I am a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene. I pastor a small church in rural Missouri. The wounds in this church are deep. It is a sixty-five year history of church splits, scandal, and a whole bunch of pastors who stayed only a few years before moving onto greener pastures. Someone remarked to me that our list of pastors is a who's who list of Nazarene leaders--because our church served as a stepping stone for seminary graduates taking their first pastorate before being "promoted" to a more "prestigious" assignment.But the wounds present in this church go beyond the sixty-five year history of the church.
The members of my church are upright, stable, respectable community members--teachers, nurses, farmers, and factory workers.
But they tell stories. Of abuse, addiction, neglect, and poverty. While the members of my church have escaped the pain and dysfunction of their childhoods, we regularly pray for family members--brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews--who did not escape, who are caught in ongoing cycles of abuse, addiction, mental illness, and poverty.
Family Systems
Those are not my story to tell. But as the author of this article so eloquently shares, they ARE our stories. I first encountered Rabbi Edwin Friedman's theory of family systems in seminary. The idea is that one person in the family might express outward signs of dysfunction, but the whole system works together to support that. One sibling might be suicidal and rebellious, while another sibling is the straight-A student who never breaks any rules. But what Friedman argues is that BOTH of them are unhealthy. Both of them hold the system in balance. And in fact, if the outwardly dysfunctional sibling improves, it may have an adverse effect on the straight-A student...until the system rights itself and they both go back to their comfortable functions in the family, reestablishing the balance.
In lots of families, then, there is the churchgoer and the addict. The churchgoer and the rebel. The churchgoer and the one who can't seem to pull themselves together. But according to Friedman, they are both unhealthy. They are both expressing their family's dysfunction but in opposite ways.
The wounds of my people may not be so visible in their lives as in the lives of their family members, but they are still there--like a broken bone that didn't get set straight. On the surface it seems healed, but it is a constant source of pain, easily triggered by a wrong movement or a change in the weather.
Here's the thing about a lot of this trauma and tragedy: a few really good therapy sessions with a gifted therapist would do a lot to bring healing to these broken places. But it's hard to explain to city dwellers just how inaccessible this is to people in rural areas. The time, the money, the right person--it's usually an impossible combination to put in place. Some of my congregants have in fact been to therapists, only to be told that their problems are beyond the scope of the therapist. And so they continue on with this poorly healed broken place that just hurts a lot sometimes.
What's a pastor to do?
I was talking to a pastor friend today who said he had a conversation with a member of his congregation. He was asked, "Why don't we see the same kind of healing in North America that we hear of in other parts of the world?" The pastor's answer: "Because we have Mastercard."
It's a joke but it's also true. When we are in need of physical healing, we put together doctor visits, medications, rest and recovery time--and we get better (sometimes). When our first attempt doesn't work, we look for better doctors, more skilled surgeons, stronger medication--and then we get better (sometimes). We pray for healing in church in case God wants to do that, but we expect healing in hospitals.
In other parts of the world, where people have less access to medical care, they expect healing in church and try hospitals just in case. (I recognize that this is a broad generalization, and I am in no way opposed to giving people more and better access to medical care!) And they find the healing that they are expecting in the church.
In parts of our country where people have access to medical professionals but no access to mental health professionals, we need the same kind of dramatic healing that is happening in churches around the world. We need miracles. We need God to do in a minute what it would take years of therapy to accomplish.
One thing I've learned: I can't do it. No amount of preaching, arguing, or listening can fix these broken places.
A few weeks ago, I preached on the story in Matthew where Jesus takes the five loaves and two fishes that the disciples have and feeds five thousand people. Too often, we try to offer our five loaves and two fishes without first letting Jesus multiply it. And then we get mad when the five thousand come back and tell us that our five loaves and two fishes just aren't enough.
That's exactly what is happening in too many churches. Week after week dysfunctional, broken people show up, and we pastors give them what we have. All five of our loaves and all two fishes. But it's not enough. They're still dysfunctional. They're still mean. They're still broken.
(That's one thing that a lot of stories I hear have in common. One of the greatest sources of pain is the way people have been treated in church. We Christians can be shockingly mean.)
We need miracles! We need healing and transformation. We pastors need Jesus to multiply what we have to offer.
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| Image credit: melkite.org |
I may be wading into some murky waters here, but I've attended a lot of churches, and I almost always see healing go hand in hand with charismatic expressions of faith. These people that wave their hankies, run the aisles, fall down, pray in tongues, and prophesy--these people are the ones who tell dramatic stories of God's healing.
A good friend of mind reminded me today that this can all go wildly awry. Pastors can be manipulative and hurtful. They can play mind games with people convincing them that they are healed or that it's their fault that they're not healed.
But it doesn't always have to go that direction. A well-respected leader in the Church of the Nazarene once said, "Wherever the church is exploding, it is living on the edge of chaos."
Paul had a lot to say to the Corinthians about their worship practices, but I think a lot of his message can be summed up with one word: love. Don't let your prejudices get in the way of love, and don't let your practices get in the way of love.
When we become so concerned that our worship services look a certain way that we start to get in the way of God's healing, we have a major problem. Maybe there isn't chaos and disorder. Maybe we've managed to bypass the emotional manipulation. But maybe in the process we've put a lid on the Spirit's work in the church. Maybe we've taken Jesus out of the equation and we spend a lot of time trying to make our five loaves and two fishes somehow be enough.
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At the Global Leadership Summit last week, one of the speakers said that, "Uniquely better often comes as a solution to a problem that successful organizations are trying to avoid." Almost everyday I hear or read something about how the church is losing its influence, losing its young people, losing its place in American society.
I hear pastors lamenting these losses and contemplating solutions, but for the most part, their churches are still hanging on, still able to go on for a good while longer on the momentum of previous generations.
This is not the case for my church, and it's not the case for this pastor. We are one family leaving away from closing. And maybe even more urgently I can't do this. I can't give my life to maintaining the status quo. I can't watch young people grow up and perpetuate the dysfunction of their parents and grandparents.
We need a solution to a problem that successful organizations are trying to avoid. We don't need better leaders or less dysfunctional people. We need God's miraculous healing in the lives of we who gather week after week.
