Seminarians Don't Blow Stuff Up: What is Seminary?

One of my previous churches is located across the street from a once shady fish store.   At least, I assume it was a fish store because it had fish-shaped neon lights in the window.  Never did I see anyone walk in or out during the day.  Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought the situation strange.  On a church meeting night, some undercover detectives staked out the place from the narthex of our building.  Our meeting veered into talking what worship hymns the church knew but hadn't sung in awhile, so I offered to run to the sanctuary to pick up a hymnal.  As I did, I turned on the light, and immediately heard, "Hey!  Turn off the light!  They can't know we're here!"  Yikes.  Seminary does not teach you how to assist a stakeout.  Or even whether you should.  Life and being a pastor teaches you how to be a pastor.

If seminary doesn't teach you how to be a pastor beyond the basic knowledge required, then what does seminary do?  What is seminary?  Why do we need it?  Do we need it?  Should our churches demand that clergy be seminary-trained?  I'll conclude this series by answering these questions, sort of.  

I started the Seminarians Don't Blow Stuff Up series with an eye particularly toward prospective seminarians and current clergy, to inform or remind them of what seminary is really like.  Now I will definitively say that seminary should not ever be in the cards simply to learn more about yourself.  You will learn about yourself, certainly, but you won't learn any more about yourself at seminary than by living life, if you're open to how God is teaching you.  Life that happens at seminary is different, sure, which I'll get to, but you don't need to be saddled with debt for it.  

A friend of mine has created and manages 40Form, a forty-day journal exploration into one's life, character, and priorities.  It's a powerful experience.  Maybe this is a shameless plug for 40Form.  Or maybe it's an example of how we can learn about ourselves to the same extent as we would in seminary but in a forty-day course far less expensive.  

What does seminary do for you?  Think of a toolbox.  Imagine that you are like me and don't like working with your hands and don't have any clue what should be in a toolbox or what the tools are for.  Now imagine that someone has gifted you with a fully stocked toolbox so that you can now consider yourself an adult.  Some of the tools in that toolbox you'll recognize and know how to use: hammer, screwdriver, nails.  Other tools, however, you still won't recognize or, if you do, not know how or when to use them.  That is, until you break something that needs a basin wrench or box-end wrench (what?).  Then you might Google a solution to your problem and realize you have the tool already.  It's the same with seminary.  Many of the tools you need to be a good pastor are taught in seminary, even if most of the applications and tips are not covered.  What you'll learn from being a pastor of how to be a pastor are, generally, advanced lessons on how to use the tools you were gifted in seminary.

For instance, during my first appointment, my father-in-law suddenly and tragically died.  In the year I had been that church's pastor, my father-in-law had become a known and respected member of the church.  My family and I were therefore not the only ones grieving.  How could I minister to the members of my church while I, myself, was grieving?  Essentially, I put to good use lessons on appropriate boundaries and the communal nature of grief.  I didn't know that I was putting seminary into practice until afterwards when I reflected on the ordeal.  The same lessons of boundaries, particularly related to self-care, significantly helped when my young family of four were re-appointed, bought a house, and moved to another state in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic--at the height of it, in fact.  

Boundaries and self-care aren't the sexiest learnings from seminary.  For survival and thriving, of pastor and church, they can be among the most important.  But what traditionally expected lessons can one get at seminary?  Personally I think that theological training is the most useful.  

Theological training covers a wide territory.  Exploring various theologies throughout Judaeo-Christian history, understanding how one's belief in x affects one's belief in y, reflecting on one's own experiences theologically, and reading the Bible accordingly.  What will be useful to you, though, is how to live in a space where diverse theologies and understandings of the world are trying to live and associate in unity.  Seminary will teach you how to manage the business and administrative side of effective ministry, but not how intense the pushback can be to even the simplest or apparently righteous decisions.  That's where theological training comes in handy.  Pushback will almost certainly relate back to differing theological positions.  Trying to navigate issues within the church simply by convincing people that you're right, without having any idea why and how it is that others believe how it is they believe, will almost certainly fail.  Or be miserable for everyone involved.

Theological training can also teach you how to guide others to deeper theological questioning and reflecting, to understand God, themselves, and others more meaningfully.  Unfortunately, therein lies a problem.  Too many in the church are not willing to explore.  Often they are of the opinion that theology is unnecessary because the way that they read the Bible, understand God, and live out their faith is the correct way--the God-instructed way.  Perhaps they're right, but those on other ends of the spectrum might believe the same.  How are we supposed to live as the Body of Christ if there is indeed a spectrum?  Clergy are trained in seminary in the very ways we least like to be challenged.  The essence of John Wesley's "Catholic Spirit" is crucial, I think, to living as a unified Christian family serving and worshiping God together, using and empowering all the spiritual gifts of the congregation.  Yet that spirit is often rejected because we don't want our pastor to teach us methods of learning about and knowing God more, we want our pastor to teach us the one right way.  We judge how well the pastor is doing in that regard based on our present conception of what is absolutely right.  

In other words, we're fairly certain we already know God's absolute truth, and that's why we don't see the necessity of a catholic spirit, of allowing or accepting diverse theologies and practices, even if they come from the pastor.  If we reject what the pastor says or does because he or she is wrong, then we are basically saying that we only want our clergy to accumulate life experiences to pepper into the sermons that agree with us.  Maybe that's why young clergy are often judged more harshly than older clergy.  They haven't built up the life experience to compensate for differences of opinion.

All this is to say that the crucial lesson of seminary teaches clergy how necessary it is for churches to discern what role or roles they expect their pastor to fulfill.  And what the role of the pastor should be.  What's the point of having a pastor if we already know all we think we need to know?  If we're already capable of reading the Bible with perfect accuracy on our own?  Of judging the pastor's every word and action because we're so perfectly in the know?  It's entirely possible that, in the last assessment, we don't need a pastor--we just need someone to stand up in Sunday worship and say words.  I say that sarcastically but it is a legitimate ecclesiastical position.

Some basic questions can help us flesh out how we understand the role of clergy and what we expect of them.  They may seem silly but they're serious.  All the questions will be asked as "do..." but could be replaced with "should..."  

Do we call it the pastor's office or study?  Is it off limits when the pastor's not there?

Do we listen to the pastor if they preach or teach something unfamiliar or disagreeable?  Do we reject it?  Do we challenge them?  Do we blindly accept?  Or do we take what they say and pray on it?

Do we prefer an older pastor?  Or a younger pastor?  A pastor the same color, sex, and orientation as us?  From the same socioeconomic strata?

