A word from Ken Luscombe: The difference of place

Let me take you to a different place. I want to share a personal story of pastoral ministry in a particular place. Places differ, and the differences are what make a place interesting, special. The story I have to share may sound familiar, not out of place with your own experience. Stories are like that. They gather up the bits and pieces of everyday life into common themes, schemes, and memes. We live by stories. Good stories matter. They change us. Good stories take us to the edge. They push the boundaries of the familiar and probe the murky depths of our interior lives. No doubt we share much in common, you and I, up to a point. And this is my point.

Real life, in your place and mine, is replete with raw detail, too rich for simple retelling. By the time we mentally note the things we observe, and sort and process them for possible meaning, we have only scanned the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, and that from only one angle at a time. We have all developed the capacity to filter out what does not fit with our particular way of seeing the world. What fills our perceptions shapes our stories. We all do it. Life is constructed, storied. Life is placed. Place is perceived and shared through culture, and culture is a wordy affair. At the core of our experience of living in a place is language. Our languages differ, not just our accents.

My story, or the small excerpt I share in this place, is shaped by being a pastor—an urban pastor—and is inflected by my recent and wholly different experience as an intentional interim. I invite you to join me in trying to tease out meaning in ministry in our urban-shaped world today, from a “different place.” Remember, when it is all said and done, this is my story, my word from, and you will have to take my word on that.

An oversized key clunks home and turns true. Rusty hinges groan and give way. A shaft of daylight slices the gloom as the large twin gothic-shaped doors part and swing free, breaching the church’s defenses with a flood of aerated sunshine and street noises. Luminosity exposes the age-lines of the wise old sanctuary. Real fluorescence plays delightfully across the stolid interior. The empty escalator choir stalls and the elevated pulpit, wooden sounding posts of yesterday, silent yet formidable, rise to prominence. The polished communion table shines center stage. Stratified pews, staid and straight-laced as a colonist’s bootlaces, striate the rest of the floor space. Daylight falls on the bemused faces of the people following my lead. I pause and pivot at the threshold, struck by the transforming effect of opening the big doors. This, I muse, is what the architect saw for his building long ago.

Sunlight catches the polished brass cross in my hand. On a whim of sermon theatrics, I had swiped the cross off the communion table before striding up the aisle to the bolted entrance, beckoning the people to follow. Mimicking the protocol associated with, say, the installation of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, I bang three times on the doors with the base of the cross. ¹ With uncanny savvy, the caretaker had already gathered his ring of keys and scurried outside to open the doors. He stood there beaming. ² A flash off the brass cross reminds me to keep going, to step out and complete what I had started. We filed out onto the courtyard space between the sanctuary and the busy city street, where we brought our service to an end.

Why all the drama and theatrics? Well, this was my swan song, my final occasion with the folk of Brunswick Baptist, a small historic church in the inner city of Melbourne, Australia. My sojourn as Intentional Interim Minister was done. Our journey together through a time of transition ended this day, in this place—the courtyard by the portico of the old church building. I was making my exit as an interim in style, intentionally.

Admittedly, this move had not occurred to me until the closing comments of my sermon. It related to the singular prayer of the people during the interim: “Dear God, what do you want us to do and be in this place?” Parenthetically, upon first arriving, I found a diverse people bonded in grief and loss in the wake of a significant conflict over property and building plans. They were shuffling dolefully up “the valley of the shadow of death” with a sense of bewilderment over what had recently gone down. Some community rebuilding work had begun, but the sense of vision and purpose had taken a telling blow. Hence the prayer, simple and straightforward, but from a bruised and confused place. Lots of raised voices, especially from the more articulate members. But not much action to match the conviction.

It would take another voice, from another place, gentle enough to lift without bruising, and to bind without constricting. There would need to be genuine healing in the answer, and clarity for a renewed future that did not require the self-imposed burden of being special to live up to. In fact, only an oblique but realistic answer would pass the people’s “pub test.” ³ There was such a moment. A community leader captured it succinctly: she named it “a God moment.”

Wanting to anchor the memory of this moment, I put a rhetorical question to the people. “What would you have thought” I asked, “if I had said ‘get ready, get your act together, because a lot of people are coming to our door to find spiritual and emotional solace’?” Moving to the strange side. “No, let’s make that fifty, one hundred, two hundred!” Think about that: two hundred people at our doorstep.” With a final rhetorical flourish, I tossed all restraint to the wind and asked, “What about five hundred?”

