7. We are not financially prepared for the coming persecution

I’m not the first to note that the recent Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell vs. Hodges may presage hard times ahead for Churches. Harsh persecution in these United States, such as imprisonment or martyrdom, is wildly unlikely. However, it seems reasonable to expect extant civil rights laws and court precedents to be applied to the prosecution of the “right” to recognition of same-sex marriages. For example, other jurisdictions may follow the New York City decision to refuse to rent public school space to Churches. Similarly, the tax-exempt status of organizations which oppose this new “civil right” may also be threatened at the federal or state level. Such actions would create heavier financial obligations for religious organizations and Churches, as might lawsuits. (Legal bills can run up very quickly.) I should also point out that currently pastor’s salaries are discounted because what they get paid for housing expenses is tax-free: should that exemption disappear, salaries would have to increase to compensate for the additional tax burden.

We may be prepared to surrender our bodies to the flames, but are we prepared with enough money to pay higher rents, tax bills, and pastor’s salaries?

A colleague from my presbytery recently remarked to me that the way we have been “doing Church” in our ecclesiastical circles for the last several decades may soon turn out to be a luxury we can no longer afford.

6. The solo pastorate is a young man's game

Presbyterians believe in a highly educated clergy, but not because we believe in higher education; at least, not as an end unto itself. (I personally do, but that’s a subject for another day.) The basic work of a teaching elder is to study, interpret, and teach the Bible, which can be done competently only by one well-trained in the humanities: we believe in a highly educated clergy because we value preaching. Writing a sermon is not unlike writing a term paper: it requires hours of research and preparation before one can begin writing, not to mention the time spent on actual writing. Learning Greek and Hebrew is a necessary prerequisite to preaching; one has to slog through a text’s grammar and vocabulary before one can interpret it.

It’s not the hardest job around, but it is a lot of work: imagine writing two term papers a week. As with any labor, it gets more difficult with age. I have never had much time left over at the end of the week after producing my two sermons, but it became extraordinarily difficult to keep up after I turned 40. I have wondered whether this is my own problem (I have had a series of health problems which caused some cognitive impairment), but I’ve learned it’s fairly common, at least amongst my middle-aged colleagues. 

In fact, frank conversations over the past few years have revealed a dirty little secret: very few  not-so-young-anymore pastors write two sermons a week, at least according to the sermon-writing standards to which I was trained. Instead of translating the sermon text, they will “look at” their Greek or Hebrew Bible. Instead of doing their own study of the text first, they read a few commentaries to learn the basic theme. The morning sermon may reflect the preacher’s best work, but often the evening is more of a make-do “study.” (I’ve come to realize that “study” is a euphemism for “kind of shallow.”) 

(Full disclosure: for the last several years, on the typical Sunday at least one of my sermons has been “recycled” from previous efforts. This allows me to maintain quality and a manageable workload.)

Frankly, it shows. We can all tell when a sermon just skates the surface of a text, and usually it’s because the preacher has failed to truly grasp that text for himself. If you’ve been wondering, go ahead and ask your middle-aged (or older) pastor whether he built that sermon from the ground up all by himself.

That’s not to say that the middle-aged man can’t preach. Far from it: while I think my early work was solid, I am sure my current pulpit ministry is much better. It’s not simply that I’ve learned to use my tools better; with age and time, I’ve also learned how to get myself out of the way so the Spirit can minister. I find the work much more difficult, but the outcome more worth hearing. But does the one good sermon excuse its slipshod companion in the other service?

That choice, if you think about it, is the consequence of an earlier choice to have only one pastor in the congregation. Where there are two or more, the preaching load can be shared and high-quality sermons delivered at both the services on any given Sunday. If Presbyterians value preaching, it’s not enough to make sure the pastor has received a quality education. He has to have the time, and the collegial support, to write a good sermon.

When I look back at the volume of work I produced during my first decade in the pastorate, I am mightily impressed with young me. But I’m not so young anymore, nor are many of the gray-haired pastors who congregations find so reassuring when up in their pulpits. The OPC needs to figure out how to free up her older ministers to produce quality work, or just admit that the solo pastorate is a young man’s game.

5. The solo pastorate is spiritually unhealthy

If your pastor hasn’t told you that you need to faithfully attend worship services so you can be blessed by receiving the ordinary means of grace (Word, sacrament, prayer: Shorter Catechism #88), then you don’t go to a confessionally reformed Church. Participating in corporate worship, and especially sitting under faithful preaching, are necessary to grow in grace.

So when does the average OPC pastor sit under faithful preaching? Especially when he has to preach twice a Sunday, is he ever able to listen to a sermon which is not an audio file? Is he ever able to listen to a sermon without a critical ear which seeks out weaknesses or tips for improving his own preaching?

