My roommate, Joel, as I've said before, was a werewolf. Signs were aplenty. He had the body and facial hair to prove it; he often paced up and down our small room as if the supernatural detectives were hot on his tail; he would exercise religiously, without his shirt, as if he had a lot of energy to burn off; and he'd often scratch his beard anxiously. Full moons were suspicious times. One last sign: Joel wanted to brew his own beer. The way I see it, only supernatural demonic beings would want to brew their own alcohol with their own secret ingredients.
That such a desire would indicate a werewolf is further evidenced by the fact that we lived on campus at a Methodist seminary. Methodists, as you may know, are not supposed to drink alcohol. There are a number of historical reasons for our ban against alcohol and gambling. Though holiness is part of the equation, much of the equation leans toward helping lift people out of poverty. Drink, gambling, smoking, etc. are often forces of impoverishment. Once in the cycle, money goes down the tubes. Certainly that would resonate with graduate students, you might think. Already burdened by undergraduate debt we have chosen to continue our education towards a vocation that won't pay well. Surely we wouldn't drink. True, surely we wouldn't, in a logical world. Many seminarians unfortunately do drink, however. Even so, it takes a special soul--or lack of one, in the case of werewolves--to brew one's own alcohol on campus of a Methodist seminary.
I don't mean to say Joel doesn't have a soul. He has one of the biggest, most caring souls I've come across. Nonetheless, on he forged with his dorm brew of dandelion beer. Financially it was clear he was a graduate student. It was a makeshift brewing container. If memory serves it was one of those slow cookers my wife uses to plate tender, tasty chicken. But, hey, it fit all the necessary chemicals and it locked, so it became a beer brewer.
Now, I had no say in this project, of course. After all, I was a first-year student and Joel was an RA. Yes, the one brewing alcohol at a Methodist seminary was in charge of creating a safe and secure environment inside the dorm; of ensuring that we all followed the rules of our dorm covenant. One day, shortly after winter break, I was told that one of our cabinets would be used to store the brew.
At the time, the revelation inside our cabinet meant little to me. I wasn't using the space myself except to steal garlic cloves that Joel kept there. Joel always kept a rather large stash of garlic as if trying to convince me he wasn't a supernatural demonic being. After the story I'm about to relate, though, I realize that home brewing beer in our room may have been his way of paying me back for how our winter break began. Back in December I had offered to drive another friend of ours up to her home in Massachusetts and take Joel to Burlington, Vermont, so that he could hitch a bus ride over to Maine while I visited friends at my alma mater. On the way, I was chatting away while driving and suddenly our friend said, "I think you need to take this turn," when it was approximately fifty feet away. Not wanting to miss a turn, I took the turn at sixty miles per hour, to the pure horror of the others in the car. I believe Joel said, "You're not really going to TAKE THAT AHHHH!!" I laughed maniacally as the two right tires decided they no longer preferred touching the road. "Aha, aha haha HAHAHA." The laughter probably didn't help. Later that day we got pulled over as I almost committed a felony on Vermont roads, driving nearly twice the speed limit through some unknown town. Apparently it was the first ever time Joel had been in a pulled-over car (a few years later, I'd be in the car when Joel was pulled over for the first time as a driver). Yet later that day, late at night, we discovered that my friends weren't exactly waiting for me, so Joel and I sat awkwardly in a campus home while my old friends went out to a party. All of that so that he could hitch a 2 a.m. bus ride. Who could blame my werewolf roommate wanting to pay me back?
Over the coming weeks, Joel would occasionally take down the slow cooker to check on it but otherwise I forgot all about it until one lovely spring night in D.C. The famous cherry blossoms were out, the semester was nearly over, and all was well. To take advantage of God's goodness in which we were all rejoicing, we gathered together for a night of playing cards in our half-kitchen. Granted, I wasn't there, but I am writing as if I were because I wish I were. The brew was nearly finished so Joel decided to bring that slow cooker with us to partake in the joy of our friendship. Boy, did that brew involve itself in our friendship. When he brought the brew to the room, Joel remarked, "The pressure in there is really high," but did nothing about it. There it sat so that, in the middle of a hand of euchre...