What do we think when a female pastor wears flats, rather than high heels, in the pulpit?  Or when a pastor takes their shoes off?  Or when a pastor dresses down?  

What do we think when a pastor curses?  Or almost curses, with words like, "pissed off" or "crap"?  What do we think when a pastor speaks in a seemingly irreverent way?

What do we think when a pastor lives in a way that we feel is unholy?  Or not to the standard of clergy?

What do we think when a pastor seems to spend all their time preparing sermon and Bible studies and not with people of the church?  Or when the pastor seems to spend all their time out in the community and not with the people of the church?  Or when the pastor does spend all their time with the people of the church, and not out in the community?  And other variations.

Going to seminary doesn't suddenly transform a person into superman/woman.  A pastor can only do so much.  There are a bunch of roles a pastor has, historically, and is now expected to fulfill, and we have to figure out our priorities.  That is true for the pastor and for the church she or he serves.  Not only do we need to discern our priorities, we need to reflect upon our theology and expectations generally.  If our expectations are that a seminarian will meet all our expectations, especially if those expectations are unexamined, we're being a bit silly.

On the other hand, if we learn the reality of seminary more, what actually happens there, what it's all about, what you learn and what you don't learn, we can perhaps better discern what hopes and dreams we'll place on the pastor; we can perhaps better live into our own spiritual gifts for the sake of God and God's church, rather than expecting the pastor to do it all.  Your church's best hope is for each and every person to commit to living their faith no matter who the pastor is and to do so with a loving, catholic spirit.  So best to know that your seminary-trained pastor (if you have one) is still a humorously normal person also doing their best to faithfully live their discipleship with you, with some theological training.

Through all these stories, I hope and pray you've decided, decided to follow Jesus.  Don't put that responsibility on the pastor, and if you're a pastor, don't add responsibility you can't meet.  Reframe the relationship between church and pastor, clergy and lay, so that everyone's gifts and training can best be used to glorify God.

Seminarians Don't Blow Stuff Up: Unintentional Community

Although seminary seems like the place a student should be concerned with growing in holiness, it's often the time and place to grow in other, less holy ways.  Though most of us had lived away from home before, the competitive field at seminary is significantly smaller.  Nearly from day one I knew that, intellectually, I excelled most of my classmates.  That may sound like arrogance, and it may be, but grades and accomplishments would later prove the case.  I knew, too, that I was far and away one of the better looking single men at the seminary.  With those two things combined, I was confident that I could impress and perhaps land a girlfriend.  I've written before about my unhealthy obsession with dating while at seminary that led me down some dark corners.  If I could pinpoint a reason, it was because I had no interest in college--working hard to be holy in an unholy environment--and also no luck surrounded by many more and many handsomer men, and so seminary finally gave me a chance to see what I may have been missing.  Constantly I did battle with desires I convinced myself were harmless with the person I thought I was and wanted to be.

Perhaps no better example exists than the night I found myself alone in a room late at night with a girl, E.  We were studying...

Because of the serious lack of actual studying, and the time of night, the obvious question was whether I was supposed to make a move.  She had invited me to her room.  E had a roommate but, it appeared, had knowingly invited me to her room when her roommate would be out.  The two of us had developed a rapport and it seemed like now she hoped to take things to the next level.  Aside from the fact that I had no experience popping the question, "Hey, should we make out?" or smoothly inching in for the kiss, I questioned all night whether I should bother trying.  What if E just wanted to be friends?  What if I just wanted to be friends?  What if I wanted to be the type of person who had good, close friends of either sex and no one had to worry about my being a creep?  What if that's why E invited me over at night, because she knew I wouldn't make a move?  To make matters worse, near the end of our time together, E sold me hard on joining the new intentional community that the seminary was soon opening in downtown D.C.  Was she inviting me so that we could live together?  Or because she hoped I, too, shared a commitment to deeply biblical and holy principles of living?

The night with E ended without a kiss and without a proposal.  Not long after, I started dating someone else.  Interestingly, E seemed to get jealous when I told her and said, at the last, that she hoped at least we wouldn't spend less time together.  I genuinely hoped we could continue playing ping pong, riding our bikes, and studying late at night, too, although my promise to stay close friends was quickly forgotten.  

Honestly, one of my major regrets in life, not merely from my time in seminary, is that I didn't work on my friendship with E and chose instead to date.  Over time, it became clear she really loved our friendship and wasn't expecting anything else from me.  Together, we pushed and challenged one another intellectually, spiritually, and practically in enjoyable ways.  That's what a good friendship is and does: co-builders and practitioners of virtue and discipleship, and accountability in the process.  

We were unlikely friends, E and I.  She was from the deep South, I from the suburbs of Boston and Worcester.  She held progressive theological positions, I conservative ones.  Later I'd learn how serious that latter divide was when she married a woman.  Yet she saw in me, and I in her, a spirit committed to digging deeper and going further in faithfulness.  Our friendship was the first of many opportunities to capitalize on unintentional community that I let slip away or never appreciated as I should have, and thus never learned or grew from as I should have.  Obviously, I never joined the intentional community living area.

There were other opportunities to experience meaningful relationships, even if not deep or lasting ones.  There always are when we live life.  I think of some of the strongest friendships I know in literature.  Or, at least, the ones I most prefer reading or watching.  Sam and Frodo come first to mind, and then Crowley and Aziraphale from Good Omens.  If you are familiar with LOTR, you'll remember that Sam tags along with Frodo by accident as much as anything else.  He was a gardener who happened to be overhearing the conversation Frodo had with Gandalf about the ring of power and, voile, became part of the Fellowship.  In Good Omens, Crowley is a demon, Aziraphale an angel.  The friendship is funny and complicated but, to the two of them, eventually more important than any Grand Plan.

So often the most meaningful relationships or experiences in life are the ones we didn't expect or didn't seek out.  When people suggest that high school, college, or young adulthood generally is the time to "experience" life, I don't disagree, although what I mean, I think, is slightly different.  We shouldn't bother doing drugs or having sex.  We should instead keep an eye out for the unintentional communities, friendships, and causes that might become a lasting part of our life.  Seminary, and all other similar times and places in our life, is a time and place to keep an eye out for what we don't expect.  My friendship with E could have been, should have been, one of those unexpectedly meaningful delights.

Other unexpected and unintentional communities could have been found all over the place.  I'm going to talk about friendships in the next essay and instead focus here on the unintended and unexpected nature of life's most pleasant offerings.  