It happened, and more besides. Ironically, it came accompanied by an unspeakable tragedy. If you read my latest editorial you will be familiar with this story. ⁴ But let me recap. Jill Meagher, local resident and beloved radio producer, was violently abducted from the street near the church while walking home late at night from a work function. She lived close by. Jill was missing for a week. Then her body was found in a ditch along a secluded country road. She had been repeated raped and murdered.

During the week of Jill’s disappearance until the distressing discovery of her body, and for several more days, an open vigil was held on the porch and courtyard of the church. Many hundreds attended to grieve, remember, pray, and leave notes of condolence for the family. An organized protest saw thirty thousand people march down the street, past the church and the public shrine of flowers, candles, cards, religious items from all the major traditions, and fruit, yes even fruit! They were marching to “take back the street” from the purveyors of hatred and violence who prowl under the cover of darkness, and to assert their right to feel safe in their city. ⁵

Coming and going, journey of discovery, endings as beginnings. ⁶ Arguably, all ministry is qualified as interim and transitional. ⁷ We draw our identity and relevance in both faith and life as followers of Jesus Christ. As Christians, we are guided by the transcendent reality of the kingdom of God, which has some admixture of the past, present, and future. The kingdom denotes a sphere of divine authority and a space of living in the fellowship of community with God, others, and the cosmos, specifically this Earth we call home. The times and spaces of our lives are spoken for. In this respect, we belong to the Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler of all things, the triune God, and so shape our lives here and now, in this place, where we live, and move, and find our community in real time. Though all things constantly change, around us and within us, in the circumstances we endure and the places we choose, yet we are held in a covenant of promise by a faithful God who is before us, with us, and within us as a community and as individuals. All of life, therefore, is touched by an in-between-ness—a perpetual state of “difference” that keeps life moving, fluid, in process. We must continually adjust, decide, respond. In this sense, we are all itinerants in ministry, and must live intentionally. This partly explains the “radical” in radical discipleship.

Now that I have that off my chest, let me return to the ministry that is Intentional Interim in the “professional” sense, and my experience of breaching the inside–outside dynamics of being in place in a local church. Back to the doorway drama. “Doorway” is a powerful metaphorical place of transition, and the porch a “liminal” space, as they say. ⁸ Doorways can swing both ways, articulating the coming and going between the different theatres of our lives. Unfortunately, in our time there seem to be more people permanently heading out the door than in. If this trend continues apace we will require more and better equipped intentional interim ministers to help the congregation to get real, and by that I mean to enter into the kind of real conversations that countenance the dying and likely death of the congregation short of a transformation, or rebirth.

Allow me to digress with another story, to alleviate any anxiety that I have totally regressed to a dark place with my birthing comment. Here is how I mean it. I was facilitating a gathering of urban pastors back in the last millennium, the 1980s. We had been tossing up gut-felt words to express what we felt about working in an urban church. Then we grouped the words into similar sets. With the help of a colleague from East London, out in Australia as an urban church specialist, we identified three categories: first, diminishing resources; second, rapid change; and third, high stress. The participants readily identified these dynamics as the signs of dying and death. However, could these not also be the signs of a birth ready to happen?

Facing into the reality of death and dying, personal and organizational, including the death of hopes and dreams, of relationships, or even of religious beliefs, is a constant challenge. Achieving understanding, and acceptance of the inevitable, takes a process and the courage to embrace it as a waking practice. Rebirthing hope and new life in the midst of death and dying is the work of the Holy Spirit in the congregation and the individual. This is the sacred purpose of a living faith, and it has life-giving power. Tom Meagher shared these words: “Since Jill died, I wake up every day and read a quote by Maya Angelou: ‘History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.’” The point of ministry is such transformation.

It is the task of pastoral leadership to help their people learn and grow in the faith together. Pastors must equip the people for the work of ministry by discerning their giftedness and bringing their gifts to expression in the life of the church. Pastors will lead the people into an awareness of the needs of the world and inspire action to bring about change. They will build spiritual strength and insight appropriate to the generations and seasons of life, and to foster deep fellowship through intentional community. Pastoral work takes prayer, patience, presence, and imagination.

