What happened next took some getting used to. A congregation. I was not only a pastor but pastor of a church. A congregation, a gathering of saints and sinners, was my workplace. This was where I went to work every day.
It had taken me a long time to arrive at the realization that pastor is who I am and, without being aware of it, always have been. But my realization of the nature of congregation as my primary workplace lagged behind my sense of pastoral identity. Why the lag time? Maybe because I hadn’t had the long development in understanding congregation that I had had in becoming a pastor.
I had entered congregations. I had belonged to congregations. But church had never been my primary workplace. I had always gone to church but, to be quite honest, I had never been much interested in church as church. As a child, I vigorously disliked Sunday school. I was allergic to things “churchy.” I was interested in God and prayer and scripture, but I pursued these interests in ways and settings that had little to do with what I understood as church.
And then I “outed” as a pastor. After those three years of apprenticeship as a pastor in White Plains, I found myself going to work every day in a church. I was not just pastor. I was pastor of a church, a congregation. Pastor was not an autonomous vocation. Pastor was not a vocation negotiated privately between me and God. There was a third party—congregation. As it turned out, the congregation and I didn’t have much in common. It turned out that what I had signed up for required spending a term in church boot camp to get a basic orientation in the conditions I would be dealing with as pastor of a church.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the low level of interest that the men and women in my congregation had in God and the scriptures, prayer and their souls. Not that they didn’t believe and value these things; they just weren’t very interested. I had assumed that it would be self-evident to a congregation that the vocation of pastor had primarily to do with God. And I had assumed that the primary reason that Christians became part of a congregation had to do with God. They would come to church because they were interested in God and the scriptures, prayer and their souls. And I would be the person expected to give guidance and encouragement to matters of God and scripture, prayer and their souls.
It didn’t happen. I couldn’t have been farther off the mark.
This lack of common cause resulted in what it seemed to me was a lot of religious clutter, much of what struck me as an accumulation of trivia. My imagination had been schooled in the company of Moses and David; my congregation kept emotional and mental company with television celebrities and star athletes. I was reading Karl Barth and John Calvin; they were reading Ann Landers and People magazine.
THE ACTS OF THE CHRISTIANS AT
CHRIST OUR KING CHURCH
Karen’s “It doesn’t look like a church” and Paul’s story of the Shekinah came together to give me a text for discovering my workplace fundamentally as God’s workplace. It set off a long process of reunderstanding church, and specifically my congregation, as God’s way of being local and personally present to these people to whom I was pastor. My work consisted of being local and personally present to them in Jesus’s name. I had a lot of sorting out to do.
I had more or less taken church for granted, thoughtlessly, a kind of blurred background to a way people lived, whether in or out of church. Now that it was my workplace, I had to pay careful attention to this place and these people—and with appreciation—alert to how God was present and how God was working. Now that church provided the place for my work, I had to attend to the expectations that my congregation brought to church and to me as their pastor. I soon learned that those expectations were more often than not distorted by romantic illusions, ambitious goals, consumer habits, competitive instincts. The congregation’s expectations were not totally wrong. And my pre-pastor indifference was not a total waste. There was usually some piece or other of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic church embedded in my years of inattention and their culture-tainted expectations. But both were going to require considerable time in the refining fire to burn out the dross.
Which is to say, I didn’t find my workplace—this congregation, this church—exactly congenial. An understatement—it was far from congenial.
On the other hand, other surprises, more welcome surprises, kept coming. Very often, disappointments in my congregation workplace, sometimes accompanied by gnashing of teeth, were replaced by a glimpse of the Shekinah. I was looking for the wrong thing and almost missed what was actually there.
One of the attractions for Jan and me in accepting the assignment to organize a new congregation was the prospect of forming a church of disciplined and committed Christians, focused and energetic. I think I had the image of a congregation of Green Berets for Jesus. No half-Christians, no almost-Christians, but the real thing.
I had imagined that when word got around that a new congregation was being formed, it would attract men and women who were willing to take risks, who were prepared to make sacrifices, who weren’t interested in comfortable pews. I went through the neighborhoods, knocking on doors, introducing myself and asking if I could talk to them about this new church. More times than not I never made it through the door. It was slow going. I felt like a Fuller Brush salesman. After six weeks of what felt like the most demeaning work in which I had ever engaged, I wrote a letter to everyone who had expressed an interest, inviting them to worship with us in the basement of our home the next Sunday. Forty-six people showed up. None of them were Green Berets.
This was our embryo congregation. In three months there were a hundred of us, charter members, and christened as Christ Our King Presbyterian Church. This would be Jan’s and my workplace for the next thirty years. And still no Green Berets.
Word did get around. People told their neighbors. Friends brought friends. As I was getting to know these men and women and children, I realized that nearly everything that I had imagined or expected in the formation of church was wrong. I had a lot of remedial learning ahead of me.
There is an account of David in the wilderness, running for his life from King Saul and eking out a bare existence, holed up in the cave of Adullam. He wasn’t alone for long. He soon had a company of four hundred men gathered around him, a company that included “his brothers and all his father’s house.” Apparently there were a considerable number of others who didn’t fit into Saul’s kingdom either. Later the Philistine king, Achish, became David’s protector and gave him the village of Ziklag as a base to work from. It became his “church,” if you will, for his family and his soldiers. The congregation was made up of “every one who was in distress, and every one who was in debt and every one who was discontented”—the sociological profile of David’s congregation: people whose lives were characterized by debt, distress, and discontent—a congregation of runaways and renegades. It isn’t what I would call the cream of the crop of Israelite society. More like dregs from the barrel. Misfits all, it appears. The people who couldn’t make it in regular society. Rejects. Losers. Dropouts.
Ziklag: for me this became the premier biblical site for realizing that when we get serious about the Christian life, we eventually end up in a place and among people decidedly uncongenial to what we expected. At least uncongenial to what I expected. That place and people is often called a church. It is hard to get over the disappointment that God, having made an exception in my case, didn’t seem to call nice, accomplished, courteous, alert people to worship.
I was now well on my way to learning that congregation is a place of stories. The stories of Jesus, to be sure. But also the stories of men and women I had grown up with: Brother Herman and Tombstone and Henry, Mary and Vivian and Jane, Prettyfeather, my uncles Sven and Ernie. My cousin Abraham. And now the stories that I was hearing in my new neighborhood. It is never just my story; it is a community of stories. I learn my story in company with others. Each story affects and is affected by each of the others. Many of these others are distressed, in debt and discontent—or out of tune, angry, rude, or asleep. This complicates things enormously, but there’s no getting around it. We’re a congregation. We’re looking for meaning to our lives. We catch a thread of the plot and begin to follow it, receiving the good news that God is gracious, receiving the sacraments of God’s actions in our actual lives. And then we bump up against someone else’s story that we don’t even recognize as a story and are thrown off balance. Distracted, we stumble.
This is my workplace.
And every once in a while a shaft of blazing beauty seems to break out of nowhere and illuminates these companies. I see what my sin-dulled eyes had missed: Word of God–shaped, Holy Spirit–created lives of sacrificial humility, incredible courage, heroic virtue, holy praise, joyful suffering, constant prayer, persevering obedience—Shekinah. And sometimes I don’t—Ziklag.