Stepping Away from Shared Ministry

Reading from the Global Scripture:

The Rev. William Ellery Channing, Minister of the Federal Street Church of Boston, invited all Massachusetts ministers known to be liberal to meet in the vestry of his church (whose entrance was on Berry Street) on May 30, 1820. At the meeting Channing delivered a prepared address. He urged upon his colleagues a "bond of union" among liberal Christian ministers, within which they might meet to exchange practical ideas for strengthening their ministries.

Meeting again on the evening of May 31, 1820, [and] thus was initiated the Berry Street Conference which has convened every year save one (during WWII) since 1820, and thus is the Berry Street Essay the oldest lecture series on the North American continent. As from its beginning, its purpose is to contribute to the practical strength of liberal ministries. The convening of the Berry Street Conference, for the delivery and hearing of the Berry Street Essay, has for many years now been the last event of the annual meeting and conference of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association.

The Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison Reed gave this lecture at the 180^th meeting of the Berry Street Essay. Mark is a scholar of Unitarian Universalist history and author of many books on race, multiculturalism and our faith. Mark and I both found our call to ministry in the First Unitarian Society of Chicago and that congregation ordained us both. 

These are words that Mark shared with almost a thousand Unitarian Universalist ministers:

I am at home among these people in this liberal religious movement. It is a place where I was nurtured, and because I was nurtured I grew; having grown, I could give, and having given I grew more. It is a place where struggling, I could fail; where failing, I was still loved, where loved, I could begin again. It is a place where in pain I could go; where, having gone, I was cared for; where cared for, I could heal and go on. That is why I am a minister, to help sustain religious communities - places like the one in which I grew up, places made holy by what people experience within them - the seasons of their lives and the healing of their souls.

The power of community is enormous and I have lived my entire life in its embrace. It is why I entered the ministry. I believe the liberal church is worth devoting a life to -- my life, in fact.

My years as a congregant did not prepare me, however, for a cruel irony. Ministry, as most of you have discovered I am sure, is a source of unrequited grief. I regret having not read the fine print. If I had, perhaps I would have made another choice. But the print was very small, the phrasing paradoxical, while I was young and eager. This is what it said:

You will love your parishioners with all your heart but never befriend them.

You will pour out your lifeblood for the community but never settle there.

You shall die to the congregation so that the ministry might live.

Sermon:

The title of Mark Morrison-Reed’s Berry Street Essay is “After Running Through the Thistles, the Hard Part Begins.”[1] Since 2000 it has become required reading for every seminarian. For me, it had such a great impact, that I printed a copy and sent it to my Mom…because I wanted to give her some insight to what I was doing with my life.

Mark starts off his essay talking about the baptismal font at the front of the church. He wrote:

The baptismal font was older than the building. It had accompanied the First Unitarian Society of Chicago when the congregation moved south to Hyde Park. The years had dulled the white marble.[2]

Part of why this essay was so impactful for me, personally, is that I had for more than 15 years saw at that very baptismal font almost every Sunday morning. I had dusted it during cleaning days. When Morrison-Reed talks about having been nurtured, grown, forgiven and loved…though separated by a couple of decades…he is talking about the very same people who nurtured, loved and forgave me. They are also the same people who ordained us both and sent us out into the world to love, change and heal the world in their name.

Our theological theme this month is Letting Go. Like a couple of the themes, it is not something I might have chosen, and at first blush, I was a little troubled by it. Letting go isn’t always easy for me, and maybe it isn’t for you, either. So far, in this month of five Sundays, we have had sermons about letting go of perfection, not quite being ready to let go, letting go of old wounds and today, letting go of our shared ministry.

I want to re-share three lines from Mark’s essay:

You will love your parishioners with all your heart but never befriend them.

You will pour out your lifeblood for the community but never settle there.

You shall die to the congregation so that the ministry might live.

You will love your parishioners with all your heart but never befriend them.

This is so true, and when you’re in seminary you think “Oh, I can do this. This won’t be so bad.” And you’d be wrong.

I know of at least one person in the congregation who was fairly hurt by this boundary. Any person, every person, has people with whom they share a natural affinity. Somebody who’s jokes you laugh at, who enjoys the same kind things, like music or books, that you do.

And as a minister, you usually start your new job in a new town where you know nobody. And also, you have this long habit of already making friends that feel like family at church.

