Midlife Meditation

An ancient juniper at Oregon Badlands Wilderness. This is my third post in a row that has the word "church" in its title. I've been wrestling with religion for most of my life. Faith never came easily for me--and, as it turned out, it didn't come the hard way, either. I tried for years to follow the advice Peter Boehler, a friend of John Wesley, gave him during one of his own many crises of faith: "Preach faith until you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith." I tried, and failed: the faith that is Methodism and, much more than that, Christianity, simply would not take root in me. And yet, even as the faith I strained to possess eluded my grasp, I found myself experiencing a gradual warming of the heart from unexpected sources: mountaintops, finish lines, friendships, concerts, novels, workouts, intimate moments. It took me three decades of such epiphanies to put them all together and realize just what I was being tol...

Well, no, actually, I didn't. But then, I stopped looking, so how could I find it? Enough with the cryptic rhetorical responses to a cryptic evangelism campaign from the 1970s, already. This is a follow-up to last week's essay on being " done with church ," in which I discussed several reasons why I'd rather do almost anything than go to church on a Sunday morning. That post got more views than my typical curmudgeonly rant--40 so far--which is encouraging. It also got something I rarely have: an eloquent response from a reader. His name is Daryl, and in the late 1970s, we were classmates at Philomath High School. His grandfather had been the pastor of the College Evangelical United Brethren Church until the great merger of 1968, when it became the College United Methodist Church, and the hardline EUBs left to start their own church elsewhere in town. Seven years later, my father became pastor of the College UMC, and baptized me in its immersion ba...

Just one of the many things I've had enough of: Calvary. I've had my fill. Sunday morning was Easter, the day around which the Christian year revolves. In the ancient church, every Sunday was supposed to be a little Easter, and Easter itself was, well, the big Easter. Most churches have allowed the Easter to seep out of the other 51 Sundays, but all of them still make a big deal about the Sunday that is above all other Sundays. Anyway, I went to church on Sunday, as I have every Easter Sunday of my entire life. I went to sit with my recently widowed mother because, quite understandably, it wasn't easy for her to be their by herself. My father (as you know already if you've spent any time at all reading my previous posts) was a United Methodist minister, so being in church without him was a hard thing for her. For my part, I'm a former minister myself. I've also been a church musician for more years than I was a minister. When I wasn't prea...

Having church in Nashville: the Stacy Mitchhart Band performs at the Basin Street Blues and Boogie Bar. Music is my church, teaching is my religion. So I wrote in my last post to this blog . Much of my meditation on this formulation was about how I came to it. This post will unpack the first half of the formulation. Understanding what I mean by "music is my church" will require a discussion of what I mean by "church." My seminary education and my years both growing up in and ministering to churches  freight the word with countless layers of meaning. Let's start with the most obvious, the symbol that leaps to the minds of most Americans when they hear the word "church": a large brick and mortar (or lumber and siding) structure featuring a steeple and cross, and containing a large meeting room in which religious services are held. My early childhood years in New Hampshire predispose me to picture a white building in the town square. If you grew u...

,  I did some of my best ministry in this church, but it was never really mine. "Journalism is my church, reporting is my religion." --Jose Antonio Vargas on the Slate Magazine podcast The Gist , Tuesday, February 24, 2015. "The Lord works in mischievous ways, his blunders to perform." --William Power, Professor of Biblical Literature, Perkins School of Theology, c. 1986. Some people seem to know who they're meant to be from birth. Some have to wait until high school or college for the spirit to move them in the right direction, to hear the call of their true vocation, but once they've got it, they're happy to spend the rest of their working lives answering that call. And then there are those of us for whom the whole vocation thing is a ridiculous 5000 piece puzzle that takes us most of our lives to put together. In case you haven't figured it out over the last 300+ blog posts, I'm in the last category. In high school, ...

I live in the None Zone. That's a label church leaders have been using for the Pacific Northwest since the 1990s, when I was, myself, a United Methodist minister. Here in the upper left corner of the United States, most people when asked which religion or denomination they belong to reply "none of the above." Organized religion--and I'm not just talking about Christianity here--has never been able to establish a toehold on this part of the country. It's rare for any of our halls of worship to have problems seating everyone during services. I've speculated on the reason for this a number of times,  and I'm not going to devote much more space to it today. Church is just a hard sell for people who have better things to do with a Sunday morning than sitting in a pew hearing a preacher expound on an ancient text. Today, though, I came across another category for the unchurched, one that resonates with me even more than "none": "done."...

6-22-14 I grew up in church. Until last November, I spent almost every Sunday morning of my life in church. Even on vacations, I usually found a church, though as I grew older, I felt less and less need for that observance. Church had become a job, and little more. Finally, last November, I resigned from a good paying church job because I just needed, for the first time in my life, to have weekends. I haven’t looked back. With all that said, church is still a comfortable place for me to be. I speak the language, I understand the way people think and interact, and even though I may now find those customs and ideas far less attractive, and find some of them offensive, I know that church is, and always will be, a place I can fit right into, no matter where it is or what its practices are. So Sunday morning in Ghana, knowing we would be attending a church in Dzodze—though strictly for sociological reasons, to see how they made use of Ghanaian music in a western religiou...

You knew it was coming, that I couldn't stay in high dudgeon forever, that at some point my grinchy heart would grow three sizes and I'd be calling out "God bless us, everyone!" to anyone with ears. You knew it, and yet you said nothing. Jerks. But seriously, this happens every year: I start off like Ebeneezer Grinch, and just like said mashed up Christmas-hater, I wind up sledding down Mt. Crumpet to return all the merch, dancing in the streets of Victorian Whoville, carving the roast beast with the Cratchets, won over by the spirit that so often seems buried beneath packages, boxes, and bags. Things that won me over this year: My 500 Children:  One cannot teach and lead holiday singing in an elementary school without having some of their delight rub off on one. And one absolutely cannot do bus duty with kindergartners wearing a Santa hat and maintain a gruff attitude toward the jolly old elf. When they glommed onto me at the door, wrapping their little bodi...