Take, for example, the annual phone-a-thon.  Few people on earth, I assume, actually look forward to a phone-a-thon.  Even fewer, I imagine, do so at a seminary, where, if statistics about clergy are also true in the halls of education, most of the students are introverts.  From a small population of students came an even smaller number willing to talk on the phone with complete strangers for the purpose of asking for money.  The only reason I participated was because my roommate more or less guilted me into it.

Yet in the school's conference room that week, something magical happened.  Quite a few things, actually.  First, I came into contact with staff members of the school I'd otherwise never have known and came to see them as persons rather than merely as officials.  That alone gives a worthwhile perspective on the operation of a school or government or any other structured hierarchy as we don't need to, and shouldn't, think of inconveniences or disagreements as "them" versus "us."  More importantly, I discovered a strange part of myself I hadn't realized existed: the "speaks will with older ladies" part of me.  It's true.  For whatever reason, I had a relatively high success rate with older women.  I should note that women were more likely to give back to their alma mater anyway, but even above and beyond that I was like Ken Griffey, Jr. in his prime with the older women on the call list.  High average, oftentimes hitting it out of the park.  Soon, the director of alumni relations, or whatever the title of the phone-a-thon manager, was handing me a specially chosen list of prospective donors.  

Why was I successful with older women?  I don't know, because I stopped helping out with the phone-a-thon after only a couple of sessions.  Over the course of my three years at seminary, I only made calls to support the school for a total of four hours.  Abandoning ship not only hurt the school but also cost me an opportunity to learn more about myself and how and why I interact with people the way that I do.

Or what about World Cup 2012?  Our school had and has a large percentage of South Korean students who, we learned, are passionate about their football/soccer.  Now, before I go any further, I should share with you that I had established a practice of watching my hometown teams alone.  Every New England Patriots game I watched alone, in my bed.  Every Bruins Stanley Cup playoff game I watched alone, in my bed.  Normally I'd also anxiously rock back and forth.  That my team won was the most important part of the sporting event and, somehow, my nervous watching contributed to my team's winning (indeed, for a few years, the Patriots never once lost while I watched alone).  

Compared to me, our South Koreans wouldn't think of watching anything important alone.  Many of them lived in their own family apartments on campus.  Not all of them had a TV set but enough of them did to make the number crammed into our common room in the dormitory surprising.  Why watch with others when you can watch by yourself?  Further, you could hear the screams, groans, cries, cheers, and laughter emanating from the common room wherever you were in the dormitory whenever the South Korean team played.  Soccer fans will know that the South Korean national teams have never been particularly strong.  That apparently didn't matter to anyone.  There they were, having a blast, not because the team they cheered for was winning but because they were watching with beloved friends and compatriots.  I am ashamed that I never joined them to watch with my fellow South Korean students but did sit in silence while watching the Americans nearly disastrously fail to live up to expectations and then nearly faint after Landon Donovan scored a last-second, dignity-tying goal because I held in all my anxiety.  Likewise, I remember being frustrated with my dorm companions for watching a movie part-way through one of the American men's Olympic ice hockey games.  I mean, it was Olympic ice hockey, didn't they know?  

Missed opportunity after missed opportunity to develop meaningful and beneficial relationships.  I thought I was at seminary to learn, get good grades, and prove to my Board of Ordained Ministry that I was a potentially great pastor.  Because of that, I didn't seek out anything else that could have helped me grow.  As a pastor now looking back, I can see that the relationships I ignored could have been the most fruitful part of my time.  

Another good example of a missed opportunity was going to see Legend of the Guardians: Owls of Ga'Hoole with my roommate's fiancee.  To this day it remains the only time I went to see a movie with a girl I was not romantically interested in.  Of course, it felt weird, and only partly because we were the oldest attendees who were there by choice.  Some of what makes a good pastor, as well as a good person, is the ability to set and protect healthy boundaries.  Learning how to have a deep relationship with a woman whose pants I was not trying to get into could have been good for me.  Probably good for every man, and vice versa for women.  Yet I never again asked my roommate's fiancee to do something just the two of us.  

You may be an introvert.  I certainly am.  Reading my encouraging you to build relationships, especially those you don't seek out, may make you feel exhausted.  Thinking of spending more time with people exhausts me, that's for sure.  Again, though, there are countless unintentional communities, acquaintances, and friendships that we can make and develop that can further our own growth.  Whether we're learning how to passionately cheer for a team even if they're terrible or how to set healthy boundaries for ourselves, with our time, emotions, or otherwise, or learning what makes others tick as well as why we are who we are, the relationships you don't go looking for are probably the ones you'll be most thankful for later.  

Essentially, reflecting on my time at seminary, I think of The Art of Neighboring.  Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon ask a simple question in that book: what if, when Jesus told us to love our neighbors, he meant our actual neighbors?  So often we think of "our neighbors" as the strangers "out there somewhere."  The story of the Good Samaritan is partly to blame insofar as Jesus encourages us to consider everyone our neighbor.  Also to blame is the ease and convenience with which we love people we can't see.  If we do that, we can just throw money at loving strangers by helping various organizations.  You know as well as I do, though, that our actual neighbors have become as much strangers to us as anyone else.  We know their faces, we may even know their names.  Do we actually know our neighbors?  Do we love them?  Often not.  We usually don't know or love our neighbors because, a) we didn't choose them, and b) we think of our homes as private refuges.  Building relationships with those we didn't choose rather than constructing private refuges is exactly what can help us fulfill Jesus's command to love our neighbors as well as learn more about ourselves and grow in any number of ways.  

Besides, what you learn at seminary in classrooms will constitute about 20%, at most, of your life as a pastor.  

If you go to seminary, then, study hard, but don't ignore what's most important: relationships.  If you don't go to seminary and plan on being a lay person all your life, the same advice holds true.  Studying and working hard at school or your job may bring you tangible success but none of it will help you understand yourself or grow.  Place your emotional and spiritual emphasis in life on relationships, particularly the ones you don't choose or go looking for.  Spend time with the people you would never choose to spend time with.  Listen to them, help them, support them, pray for them, learn from them.  They'll teach you a lot.  

Kind of sounds like a church.  As long as you commit to listening and living together as a church, not as a faction.  The ideal of a church is a community that unintentionally finds themselves living together and sticking together, no matter what, learning and growing all the time no matter the challenge.

Seminarians Don't Blow Stuff Up: Living with Baboons

My seminary tenure was punctuated by a number of memorable experiences.  The Fund for Theological Education awarded me a grant that enabled me to ride my bike across the country to raise awareness about and fight human trafficking.  Wesley Theological Seminary also requires some type of an immersion trip for Master of Divinity students.  By the time I and other students embarked on our trip, I had already decided to switch my degree, but I wasn't about to pass up an opportunity to spend two weeks in South Africa. 

