Spiritual Hiccups - Saturated with God

Because I am a "second career" pastor, I had an normal life until I was in my mid 30s.  I had regular jobs and I was a regular church member who listened to sermons, served on a committee or two, and slept in on Sunday morning if I felt like it.  I was probably as religious as the average church person, which is to say that God did not really saturate my life all that much.  God did not have a great deal to do with my work life, or even with how my wife and I were raising our young children. 

But when God started to become more important in my life, when God started to occupy my thoughts on a more regular basis (why and how this happened is another story and not entirely certain to me), it wasn't all that long before I began to think about seminary and ordained ministry.  If God was going to be around all the time then obviously you need to be doing a job that was about God.

I am quite convinced that God did call me to go to seminary and become a Presbyterian pastor, but over the years I have come to understand a piece of advice that as given to me when I first announced I was thinking of attending seminary.  "Don't confuse God's call to an active life of faith with a call to become a pastor."

I think there is a tendency to assume that church and God's presence are close to the same thing.  And it is easy for pastors to consider church involvement as an accurate faith indicator.  After all, the way we responded to God's presence was to spend all our time at church.  Pastors and seminary students will even talk about our "call stories" as though we are the only ones who have them.  As a result we don't always recognize that some churchy things don't necessarily help folks live in God's presence.

Many of the Psalms are saturated with God's presence.  God's steadfast love is everywhere, and God's activity can be seen in everything from a wheat field to frost on a winter's morning (something that sounds quite refreshing during this heatwave).  For Israel and for Jesus, God is mixed into every facet of life, which is why Jesus cannot turn away from anyone in need.

There is an adage in the church business that when new members join they need to become involved in something more than worship or they are very likely not to stay members for long.  In many of the churches I have known the first thought in addressing this problem is, "Let's see if they'll serve on a committee."  Now I'm not badmouthing committees.  They do a lot of important work and some of them are very spiritual places, but this inclination to put folks on committees seems to me an echo of that trap we pastors fall into: thinking that lots of church activity is a sign of deep faith.

I wonder how churches might to a better job of helping members live lives that are saturated with God.  Obviously congregations would need programs (and likely committees) to organize such learnings and practices, but what if we focused less on our congregations and more on how we could help each other live out our faith beyond the church walls?  And perhaps this starts with pastors realizing that being saturated with Church and being saturated with God are not necessarily the same thing.

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