If you have heard yourself say any of these things in recent months, you are not alone.
- “I can’t see the end of this.”
- “I’m putting in twice the energy and getting less results.”
- “How can I be an inspiration to people when I’m so disillusioned myself?”
Sometimes you have the emotional energy to look for the reasons you feel stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed. Sometimes you’re just too spent to figure out why you’re feeling so spent.
Let’s take a look at the way the current trauma to our guts and souls has unfolded. Let’s also look for some islands of sanity on which we can land and rest.
The Beginning of a Different Normal
On about March 15, an event of epic proportions blew through the United States, through all of our lives, and through all of our churches.
You scrambled to figure out how to offer a worship experience to your people. You shuddered at the thought of what effect an extended period of closure would have on the people’s giving. You learned Zoom, stumbled through how to do virtual pastoral care, small group engagement and even on-site missions like food distribution.
It was heroic work. And there is still heroic work going on.
But the moment came when you sat on the one couch that survived the storm and realized that no genie was in sight. On top of that, you faced the same emotional challenges as your people.
There’s no other way to say it: this is traumatic.
Innovation or Adaptation?
By April 15 or so, a new wave of feeling started to surface. Clergy struggled to find the vocabulary to describe what was going on inside them. In the midst of exhaustion was the uneasy sense of disorientation involved in re-imagining how to observe Lent, how to put on the appearance of joy on Easter, and the continued wrestling with how to maintain staff and buildings.
But there was something even bigger: clergy began to realize that what they had been celebrating as innovation was really adaptation.
To be clear, adaptation, defined as ‘making things work in a new context and reality’, was completely necessary. The energy spent in making the adaptations was heroic. It took grit and persistence.
But there was a gnawing sense that all of that effort (not to mention expenditure) had simply gotten the church back to where it had started. One pastor said with real angst in his voice, “We learned all this new technology, but we didn’t do anything with it. We’re using new delivery methods to deliver the old product.”
Caught Between Now and Next
Conversations began in small groups, on Facebook, and other social media platforms. People began to say things like, “Having this change to virtual worship is forcing us to ask what is essential about worship.” We’re having to ask, “Why do we do what we do?” One pastor even commented that the switch to the virtual platform had pointed out what was ‘bogus’ in his Sunday morning experience.
But there was a two-headed monster standing in the way of re-thinking things: the tyranny of the immediate, and the death grip of nostalgia. You can’t keep the need to produce a worship service from coming every seven days, and you can’t keep people from wanting familiar things restored quickly. We heard lay people lament about what looked or felt different in online worship by saying, “That’s just not who we are.” [read: “That’s not what I’m accustomed to.”]
OK, So What is Innovation?
One way to say it is that innovation involves taking familiar bits and pieces and combining them in a way never seen before in order to produce something that hasn’t existed before. And if it hasn’t existed before, then someone had to be able to envision it.
The Wright Brothers left the familiar confines of their bicycle shop, took two familiar bits (the ability of a wing to produce loft and the ability of a gasoline engine to propel something) and put them together to produce something that was new, and the world hasn’t been the same since.
Innovation isn’t about being smarter than everyone else. It’s about taking the persistence and grit involved in adapting and combining it with a willingness to risk and fail, and with the courage to dream about what hasn’t happened yet, but must.
So, how do you do that when you’re exhausted? How do you dream when you sense that your future in ministry will bear very little resemblance to what you did prior to March 15? How do you lead people who look to you for strength when you feel as bewildered as they do?
Finding Rest (and Strength) on Islands of Sanity
Borrowing the image of Margaret Wheatley, you need islands of sanity if you intend to make it through this transformation in one piece. These islands, if you will, will serve as waypoints along our journey forward.
First, I hope you can feel how massively faithful and accomplished you were in doing the work of adaptation. More than that, I hope there are wonderful moments in which your dreams of innovation, now locked away by worries about keeping the institution afloat, will be loosed.
Rest
The cultural story of America skews sharply in the direction of productivity. Sabbath is for wimps. Anyone who asks for it is lazy or apathetic.
But the biblical story is different. It says that if we don’t rest long enough to remember who made us, we continue toward a head-on collision with ourselves. We self-cannabalize, eating away any energy we might have to imagine the world as God does. Sanity requires rest.
Grieve
Sometimes at points of utter frustration, pain or loss, we hear ourselves say, “I just have to talk with somebody.” It could be a consumer complaint, a medical issue, or a dead-end in a relationship. We need to talk because we need someone to believe how real our frustration, pain or loss is. It’s remarkable how different we feel when someone believes us.
God is the one who believes that what we’re going through is real. Grieving isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of health and what sane people do.
Renew Purpose
When we don’t know what to do, we do what we’ve always done. We take the tasks that do not ask much of us and do them in order to feel we are accomplishing something. But the sense of accomplishment or fulfillment doesn’t last any longer than the energy from a sugary snack.
What will restore our sanity is having the intimate encounter with God that is inevitable when we ask, “God, what is the difference you are calling me [our congregation] to make?”
We’re not asking God to give us tasks so we can check them off. We’re asking God to accompany us into the deeper engagement with each other and with our neighbors. A sane person is able to proclaim, “God, I will not offer to you that which costs me nothing.”
Walk Alongside
We’ve turned ‘loving our neighbors’ into a program rather than a way of life. We form a committee and have the yearly turkey dinner for homeless neighbors at which we serve them food but don’t know anything about who they are or where they go when they leave the building.
It isn’t a bad thing to offer a meal. But if there is no attention to meeting each other at the basic level of our common humanity, it’s a squandered opportunity.
Something as simple as knowing the names of the 8 people or families who live the closest to you and making a point of greeting them or having a two-minute front porch visit could provide a breakthrough. I feel the most human when I’ve asked someone to tell me their story.
De-Centralize Power
One of the central tasks of church leaders is not to be the center (the one who has all the answers, makes all the plans, and through whom all decisions must go) but rather to lead people to the center.
Our sustainability and sanity require that we not only find people who can help, but to trust them even when the methods they bring to accomplishing the work go counter to our instincts.
Know that God has gone ahead of you, will surround you on your journey, and will ensure you have the strength to endure the change at hand.
Note: This is a guest post by John Thornburg with the Texas Methodist Foundation. He is a great friend of Horizons and a trusted advisor of many.