KA BLAM!
In the movies, when there is a loud explosion, they often portray the aftermath with dazed characters who can't hear anything except a strange tinny noise. Those movies aren't kidding. A very loud silence prevailed as we anxiously looked around trying to figure out what just happened.
A bomb went off! Someone threw a bomb through the window! They hate seminarians!
"I have glass in my leg. In my leg. Glass. In my leg."
"Are we dead? Anyone dead? I'm alive. Are you hurt? Who's dead?"
"What the hell happened? What the flipping hell happened?"
"Wait. Where's my beer?"
Such were our reactions. We discovered that we had to be particularly careful touching our hair, or our clothes, or the table, or anything. Glass was everywhere. Beer--all that werewolf beer-was everywhere. Crowds were, well, not everywhere. Many were too afraid to leave their room in case, indeed, a bomb had just gone off. Once we came to our senses and knew the true cause of the explosion, we divided into two groups: those who needed transportation to the hospital for glass removal, and those who would stay behind and clean up the evidence. The clean up was sad--no beer--and lasted well into the night.
Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt. More thankfully, the dean of housing, after grilling Joel on what in the world he was thinking, let Joel go with a mere, "No more brewing beer in the dorm." Perhaps even more thankfully we received a lesson in how stupid seminarians can be.
Especially when we first enter pastoral ministry recently minted with degrees, we seminarians think we know it all simply because we know the ins and outs of theological discourse. Sometimes we might even impress our churches with how deep our knowledge runs. Never do we miss an opportunity to name drop. "You know, I think what Karl Barth had to say applies here..." could well define how we do ministry in our first years. Perhaps some clergy minister that way throughout their lives. Perhaps, even, some churches prefer believing that and acting like their pastor learned all that is necessary in seminary and will go to great lengths to prove it. The problem, of course, is that no matter how well trained--whatever good "training" means for pastors--a pastor may be, no matter how good a pastor's grades in seminary, the pastor is just as likely as anyone else to explode a homemade brewing experiment or blow up a church.
When Daniel Goleman and other psychologists coined the phrases "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" they did the world a great favor. Many already referred to such distinctions with the phrases "book smarts" and "street smarts." Generally werewolves are fairly street savvy since they have to be in order to remain hidden. That applies to Joel, too. Yet even then, we might not have the particular intelligence required to notice built-up pressure and then also know what to do to prevent a catastrophe. No one person possesses all the intelligences, all the gifts, let alone in the proper degree, that are necessary to properly tend the brew, or the congregation. It takes a village ultra-focused on the goal to maintain the health, love, and enthusiasm of the dandelion beer that is church life. The pastor is part of that village but only a part.
Hence why it is so important to understand that each and every church is God's church. No church belongs to the clergy nor to a sovereign. It therefore makes little sense to join or leave a church because of the pastor. Sure, you may come to like one pastor's sermons, or one pastor's visitation skills, or one pastor's passion for global mission, or whatever. But if you join the church for that reason, you are almost surely going to be disappointed by the next pastor who doesn't exhibit the same spiritual gifts. Besides, what about the people sitting next to you in the pews who don't care about your priorities? The church is the church, not the pastor.
Recently I heard of someone who left a church because she was in the hospital for four months and not once did the pastor call to check in on her. That is actually a legitimate reason to leave the church. I say that not so much because the pastor didn't come to visit or at least call, I say so because it means not a single person in the church noticed that she hadn't been coming. The fact that no one in the church called or visited is what most bothers me in that story. The church is the church, not the pastor. Therefore, when I hear, as I also have heard recently, that someone left a church because an invited speaker once said, "more resources means more ministry," I'm furious. Apparently the person took offense at such a statement because trust should only be placed in God, not in money and resources. That's fine, but simply because an invited speaker says it, or even if the pastor said, doesn't mean that the church necessarily acts that way. The church is the church, not an invited speaker.