But as the minister, you can’t do that. Morrison-Reed wrote:

The relationship of minister and parishioner has the qualities of a friendship, but no matter how warm and deep, authentic and reciprocal the relationship is it is not a sustainable friendship. Why? Because it is built upon an unavoidable imbalance -- the minister is always more responsible for the relationship. When necessary we must be prepared to forsake the role of friend for that of minister, and ready to choose the well being of the community over the needs of the friend. We are not as free to share all aspects of our lives and ourselves. Nor can we make friends with whom we please, for that would create two classes of parishioners -- the chosen and the not. Finally, when our ministries come to an end so must the relationships, lest we take up space the next ministry needs if it is to take root. [3]

This very concern came out in answers to the survey the Ministerial Search Committee did. To potential new ministers, the Search Committee answered the question: Describe the worst mistake your new minister could make: by saying:

In our survey, with 59 people answering that question, two mistakes categorized as “change” and ”clique” finished in a dead heat. The members do not want the new minister to make changes without making them feel they have been a part of the process, nor do they want him/her to align with a person or groups in the church.

In this one answer, one of many, many answers an old wound can be seen. It is true that there is always somebody, some person who feels that the minister likes others better, that someone else is getting preferential treatment. This can only be addressed by the person who feels slighted.

What I find interesting in this answer is that only 59 people responded to the survey written by the Search Committee. 59 out of some 145 people. That’s not a very high voter turn-out.

Secondly, systemically, the people who answered this survey are very worried that the new minister will have favorites and will work to change the congregation.

Every minister knows that it is a potential disaster to befriend your congregants, and yet we are only human. This is one of the toughest parts of ministry, and probably one of the most invisible.

There are concerts that I have not attended, parties I have not gone to, and people I have not invited to our home for dinner. There are people I am very sure we would love to spend more time with, that I have not, because of this boundary. Whenever we are together, I am the minister. I do not get to take the collar, or stole, off, so to speak. It doesn’t matter if that setting is here at the church, at Target, at Graceada Park, in the hospital or in your home.

It isn’t that I don’t like you. I think by now you must know how deeply I care. It’s that the minister is always responsible for the relationship and its boundaries. And yet even with my still careful attention to these balances in relationship, still I have been accused of having favorites. As Rev. Grace was accused of before me, and before her, I have heard that Rev. Lesley and Rev. Jody also dealt with this concern.

I’m sure that all of my predecessors also had to deal with resistance to change.

When, over a forty year period, the same patterns, the same tensions between congregation and minister arise, even with vastly different personalities in your pulpit, if the same concerns keep coming up over and over again, it is not issue of the ever changing ministers. It is clearly something deep within this congregation.

And that will be something I hope you keep in mind with your next minister, and your shared ministry with them. Ask yourself “Why am I so resistant to change?” “Why are we, as a system, so quick to assume that there are cliques in the church?” And then ask yourself how you, yourself, can be part of the solution to these long-term concerns. What is it in your own behavior, mindset and engagement that manifests these issues.

You will pour out your lifeblood for the community but never settle there.

This is very evident when you are an Interim Minister. You come with, as the Canadians say “An Expiry Date.”

But this is true of all ministry, and an interim minister pours no less life-blood into the community than does a settled minister.

Even if my next ministry is a settled ministry, that place will not be a place I will settle. I must always be prepared, Denis and I must always be prepared for the time when our ministries have come to their natural conclusion.

We must always keep this in our hearts.

When Rev. Grace came back to celebrate the 60^th Anniversary of the congregation, she asked me to have coffee with her the next day.

For a while we talked about many things, like how retirement was going for her, her astonishment at the Sanctuary Renewal and that the mayor and poet laureate were there.

And since she is a senior colleague, I used some of our time to get some advice. I said to her “I don’t know how you left them (meaning you.) They are such an amazing group of people. I have a pre-set date of departure, but how did you have the strength to do it?”

She replied “I knew it was time. We had shared a lot, and the congregation had been through some nice change and growth, and I knew they were about to embark on a whole new level of growth, and I felt that I was not the person to take them through that. And I know Joe, that you’re pastor enough to know, that when you have a settled ministry, you will know when it is time and you will have the love and strength it takes to leave when it is time.”

Even though homes are bought in town, and you get to love things like the Gallo Center, always in some back corner of your mind is the knowledge that this is not the place you will settle.

And that knowledge always keeps you a little bit separate.

You shall die to the congregation so that the ministry might live.

This is a third, painful aspect of ministry. That despite all of my work, all of the belly laughs and tears from deeply honest places, when it is my time to leave, I must leave.

