I’m under no illusions about people who have left our community and who I no longer see. People who were friends of mine and aren’t any longer. Or people who, as far as I know, are still friends but who I don’t get together with anymore for whatever reason. Of course, that’s the nature of illusions: you’re not aware of them until they are pointed out. Like blind spots. You can’t see them. Like deception. The nature of deception is that you are deceived.
So I read emails and facebook and through the grapevine find out how great they are doing in their new churches and how wonderful their new pastor is and how happy they are and I always feel sad. Obviously not for them. For me. I do have a jealous bone in my body you know. I’ll be the first to admit it. I compare it to someone who’s spouse has left and found a better man. She’s so happy now. Well… I’m glad she’s happy. Now please don’t tell me any more about it because you’re tearing my heart out! And I suppose the hundreds of people I’ve experienced separation from have the right to be happy and finally find what they’ve always been looking for. But it still hurts that I couldn’t seem to satisfy them and that this community couldn’t provide what they needed. True: I purposefully didn’t supply some of their desires. And I couldn’t give them what they wanted because I wouldn’t. But that’s a whoooooole other story.
Sometimes someone will say to me something like, “If only people understood what you are about, then they would love it and our church would grow!” I always try to balance their view: these people who left aren’t stupid. They left precisely because they did understand what I was about and had major issues with it. I’m not silly enough to believe that if only more people knew about Rothesay Vineyard or me as a pastor or about nakedpastor.com, then there would be growth and success for me, my church and my blog. I’ll never fall for that one. In fact, the opposite is true: many, many people know about Rothesay Vineyard and have forsaken her, about me as a pastor and are offended, and about nakedpastor and abhor it. My problem isn’t that I need publicity. Publicity is my problem! But it’s not really a problem because it isn’t my goal to be famous.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a dual aspect to Rothesay Vineyard: one is a small core of consistently committed people who will sign with their blood that we are in this together, who believe in it and invest heavily in its welfare; then there is the other group of people who believe in it and love it and call this their church, but who’s commitment is minimal, conditional, intermittent and sometimes even cautious. The thing is, you can never be absolutely sure who’s in which group. Some who I thought were lifers are suddenly gone, and some I thought would be gone a long time ago persevere with us. Those who have patted me on the back and said I’m with you forever are the ones doing that to someone else now. Those who have struggled remain. Go figure! One of my tasks though, I feel, is to be sure they all receive the same unconditional and indiscriminate care.
I live a very strange life. Wouldn’t you agree?
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- the existence of God can’t be proven
- fundamentalism, in any form, annoys me
- although I appreciate my Christian heritage, once I got to a certain point in my development, I found it more difficult to find support within it. So I understand why some leave the church and even the faith.
- I have received the cruelest treatment at the hands of church leaders, so I am very suspicious of religious authorities
- although the church can be good, too many Christians are blind to the difference between the community and the corruption and corruptive power of the institution
- I appreciate and am interested in the sciences, and believe that their findings shouldn’t upset the truly religious mind
- I think all religions are an apparent local and temporal manifestation of a deeper unifying reality
- that some people are discriminated against based on their sexual orientation, beliefs, race, gender, etc., is unethical, especially within religious groups
- even if I did believe that there might be a God, though unprovable, a mysterious divine power or what have you, and someone asked me if I believed in God, I would probably say no because I wouldn’t want them to assume I was ascribing to their beliefs
- I look forward to the day when I will dialog with a wide variety of people with vastly differing beliefs and non-beliefs (not just online like this blog, but face to face), believing that dialog contributes to a richer and better humanity
I’m feeling really tired today. Part of it is having teens. But you can tell, can’t you, when a tiredness comes over you that’s deeper than just sleep deprivation? I was at the church all day today pretty much by myself. The weather is terrible… cold, wet and foggy so I understand no one moving about. I had a lot of time to be by myself and think.
Lisa (my wife) and I were talking just this morning about the brokenness of the world. We were trying to describe it. You could say that everything is shot through with sin. Even when we think we are doing the right, the noble, the good, the true, I believe that running deep and often secretively beneath the surface is our self-centeredness and sin. But that really doesn’t say it. That’s not all if it. It’s not only morbid, but unfair. It has something to do with fallenness. That’s not even a real word but it says it for me. Our deepest and essential identity is that we were created good. Our secondary and, shall I say, derived identity is fallen. Our church community is filled with people who are in pain, broken and wounded and suffering, struggling morally with very serious issues. Everything is soaked in this sense of brokenness. It is a reality we all live in.