It also takes collective memory work, recalling not only the long witness of faith through the stories of Scripture and the creedal statements of tradition, but also the influences of formative people and events that have crafted the culture of the congregation. Much of the past will be held tacitly. Some may be repressed in forbidden places. However, the tacit lives on instrumentally in “the way we do things around here.” It is implicit in the unconscious competencies of the culture. Collective recollection shines the light of memory onto patterns that are still in play. Participation in genuine conversation, without defensiveness or acting out, allows for the big picture to emerge and its patterning to be traced in present day events. However, it is by such fractal reveals that the inevitable interplay of the symbolic and the diabolic, meaning and alienation, life-giving and life-denying come into focus. This is bigger than any individual, and rather scary.

Real life, in all places, is a constant struggle between the antagonistic forces of good and evil, life and death. What begins as a small seed, when nurtured by intent, can “go viral” by being swept up in the spiral dynamics of life-giving or life-destroying force. Think of a simple kindness, a smile, an affirmation, a listening ear, an encouragement on the one side, and a careless comment, a piece of juicy gossip, a snide suggestion, an unjust inference, or a plain “white lie” on the other. What begins as a seed, when nurtured by intent, can grow to something of undeniable significance, for good or evil.

Here I recall reading the thought of quantum physicist David Bohm. He postulates an invisible “implicate” order that, under the right circumstances, unfolds into the “explicate” order of visible forms that we perceive as reality. Take an oak seed. We plant it in the expectation that an oak tree will grow in its place. It seems like the seed causes the tree to grow. Rather, for Bohm, the environment can be seen as unfolding into a tree—seed, soil, air, and water all working together. Crucially, the seed acts as an “aperture”—an opening through which the tree unfolds. The seed can be said to organize the processes of growth that becomes the tree. ⁹

Fascinating. The seed by being put in the right environment opens out to attract the elements needed for something to grow into a new reality. If this is true of our language, attitude, and intent, then beware the seeds we sow, and the spirit in which we scatter them.

Bohm indeed suggests a correlation between this patterned rhythm of nature and how our personal consciousness works, i.e. our thoughts and feelings. There is unfolding and folding back that makes explicate what lies beneath—abundant potential that can, with courage and authenticity, be brought to awareness and put into action. ¹⁰

The language of aperture as “opening” has real metaphorical potential: for what we see, as in a camera, microscope, or telescope; for what we believe, as in our openness to the truth of matter; for how we relate, as in our willingness to engage others with dignity, mutuality, and transparency; for our being-in-place, as in our readiness for creative “placemaking” in our communities of home, residence, work, and faith.

In reality, public life today is far from open and transparent. Sadly, but not surprisingly, this is also true of the local church, which is not immune from the mood and tone of contemporary life. Our cultural stories tap into the unlimited reservoir of potential that lies, in Bohm’s terms, implicated in the hidden flow of unformed energy. We are known by our stories, and on this account, we have every right to be deeply troubled. All reality is constructed, on the surface at least, which is where our postmodernist friends situate us, and this reality, to my sensitivities, is banal, insubstantial, and feckless. The digital revolution is stunning, in every sense, at once opening our devices to the wide world of, well, practically everything really, but at the same time offering only a virtuality without virtue—a false sense of reality epitomized in the slew of “reality television” shows that dominate our consciousness and conversations. We are in danger of digitizing our souls into virtual slavery. We are being re-placed.

That is why we need stories—stories and conversations about things that cannot be replaced with digitized myths, epic legends of bodiless gaming, keyboard relationships, and simulated sex. Fortunately, despite the global reach of digital technology, and the obvious entrancement of what it presents, not all of us—that is, not every part of each of us—is equally enamored with the bodiless reality that touches nothing tangibly human. Good stories, everyday stories, told from the heart by people who have experienced the agonies and the ecstasies of everyday life, have the potential to release the reservoir of repressed or unused energy that awaits activation. Stories call to stories.

In this way, conversations begin that can create counternarratives to the hollowed-out realities that our public language has manufactured and promoted. Good stories do not need to be fact-checked. They ring true to the human spirit. They inspire and inform because they are resourced with what gives life, nourishes, and dignifies. Good stories are worthy and inspire worthy lives. We know a good story when we hear it. Good stories also nourish the collective spirit to resist. Stories are not tweets, or advertisements, or the rantings of would-be autocrats and dictators. Stories that ennoble the human spirit do not short-change the listener by shying away from hard realities, unspeakable monstrosities, and unpalatable truth, because they trust the process and the capacity of the human spirit to intuit the lie.

