Grumpy Pastor

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
     to raise up the tribes of Jacob
     and to restore the survivors of Israel;
 I will give you as a light to the nations,
      that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

 Isaiah 49:6

I'm feeling a bit grumpy about the church and my denomination today, and attending a presbytery meeting yesterday has little or nothing to do with it. (Presbyteries are regional, representative governing bodies and my denomination's districts or dioceses.)  It turned grumpy when I saw another Facebook post about the proposed changes to our medical benefits.  I won't bore you with details, but like everyone, our denomination is dealing with the spiraling cost of healthcare. And the group that oversees our medial plan is proposing big changes, changes that seem to hit small churches and young pastors with children the hardest.

Now I should add that there are many things in our health and pension plan that lean the other way. Pastors who make less money pay smaller deductibles and their churches pay less for the same coverage.  And pastors making salaries below a certain point get treated as though they make more when pensions are calculated.  So traditionally we have tried to take good care those who labor in small churches earning small salaries.

But I should also add that such things were instituted in a past when Mainline denominations were quite well off and we had no trouble funding health care.  But now, as it becomes more painful and costly to provides such things, we are not so sure we can continue.  And to me it feels a bit like we're saying, "We want to love our neighbors, but only if it's not too difficult."

Sometimes we in the church are better at being an institution than being the body of Christ, and that's as true of local church governing boards as it is with the larger, institutional pieces of a denomination. We produce voluminous annual reports and statistics. We worry a lot about numbers.  When you meet people you don't know at a presbytery meeting and tell them the church where you represent, very often the next question is, "How many members do you have?"  (We pastors sometimes engage in what is jokingly called "steeple envy.") Numbers and statistics have their place and purpose, but no one has ever asked me, "So what is your congregation doing to share God's love?" And I'd be shocked if someone did.

"A light to the nations." The word "nation" here can also mean "peoples" or "Gentiles."  A light to others, to all people, a beacon showing the way.  But that is hard to do when our ways are indistinguishable for the world.

I'll admit to being overly idealistic at times.  That can lead to frustrations, but I really don't expect the church to be perfect or anything close to it.  We are a collection of human beings in all our sinful and broken glory. But one of our core faith claims says we are being transformed and made new, becoming new creations in Christ.  This is a process that does not come to completion in this age, but there has to be some visible evidence of it if the church is to be, in any significant way, the body of Christ.

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