tongues. Members are trying to figure out how to connect with their neighbors and how to make a difference in the community. Bottom line: there is a growing awareness among members that matches my growing conviction that we are in a new day, requiring a vastly new approach.

I said to one member last night, “Fifteen years ago young families literally poured into Faith Church. Today there are just as many young families in Medford as before, but they’re not coming. Even when we invite them, they politely decline. We have to find a way to connect with these people on their terms and on their turf, and that will require learning a new way, not of doing church, but of being church. We will have to learn how to crawl before we can walk, and walk before we can run.”

Her response to me? “That’s a pretty good place for us to be.” I couldn’t have been happier with her reply. We have only the sketchiest idea of what we need to do or how to do it, but we’re ready to get going on the adventure of following Christ into the world.

In the ten weeks since I began posting reflections on my sabbatical, by far the highest number of viewings and the most strenuous response has been to the blog entry, “Time to Stop Preaching?” I could imagine Faith Church members exclaiming, “Three days into his sabbatical, and already Rick wants to quit?” I have refrained from responding to the online comments, in part so that this web log could become a forum for group interaction and not just dialogue.

A short section from the book, Church After Christendom, seems to pick up on several of the comments on my blog post. Stuart Murray writes of the emerging churches that are experimenting with what he calls “multi-voiced worship,” various attempts to avoid the monologue sermon and worship led only by the pastor.

“Some emerging churches are convinced that multi-voiced worship promotes spiritual growth and builds strong communities. But many churches that introduce multi-voiced worship find almost irresistible the gravitational pull of the mono-voiced Christendom legacy. Table churches, household churches, cell churches and other small-scale community-oriented churches know the difficulty of sustaining multi-voiced worship. Many struggle with the low quality and predictability of contributions. Multi-voiced churches do not just happen. But there is an alternative to reverting to mono-voiced worship – training and equipping processes that ‘prepare God’s people for works of service’ (Eph. 4:7). . . Some emerging churches agree with Ephesians 4 that maturity comes not from over-dependence on worship leaders or listening to endless monologues, but ‘as each part does its work’ (v. 16), contributing distinctively to the harmony.”

Faith Church is way ahead of the game on this matter. We have been doing multi-voiced worship since 1990, if not longer, and we have a cadre of above average worship leaders. Our worship is richer because we have developed this congregational expertise.

The next frontier to consider is the sermon. My original blog included a quote from John Drane, whose book I read shortly before taking the course he led in England. Before this sabbatical is over I want to return to his thesis, that people accustomed to postmodern ways of experiencing reality will respond better to a different way of presenting the Word than a monologue sermon.

Stuart Murray is undoubtedly right, that the time and creativity required to produce multi-voiced worship make it hard to sustain week after week, but he also notes that expecting highly creative and engaging worship from the same pastor is also hard to sustain, and from his standpoint that creative effort requires an inordinate amount of the pastor’s time. There are no easy answers on this intriguing matter.

I’ve been digging around for a few days in an area of research that is all new to me. I’m studying the life and writings of Gregory the Great. He was pope during the years 590-604. It was the twilight of the Roman Empire, a time of great social dislocation and political upheaval. Constant war, and decimating plagues, famine and floods added to the misery of his era.

Gregory is called “great” because of his leadership of the church in a time of high anxiety and uncertainty. He brought spiritual depth to his oversight of the church, and his guidance to pastors is still being read today.

Of note to me is Gregory’s effort to reconcile the desire for spiritual reflection and prayer with the demands of daily duties. Gregory had been called into service as pope from the monastery. His preferred way of life was the quiet of contemplation, and he was very reluctant to give it up for the administrative rigors of the papacy.

Gregory wrote extensively of the tension between the active life and the contemplative. In his biography of Gregory, R. A Markus writes, “Service and contemplation [Gregory believed] complement each other in the pastoral life. The preacher always needs to return to the ‘fire of contemplation’ to renew his ardor, if his work of love is not to cool. The life of a faithful minister is a constant returning from action to contemplation and from contemplation to action.” (p. 24)

Surveys of today’s pastors show how much they struggle to find time for contemplation. Gregory offers a word of realism as he reflects on the story of Mary and Martha.

“If those of us who serve our brothers cannot sit quietly at our Redeemer’s feet, we should nevertheless stand by Him for a little while. We do this well if we glimpse Him as we pass to and fro while serving. And what does it mean to glimpse the Lord in passing, but to direct to Him the intention of our hearts in all our good works? For we pass to and fro as we run around serving Him, ministering to His members. And passing we glimpse the Lord if in all we do, we contemplate Him who is present to us when we try to please Him.”

Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, as we “pass to and fro while serving:” to “glimpse the Lord in passing.” And I think what Gregory means by “directing to Him the intention of our hearts in all our good works,” is something like the prayer, “Lord, as I hurry from task to task, this is my service to you, my offering, my prayer; please receive it in love.”

It still seems unbalanced, and Gregory would probably agree. But if in our ministry the Lord should grant us a glimpse of himself, not only would that give us extraordinary encouragement; it would undoubtedly draw us toward more frequently to prayer.

I am thinking that maybe I should stop preaching. There is something ineffective about professional ministers delivering sermons to silent congregations. My reading of John Drane’s The McDonaldization of the Church is reinforcing the feeling. He writes, “A minister wishing to empower his or her congregation to take seriously their own calling as the people of God, equipping them to make a distinctive contribution to the corporate life of the body of Christ, whether in worship or witness, simply cannot do it by preaching sermons from a pulpit.”

