"Subtle Change"
What does a church do when it agrees to take on a man right out of theological school? It agrees to train a minister. The man comes from seminary with academic training, some learned skills, some experience with life and with churches. But he has never been a minister before and he is not entirely sure about what it is to be a minister.
In our fellowships and new churches there are a number of people who have had experience in Unitarian churches. There are some who have had experience with ministers. There may even be some who have had “bad” experience with ministers. But overall, a new congregation is not quite certain what a minister is either. Is he “one of the boys”? Is he an administrative executive? Is he a paid “volunteer”? Is he an errand boy? In what sense is he a spiritual leader? How should he run things? Or should he run things at all? Should he be a strong leader with certain autocratic powers or should he be a democratic leader? And what is a democratic leader? What are his responsibilities? Who is responsible to whom?
These and many more questions pass through the minds of new ministers and leaders in new churches. Some of them are never entirely answered. Some of them find their way to working answers only through experience and practice. Some of them are decided by the minister himself as he gains confidence in his ministry as a profession.
What does the new church do in taking on a new man? It agrees to train a minister. That is what you have done for me: Not that all questions are resolved; not that all lessons are learned; the changes have been subtle. They are still in process. But having enjoyed your help, I now know what it is to feel pride in the ministry as a profession.
When I first thought of doing this sermon, calling it “Subtle Change” I had an idea of going back to experiences, thoughts, and sermons from my first year with you and comparing them with feelings today, attempting to point out subtle changes in myself and in the congregation.
There will be some of that, but I have decided to forget the sermon title and simply speak to you—with you—as a minister can only after he has been with a congregation for some time. It takes at least a couple of years for a minister and a congregation to know each other. At first there are so many things to learn—so many ways of thinking to explain. A minister spends a lot of time speaking on this subject and that, clarifying his understanding of religion and the use of various words. After a while most people pretty well know or feel his general approach.
It would seem, then, that knowing how he feels about many things, it would get pretty dull listening to him. That of course is a definite possibility and I’m sure it happens. On the other hand I feel that it is only then, when there is a bond of understanding and communication between a ministry and a church—it is then that a minister can really begin to speak to the needs of the congregation he serves—not some other congregation—but his own congregation. He can deliver informational sermons to other congregations but he can communicate best with his own. His life and the life of the congregation are tied so closely that when the congregation gets a pain in the stomach he groans! It also happens from time to time when the minister stubs his toe the congregation says, “Ouch!”
Just about three years ago, in April of 1960, I read a poem by Don Marquis in a sermon called, “The Anxiety to Believe.” It came from Archy and Mehitabel. You, of course, remember Archy, the cockroach, who bumps out the typewriter keys to leave his message. I’d like to read Archy’s message on “the moth” again:
I was talking to a moth
The other evening.
He was trying to break into
An electric light bulb
And fry himself on the wires.
Why do you fellows
Pull this stunt, I ask him,
Because it is the conventional
Thing for moths or why?
If that had been an uncovered
Candle instead of an electric
Light bulb you would
Now be a small unsightly cinder.
Have you no sense?
Plenty of it, he answered,
But at times we get tired of using it.
We get bored with the routine
And crave beauty
And excitement
Fire is beautiful,
And we know that if we get
Too close it ill kill us.
But what does that matter?
It is better to be happy for a moment
And be burned up with beauty
Than to live a long time
And be bored all the while.
So we wad all our life up
Into one little roll
And then we shoot the roll.
That is what life is for.
It is better to be part of beauty
For one instant than to cease to
Exist than to exist forever
And never be part of beauty.
Our attitude toward life
Is come easy go easy.
We are like human beings
Used to be before they became
Too civilized to enjoy themselves.
And before I could argue him
Out of his philosophy
He went and immolated himself
On a patent cigar lighter.
I do not agree with him myself.
I would rather have
Half the happiness and twice
The longevity.
But at the same time I wish
There was something I wanted
As badly as he wanted to fry himself.
- Archy
Three years ago I went on to say, “Human beings can become willing to throw themselves into a fire. A kind of moth psychology shows up in advanced cases of the anxiety to believe.
I still believe that’s true—that people sometimes make the mistake of throwing themselves into the fire because they think they will find a great and all-powerful meaning for their lives there. Some would burn themselves up just to have a cause—almost any cause, or action, or thrill to believe in.
I was against such moth psychology then as I am now. On the other hand I have for a long time believed in openness to experience, the increase in one’s capacity to appreciate beauty, the positive value of seeing life as an adventure. What is required is balance.
I’m groping for a subtle change here related to my own experience as a minister. I think what was involved was that three years ago, albeit unconsciously, I wanted to know what a minister was and wanted to be a minister so desperately that I was as willing as that moth to fry myself to get there—either to get there or fry myself getting away from there—from the ministry.