South Africa attracted me as the land of Steve Biko.  Of course I knew about Nelson Mandela but I had seen Denzel Washington portray Biko in the movie, Cry Freedom, and life could never be the same.  After watching that movie, I read Malcolm X's autobiography and found a lot of connection between the two and my affinity for Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre's form of existentialism.  I had come to understand that the power capable of instituting equality between people and races is one's own consciousness of self, what Biko called black consciousness.  Political activism had its time and place but, I felt, should never be a priority.  After all, Christ's kingdom is not of this world.  We can choose on our own to live in that kingdom at any given time.  So I was desperate for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to visit the country and ask South Africans themselves what they felt about the different approaches of Biko and Mandela.

Prior to the trip, there were a number of hurdles I had to jump.  First, I had to read a bunch of books and attend some discussions with my fellow trip-goers.  Certainly I learned a lot about South Africa's history.  Apartheid was the unfortunate result of many years of unjust colonial activities and decisions.  One could not possibly separate apartheid, the legal separation of the races and condescension of black South Africans, and the associated racist biases and societal racism, from the century plus of "the white man's burden."  It became clear to me that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, its amnesty, and its recommendation of reparations were the only possible path forward for a country that wasn't so much dealing with five decades of apartheid but two hundred years of racial and cultural battles.  Focusing on the tip of the iceberg, namely, which individuals and laws are to blame, can't possibly heal deep rooted emotional and spiritual issues.  To this day I have a hard time understanding why white people seem so concerned with equating the terms "white privilege" and "racism" with "blame."  As Robin Di'Angelo says, to have white privilege or to be racist, or both, does not mean that you are a bad person or that you are to blame.  It does, however, mean that we need to participate in the work of healing and reconciliation with those who have been shut out of political processes, job interviews, raises, peace and justice simply because they have not received the same privilege and been on the receiving end of racist--often unintentionally--policies.  All this I learned in my reading.  Complex histories require complex, creative, grace-filled, and restorative solutions.  However, I found the discussions rather sad. 

One part of the discussions in particular seared itself into my memory.  Dr. Beverly Mitchell, one of the resident theologian professors, asked us when we first became conscious of racism.  We went around the room telling our stories.  Most of the black students had some horrible experience to relate.  In a way, that is the day I became conscious of racism in all of its ugliness.  But then most of the white students told a story in which they played the hero.  They saw or heard someone receiving the brunt of a verbally racist attack or they couldn't stand states' voting laws that often disenfranchise minorities, so they stepped in to set the matter right and then themselves were depicted as traitors.  Not all the stories were quite so Don Quixotic.  What saddened me about the whole affair, though, is that my fellow white students didn't seem to be doing any of the introspection the history of South Africa seems to require of us.  Obviously I can't say for sure what was going on in the heads and hearts of my brothers and sisters.  I can say, however, that I was the only one who shared a story in which my own racism was the heart of the story, which simultaneously made me the best and worst white person in the room that day. 

I first became conscious--as distinct from "aware," because my high school teachers made me well aware--of racism at college in Vermont, the whitest state in the country.  Late at night I found myself at a convenience store when a beat-up old car drove up, parked quickly, and out stepped a young black man wearing a bandana and jeans falling well off his butt.  My first reaction was to hide behind a shelf of candy bars.  It took me a few seconds to realize what I was doing.  Even then I had to muster courage to believe the best of that young man and stand up straight.  Terrible, I know, but common.  Indeed, I bet you have acted similarly at least once, perhaps by feeling scared merely because a bunch of young black or Latinos are sitting around in the middle of the day, not at work, clearly lazy, up to no good.  Not that any of them actually are lazy or up to no good but we are quick to feel those conclusions shooting from our gut to our brain and back.

 

Another obstacle was, perhaps obviously, getting to South Africa.  A few months before the trip I learned that I have generalized anxiety disorder.  I don't get panic attacks or acute symptoms but I am constantly stressed and there are some things that, if I think about them enough, will make my blood explode.  Flying thousands of feet in the air with only a few feet of metal between me, a bunch of nothingness, and certain death is certainly one of those blood-boiling things.  Thankfully, I had already been seeing a psychiatrist shortly before the trip so he could prescribe me some drugs for the twenty hour flight.   Not long into the flight we hit turbulence.  I didn't know it was turbulence.  I thought it was a fun ride at the park.  "Wheee" may have escaped my lips.  My friend Joanna--who promised my mother before the trip to keep me safe--was sitting behind me calling out for help.  "John John, please, do you have a vomit bag up there?!"  I had no idea why she was asking so I didn't look all that urgently.  Meanwhile, the guy next to her was vomiting all over the place.  Minutes later the guy got up to clean himself and Joanna told me the whole story.  Try as I might I couldn't feel bad because the drugs made it impossible to feel anything.

Even so, getting on the plane should have been my first concern.  Apparently you are supposed to sign your passport.  Not only that, but I had forgotten that, when I got my passport a few years before, I had planned on traveling to Canada but never did, and therefore had no prior opportunity to learn that my passport was still unsigned.  Of course, the TSA agent noticed immediately.  "Are you telling me that you've had your passport for nearly five years and you've never signed it?"  The thought that after paying for the trip, freaking out about the flight, and reading all those books and having all those conversations would have been for nothing flashed into my mind.  What was I going to do if I wasn't allowed onto the plane?  I needed the trip to graduate from seminary with the degree I was pursuing at the time.  My mind was too preoccupied with a miserable future to respond.  We stood there, silently, for about half a minute before Joanna said to me, "John John, say something.  Maybe you can sign it now?"  Yeah, maybe I could!  Before I could suggest that myself, the agent said, "It's okay.  If you were a criminal mastermind, you probably would have had a response ready."  Grace abounds.

Getting to South Africa was the challenge.  Being there was almost entirely a joy.  I can remember the large, outdoor street markets with beautiful, exotic jewelry and paintings and plenty of counterfeit movies; swimming in the ocean nearly at where the two oceans meet; climbing along a cliff and thinking for longer than I should have that I saw a whale that turned out to be a rock; the powerful worship services we attended at small, rural churches, under tents, and at a mostly white church whose current pastor was the son of the famous Peter Storey; and eating lunch with my classmates by sharing from one big plate of meat.  Worshiping with Alan Storey, though not quite as uplifting as other worship services, reminded me of why I'm proud to be a Methodist because, despite a challenging history, we have generally been on the right side of racial justice.  I realized, further, that here was this son of a famous pastor, a famous preacher in his own right, leading a church whose attendance was nearly doubled because our crew of about twenty were present.  Even the best preachers and churches can be small.  There is reason to never give up.