We ministers are in a covenant with each other. We have rules about how long we must stay away from a congregation we have served. We, for the care and well-being of our congregations, accepted a hierarchy of ministerial authority. We, who are also Unitarian Universalists, who don’t like authority, or too much structure, we have voluntarily accepted both for the sake of the congregations we serve.

When I was here two weeks, and Martin Z. died, I called Rev. Grace and asked her if she would like to preside over Martin’s memorial service. After all, I had only met Martin once, and Grace had been his minister for a little over a decade.

Truth be told, I was really hoping that she would perform the memorial service, because I didn’t really know ANYBODY yet, and I was concerned I would make a mess of things.

But Grace, knowing better, told me that she would not accept my invitation, saying “They are your congregation now, and funerals are part of what bond a congregation to their minister.”

Not the answer I wanted, but the wiser answer.

In so doing, Grace demonstrated for me what I will need to do when I leave.

I will need to leave. I will not be able to, in good conscience, correspond with the people in this congregation. The ones who I have come to look forward to seeing each and every week. The people whose presence makes my heart smile, or grin wryly, depending on the person.

It is not yet time for us to be that separate, but it is time that we start thinking about it. It is time that the separation begins. In little, baby steps.

You many notice over the course of the next two months that I respond to email differently. Instead of using the word “we” I will use the word “you.” Instead of answering questions to the best of my ability, I will try to show you were to find those answers yourself. In conversations, I may contribute noticeably less.

In doing this I am not being cagey. Rather, I am practicing.

We have become so used to each other, so comfortable with each other, that this change may difficult for us. But I will keep Mark Morrison-Reeds words on my desk.

You will love your parishioners with all your heart but never befriend them.

You will pour out your lifeblood for the community but never settle there.

You shall die to the congregation so that the ministry might live.

I hope that as we prepare for our journey together to end, me taking one path, you taking another, I hope that as we come to that place in the road where we will say goodbye, I hope that these three sentences will help you, as I hope they will help me.

---

[1] http://www.uua.org/documents/morrison-reedmark/afterthistles.pdf

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

Letting Go of Old Wounds

My Mom called me up from the basement: “Come into the kitchen with me, I have something to tell you.” With my Dad behind her, and my brother beside me, my Mom told me that my Grandmother, my Babcia had died.

I will never forget the tile on the floor of the kitchen. I can’t, all these 33 years later, remember my Mom’s face, or my Dad’s as they shared the news with my brother and I, but I can remember the tile on the floor.

This was the first brush with death that I can remember. I remember feeling confused, and like someone had taken all the air out of the room. I felt light headed, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to cry immediately, or go into my room first.

There had been no previous instructions about what one is to do when someone you loved has died.

In telling me of her Grandmother’s death, my Mom wounded me, not out of malice, but in doing what she ought and should have done. In the natural course of a human life, the people you love die. I was very lucky to know and love my Grandmother, Helena Witowrksa-Wiesniewski.  

But learning of her death, that I’d never see her again, hurt me deeply.

This sort of deep hurt, of deep woundedness, is both a universal and utterly unique experience. Earl A. Grollman, in his book Living When a Loved One Has Died wrote:

There are no pat answers.

No one completely understands
the mystery of death.

Even is the questions were answered,
would your pain be eased,
you loneliness less terrible?

There is no answer that bridges
the chasm of irreparable separation.

There is no satisfactory response
for an unresolvable dilemma.

Not all questions have answers.

Unanswered why’s are part of life.[1]

The unanswered, and unanswerable whys are part of living with grief.

Grief, of course, comes not only when someone you love has died. It comes when a friendship ends, and when your childhood heroes fail you.

Loss comes in many forms. Some of them serious, some of them less dire.

One of the less serious losses might be when you have a favorite band or artist, and you love their fist album so very much… and then they make their second album, and it’s so not like what you loved about the first one.

One of the more serious losses though, one that leaves deep wounds, is the loss of our childhood ideals. These losses may come in many forms, some of them feel universal, like the loss of your first best friend, or your pet.

Today I wanted to talk to you about letting go of old wounds; these wounds that we’ve been carrying around, sometimes for decades. This is kind of a big and intimidating topic to address on a Sunday morning. Knowing that this topic was coming, I was extra diligent about doing research.

What I’ve discovered is that there isn’t much literature on addressing some old hurts.

There are a lot of books about grief and loss when a loved one dies. There are many articles about getting through the dissolution of a relationship. Nowhere could I find any articles about healing the deep emotional hurt that one feels when religion has failed you.