Some go one way and start speaking and acting and preaching very triumphalistically. That’s just utter baloney. I won’t even address that here. My tendency is to go the other way. Lisa said that it is important not to become Eeyores about it all. And THAT, my friends, is the struggle. This is why I don’t run away. I don’t want to give up. I don’t want to surrender. I don’t want to commit vocational and social and spiritual suicide. I think there is hope. I think there is a deep and residing promise of freedom being held out for all of us. And this is probably the only reason, in spite of my exhaustion, that I don’t allow myself to fall into a deep and everlasting stupor.
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When I became a Christian at the age of about 15 (no, I can’t remember the date or my age)… I was immediately… immediately!… infected with a virus. That virus I will call the “LaLa Virus“. The LaLa virus basically makes you think that now that you are a Christian, everything is going to go better for you. You life will be easier and trouble-free, suffering-free, and pain-free, like La-La-Land. I remember our youth group singing along to the tune of the Coke commercial, “Things go better with Christ!” Uh huh!
This virus is impervious to almost all kinds of treatment. It cannot be tolerated at all because even the smallest trace infects your whole system. It must be completely and totally eradicated. I remember questioning this in the past and being rebuked by another youth leader with the verse from Malachi 3:14 where the priests are chastised for saying, “It is vain to serve the Lord!” As I continued to grow up and as I allowed my eyes to actually see what they actually saw, I began to question just exactly what that verse meant. Surely it doesn’t mean that there are tangible advantages to serving the Lord! When I was going through seminary, the alarming statistic was revealed that there was a higher rate of divorce among seminarians than others. Indeed, many of my friends have gone through horrendous pain and suffering in their marriages, jobs, relationships, bodies, and on and on. I look around me now and I have friends who serve the Lord who have cancer, ex-spouses, messed up children, debt, poverty, depression, hardships of all kinds, pain of all sorts. And these are just the people I know. Around the world, those who claim to follow Christ are sick, starving, suicidal, suffering, slowly dying. It isn’t true that the life of a Christian has advantages. There is something else going on. I think seeing that the world is full of suffering and sorrow and admitting it is the first and most crucial step towards any kind of liberation.
Yet still that virus persists! I still unconsciously hold to the wish that things go better with God. I don’t believe it, but it’s still there. I don’t believe we get special favors. Not any more. As a pastor it often requires a brutal honesty with myself and with others to admit this. There’s something else going on. A deeper truth. So even though the nasty virus still clings to me, I do believe it is on its last legs.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Howard Nowlan.
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I’m finding it very difficult lately to be two things at one time: a critic of the system I’m a part of. As you might have guessed by now, I’m both a critic of official Christianity and institutional church as well as being a full-time professional pastor. I find it really challenging to remain in the system. I experience why so many people abandon the church and religion. One of the main reasons, I must confess, is because of the backlash from the system itself and those within it when you express unrest with it. If you criticize an institution it is assumed that you have no moral right to be a part of it. You’re said to bite the hand that feeds you. And we often conclude that to criticize something is to hate it rather than suspect that the criticism is borne out of an intense passion for the thing.
Jacques Ellul, the French sociologist and theologian, wrote:
… the churches are so debilitated and apostate that a Christian can hardly bear to remain in a church, and yet, on the other hand, no Christian can leave a church lest he fail to confess his own part of the responsibility for the very conditions in a church which provoke protest
This ought to be, in my opinion, the dilemma of every church-going or church-skipping Christian in the world. I believe, like Ellul, that the church is horribly apostate and debilitated and borders on complete collusion with its fallen state among the principalities and the powers. I realize and accept my participation in its present condition. It’s time for transformation.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Jorgen Klausen. I imagine this is Samson pushing against the pillars that brought down the temple and all within it, including himself. I guess there were no other options than to bring it all down.
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David Hayward is an artist trapped in a pastor's body, stripping to the essential.