Pastoral leadership encourages storytelling. Communities thrive when they have processes and rituals in place to share stories from everyday life. Opportunities are taken to build social ritual chains through dialogue and open conversations. Furthermore, strong communities are those that connect their stories with the deep stories of faith. This multi-lateral conversation plants seeds that create the apertures for growth and sustainability. But they do more than this. The pastoral heart knows the creator of the soil, sun, wind, and water and dares to bring human conversation into a prayerful dialogue with the divine, through the mediating presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is the relational means by which the community and persons as individuals bring their truest selves into conversation with God. What could be more important?

That said, the historical narrative of the Church, the contemporary disdain and distrust of any religious discourse, and the ambiguity of our congregational and personal stories remind us of the precarious hold on truth that our faith communities share with all humanity. Our body of work, too, is shot through with self-interest, guarded possession, and political opportunism. Churches today face the fires of public criticism for perceived duplicity and cover-up, and popular judgment as irrelevant. Seemingly constant revelations of child sexual abuse by clergy and other institutional leaders in positions of trust, abusive behavior toward women, minorities, and people of differing religious persuasions, especially from the pious and conservative end of the church continuum, are sobering reminders of how far we have yet to travel in the evolution of our humanity. Vulnerability is part and parcel of the experience of engaging others. Keeping faith is a nuanced challenge.

Realism can be a bitter pill, hard to swallow. Harder still, for the faithful pastor, is calling out internal trouble in the congregation that threatens the integrity of the community and its values. Such issues need to be confronted and challenged with pastoral sensitivity and courage in the name of justice, truth, and due consequence. Justice, however this is understood and applied in any case, must precede both forgiveness and reconciliation. Hard stuff! Pastoral work is no walk in the park. In fact, in simple terms, the more diligent the work of pastoral care, and the clearer the prophetic voice, the greater risk the pastor faces of resistance, political repercussion, or just plain old “voted off the island” (to use a reality show term that I’ve already questioned for veracity). ¹¹ Pastors are replaceable, and therefore expendable. Yes, realism is a bitter pill.

When pastoral relations with the people break down, or weariness, health, family issues, other pastoral opportunities, or special circumstance leads to the departure of the pastor, the church will enter a time of transition. It may be to find some consolation, especially if the departing pastor was a beloved person, or clarity, if the situation is shrouded in secrecy or confusion. At some point the congregation will want to recast its vision, mission, and statement of ministry purpose for the next chapter in the church’s story. Churches reconstruct. It is a building process. All aspects of the building and rebuilding matter. The whole environment must be taken into account, including the culture of the community and the changing nature of the neighborhood. It is at this point that the matter of an interim, or intentional interim, is engaged.

Standing on the street looking back over the courtyard across the porch beyond which the big doors of the church stood wide open, I took a moment to let the contending emotions flood my mind and body. It was not until the later experience of finishing the Camino de Santiago that I felt this same sense of completing a pilgrimage. I looked at the people buzzing happily around the front of the church, engaged in conversation in small groups, laughter, hugs, and parents keeping an eye on their children, who were clearly enjoying the experience of something different. Usually all the interaction post-worship would happen in a different place, out of sight, behind the big fence that separated the church property from the street.

One day I must write something about this experience. Perhaps I should get some distance first, though. Strange, I used to think that intentional interim ministry was a boondoggle, meant as a way to keep aging clergy happy and out of harm’s way. The street cred had it that you just turn up, keep the lights on, and dare not try anything new. Keep yourself busy by visiting people and listening to stories of the good old days. Coffee is good. Stay above the fray. Keep a non-anxious presence. Did I mention not doing anything new? Chair the meetings. Keep the agenda flowing. If needed, add a sage comment or two on the process of crafting a mission statement. Don’t flood it. Your time will soon be over, and you can hand over the keys to the office, and ride quietly off into the setting sun. Yeah, I changed my mind on all that. Must write about it.

I stepped back into the fray and headed toward the big doors. I was joined by a mother with a child in tow as we stepped across the threshold. “There’s a reason why the doors are always shut you know,” she said, in a voice edged with determination. “It’s to keep the children inside. Can’t have them running out on into the traffic.” Point taken! Child safety is extremely important, and it is incumbent upon the church to make sure that every precaution is taken, and policies adhered to. No argument from me on that count. Before I could muster a thoughtful response, though, the big doors slammed shut, from the outside. Darn, where did I put that cross? Oh, someone’s put it back already. Job done. Let’s go and get a coffee.

Here’s a dollar that says the doors are still shut!