Why Do Institutions Tie Us Up in Knots?

It happened again, this past week. I went to Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing. I was there to make a presentation with Christy Berghoef on how one goes about writing a spiritual memoir. We had fun. The seminar was well attended. People seemed to enjoy it.

Walking around campus afterward, however, I felt disquieted. I’m not sure I can pinpoint why. Maybe it was because I am very introverted. I don’t enjoy floating like a butterfly in a big crowd.

But some of my disquiet also had to do with my deep emotional attachment to Calvin College—and even more so, the Christian Reformed Church. Or rather, I should say my disquiet was rooted in no longer being attached to those institutions.

We all know the legal fiction that makes corporations—institutions like the church or its college or seminary—people. The law generally treats institutions as if they are persons. The law treats institutions as independent centers of will and action. They can earn profit, make donations, pay taxes, sue and be sued, and so on—even though they are not flesh and blood.

But there is actually more going on here than the necessary legal fiction. The truth is we often become deeply attached to institutions, just as we become attached to real people. Attachment to people is a basic human need. Adam needed a helper who could be a partner. Children are born pining for mothers. We need friends and community to thrive. And institutions, like people, can partly fulfill that need for attachment. Mostly through their human proxies, institutions love and nurture, accuse and forgive, embrace and reject. People are deeply affected by such actions and respond emotionally. Thus they often become deeply attached to their institutions.

Being back at Calvin disquieted me because it brought home with great emotional force the injury I’ve suffered by abandoning my lifelong attachment to the Christian Reformed Church.

The best analogy I can think of is a story that a former parishioner told me, years ago. This older person had been married for over thirty years but was abandoned by his wife. They divorced. They had no children. While married, they had also moved around a lot, often far from family and old friends, never putting down deep roots.

The parishioner told me that his thirty years of marriage now seemed, to him, a big black hole. There was no one to talk with, anymore, about those thirty years. No one could recall with him his mountaintop experiences or triumphs. No one would remember with him the pain or defeats that punctuated those years. Without anyone to speak to who was there those thirty years, it was almost as if they had never happened. “Sharing memories, good and bad, is how we process things,” this man said to me. “But I can’t process. It is as if someone imposed a press blackout on half my life. No one will ever know what happened.” He had become "unattached," as they say.

Now, I’m sure that leaving an institution behind isn’t as painful as leaving the one person you were daily and deeply attached to behind. Besides—I still have a spouse I’m happily married to, family is an important part of my life, and I’ve got many good friends of long-standing both inside and outside the Christian Reformed Church. Still, much of what I believed in and worked for in the Christian Reformed Church seems insubstantial now, thin and watery, like soup stock. Thinking back on it alone isn’t fulfilling. It makes the past thirty years seem, if not a great black hole, then at least a long excursus. An emotional loss.

Some readers will wonder, then, why I left. Why not—like a couple in crisis—get some counseling, work on the relationship, and repair what was going wrong? But here institutions are utterly unlike people. They cannot negotiate relational issues. Where people can engage in self-examination, change their habits or even their minds, confess sins and make promises to do better next time—institutions rarely do any of these things. When they try, only herculean and time-consuming effort will lead to change. There are, after all, bylaws to follow, creeds and confessions to uphold, and conflicting factions to balance and appease. I’m reminded of what a former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, wrote in his autobiography, Leaving Alexandria. “All institutions over-claim for themselves and end up believing more in their own existence than in the vision that propelled them into existence in the first place. This is particularly true of religious institutions. Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them” (p. 151).

My problem with the Christian Reformed Church—which I loved—is that I have changed my mind about those mysteries beyond description. And the church isn’t about to change its mind. The thing is, when potential change in a relationship can come only from one side, counseling and repair isn’t an option. The relationship is over.

Just so that no one misunderstands—I recognize that my new denomination, the United Church of Canada—is as hide-bound an institution as any other. This is especially true when it comes to its government and administration. The great difference, for me, is that the United Church is also institutionally committed to not “claiming exclusive rights” to any specific mystery, unless it is the mystery of loving neighbors (however imperfectly we actually succeed). Right now, the wide-open space my second church relationship allows me is also perfect for me.