I know that is true, and for thirty-two years I have had this gnawing misgiving about what I was doing. Even as I prepared the sermon I was anxious about how to transfer to the worshipers the enthusiasm and conviction I was finding in my study of the Word. I dreaded the almost certain result, that following worship I would hear accolades from a few worshipers, but in reality the preached Word was not going to result in transformation.

I would go home on Sunday and console myself with the view of Martin Luther, that as he went home to enjoy his beer (his expression), the preached Word was even then working its way into the souls of the congregation. Maybe so, but it takes a lot of years of preaching to adjust the world view and practices of worshipers. Too long – because worshipers listening to sermons are largely passive, which restricts their ingestion of the Word to what they can remember hearing.

The reason pastors love to preach is because they get so much out of it, not because the congregation gets so much out of it. God’s Word really is a powerful, transformative message. Living in the Word for a few days, while mining the treasures in a passage of scripture, is very rewarding. The problem is that the pastor is getting all this benefit, not the congregation.

I need to consider redefining my role as Minister of Word and Sacrament so that I become the coach and guide to others as they prepare to deliver the Word in worship. Sermons prepared and delivered by the members, not as oral lectures but as corporately conceived, creative embodiments of the message, will likely touch far more lives than I ever will in the traditional format of preaching.

Right now what I am imagining is worship teams – lots of them. Each team is given a passage of scripture to work on a few weeks before their appointed Sunday. I work with them on exegesis and interpretation, and they decide how to present that to the congregation, using as many senses as they can, and engaging the congregation as fully as possible.

My role, then, would be (1) planning worship a few weeks in advance, by choosing the scriptures to be used each Sunday, (2) meeting with worship teams as they study and prepare, and (3) reviewing with the team afterward as to how they think they did. In other words, coach and trainer.

I want to think hard about his. Not only would the end product be more effective, but it would move us closer to the biblical model of the whole congregation actively participating in worship.

Near my desk is a cork board covered with sayings collected over 32 years – quotes and cartoons designed to bolster my faith and to keep me on the path. I need these reminders because, if it is true, as Scott Peck says, that life is hard, then it is doubly true that ministry is hard.

Ministry is hard because we are engaged by our savior against formidable foes, summarized in classic Christianity by the words “flesh, world and devil.” You can’t pin any of these down. They often go unrecognized., and their influence shows up within us (to our great dismay) as well as in those outside the church.

Often it is hard to tell if we are making any progress. We fix one thing and something else falls apart. Are we winning the battle but losing the war? Or is it possible in some way unseen to human eyes, that although many battles are lost, God is still winning the war?

Those of us in the branch of the church committed to God’s work of renewal can’t help but think about these things. And the constant danger is that we might lose heart.

The apostle Paul faced every imaginable obstacle in the course of his ministry. The church in Paul’s day had splintered into factions, some in the church were championing sexual immorality, and the authority structure had broken down.

What kept him going? With surprising candor, Paul writes to the very church that gave him the most trouble, “Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.” (II Cor. 4:1 NRSV)

It’s the sort of sentence you put on a cork board near your desk.

Paul trusted God to accomplish his purposes in the power of the gospel. He could be open about his weakness, and he could even risk dying daily with Christ in order to experience the resurrection power of Christ.

It is counterintuitive. While our Adversary whispers, “But you’re not winning by any measure!” we find ourselves going deeper into the heart of the gospel.

Our redemption came out of the darkest moment of seeming defeat, and we have learned ever since to define success by the cross. Dying with Christ is God’s appointed process for defeating our greatest spiritual challenges.

“For your sake we are being killed all day long,” Paul declares (Rom. 8:36), quoting Psalm 44:22. Ironically, this constant dying is God’s pathway to spiritual victory. Just knowing that is enough to keep me going.

Each year our church’s nursery school, Small World, invites me to tell the children, one class at a time, the Christmas story. They come into the sanctuary, and instead of just hearing the story, the children act it out.

“We need Mary, Joseph, shepherds, and angels,” I explained, as we prepared to reenact the sacred story.

Some were immediately clamoring, vying for certain roles, but one little boy held back entirely. He wouldn’t take any role in the pageant. “I’m not an expert at this,” he said. So, we allowed him to watch.

Finding the ones to play Mary and Joseph had its challenges this year. In one class of four year-olds, we thought we were ready to begin. There were Mary and Joseph, standing together and ready to make the long walk to Bethlehem, with the rest of the class walking along behind.

All of a sudden, Joseph, broke away from Mary, saying, “That’s it; I quit.” And he sat down. No amount of persuading would bring him back to assume his role. As soon as he had learned that he was going to have to hold Mary’s hand all the way to Bethlehem, he would have nothing to do with the part. And now none of the other boys would be Joseph either.

What to do? “We need a Joseph,” I pleaded to the class. “Who will be Joseph?”

A couple of girls raised their hands, and I picked one, and off they went, Mary and “Joseph” on their way to Bethlehem.

The next class provided an even more formidable challenge. Here was a class of ten, four year-old boys. But by then I had done this story five times with other classes and I made an executive decision. Mary and Joseph are so overrated. We can do this story without them. And we did. Every boy got to be a shepherd or an angel, and they did their parts well.

As each class is leaving the sanctuary, we always go over to the tree so they can look closely at the ornaments. These are ornaments not usually seen on Christmas trees and the children find each one fascinating.

Then it’s time to go. “What do we say to Pastor Rick?” asks the teacher as the children are leaving the room. “Thank you, Pastor Rick!”

“You’re welcome,” I returned. “Merry Christmas!”

To which one four year-old replied, “Happy Holiday!”

Happy Holiday, indeed.