For many of us in this room, religion has, in one form or another, failed us.

The God we were sold as children did not meet our expectations and our needs, and has therefor failed us.

Even though, as you know, I was not a particularly churched child, even I know some of the rhymes and little stories of religious America “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

And then people told me that Jesus didn’t love me.

A lot of people told me this.

One of the people who told me that Jesus didn’t love me was named the Rev. Fred Phelps.

Fred Phelps felt he was a man on a mission from God to denounce homosexuality, and to do so he and his church, largely members of his own family, but not exclusively, performed many. many acts of public witness, decrying the influence of homosexuality in our American culture.

Together, in an attempt to save the world, this church demonstrated at gay pride marches and funerals of people who had seemingly no connection to the feared “gay agenda” that was bringing down God’s punishment to our nation.

The anti-gay actions of Fred Phelps and his followers, beginning in the late 1980’s, were harsh, hateful and divisive.

And their actions offered convenient peg for people who already had been hurt by religions, to hang their hat on.

“Look at that behavior,” they would say, as they placed took off their coats to get comfortable in the house of religious dissidents. “Those people represent God.”

For the entirety of my life as an openly gay man, the efforts of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, have made my life so much more difficult than it needed to be.  With their “God Hates Fags” chants and the “Gay equals Got AIDS Yet?” signs, they frightened me, no they terrorized me, when I was at my most vulnerable.

Their actions have made my own ministry more difficult. Here are two ways in which this happens. Many of the openly gay clergy I know have had this experience. It is easier to come out of the closet to a religious community, than it is to be an openly spiritual and religious person in gay life. This is particularly true if one is clergy. You get called a betrayer, an Uncle Tom, a sell out. You become part of the problem and people’s hurt causes them to close the door on you. Leaving you out in the cold, shut out by the very community that is supposed to embrace you because you’re one of them.

Another way they make my ministry more difficult is that people who are in this very room see this church acting out of their own understanding of God, and use this as a weapon to dismiss examining their own spiritual needs, because the action of people like the Westboro Baptist Church repulse them.

On the one hand I have this community that I’m supposed to be part of shunning me because I am a preacher, and in the other hand I have these people I care for deeply, people I know only because I am a minister, and I witness to their pain because of what other people have done in the name of religion.

All around, there are wounds.

With the death of Fred Phelps, I was sort of stealing myself for a lot of anger and hatred unleashed by gay folks on the internet. To my surprised, and frankly delight, what I have read has been almost universally forgiving of Mr. Phelps. There have been very few mean comments about him, mostly acknowledgements that he, like all of us, was a frail and human being.

Of all the comments and articles I’ve read over the last few days, only Fred’s estranged son, Nate Phelps, had anything to say that was remotely troubled:

Fred Phelps is now the past. The present and the future are for the living. Unfortunately, Fred’s ideas have not died with him, but live on, not just among the members of Westboro Baptist Church, but among the many communities and small minds that refuse to recognize the equality and humanity of our brothers and sisters on this small planet we share. I will mourn his passing, not for the man he was, but for the man he could have been. I deeply mourn the grief and pain felt by my family members denied their right to visit him in his final days. They deserved the right to finally have closure to decades of rejection, and that was stolen from them.[2]

Nate talks about his father’s 23 year mission against the people of the Bi, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender community and how he hopes that his father’s legacy will be that people remember that the BGLT community are our friends, neighbors and family, and that the larger culture will learn something, saying:

 How many times have communities risen up together in a united wall against the harassment of my family? Differences have been set aside for that cause, tremendous and loving joint efforts mobilized within hours… and because of that, I ask this of everyone — let his death mean something. Let every mention of his name and of his church be a constant reminder of the tremendous good we are all capable of doing in our communities.[3]

In his words, Nate Phelps echoes the advice of many people who have let go of deep hurts from their past. But still, you can see in his statement that Nate has not forgiven his father for all that his father has done in the world, and now that his father has died, and a living reconciliation is impossible, Nate will have to do this work on his own.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her working partner David Kessler say that there are five stages of grief

1. Denial

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance.

There are many systems of grief work, some have more steps than these, some use different nomenclature, but these five will do for us today. Can you recognize any of them from your own life experiences?

The Buddha is meant to have said “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

When we do not let go of our old grievances and wounds, we are doing what the Buddha suggests that we do not. We hold onto to our anger, we stop at the second stage of grief.

