‘Holy Orders’
Part 3 of our reading through ‘Searching for Sunday’ by Rachel Held Evans
Read Part 3 ‘Holy Orders’ of ‘Searching for Sunday’. Read the short reflection below, then comment about either Part 3 or the reflection!
The Church Plant
In Part 2, Evans announces that her friend and former youth pastor, Brian Ward, is planting a church. Here we get its story. Its very short story.
Lasting only a year, Evans and her husband and friends gather to make the church they have longed to be a part of. They struggled with identity, financing, but never with purpose or relationship. It was existentially the church they longed for. But not the one they could conceive of.
And like the vast majority of church plants, it died a slow, early death when it never became feasible.
But the story of their church, The Mission, demonstrated the kind of church most of us claim to value and represents the upside-down economy of Jesus. They served their community and represented an openness lacking in any of the churches they shopped.
They lived an intentional way. And in doing, seemed to reveal the very challenge of the gospel itself. That doing it right leaves us broke.
Failure
Broke. Unpopular. A bunch of people pissed.
Evans writes about J. R. Briggs and his Epic Fail Pastors Conference — the perfect example of a failure-turned-success story. But it also spoke to the pervasive and pressing sense among the majority of clergy in the country that the work is too much.
I found my own mind wandering into my experience of ministry, into my own frustration with the constant pressure and regular responses to my own failures or inability to meet the expectations forged in earlier generations.
In the Boom-Fifties, we had a higher birth rate, economic growth, and the highest rate of middle class families in American history. It was also before automation, the dismantling of the middle class, and the Civil Rights Movement drew the white majority’s awareness to injustice and inequality.
In 60 years, all the stuff that made church easy at that time went away. But the weight of that expectation, remains. The ghosts don’t just linger, they speak. Like paintings and photographs of dead white men in cassocks burn holes in a pastor’s flesh as she walks by them.
Failures are certain. And despite all the business community’s recent embrace of failure being good, this failure is about life and connection to God. This failure is people’s whole spiritual world.
Leadership
In the last chapter of this short part called “Feet,” Evans wades into the question of following Jesus and leading in the church. She will not be able to run the gamut of church history in four pages, but she will give us enough concern to chew on. And hopefully highlight why there is a debate at all.
She uses the monumental example of Pope Francis, who a week into his papacy, washed the feet of 12 incarcerated persons.
I remember at the time how deep a controversy this was. The Pope wasn’t only breaking a tradition, but what was seen as canon law. That foot washing on Maundy Thursday is reserved for the clergy. This new Pope wasn’t breaking some stodgy old rule, but an accepted legal code of the church.
The transgressive nature of the gospel is astounding — but the hierarchical commitment of the church in light of that fact isn’t. Especially in light of pressure pastors feel and the expectations their communities place upon their shoulders.
Questions
What are your stories of success “Kingdom-style,” where few showed up, but lives were changed and people were fed? When has the Spirit come and the people haven’t?
What role has failure held in your life? What role does it hold today? What would it be to change that role before tomorrow?
What would it take for you to embrace your priesthood where you’re at now? What would that change about your relationships with your priestly colleagues?