Perhaps I’m obtuse, but I can’t think of a passage of Scripture which tells us only pastors don’t need to regularly participate in (as opposed to lead) worship services. (In fact, Jesus draws a sharp distinction between what worship leaders and worshipers do, identifying the former as “work” in Matthew 12:5.) If Church members suffer when they don’t attend on the ordinary means of grace, then pastors suffer as well. I can’t say what difference this makes in the life of any given pastor, but I’m sure it does. Your pastor may be wonderful; imagine how much more spiritually mature he would be if he didn’t have to work both services on the Christian Sabbath. Imagine, in turn, how much more spiritually mature your entire congregation might then be.

There’s actually a very simple way to help pastors attain greater spiritual health: every congregation could hire two or three ministers so that the preaching burden can be shared between them and each can hear at least one sermon every Sunday. (Also imagine how much more careful a minister would have to be when preaching or during session meetings if another man with the same level of training were in the room.) The objection to this simple proposal is equally simple: small congregations, such as are common in the OPC, can barely afford one pastor, let alone a pastoral staff.

This suggests that the standard OPC congregational model, despite our best intentions, may foster poor spiritual health.

The screen and the book

In his essay "The Screen and the Book" (First Things, May 2015), Marc Barnes argues for the metaphysical superiority of the printed-and-bound-book to the e-book.

This is the phenomenology of the screen: It could be otherwise.

This is the primary reason we feel the book to be solid in comparison to the screen. The screen is saturated with possibilities. The screen is fluid.

I read it on my Kindle.

4. Pastors cost money

My dad had the good sense to be born in the mid-1930s, which meant that when he became an adult, a good government job and sensible investments in stocks and bonds would, in due time, produce a comfortable degree of wealth. That, in turn, allowed him to pay for my college education at respectable state university. I taught in the public schools in Houston, Texas, for a few years after college, and then worked my way through seminary, but still had to take out student loans to cover my tuition at Westminster Theological Seminary in California. From what I can tell (by which I mean, all my evidence is anecdotal), many of my younger colleagues have much heavier student debt than I do, having financed both their undergraduate and graduate years with borrowed funds. That’s a change from years past, when many pastors in our circles were able to get their education on the cheap (through very low state college tuition fees, generous donors to seminaries, lower costs of living, deferring marriage, and so forth).

Today, however, pastors of all ages live in an economy in which housing costs are skyrocketing (especially in urban areas) and health care costs keep going up (especially for the self-insured, which is what all pastors in small denominations are). Thus, even before an equitable salary is considered, the modern pastor’s compensation must keep increasing to merely keep pace with the cost of living and servicing debt on the education he must obtain in order to be qualified to serve in the pastorate.

This means that congregations can no longer count on pastors being cheap. This means that if a congregation wants a pastor, it will have to come up with serious money. This means that  small congregations will have to either get some wealthy, tithing members, or grow in size until they can afford the modern pastor’s salary.

A little, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bit of leaven

Today we call it "sourdough," but for most of mankind's history it was just called "bread." Instead of commercial yeast, sourdough bread uses leaven, which is wild yeast captured from the air and cultivated in a flour and water matrix, called a "starter" (because you use some to start your bread loaf rising). That capturing process can be challenging for those of us surrounded by the thin air one finds at altitude. I began my own starter about ten years ago, following the recipe I found in (I think it was the 7th edition of) The Joy of Cooking. It took another five or so years to grow to the strength that I didn't need to add a yeast booster to get my bread to rise.

Over the years, I've given it to several people who've been able to use it with much success. (Because it's a living, growing thing, starter is the gift that keeps on giving.) One's starter can be a point of pride for the home baker, and it certainly is for me: it represents years of effort and cultivation, and proves a certain level of attainment. So you can imagine my distress (I actually cried out in anguish) when I discovered that Thing 2 had found my starter sitting on the kitchen counter and decided it had to be cleaned along with the supper dishes. The tupperware container in which I kept my starter was in the top rack of the dishwasher, thoroughly rinsed, and my starter had all been flushed down the kitchen drain.

Once I could start thinking again, I looked more closely at the lid. There was a wee little bit of old, gelatinous starter stuck in its rim. Given that I was looking at years before I would be able to cultivate and age a new batch of starter, I decided to take a chance. I was able to scrape out about 1/16th of a teaspoon, which I then mixed with just a teensy bit of flour and water. Frankly, it didn't mix in too well (I could still clearly make out the little lump in the rest of the matrix), so my hopes were low. But the next morning there were a few bubbles in the dough, so I fed it slightly more flour and water. By that evening, I not only had a resurrected starter, it returned from the grave with a richer, even more offensive sour smell so dear to the gluten junkie. 

Ah, the sweet swell of paternal pride.