 

Because of the people I shared the trip with, even the more spiritually challenging experiences of the trip were enjoyable.  We visited Robbin Island and saw the cramped quarters where Mandela and too many others were treated as inferior, we went to the hinterlands, we spent time in the Apartheid museum and other similar places.  We had to be warned not to give money to the destitute children of the shantytowns because otherwise they would morph into a horde, and we heard how this shantytown on one side of the tracks often reported electrical deaths as parents tried stealing electricity from their wealthy, white neighbors on the other side of the tracks.  I remember those young faces with wide smiles, also holding out their hands.

When we returned from the trip, I was asked to represent the South African contingent at a seminary worship service where a representative from each cultural immersion trip (there were many) would speak for a few minutes, highlighting the benefits of the cultural immersion program generally and each specific trip.  I hesitated at first because I've always disliked the common comment people make after a mission trip or studying abroad: "it changed my life."  I've never much liked that phrase because, usually, the person's life changes not at all.  I told my advisor I would explicitly say the trip didn't change my life and yet, still, she had confidence in me.  Sure enough, every other speaker said that their lives were changed while I did not.  It's true, though, that my life didn't change.  Indeed, my theology and philosophy were confirmed: Biko's concept of black consciousness, and other similar forms of it, is crucial to living well in society together.  We each, existentially, must understand ourselves as a person with life, and therefore we are a worthy person and should not wait for others to give us worth, praise, or equality.  As a human, we must enjoy this life given to us by God as much as possible and allow others to enjoy their life as well.

What I told those gathered at that seminary worship service I now tell you: I was confirmed in what I already believed because of experiences that had almost nothing to do with the sad history of South Africa.  Of course, these experiences are no less a part of South African culture, just not what you'd think of as being important.  For instance, the first memorable experience was eating at a fancy restaurant where, prior to being seated, we learned how to use a hand drum.  During the meal, dancers in cultural costume put on a show in the middle of the restaurant, at one point pulling someone out of their seat to dance in front of complete strangers.  Having been voted most unique in high school, I thought that would be fun.  Then, next thing I know, a terrifying, giant mask is looming over me as the person behind it pokes me to bring me forward to dance.  A group of masked dancers then tried teaching me some dance moves, which went horribly wrong, but was incredibly fun.  The music, the dancing, the atmosphere of hospitality of knowing I wouldn't be judged by anyone and it was all in fun, were imprinted into my memory.  

Likewise, I clearly remember showing up at some nondescript neighborhood to have a chat with those who lived there.  The whole neighborhood was there because, well, they all shared life together, would walk through each other's doors unannounced to chat about life, ask for help and prayer, and enjoy one another's presence.  They could do this easily because their front "doors" actually opened onto a courtyard precisely meant for community gatherings.  During our time there each resident shared the story of how they received their name, which had real and actual meaning for who they were and are; and then invited us to share our stories and gave us new names.  At the end, they pulled out their own instruments and started up a dance party.

The most memorable part of the trip of all, for me, was the animals.  Many times we had been warned not to come anywhere close to baboons because they can literally rip your face off.  No joke.  About halfway through the trip, our group van had to stop in the middle of the road because a crew of baboons were slowly making their way across the road.  These baboons knew they owned the road.  We were near the coast at this point and so were very near a cliff where tourists often stopped to take pictures of the ocean.  One large male baboon tried opening the doors of a car that belonged to two young women.  From the van we tried yelling to them that they shouldn't turn around and walk back to the car but they didn't understand us.  Eventually, they turned around and found the baboon sitting on the roof of the car, as if to say, "If I can't get in, neither can you."  A few minutes into this wild adventure, I decided to get out of the van.  For some strange reason, our tour guide, Skip, responsible for our safety, let me.  The husband one of my classmates came with me along with Skip.  All the while Joanna is yelling at me, "John John, I promised your mother I'd look after you!  GET BACK IN THE VAN!"  The end result of my foolishness was a once-in-a-lifetime photo shoot of my kneeling next to young, wild baboons (the picture of that you can find on my blog); and I was also the only one who caught a glimpse of a baby baboon trying to drink out of a Coke bottle he had picked up somewhere.  Only a few days later, we ended our trip with a few days on safari, where my jeep group almost got rammed by a bull elephant and was chased through the night by the same bull elephant and our safari guide had to drive backwards in the dark.  

So, as I say, my favorite and most precious memories had little to do with the history and lessons South Africa has to teach us.  To me, the trip was a highly enjoyable adventure.  It was not life-changing.  However, it must be said that the trip was life-affirming.  While my theological, conceptual, intellectual, historical, political, and life ideas were not changed, I did for the first time realize that people are not just people defined and collected into statistics.  People are persons, creatures of our God.  Whatever life situation any of those we encountered on our trip may have been experiencing, they were still a person.  They could still enjoy life, dance, sing, welcome and offer hospitality, and rejoice as much or more as we do.  

I also remember a father and son we came across riding their bike up a long coastal climb.  We met them at the top and, having only started riding a road bike a few months prior and therefore not knowing much of anything, I said, "What a great ride you must be having, it's a great day!"  The father replied, "Yes, I'm not sure you know how challenging it is to ride this mountain in the wind, but it is great to be out together."  He's right.  I had no idea (though I have come to hate riding my bike in wind).  Even so, he had the opportunity to praise God for the time he was spending with his son and the view they had at the top. Whatever anyone may know about the challenges or successes you have or are experiencing in life, your consciousness of yourself and relationship to God matters most because no one can take away the fact that you are a person, a child of God.  There are plenty of reasons to get depressed, to blame external factors for our state in life, but through it all we still exist as a person.  Thank God for that.  There is an infinite gulf between knowing and thinking that on a conceptual level and then seeing it lived and expressed in the lives of people who have every reason not to enjoy life, not to give thanks, not to dance.  They didn't allow their history or poverty define them.  My philosophy was confirmed but in a life-affirming way, and that makes all the difference.

To be fair, as well, I did come away slightly changed.  I came to realize why consciousness of ourselves (whether black consciousness or anything else) in an existential sense cannot be the end of the story.  As Jean-Paul Sartre says, existentialism must be a humanism.  We cannot possibly see the shantytowns and hear the stories of people's dying trying to steal the electricity from the other, affluent side of the train tracks and then say, "Well, at least you can still know yourself as a person who can rejoice in life."  Our consciousness of ourselves as persons made by God who can enjoy life, sing, and dance should further lead to working to ensure that our life and the lives of others give each and every one of us as much chance as possible to see life as good.  Simply existing and being given the gift of life is good, but there's a lot of work to do out in the world to help others better see life as good.  Existentialism, consciousness of ourselves must be a humanism.  In being conscious of ourselves as persons we must be conscious of one another.