But still, I was very sad at Calvin this past week. I’m reminded of something (a bit naughty) that my great-grandfather is reputed to have said, long after both of his wives had passed away. “When you remarry, you go to bed with your new wife. But you always sleep with your first love.”

Institution-wise, at least, I think I know what he meant.

Who Knows (Anything)?

           A few weeks ago a young woman approached me about teaching a Bible class for young professionals like her. She said that nothing much was available in the churches, or it was all at the wrong time, or it was too narrowly focused on truth as that particular church saw it, and none of her friends particularly wanted to go to a church anyway. But still, she had friends and colleagues who would love to get together to study what the Bible says. They were just curious. Would I be interested in sitting down sometime, with her, to discuss the possibilities?

            I was. I put a note in my agenda to set the meeting up as soon as I return from my study leave.

            I have to say that the request stunned me. I can’t remember the last time someone approached me about learning more about the Bible. In fact, if I’m honest, one of the things that has changed most in the thirty or so years that I’ve become a pastor is both how much people know about Christianity in general, and how willing they are to invest in that knowledge.

            When I started as a pastor, teaching kept me busy. I had two weekly catechism classes filled with teenagers. Those same teenagers also went to church once, or even twice, a week. I did a Wednesday evening adult Bible study that was well attended—sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty people crowding into my living room. Well-attended lay-Bible studies met in the church, some as women’s groups, and others following popular interdenominational curriculums. 

            I also preached twice a week—to dwindling audiences, I’ll admit. Still, the second service often had at least half the people in it that the morning service did. We usually covered the catechism. And whatever you may think about whether or not the catechism was “right,” at the very least going through the catechism introduced people to the basic framework of Christian theology. We’d cover the doctrine of God, sin and atonement, the Apostle’s creed, and last things, for example. The youth group meeting would also include some Bible study, and many adults belonged to small groups that focused on the Bible with the help of all sorts of denominationally approved study-booklets.

            These days—and for quite some time, actually—in churches both conservative and liberal, people don’t study nearly so much. Catechism classes have pretty much disappeared unless it is time to do confirmation. Youth groups meet during the Sunday service, so while they do spend a few minutes studying, they miss out on sermons. Adults may belong to small Bible study groups, though it is more likely (barely) that they belong to a book club. Sermons are preached only once a week.

            The nature of study, when it does happen, has changed, too. Where once study groups would read and discuss prepared materials, these days they tend to sit around a circle and offer opinions about what they “feel,” about some passage or issue or doctrine. The sense that two thousand years of reflection on almost every theological issue imaginable has already occurred is absent. People invent insight on the spot, if insight is what it can be called.

            This turn away from an established tradition of theological knowledge—or, if you please—reflection about faith and life, isn’t restricted to people in the pews. One of the more interesting changes that has taken place over the past thirty years is that pastors themselves seem to know less. This is a harder thing for me to get my head around. I’ve taught at the college and seminary level, and had occasion to sit in many classes as a guest over the past few years. I’ve met many recent grads at pastor gatherings. And the bottom line, to me, seems to be that pastors just don’t study the same things, in as great depth, as they used to. Few study Greek or Hebrew. Books that pragmatically lay out how to grow your church or transform your ministry or give purpose and direction to your life abound—not that there is much evidence now of growth or purposefulness than there used to be. I’m not hearing young pastors talk about the big theologians anymore—no Karl Barth, no John Caputo, no Richard Kearney, no Nick Wolterstorff, no Charles Taylor. Maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy, stuck in my dusty tomes.

            I understand that I’m generalizing. But I do believe this is a pattern, even if some pastors are still avidly reading and studying the classic stuff.

