Living word by word

what I learned in my kids' swim school

 

I’m still developing a parental philosophy of extracurriculars, but generally speaking, one of our family rules is that if the Parks & Rec program near our home teaches something, there’s no need to pay more money or drive further to get it somewhere else.

 

 We made an exception, however, for swimming, mainly because my daughter was phobic about water until recently. Washing her hair could turn into an epic battle.  (Fortunately, she didn’t have much hair until recently either.)

 

 Swimming is a life skill, and a pretty important one for a normal social life in this Land of Lakes, so last year we decided to shell out for the expensive swimming lessons at a private swim school. The water is warm, the classes are small, and they more or less guaranteed that our kids would learn.

 

  I’m still a bit sheepish about this decision, particularly among our friends who’ve heard us go on about how we don’t want to become “that” kind of parent. But this swim school has taught me a lot about how to treat parents and kids in learning situations – lessons the church could stand to learn too. I have no idea what their actual company manual says, but here's what I imagine is in there:

 

1. Inspire confidence.  Even if I wasn’t spending lots of money on these lessons, I would be spending precious time and gas, so I sure want to feel like it’s worth it, from day one. Everything from the cleanness of the facility to the clearly laid out expectations of each class says, “We know what we’re doing, and this will be worth your time.”
2. Train the heck out of your teachers. Our kids have never had the same teacher twice, and no doubt there’s a good deal of turnover in a place where most of the staff are barely adults, but the quality of teaching is amazingly consistent. They all use the same methods, they all clearly love kids, and every single one is both courteous to the parents and respectful to the students.
3. Have a clearly laid out system, but treat every individual like, well, an individual. This school is a big operation – they must conduct thousands of classes a year in the metro area. And yet the registration process is clear and simple, and when you arrive in a class, you know that your child will get the attention they need.  My children are known by name and greeted enthusiastically – every single time.
4. Evaluate like crazy.  Every child is assessed by someone other than the teacher every term, and I have never been in a class when I was not asked to fill out an evaluation as a parent. The one and only time I wrote something out of the ordinary on an evaluation (and it wasn’t a criticism, just a “it would have been nice. . .”), it was responded to the next day, in person.
5. Failure is not an option. This summer my son had a sudden and inexplicable case of stranger anxiety. He refused to get in the water without me. He cried through most of the first three classes. His group instructor couldn’t persuade him and still treat the other students fairly, but in a flash another teacher was there to give Johann 1-1 attention. No one blamed us, ignored the problem, or shrugged and said, “he’s just not ready.” No questions asked (and at no extra charge), he was given undivided attention until his anxiety abated, and by lesson five he was right in there with his classmates, progressing rapidly. 
6. Believe that this is important – and really fun too.  The school reminds parents – before they register and during the course of a term – that swimming is serious business, a skill that can save lives and is worth teaching at a young age. They clearly know that there’s a huge responsibility when little ones are in the water. At the same time, every instructor knows how to calm nerves and make the hard work a whole lot of fun. There is tons of silliness, usually at the instructor’s expense.  My kids are allowed to forget that we’re doing this so they don’t die.

 

As Sunday School is about to start up, I’m pondering how the church can learn a few things from these people. Surely, we have the most important life skills of all to teach: prayer, life in community, stewardship, living with hope.   Parents need to feel it is  worth their time, and kids just want people who respect them and who will just plain have fun with them.  My church doesn't have the resources per student that the swim school has, but our mission is just as vital.

the integrated life

We like to think that work is the reason we are miserable. If only we had less of it, perhaps, we would be satisfied. We romanticize the places we visit and imagine that life there is slower, more peaceful.

 

For a month we’ve been on sabbatical (well, I have – Will has continued to work) at Weingut Landmann, a family-run winery and farm. As far back as anyone has been able to trace, both sides of this family have produced wine, in this corner of Baden. Twelve  years ago, the two sons of the family took over the business, one serving as the oenologist and the other as the business manager. They run a farm stand seven days a week during asparagus season (April – June), rent out five vacation apartments, offer wine tastings with food on arrangement, and produce 100,000 bottles of wine a year.