With that said, I still don't believe I needed traveling to South Africa to learn all that.  Neither do you.  We don't need to travel to some faraway place to find ourselves or understand how to live better together.  What we need is a consciousness of our spirit being witnessed to by God's Spirit--you are alive, you are a person, you are good--so that we can then be conscious of one another.  If we recognize that, we'll realize that the spirit of life is much more important than a focus on laws, rules, policies, numbers, finances, and beliefs.  Believing, knowing, and feeling ourselves as good, worthy people (remember how God says all is "very good" after creating us?) and believing, knowing, and feeling that about our brothers and sisters is most important.  We can then show up to ourselves, our families, our friends, our churches, and our communities day after day, year after year, doing our best, dancing our songs, climbing those mountains, supporting one another against the wind, dancing our dances, and kneeling next to baboons, and all the while enjoying and rejoicing for life.  But we must do it together, conscious that I am no better than you and vice versa.  In other words, to truly understand who we are in relation to God as a created person that is good and able to rejoice, we need the Other.  That's how Sartre puts it.  Without opening ourselves to the reality of the Other, we can't know our own full reality.  This we can do every day, all the time. 

Sometimes I think that churches find it particularly problematic to be open to the lives and consciousnessess of others.  Often those churches that most desire to be multicultural are nearly entirely white.  Declaring that we are open and welcome to diversity is not the same as actually being open and welcome.  And then often pastors will hear feedback from their parishioners along the lines of, "I've never heard anyone say such and such about that scripture passage," or, "Isn't having Communion more than once a month a Catholic thing?  We shouldn't do it."  Underneath these comments lies a resistance to openness.  

Often, though, your pastor invites you to partake of Communion every Sunday through Lent (if you're not Catholic) or exposes you to a new reading of scripture precisely to make you conscious of the fullness of who God has created us to be as persons.  The purpose isn't to change secretly convert you to a different denomination or change your beliefs or practices but merely to expose you so as to be conscious of how great and vast our God and our life truly are.  It's likely that your pastor does this because he or she has experienced their own grand adventure, often because seminaries nowadays require those types of experiences.  Your pastor, then, probably knows the benefits of singing and dancing in new ways and with new persons, of taking risks by getting out of the van, and hearing stories of others' lives.  At the end of the day, you may only find yourself confirmed in what you already believe and think, in how you already live, but hopefully your confirmation also comes with an affirmation of life--your life and all life, baboons included.

If we can be open to the consciousness of the Other, and the life history behind that consciousness, then we may have a new lease on life.  The flight home from South Africa was rough.  More so for me, perhaps, than others, because I had never pulled an all-nighter, but after the long flight we landed in D.C. around 6 o'clock in the morning, and so my sleep rhythms wouldn't be too messed up I didn't want to sleep too much once we returned to the dorm, which only made me more grumpy.  A deafening and depressing silence filled the cabin when our plane came to a stop but not yet at the terminal.  No one, it felt, wanted to break the silence and possibly incur the wrath of one of the other grumpy passengers.  Probably we all thought, "Let's just stay silent, focus on ourselves, and get out of this plane in one piece."  Yet one child decided, "To heck with it," and he would burst in upon everyone's consciousness.  All of a sudden he yelled out, "DO YOU KNOW THE MUFFIN MAN, THE MUFFIN MAN, THE MUFFIN MAN?"  We were tired and didn't want to deal with anyone else... but now, we all burst out laughing.  The whole plane was then all smiles as we helped each other off to wherever we were going.  A new lease on life.

Seminarians Don't Blow Stuff Up: We Blew Stuff Up

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.

Seminarians Don't Blow Stuff Up: Bobby the Beaver

During my third and final year in seminary I was the president of Student Council and, therefore, had oversight of the student-run bi-monthly journal publication.  One of my best friends was a stay-at-home at the time and clearly had nothing to do with her life so I roped her into being the editor of the paper.  Without knocking the previous editions of the school's journal, I think our publication was the best during my time at school.  My friend, who I'll call Alice, had the good sense to hand over design work to someone who knew how to design.  That simple decision to delegate made us look amazing.  We also worked hard to solicit and incorporate submissions from students normally not given a voice in the paper, particularly foreign students who weren't always comfortable with their grasp of English.  In my biased opinion, all went swimmingly for the first three or four months.  Then disaster struck.

Some students had, that first semester of the school year, decided to launch an experiment called "Bobby the Beaver."  You might already hear in the name the intention to copycat Smoky the Bear, except for a seminary.  Rather than prevent forest fires the intention was to keep the dormitory community living on campus grounds clean. 

Soon there were signs above the sinks in our kitchens of Bobby the Beaver relying on you to wash and put your away your own dishes; above urinals and toilets to make sure you flush; around entrance doors to make sure you closed the door (to protect us from stranger danger); and other similar warnings.  These posters usually carried the message, "Shame on you if you don't listen to Bobby the Beaver."  Not long thereafter Bobby had his own Facebook page on which people were encouraged to post pictures of shameful behavior where, indeed, people commented, "Shame on whoever did this!  How could anyone be so careless?!"

From the beginning I wasn't a huge fan of Bobby the Beaver.  The idea of encouraging generosity and consideration to our dorm mates, of course, was and is a good one.  Yet the execution itself seemed lacking in either generosity or consideration.  What if someone ate a quick breakfast and had to run to class, planning on cleaning their dishes later?  Shaming that person for being late to class, or getting an emergency call about their dying grandparent, or whatever it may have been, didn't seem the appropriate response. 

Plus, I always wondered at the choice of Bobby's targets.  For instance, there wasn't a single Bobby the Beaver poster reminding people to shut off lights when they left a room or in the hallway or to turn off the TV in the common room.  Saving the environment was strangely absent from Bobby's hopes for our community, particularly strange given that Smoky the Bear was, so to speak, Bobby's uncle.  Likewise, the insistence that the toilet be flushed was out of concern for cleanliness--cleanliness for whom other than the originators of Bobby the Beaver.  One of the masterminds was a self-described germophobe.  I understand that, I do, but my rejoinder was always that he could then flush the toilet before using it if he was concerned about germ splash.  Why must the rest of trying to save and conserve water take an environmentally destructive action for one person's sake?  Oftentimes in households that care about the environment yet still flush the toilet even when the water is yellow, the choice to not let it mellow stems from a concern for the one who has to do the cleaning.  Not regularly flushing a toilet does sometimes result in more work for the household janitor.  That would be even more true for a dorm.  I never heard a concern expressed for Luis or any of our other janitorial staff, however.