            Now, in all fairness, it is probably important to note that for most of its history, most Christians and many of their priests were very ignorant. For the first fifteen hundred years of the church’s history, most people couldn’t read, for starters. Being Christian was just what people were by culture and habit. They knew the Apostle’s Creed (maybe), the ten commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and some of the Bible’s highlights. They knew how they were supposed to behave. The education of most priests was a shadow of what seminary education came to be after the invention of the printing press (and a whole long train of other factors). Historically, there is a way for Christians to participate in their faith in a lively and personally meaningful way in spite of not knowing much about it.

            The other side of this reality, however, is that where Christians in earlier centuries had little opportunity to learn more about their faith, even if they had wanted to, Christians today are voluntarily turning away from knowing more about their faith in droves, even though they have the option of learning more than ever.

            What has happened? Many things, on many different levels, I think. Let me make a starting list of the usual suspects:

1.     People simply don’t read as much or with as much understanding and depth as they used to. There is extensive scholarly consensus here that I’ve gone into in other posts, and my book, Not Sure. The bottom line is that if you don’t pick up books you won’t be able to figure out or recall even basic theology. If Christianity is a religion of the word, and people are not interested in reading words, you can be sure that Christianity is going to be in trouble.

2.     People are too busy to read, or to gather to study or learn. In a way, this partly has to do with priorities, of course. But not entirely. If you live in a big city like New York or Toronto, it takes a very high level of commitment to fight the traffic and get over to church or someone’s home to study. The traffic is stalled, the kids need rides to hockey and basketball, both parents are working, more people have complicated patchworks of part-time jobs with odd schedules, and those who are on the big career track are facing huge demands at work.

3.     People are too distracted to make study a priority. Let me count the ways. Television, internet, gaming, cottages, kid’s sports and activities (again), juggling two careers (again). We work on backhands and putting, abs and pecs rather than reading. And then there is shopping at the mall, and movies, and a critical lack of babysitting.

4.     At the same time, people don’t feel the need to know. And perhaps this is the biggest change. There was a time in the history of the church when the three great estates each had their own area of expertise, which they were supposed to practice on behalf of everyone else. The nobility ruled. The peasants tilled the land. And the church saved everyone through prayer, ritual, study, and whatever it was that they did in the monasteries. In this system, people didn’t have to know and were not encouraged to know—some one else did it, for them. But, in a round about way, we’ve returned to that sense that whatever is in those theology books is great for theologians—but I don’t need it. I am particularly struck by the suspicion people have for learning, a sort of crawling anti-intellectualism that shouts “if it isn’t useful, if it isn’t going to advance my career, it isn’t worth it.”

5.     The culture in general has made church, and what used to be its demands for study and attendance, passé. This is mostly through a widespread—and well-founded—suspicion of institutions and the power they wield. When any institution tells you what to do these days—people bristle. Trust is low. The church—its philandering priests, its residential schools, its insistence (in some quarters) on what is perceived as outmoded rules, just doesn’t seem to merit much interest or study or attendance where you might learn.

6.     And finally, our individualistic culture has put a lot more trust in the spiritual narratives we spin on our own. More on the why and how of this in the next column.

            What do we do about all this? Can churches somehow plow against this cultural tsunami? I hope so. I think a lot about it, and experiment. In the meantime, However, I am taking up that young professional on her offer to help me establish a Bible study for her and her peers—probably in a pub. I’m looking forward to it.

ADMINISTER. OR. ELSE.

One of the things that amazes me most, thinking back to my first few years as a pastor, was that most Sundays I preached twice a week. It made for a busy life, as each new sermon usually took two days to write. But between being allowed to exchange pulpits once a month or so, and having a few Sundays a year off, I managed the two-sermons-per-week routine without too many problems.

I could never manage that sort of preaching load anymore. Why not? In a word (or two), church administration.

In my first congregation, things pretty much ran themselves—and if they didn’t, a layperson was there to make it run. So, when a new church needed to be built (around the bones of an old fire station), every detail was handled by church members—from building support for the project, to fund-raising, to getting zoning approvals, to final construction. Many members contributed free labor, as well. I didn’t have to do a thing, other than take a few turns behind the paintbrush and serve as a cheerleader.