Sometimes our being stuck has to do more with not knowing how to move forward, and less about wanting to stay stuck in the grief we are in.

Deepak Chopra offers these ideas on how to begin to heal:

1. Gain some detachment. Stand back and view yourself as if you were the helper, not the victim.

2. Don't indulge in emotions you cannot afford. Don't act as if you’re feeling worse than you really are -- or better.

3. Make a plan for emotional recovery. Look at where you hurt, feel wounded or see yourself as victimized, then set out to heal these areas. Don't rely simply on letting time do it for you.

4. Feel the hole inside and grieve over it -- but promise yourself that you will fill it.

5. Seek a confidant who has survived the same betrayal and has come out on the other side.

6. Work toward a tomorrow that will be better than yesterday. Don't fixate on the past or what might have been.

7. Counter self-pity by being of service to someone else. Counter regret by seeking out activities that build your self-esteem.

He then says that it is far easier to do the opposite of these things. One can try:

1. Dwelling obsessively on how you were wronged. Feeling exultant in our self-righteous pain.

2. Turning your pain into an ongoing drama.

3. Acting erratic and scattered, with no plan for getting better.

4. Mourning your loss forever. Not looking honestly at the hole inside yourself because it is too painful or you feel too weak.

5. Talking to the wrong people about your woes. Seeking out those who keep agreeing with you and amplifying our resentment by egging you on.

6. Idealizing the past. Obsessing over the good times that are gone.

7. Letting self-pity and regret dominate your state of mind.

This kind of behavior only makes a betrayal linger.[4]

How many of these last seven, unhelpful behaviors, do you engage in around the topic of God and religion?

I have been serving as your minister now for 27 months of my 30 month’s time here. My time with you is now 90% over, and, with love, I want to tell you that I have seen these last seven behaviors around here, and around Unitarian Universalism, so much that it’s heart-wrenching.

So often I feel like we are a people stuck. Spiritually stuck in anger and grief over stories about God we were told when we were children of less than ten years old.

I am not, let me be clear, advocating that we “slide into deism.” I have been accused, jokingly or otherwise, of being too theistic in my sermons.

What I am saying is that as a body, as a whole, we, Unitarian Universalists globally, we spend most of our lives in anger over religion because we have been wounded by it in our past.

I’m asking you… I’m begging you, let go of your anger.

God, in whatever form God may or may not be, has not spent decades being angry at you, I can assure you.

There is a proverb that says “In order to keep a man down on the ground, you must be there, too.” I don’t want to get into the exact logistics of that, but rather I want to say, if you have to keep your focus on a person to keep them in the place you wish them to be, you must also focus on them, rather than being able to turn your attention to any of the many other things going on around you.

If you take a child to the park, you watch the child, right? You don't get to focus on the beautiful flowers and trees around you for more than a millisecond.

If you’re first and immediate negative, visceral reaction to someone, like me for example, talking about God or things religious, than it’s clear that you have some healing to do. We only react strongly to things that have hurt us. It’s a fear-based response.

I don’t want you to live in pain and fear anymore. I care about you.

I want you to live in abundance and joy. I want your days to be filled with happiness and new experiences.

This is far less likely to happen if you are stuck in grief.

Grief and mourning have their place. I know this, and I encourage you not to forget that either.

But always the next day there is a dawn.

I want to close by telling you something very personal about myself and my theology.

For as long as I can remember, when I think about death, my own death, this is what brings me comfort.

I know that the day that I die, no matter how or when it’ll happen, the day that I die will be followed the next day by a sunrise. A glorious change in the sky from the stars to the light.

I expect that some will be sad, but that billions and billions of others will have been completely unaffected by my death. I hope that some people’s lives will have been made easier by my life and my work.

But I know that the next morning, there will be a sunrise. 

This is one of the things my sense of faith, what my religious understanding has gifted to me. I think to find it, I had to let go of my grief around topics of God and religious people. It is by letting go of the grief and anger I had toward God that let me become the religious person, this spiritual entity, that I am.

It is my deep hope that you are gifted some sense, some idea, some certainty that will help you rest easy all the days of your life.

Blessed be and Amen.

---

[1] Living When a Loved One Has Died. Grollman, Earl. Pg. 8

[2] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/21/nate-phelps-issues-public-statement-after-his-fathers-death/

[3] ibid.

[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/on-betrayal-deepak-chopra-healing-pain_n_1967059.html

Letting Go of Old Wounds

© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

Written for and delivered to

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County

And the Unitarian Universalists of Merced

On March 23, 2014