The (im)moral reach of Bobby the Beaver quickly spread to cover everything and anything thought to be wrong by those who participated.  Why couldn't the student body, made up of natives of all different backgrounds, communities, and nations, see the obvious common sense that a handful of students shared?  Notes were left all over the place anonymously expressing Bobby's disapproval, whether because someone put their sweaty and smelly shoes outside their door to air dry or because someone accidentally tracked in some dirt from their bike.  Until one day a student used lipstick on Alice's car to draw an unhappy face on the windshield with Bobby's mark.

You should know that parking at my seminary was notoriously difficult during the day.  There were barely enough parking spots for the students who lived on campus so when you added professors, staff, and commuting students to the equation, cars often had to be parked in illegal sports in the lot, down the driveway, on the street, or somewhere in the posh nearby neighborhood where no one liked cars to be parked.  It was a constant challenge.  An added challenge was that if you had to park along the sides of the driveway, there were two service entrances you had to avoid, one for the dorm and another for the refectory (seminarian language for dining hall).  Oftentimes, after circling the lot and neighborhood a few times, those sports would be the only ones left if you had the courage to parallel park where there wasn't any room.  You should also know that, for some strange reason, some students had taken up the habit of parking by the service entrance to the dorm since that entrance had not been used by any service vehicles in anyone's memory, though there was a sign making it clear that parking down the little service road was as illegal as anything could be on a seminary's campus.  The last thing you should know is that, in a rush one day between returning home from work, needing to pick up her youngest child from the apartment so her husband could go to class and so she could pick up her other kids from school, Alice parked blocking the service entrance to the dorm.  Though technically and officially no one was supposed to be parked in the service entrance anyway, one Bobby the Beaver advocate found it necessary to chastise Alice for her tight motherly schedule with lipstick that took Alice an hour to remove--an hour she did not have before picking up her kids from school so they saw the consequences of a shame culture.

In comes the school's journal to the story.  Alice wrote an editorial describing and reflecting on her encounter with Bobby the Beaver.  She had come to realize, she wrote, that the whole idea, while good in its intentions, was flawed in execution for two reasons that I hadn't thought of myself: first, the majority of our foreign student population hailed from South Korea, where shame is often used to extremes, and many of them, if anyone took the time to listen, would tell how they hoped to learn a different way of raising kids by attending seminary in this country; and two, use of Bobby the Beaver may teach a form of ethnocentric license, as in, "my way or the highway, get with the program."  Neither seemed to Alice to be lessons we wanted to promote as Americans or as pastors-in-training.

Next thing we know, before the publication of the piece, word gets around to the masterminds of Bobby the Beaver and they are sitting in my dorm room yelling at us.  Their demands were simple: we couldn't run the piece because "everyone" knew who was behind Bobby the Beaver, including the pastor mentor of one of them, and the piece would ruin their reputation.  After a little while, two of them realized that the yelling was a bit much and was entering insulting territory and tried to calm down the third, but the third of them went right on yelling and screaming.  Sometimes she would leave the room, ostensibly to cool down, only to return louder than before.  Alice and I, I'm proud to say, never raised our voice, tried to hear and understand, ask questions, but hold firm and explain our position as to why an opinion piece that questions the appropriateness of a concept and practice without condemning the people behind it shouldn't be censored regardless of who wrote it.  Unfortunately, I'm less proud to reflect that perhaps the reason we kept our cool had less to do with, you know, Jesus, and perhaps more to do with the nagging thought that surely people were out in the hall with popcorn listening to the whole exchange. 

Why, I wondered, were they worried about people's perception anyway?  If this person's pastor mentor knew about Bobby the Beaver, surely, as a good pastor, they had already thought through the possible consequences and reactions others may have towards the little rodent.  If others on campus knew and approved of the beaver, how would one person's opinion suddenly sway them to the contrary view?  Besides, is one's reputation really something a Christian is supposed to worry about?  I wondered if, truthfully, their strong response to the forthcoming editorial had less to do with their reputational anxieties and more to do with the Spirit's convicting.  Maybe the fun they were having at the helm had been chipped away by some as-yet unfinished self-reflection and prayer.  While it would have been nice to theologically and pastorally pursue these ponderings of mine, we had no opportunity.  The berating ended in a storm.

The next day Alice and I were both called into the dean of student life's office for questioning.  Well, it wasn't so much questioning as telling.  The previous night had been fun for me because I got to sit around for about twenty minutes receiving the brunt of Bobby's fans' attacks waiting for Alice to make her way over after putting her kids to bed.  This day, Alice got to return the favor, as I saw she had already spent some time alone with the dean when I arrived after class.  I knew how awful the feeling was--though, to this day, I can't imagine dealing with such foolishness in the midst of working full-time and caring for two young boys with one on the way in a very large belly.  We were told why we thought publishing the piece wasn't an abuse of Alice's power as editor.  That may sound like a question to you but it wasn't.  After an hour of explaining to the dean that editors of newspapers across the country are daily expressing their opinions in editorials, that such a piece didn't come anywhere close to infringing upon the journal's policies or standards by not targeting, name-calling, condemning or judging (or even naming) individuals, and that had any other student in the student body written such a piece she can't possibly have had an issue with it, the dean finally left her office to ask other staff members if they believed the piece violated an editor's power and authority.  She returned to inform us that she'd allow us--allow us--to run the piece.  Apparently plenty of other mature, working adults saw the light of day.

Alice and I had won a victory.  A completely hollow victory, however, because it was sad to us that fellow pastors-to-be would have treated the situation as they did and that the dean of student life at a seminary immediately and without question sought to assuage the hurt feelings of entitled young adults, who clearly felt that no one should have the right to disagree with them or question their practices or seek to engage in dialogue, and didn't bother to take the time to understand all sides of the equation.  Are Christians now meant to ensure that no one's feelings are hurt ever?  Or are we meant to engage in disagreements in love and understanding to, hopefully and prayerfully with the Spirit's guidance, discern what is good and right?  Within minutes of our "victory," Alice decided to withhold publication of her editorial and resign from her position and I concurred. 