Worship was the same every week—only the songs and sermons changed. On Tuesday mornings I’d pick the songs we were going to sing the following Sunday, write a few announcements about upcoming events, and pass them along to the secretary. Members of the congregation looked after almost everything else—nursery and coffee schedules and volunteers, committee meetings for education, building and grounds, as well council meetings. The clerk received all church mail and responded to it all.

It isn’t that I didn’t have a few projects of my own that I promoted and planned for. But the bottom line was that the church was owned and run by the membership. Volunteers were never in short supply. And the church template—what churches did on Sundays, in particular—was far simpler than today’s.

These days, things are different. It isn’t that there isn’t any more lay participation. In my current congregation, there certainly is—from the flower guild to the council, from greeting to coffee preparation, many volunteers participate in the life of the church. Still, volunteers, especially for longer-term responsibilities, have become harder and harder to find over the past thirty years. And when things are not going smoothly church members look to the pastor and his or her staff to fix it.

What has changed?

1. Most people have less time. Especially in large urban centers like Toronto, where most people now live, people are feeling more and more pressed for time. Traffic is a mess, especially in the hours leading up to traditional church-meeting times like breakfast and just after supper. What is more, with unemployment hovering between 7 and 8 percent, people have to give extra time and effort to their jobs. Many feel vulnerable. Again, time for other activities suffers. On the plus side, some people have less time because community—and even foreign—NGOs are also dipping into the traditional church volunteer pool.

2. A related factor, and probably the single largest factor in this list, is that many more women—once the heart and soul of church volunteerism—are now working professionally. They (as was almost always the case with their husbands) are coming to church exhausted. They want to participate in worship, but resist teaching for and planning Sunday School, babysitting during the service, organizing social and community events, and serving on council. More and more equality in the workplace means more and more tired, stressed out church members.

3. Our culture has encouraged greater expectations for parental involvement compared to the seventies or eighties. Parents want to cheer kids on, drive them to and from practices, and spend quality time at home or on vacation with their kids. Overall, this is a great development, as many of us boomers can remember when parents were just too busy or distracted to spend much time with us. But a byproduct of this is that both parents and kids are too busy to help out at church.

4. Still, expectations for the quality and variety of church programing have only increased. No surprises here. In the era of TV preachers, megachurches, and a consumer-satisfaction oriented culture, churches that don’t shine don’t attract new members. They lose old members and fail to excite current members. People—whether consciously or not, rightly or wrongly—treat churches as franchises they have to choose between. Franchise outlets that don’t sport the best menu, the latest innovations, the best music, the latest technology all fall behind. Churches run as mom and pop operations don’t keep up with the times and fail. Ironically, just as members have less time for church involvement, expectations for what churches must deliver have increased.

5. Technology can save time, but it has also increased expectations on pastors and staff for fast response times about ever more and more matters. More insidiously, the very ease of sending off an email means that lots of them are sent! Even when parishioners are not deeply involved in offering time for church matters, they are making suggestions and asking for answers. Email represents a great opportunity to stay in touch—and to touch—church members. But it comes at a cost in time and energy.

6. Technology two. The Internet and other contemporary technology is great for getting your church noticed—if you are good at it. But that means someone on Facebook and Google Plus, and updating your webpage on a weekly or more frequent basis, providing great content for blogs, and regular tweets. As the franchise competition heats up, more and more resources have to be dedicated to marketing. Someone on staff has to be on top of this.

7. Bigger staffs themselves require more administration. Although my first congregation and my current congregation are about the same size, many of the factors mentioned above mean I work with a much larger staff than ever before—from 1.2 FTE to 4+ FTE. But working with a large staff, maintaining morale, helping them grow in their skills and keeping everyone on target takes a lot of administration too.

8. Laws have become more and more complex—often for good reason. But the burden on churches is also real. From the annual audit to voluntary sector criminal reports, to writing policies covering matters as diverse as sexual harassment to what foods can and cannot be served during coffee time, churches are being held to a higher standard. And the staff is expected to stay on top of the constantly changing demands.