What I'm saying here applies to all individuals within a church. Just as the pastor is as likely to blow up the church as anyone else, so is the lay leader, or the treasurer, or Joe Schmo sitting in the back row. Too often we pastors hear of people leaving a church because they overheard so-and-so say such-and-such and they didn't like the statement or the tone or both. Or, perhaps, the church was having a Bible study on women in the Bible and they didn't understand why we needed to study that topic. I mean, c'mon, give each other a break, including the pastor. We are all idiots in one form or another. We all brew dandelion beer in Methodist seminary dorms from time to time without thinking about the consequences.
Sometimes we may even think that the person blowing stuff up is, in fact, a werewolf. Even then that doesn't excuse us from not following Jesus's model from Matthew 18:15-20. If someone harms you, sins against you, or offends you, the response is not to leave the church, perhaps especially when that person is the pastor. The response should be to go to that person and seek reconciliation using elementary school tactics, namely the I-statements. "I feel this when this happens, and I hope we can understand each other." If that doesn't work, bring someone else from the church to act as a mediator, another person in the room who might be able to bridge the gap of understanding and ameliorate compassion. Then bring along the whole church. For Joel, all it took was a simple conversation with the dean of housing. He didn't need to be stripped of his duties. Indeed, knowing how good a person Joel is, he probably didn't even need that conversation because, usually, when Christian brothers and sisters know and see the hurt they have caused, or the hurt they could have caused, grace convicts and transforms. While we might rightly hold our pastors to a higher standard, part of that standard should include an expectation of their alacrity in asking for forgiveness and seeking to understand when they have caused hurt or offense. No pastor can do that if we don't include pastors as part of our church, the family Jesus talks about. They, too, must be seen as people that we seek reconciliation with.
Understandably I never miss an opportunity to highlight Jesus's words in Matthew 18, but most relevant to this story are those passages urging kindness to pastoral leaders. Hebrews 13:17-19 comes to mind, which partially reads, "Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls and will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with sighing--for that would be harmful to you." Concerning pastors who may be blowing everything up, the first part of the passage may seem strange. However, probably every pastor can tell a story about a parishioner, or two or three, who has said something similar to, "Look, I know you're young, so let me tell you how things are going to be," or, "You just don't seem to understand," or has even laughed at the pastor behind their back. Submitting to the pastor's ideas and vision isn't the point. Rather, submitting to the pastor's authority and calling, trusting that indeed God has raised this person up to be a pastor, just as God as raised you up to fulfill various other roles within the church, so that you do not treat the pastor as if they are ignorant, naive, too young, stupid, dumb, etc., is the point of the passage. If we neglect to trust the pastor's calling and challenge their right to fill the position, then their ministry will be full of sighing and pain, which will dampen their fire to serve the church. Yes, pastors are idiots like the rest of us, but that is all the more reason to treat them as well as we expect them to treat us. We can disagree, we may hope to change their minds, but we shouldn't expect pastors to superhumanly do all that we want them to do all of the time in exactly the way we want them to do it.
Before James launches into his admonition to speak less and tame the tongue, he says, "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes." Anyone considering to enter seminary with an eye to pastoral ministry should hear these words loudly and clearly. Our churches, too, though, should act with grace towards those mistake-prone idiots who happen, for some reason, to have been called by God to lead instead of heaping upon pastors additional cares and worries. Already pastors go home finding it hard to sleep as they review the mistakes of the day, the explosions they may have caused, and how many glass shards may need to be removed later. Already pastors go home finding it hard to sleep as they pray for discernment to reveal all the homemade pressurized vessels about to burst that have thus far gone unnoticed. There is a reason why the later letters of the New Testament describe the holy qualities a church leader should possess: the vocation is not easy, will likely cause burn out and a host of health issues even under the best of circumstances. We don't need to make their job harder. If we don't understand why our pastor could say or do what is clearly
dangerous, then we can ask, we can talk, we can laugh about our
foibles. Foibles probably sounds funny on purpose.
Every child of God has room to grow and therefore deserves God's grace. In the meantime, they may blow stuff up, and so deserve our grace, too. That includes pastors. And werewolves--for whatever strange reason I decided to include them in this piece. Let us then do our best to offer God's grace to our brothers and sisters, lay and clergy, angel and demon; offer forgiveness, reconciliation, understanding, hope, and renewal, so that to whatever extent possible we may each go to sleep at night in peace. With some garlic by our bedside.
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