Two related but separate lessons emerge from this story.  The first is perhaps obvious as we ask the question, how should Christians act toward one another?  In Matthew 18:15-20 as well as in other places in the gospels and epistles Jesus and the apostles encourage brothers and sisters in the faith to reconcile with one another through peaceful dialogue, confession, forgiveness, and understanding.  After reading Archbishop Desmond Tutu's reflections on his time leading South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, No Future Without Forgiveness, it becomes clear that the world expects winners and losers.  Varying disagreements and mistreatment of others must, according to the world, be resolved by reversing the power dynamics.  If black South Africans were once oppressed, then their coming to power must mean that white South Africans will reap what they sowed.  Yet that is not only unhealthy for a country it is also not Christian.  Bobby the Beaver fans need not have perceived the duality that they did: either they are right and well-liked or they are wrong and disliked.  The goal is not for one side to win and the other to lose; one side to be cheered and the other to be disparaged.  The goal is understanding, reconciliation, confession, forgiveness and compromise.

It is true that in 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul teaches the wayward Corinthians not to bring brothers and sisters to court and instead resolve disputes within the church as people who love one another, Paul writes, "I say this to shame you."  I'll come back to this passage in a bit but for now it's worth pointing out that things like shame, guilt, and judgment have their time and place, Jesus himself does little of any.  Rather than shaming people for what they have done wrong, Jesus calls his disciples to something higher and better.  Indeed, shame often works to keep people down.  Having worked with kids before becoming a pastor, I remember one child who often, whenever he did something naughty, would walk over to a corner on his own, knock on his head a little and, if anyone went over to talk to him, would say, "I know, I'm just a bad boy.  I can't do anything right."  His parents and teachers and other adults in his early life had told him over and over again how he was a bad boy.  Shame had been the parenting tool of choice each and every time.  Shame may prevent a person from doing wrong but it doesn't teach or empower anyone to do good, to do better. 

Whatever we may think of President Obama, I love what he said about "woke" and "cancel" culture.  Here's the video: The Guardian.  "That's not activism," Obama said.  "If all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get that far."  How right he is.  There needs to be compassion and understanding of the person or institution that we're trying to change and not only ideological purity or comedic shame and canceling of the other.  I fear, however, that the Bobby the Beaver episode reveals that even our pastors-to-be (who are now themselves clergy) would rather cancel the behavior of others while patting themselves on the back--as Obama says, "Look at how woke I am"--than do any prayerful transformation work through Christ's spirit.  Just as the idea of Bobby the Beaver had good intentions and could have been executed well, so, too, the precepts of "woke" culture have solid foundations in tolerance and acceptance.  Too often, however, those of us who firmly believe we are on the right side of history make no time to tolerate or accept or welcome or understand or confess to or forgive our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, on the other side. 

When we fail to approach our brothers and sisters with the intention of understanding and reconciliation, and instead seek to win, whether we admit that's our aim or not, we not only lose an opportunity to share in the good news of Christ but we also bring the stain of sin upon ourselves.  I loved the fact that Alice and I took the high road.  On some level I felt that we had gotten back at everyone who acted as if and portrayed us as somehow evil in the whole charade.  After Alice resigned, the journal went downhill fast.  The Vice President and I hired a new editor who can't possibly have had the design and editorial credentials she claimed to.  Trust me, this isn't bias talking here.  While the journal continued on, it no longer had the quality it did prior to Alice's tenure.  The new editor said she couldn't possibly produce the journal without a certain sum as payment, well above our budget, so that I had to use my own stipend to pay her.  Even so, the submissions and design were inferior to anything I had seen in my three years at the seminary.  I felt good about that.  I hoped everyone involved noticed what their foolishness brought about.  The dean of student life said she'd start reading each publication more closely to monitor.  Well, she had a front row seat to the consequences of her actions.

Therein lies the problem, though.  I should not have felt good that the journal's quality sank.  My goal should have been to ensure that each and every issue of the journal was as good if not better than the last.  Instead, I found myself thinking and feeling in terms of winning and losing.  I won the moral battle, I told myself.  Today I know that I lost the moral battle, if ever there were one, because the best resolution would have been to follow Jesus's advice in Matthew 18: to continue meeting with Bobby's fans and find reconciliation.  Meeting with some outside authority figure, a judge, to rule who won or lost did no one any favors.

That brings us to the second lesson of this story, namely what our relationship as Christians should be to authority.  Again, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that Christians should not bring disputes to judges, particularly because those judges are often non-believers.  We who know how to live rightly through Christ, whether we're living that way or not, are capable of resolving and reconciling on our own.  The way I read the passage, I hear echoes of 1 Samuel 8 in which God, through Samuel, tells the people of Israel that they should not want a king.  God alone should be their leader and ruler.  The problem with kings, God says, is that even if they are born and raised in and as one of the people of Israel, they always corrupt the governing office as well as the people they rule.  Much of the reason why scholars argue that the books of Samuel, telling the story of King David, were written well after that period is that God's warning unfortunately rings true king after king.  Even Solomon, the celebrated king of wisdom, had glaring faults that directly led to the division of the kingdom into two.  God didn't coin the phrase, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," but He could have.  Why in the world, then, would a seminary handle the Bobby the Beaver situation by giving an authority the power to judge?  If that authority figure had used her position to mediate, as talked about above, then well and good, but instead she judged our case while the prosecutors remained absent.  If our actions barely constitute justice how can they possibly constitute discipleship?

Knowing full well that I am not being quite fair to Bobby the Beaver's originators nor to the dean of student life, particularly when I call them "entitled," but it seems equally clear that we must question our relationship to authority.  Simply deferring to authority to adjudicate rather than relying on our power to love and reconcile is a position of privilege, and therefore entitlement.  Who are the ones most likely to receive "justice" when we hand responsibility over to authorities?  As Paul noted, dating all the way back to Leviticus, and as our own recent history has confirmed again and again, the wealthy and powerful usually win.  Those who rely on authoritative adjudication are usually in the habit of getting their way and so repeat the process as often as they can.  Hence the yelling, hence the subsequent poor handling of the situation.  As I write this piece I acknowledge that I am not exactly being fair, especially concerning my own role in the story, but it is to make sure an appropriate point is made.

Another unfair target in all of this, of course, are seminaries everywhere.  It is hard to be honest about seminary life without also painting the place as a brood of vipers.  I'll probably do so again.  Yet it is important to remember that seminary is a place where pastors and theologians are trained.  Seminary is a place of learning.  While there we do not only learn who wrote what but also what the daily ins and outs of Christian living, of being a pastor, may look like and should look like.  Hopefully we have all learned from this story.  Learned how best to use Smoky the Bear and his relatives and learned how to reflect on the ways our Christian witness is impacted by our small and large choices.