Ministry in the Middle

I've spent part of this week preparing for our congregation's first board meeting of the new year.  Often, this process takes more time and more communication than I remember from year to year. Our congregation has a good tradition of official and unofficial term limits, so that most positions have new people in them every few years.  In general, I support this practice.  On one level, I want to prevent anyone from ever becoming so entrenched in a single church leadership role -- whether by personal desire or popular acclaim -- that they cannot do anything else and no one else can assume that role.  On another level, I think that these term limits are a way of practicing sabbath.  Not only do we allow people to rest from certain responsibilities every so often -- even if they are quite gifted at them -- but we also celebrate that God has blessed the congregation with multiple people who can assume responsibilities in ways that bless others and enrich our share...

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...