One’s parting sermon being a time for confession, I confess that. The thing I couldn’t see or feel was that trying too hard, looking like mad for a role, was not the way to discover what the profession of the ministry is. There had to come a time of backing off a bit, relaxing some—I would even say “not caring quite so much”—before this church could help me train as a minister. Oh, the caring is still there along with ample anxiety but this church has helped me see that the ministry is not a “role” someone can define and someone can then throw himself in the fire to assume. Beyond certain skills ad training the ministry is a relationship that one, attempting to be himself, tries to live.
There is beauty in it, to be sure, but it is a calmer more confident thing than self-incineration. Isn’t this true of finding oneself in any work or phase of life? There is such a thing as tearing oneself to pieces over uncertainty about what one wishes to be and thus not finding out what one actually is. So I thank you for taking me with you—for giving me the ministry.
Along with this gift go some responsibilities. I take it as a responsibility now, having looked back in my mind over the way we have come, to offer suggestions in the spirit of love and of trust as to things you might do as you go on to relate to a new minister and build this church more solidly into your lives and the community.
I’ve thought of five things. They are only starters. You will think of more. The first one has to do with you as a congregation—the later ones with your relation to a new minister.
First of all, work for this church. Come and participate and find what you want to do and put in some time and effort for the church. It will mean that much more if you do.
Help the Board Chairman, the Board Members, committee chairmen, and staff do their work more effectively before and after the new minister comes. If you are asked to take on a job, do it if you can. Better yet don’t wait to be asked. Let the leadership know what you would like to do. There is plenty to be done.
This church is blessed with outstanding lay leadership and ability. It will continue to thrive so long as everyone makes his effort to respond to or become part of that leadership without burning it out.
Carl Sandburg has said it better than I. He is a man who came under considerable Universalist influence when he was in the Universalist college, Lombard, reading their books of theology that lined the walls of the bell tower where he had the job of ringing the school bell every hour. He is, to this day, perfect in all the arguments that God is good and will not condemn us all to hell.
Well, he has also recognized the value of a person’s commitment to his church. This is what he said:
“You’ve got to settle in a church and throw your life into it, and build it up. Who would want to go to a picnic all the time and eat out of other peoples’ baskets? It’s our obligation as members of one church to give ourselves to it. You’ve got to feel that you are a part of the greatest organization on earth that is going to outlast all the rest of them. You’ve got to feel the importance of your own individual participation in its life.”
The second thing I would urge is an attitude toward dealing with differences. Let me preface this with a comment on this congregation’s attitude toward fund raising. There has been not a subtle but a dramatic change in that attitude. Whatever soul searching and agonizing we have been through in the past has, in its way, ended up by serving the church. The cooperation and seriousness of purpose in getting a financial job done this year is so obvious and so gratifying because it was suffered for, worked for, tempered to strength through lived experience.
I think we have learned a lot from experience and this is the suggestion I would make for the future. When you come up against differences, have them out and do it in the spirit of trust. It is a powerful help, when caught up in immediate differences, to take some time to sit back and realize that all are concerned about the strength and the future of the church. All want to see it go. The basic motive is a positive one. Please don’t forget that.
The quickest way to undermine noble efforts and destroy the very community of love, which is a church at its best, is to confuse differences of opinion with bad faith.
Now, having grown so bold, three suggestions which you may take or leave with regard to the relations with your new minister when he comes. I offer them in the sincere belief that they will help you and him.
One: Support him by coming regularly to church, not just when he first arrives but over the long pull. I think you will be glad you did. Attendance is certainly not the only measure of the inspiration and success of a church but it is one measure. The minister is human too, and he will respond well to you, and do better by you, if more of you are there more of the time.
The same is true of the regular attendance of your children in the School of Religion. They will get a lot more out of it if they are there regularly—if the church becomes an expected and regular part of their lives.
The minister will wish to be responsive to your needs. He will hope to be relevant. Come to church and don’t hesitate to tell him a kindly way of some of the things you would like him to speak to sometime.
A second suggestion is: help your minister plan for program. He will have some ideas about things he would like to see happen—some program projects. At the same time, in a church like this one, he will, more than likely, have to run to keep up with an active congregation. I’m convinced this is a fine thing—far superior to the cases of some dejected churches where the minister has to kill himself trying to interest the members in any kind of a program at all.
So let him know your new ideas, needs, constructive suggestions, and don’t make suggestions only. Pitch in on worthwhile activities and see that the job is done. The minister will not be able to see that every food idea takes shape but he can encourage you and others to take it and go with it.
He will also have some judgment about the feasibility of carrying through some projects. So have a heart. It will not always happen that the minister can give as much time to or be as enthusiastic about a particular program as you might wish.
Let him grow with you as you grow with him. Include him in on every phase of the church life. Certainly let him know of any activity which affects the church life. Include him in on policy decisions, important committee decisions and encourage his participation with you. He’ll serve you better that way.