9. Worship is better. More musicians playing more genres of music practicing with each other and looking for direction from staff, more thoughtful use of movie clips and other media, more drama and lay participation, more responsive reading, more consideration for historic liturgical practices—worship has changed a lot from the days I used to give the part-time secretary a list of six songs to put into the church bulletin’s never changing worship template. All of this requires a lot of planning and administrative work behind the scenes.

10. Denominational and local church structures are more intrusive than ever before. They always claim that every new initiative is going to save you time and help your church thrive, but the truth is denominational leaders have only rarely figured out how to offer real and timely help rather than more obligations. Denominations undoubtedly struggle with many of the same trends that local churches do. Denominational agencies and affiliated organizations are vying with each other for time and support in an era it doesn’t come to them automatically anymore. As a result, there is more and more stuff from denominations, more and more new initiatives, and more and more insecurity. A lot of pastors try to ignore the whole scene, but that won’t make for improvements, either—or eventually deliver real help.

We live in an era heavily influenced by post-modern suspicion of institutions. People think institutions are rule-bound, hidebound, and acronym-obsessed. They don’t like the rules, regulations, master plans, and perceived coerciveness of institutions. They want church experiences that are of a gee whiz sort rather than church responsibilities that require time, attention, and dedication.

But ironically, as their other obligations make church involvement more and more difficult, and as they download their old volunteer jobs onto church staffs, and as they raise their expectations, churches themselves become more and more the staff-driving institutions that the same members are suspicious of.

What’s the solution? Well, it isn’t going back to how things were, because it just isn’t going to happen. Jobs will not become less demanding. Children won’t need less nurture. Technology is not going to simplify our lives. Commutes will only rarely take less time. And so on.

No, the solution, though counterintuitive, has to be better administration. As church administrators, our work has to become more effective from Monday through Saturday, so that our work becomes mostly invisible on Sundays. That creates the atmosphere—along with great worship and community that staff has done much to arrange—where congregants may become inspired to figure out how they can give more too.

What do you think?

We All Have Our Moments

We all have our moments.

I remember one, in particular. I was seven or eight years old, and had just graduated from Beginner Swimming at the neighborhood pool on Geneva St. in St. Catharines. A summer earlier I had merely earned a participation certificate for that class--so passing was a big deal.

Privileges accrued to those who passed Beginner Swimming. The largest was permission to dive from the high board--if you dared. Many kids didn't. Some climbed the ladder, walked to the end of the board, looked down, and turned back. Climbing down they had to squeeze by all the kids on the ladder waiting their turn to dive. Not pleasant.

Well, I passed, and so Ernie and John and Art and several other neighborhood kids dared me. Even now I remember clinging to the chrome railings, standing nose to back of shin of the kid ahead of me, and the sandpaper-like feel of the plank. Soon I was above all, looking down at the postage-sized pool fifteen feet below. I see it all as clearly as if it was yesterday.

Then--the moment. Flex knees, bounce up and down an inch or two. Notice friends out the corner of my eyes. Wonder about bright reflection of sun on pool. I think that maybe I can still back out. Maybe I will! But my body is ahead of my brain, overriding my caution. I realize I'm committed. The dive is a go.

My moment has arrived. It is too late to back out. But the actual terror of my headlong dive hasn't yet begun. Already triumphant in my emotional brain, the rational part of my brain is nevertheless still thinking belly flop, mouth-to-mouth, and giving up the ghost. I remember this moment. It is almost unbearable but also, mysteriously, lovely.

And then it was past. I swam to the edge of the pool, and like an idiot lined up to do it again. But what amazes me, even now, is that I don't remember my (by all accounts, graceless) dive. Or hitting the water. But I do remember my moment before.

I've had a few more since. The moment between saying, "hi," on the telephone and asking her out on a date; the moment between stretching out my hands and catching my first child at his birth. Last night, there was the moment I stood in the pulpit before my new congregation for the first time, just having been introduced, but not yet launched into my sermon.

Once again, it was mysteriously lovely--a reminder that there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the sun; a time for endings, but a time for new beginnings, too. Thank God.