Ministry in the Middle

Like many Americans, I paid close attention to the public Senate hearings regarding allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.  While I could not watch the hearings in their entirety, I watched or listened to roughly half of the proceedings. That was more than enough to find the entire conversation demoralizing.  While many of those involved paid lip service to seeking truth, mostly it was an exercise in political warfare, pitting one side against another.  Both Republicans and Democrats railed against the questionable tactics of the other side related to hiding or revealing evidence and rushing or slowing the process. Others have written extensively about the increasing tribalism in our culture, in politics and beyond.  Without question, this tribalism stretches into the church as well.  We join our teams and we stick by them.  We circle the wagons when others threaten or challenge someone in our own tribe....

The church, we are told, is shrinking.  Statistics suggest that overall American church membership is declining, sometimes drastically.  In most of our congregations, we see the decline.  There are fewer people in the pews and fewer people participating.  In most congregations, this becomes painfully obvious once a year when leaders begin to prepare the next year's budget and nominate the next year's officers.  Financial support of the church lags behind the expenses of the church, creating pressure to cut programs, cut outreach giving, or even cut staff time or positions.  There never seem to be many new options for officer position, forcing people to keep serving again and again... and again, and sometimes requiring people to serve in multiple capacities to keep programs going. In the season of planning, it is easy to lament that our church is too small.  If we just had a few more people and more reliable financial giving, things would be easier ...

In the past few days, the news has been dominated by an anonymous editorial written by "a senior official in the Trump administration."   It suggests that many people appointed by the president are working to protect the country from the president's "worst inclinations."  Like many people, I have found the entire affair fascinating, though I recognize there are some rather horrifying implications to the op-ed and some of its details. One paragraph caught my eye, not only for its political implications, but for a trend in behavior that I have often observed in church settings. Given the instability witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president.  But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.  So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until -- one way or another -- it's over. Presumably, people who have the...