Remember that his is a hard won profession. Don’t ask him to make it less than that. Don’t pull him down to the level of someone who doesn’t know about this or that. See that he knows.
And the final suggestions I would make with regard to the minister is: Listen to him. Listen very carefully and come to understand him. He will have that task with you also. You will help him off to a good start by listening not just to his candidating sermon, or the first three or four after he comes, thinking you have then sized him up. You can’t tell and feel what he thinks from a few sermons. If there is one little idea worth taking away from each Sunday service he will be doing an outstanding job.
But there is more to it than that. Obviously a Unitarian minister is not God’s special representative to a flock of sheep. He is someone who, by virtue of training and experience and by living every day with the weightier matters of human existence, strives to deepen and widen the spiritual dimension in human relationships.
Listen to him then, and grow together, using your critical faculties of course. You will disagree with him some of the time—perhaps much of the time. That’s all right. You are not asking him to serve you simply by finding the easiest common denominator—the safe word—the non-controversial theme.
What you are asking of him, I think, is to think out loud and struggle in your presence for his on affirmations and convictions.
As I indicated earlier, you will not only listen to him. He will—he must—listen to you. He would know what you are thinking and feeling.
He will care, perhaps more than anything else—he will care about communicating with you and being communicated with.
Communications are rarely, if ever, perfect, and, in individual cases, you may not feel that you are really understood. You may not feel that you are getting through to the minister. He may experience the same difficulty.
Just because we are—all of us—made up differently—with differences in personality and temperament, no one finds it equally easy to communicate with all persons.
But it will happen some of the time. It will happen in varying degrees. And if you listen, and if he listens, a subtle something will happen in the church between you.
Someone said something in a church group recently which I would like to repeat. It was said in good humor after the group had had a very satisfactory work experience together. It says something about the attitude that develops when a group, despite differences, becomes solidly behind someone who serves them. (This, coincidentally, was in a difference capacity than the ministry.)
The statement was made in harsher language than I’m about to use but you will get the point. The statement about a man was something like this, “He may be a son of a gun, but he’s our son of a gun!”
Now that could be misunderstood. But the attitude is important. It’s like saying, “I may not always agree with him but I’ll support his right to speak and I believe in his sincerity in speaking his mind.”
I clearly recall sitting in a Board meeting in another church one time when a relatively new minister was being taken apart by a board member who was disillusioned over something the minister said in the sermon the previous Sunday.
The lady was saying, “I was so enthusiastic about when you came. I felt you were an inspiring young man who would do great things for our church. I voted for you. Now, to hear you stand up on Sunday and say what you said makes me wonder if there is anything left for me in this church anymore.”
The minister listened quietly—I thought, at the time, too quietly. The only sign of nervousness was his lighting of a cigarette.
Other board members supported the minister, including some who tended to agree that they didn’t care for the particular point of view he had expressed in the sermon.
Finally the minister said softly, “Mrs. X, I am of course sorry you feel this way. I have spoken from my own beliefs realizing that there are other beliefs. You have been a loyal member of this church for many years and have seen ministers come and go. I only hope that your devotion to and loyalty to the church is greater than the differences you might feel with or toward any one minister.”
As it turned out the lady’s sincere devotion to the church was greater than her differences with the minister. The minister is doing superb work for the church and that particular board member continues to do so as well.
So much for my observations and hopeful suggestions. In large measure you have done these things for me. I have no reason to doubt that they ill be done even better, because of experience, with the next minister.
Some final words. I have told you before of one of the trips the students at Starr King School for the Ministry made to churches on the west coast.
At one of these churches we were asked to get up one by one and tell members of the board and other influential leaders in that large church why we entered the ministry.
As I have intimated, we did not yet really know what the ministry was to be. Also, we had been through some of what we called the Starr King process, a process in which a person examines his motives pretty thoroughly.
As the evening went on it became apparent that each of us still had a lot of growing to do. Each man had recognized as false and had discarded some of the reasons he thought he had for entering the ministry. Each man was honest enough to lay open his feelings, express his doubts as well as his hopes. Each man felt some dissatisfaction with his life as it had been but none of us were entirely solid in knowing just where we were going.
When we finished one older gentleman of considerable means and influence who had, by the way, slept through a good portion of our presentation, then spoke up.
“You know how automobile batteries work these days,” he said. “They can sit for a long time and then, when you’re ready to use them, you pour the water in them, and they’re ready to go—all charged and ready to do a job. “What I want to know,” he asked, “is when is somebody going to pour the water in these guys!?”
And now the ministry. I thank you all for doing a better job than could have been done anywhere else I know of, of beginning the continuing task of pouring the water into the batteries of my ministry.
I thank you for giving me the ministry.