3. Small Churches are a luxury good

Although I serve an urban congregation in Denver, about half the congregations in our Regional Church of the Dakotas could reasonably be described as “rural,” located in North and South Dakota towns which range from small to very small. Consequently, these congregations tend to be small as well: none is over a hundred in membership, and there are no realistic prospects for  significant growth in towns which have been steadily depopulating over the last few decades. Nearly every time a pastor moves on, the congregation must soberly assess its future. Can they really afford a pastoral salary? Is it time to think of something drastic, such as sharing a pastor or even merging with another Church?

Thankfully, there is a steady supply of older pastors, near or past retirement age, who are glad to serve where they are needed and don’t have the financial needs of men with young families and mouths to feed. These days, there seems an even greater supply of fresh seminary graduates with few or no children who are equally willing to take a call which will get them established in their pastoral careers: they know they may not be able to stick around

for more than a few years, but at least the pulpits stay filled.

That’s not an ideal situation, but it’s the unfortunate demographic reality of rural Church life. What, then, accounts for the presence of a similar model in urban areas such as Denver? Just to point out the obvious, the difference between a small town and a city is people. Lots and lots of people. Hundreds of thousands of people. With all those people, what accounts for multiple OPC and PCA congregations, some a little under a hundred and some a little over a hundred, in the same metropolitan area, especially when their members drive past other congregations of like faith and practice on the way to services? 

Here’s what accounts for it: a few years ago I was talking to a South Dakota pastor, originally from the Denver area, during our two presbyteries’ joint youth Bible camp. He had been solicited to begin a new Church plant in south Denver, just equidistant between a PCA Church and a URC which both happened to be pastored by friends of mine. Yes, they were friends of mine, which necessarily calls their good taste into question, but they also were ministers in good standing of Churches of like faith and practice not more than a 10-minute drive from the geographical area in question. Why had a “core group” begun talking with this pastor when they could easily join a small (around or under 100 members) Church in their area?

I can claim neither prophetic nor telepathic insight, but I’ll tell you why: they wanted a Church which was to their particular preference. Neither that PCA nor that URC was quite what they wanted, but they had learned from experience that there are plenty of pastors who need a job. All they had to do was demonstrate an ability to provide a nominal salary for a year or two, and they could get a pastor who would provide the kind of preaching and/or pastoral care they liked.

In my more cynical moments, I describe the OPC (and sister denominations) not as “small,” but as a “boutique” Church. Cities have plenty of stores which are small in size because they have to fit into cramped quarters. Cities also have plenty of boutiques which are small not out of  necessity, but by design: they provide luxury goods which are of interest and affordable to only a few, and especially the few who are willing to pay the price.

Many (although by no means all) confessionally reformed Churches have well-educated and relatively affluent members; if these members are willing to tithe or even give beyond their tithes, then a relatively small number of members can pay the relatively small salary asked for by a man who wants nothing more than to preach the Gospel. This concentration of wealth gives them the buying power to acquire a preacher who is not merely faithful to God’s Word, but who also provides the style of preaching which they’d like to hear on a regular basis.

Demographic reality dictates that rural areas will have small Churches. In an urban area, small Churches are a luxury good.

All Ecclesiology Is Local

I just noticed that my 2002 essay, "All Ecclesiology Is Local," appears at the top of the "Archives" list at the June/July 2015 issue of Ordained Servant; it was published in no small part due to the gracious and paternal interest G.I. Williamson took in my younger self. Also because, as is to be expected, it was insightful and stylistically impeccable.

And for those who may be wondering, yes, the title is a tribute to the late House of Representatives Speaker Tip O'Neill, who frequently said "all politics is local." I'm not sure I agree with him on any policy positions, but he was a great politician whose era I still miss.

How do we begin the immigration conversation?

I agree with his perspective, but I'll be the first to admit that this lecture from M. Daniel Carroll of Denver Seminary, delivered at Beeson Divinity School, begins on a somewhat pedantic note. Unless it's a sermon, I consider listening to someone tell me something I already know and agree with a waste of time, and I almost gave up during the first five minutes. But then Carroll gives a reading of the Old Testament as a collection of immigrant narratives, and concludes by making the point that if the Scriptures invite us to identify with and find ourselves in its narratives, then they call us, as Christians, to identify with and find ourselves in immigrant narratives.

Read as the primary humanist text, the Bible enables and equips us to find the human even, and perhaps especially, in those we identify as alien.

The Great Interpreter

In a powerful argument for Abraham Lincoln as a strict constructionist whose interpretation of the Constitution has become the standard one in these United States, Michael Stokes Paulsen and Luke Paulsen advance another provocative thesis: Lincoln's de facto repudiation of the Dred Scott decision, through executive action, demonstrates that other branches of the federal government, equally bound to defend the Constitution, cannot be held to illegitimate interpretations offered by the Supreme Court.

Provocative and, in light of recent history, well worth pondering.