 

The irony for us is that this sabbatical on the farm in fact puts us right in the middle of a lot of very hard working people. With Spargel (asparagus) season in full swing, the tractors and work crews start heading out by at least 7 a.m. every morning, the farm stand is open by 8 and people do not shut down until sundown, which is 9  p.m. or later. Frequently there are people in the office, which is just outside our front door, until 10 or later. We are surrounded by people working very, very long hours, and mostly we feel its our duty  to stay out of their way. The lush green landscape that for us is a picture of peace and tranquility must look very different through their eyes, where a good portion of the year’s profit must be removed from the ground and gotten into saleable form in a relatively short time.

 

Is the rural life more peaceful? Certainly one couldn’t say that if you count work hours,  noise levels, or the numbers of people and vehicles coming and going. There is a sense, though, that life here is more integrated than the equivalent life would be for us back at home. When we work 60 hour weeks at home, we are away, in the office, and if at home, often barking at the children to keep their fingers off the computer. Here, three generations are all engaged in the common work, except when the children are in school.  The oldest child in the family is drafted into service washing and peeling asparagus. The youngest ones may not be working, but they are very much about the place as their parents work. Three generations plus a lot of neighbors and helpers are part of the effort, from dawn until dusk. Long days, no doubt, but days in which they are together -- or at least together in a common endeavor.

 

David Wood of the Fund for Theological Education has argued that the pastoral life (the ministerial kind) also offers some of that same integration, though it is limited to the degree that we operate the church like a business. My children have no idea what Will does for a living (even I have difficulty understanding it sometimes), even when he’s working from home, because the projects are abstract and the communities he serves are miles away. My work, at least a good part of it, is tangible and visible. My kids see me lead, preach, sing, preside. Katie insists on going with me at 7 every Sunday morning to church and knows many members of our community by name – and nearly everyone knows their names. I do not take them to the office much, because they would be as disruptive there as in any office setting, but the public element of my ministry and its communal nature offers them an access point that few children have to the work world in urban places. Every Sunday is Take Your Children to Work Day for me. That’s a gift.

schmoozing

Kelly Fryer has a nice piece on schmoozing on her blog this week. It’s stunning how easily church members focus on our own comfort – such as the fear of having to ask someone’s name – rather than the obvious discomfort a visitor experiences in a new place. I've learned the hard way that you just have to ask people's names until you get it right, and not not ask for fear of embarrassment.

Since I've been on the other side of the visitor/ member divide the last couple Sundays, I second Fryer's remarks even more. That being said, I will add this – whether a church is welcoming tends to have no relation at all to its formality in worship. I’ve been in places with nosebleed-high liturgical practice where the community is warm and inviting -- especially toward children -- and I’ve been to churches that are very chatty, informal, and simultaneously quite exclusive toward anyone who is new. Bottom line: while some people find it easier to reach out than others, the most welcoming communities are those who actually expect visitors, plan for them and intentionally provide ways for the newcomer to get connected. (Fewer chairs at coffee hour isn’t a bad start.)

a strange good-bye

Sunday was my last sermon until August. It's a little odd, knowing that I will not be back worshiping with my community for that long. The only times before when I've had that long a leave from community were leaving my first call -- hard, more final good-bye -- and for the birth of my two children. And with the kids, I never knew exactly when the leave would start (In Katie's case, it was quite unexpectedly early), so every Sunday was a sort of, "Well, we might see you again. . ."

Of course, lots of church members are absent for periods of time -- not usually this long, but certainly for weeks at a time -- due to travel or just happenstance of life. But it's so different when you are the steady presence and everyone else moves around you.

Needless to say, I'm very excited about the rest that lies ahead. Next Sunday morning I will not be sleeping in because I'll be getting on a plane, but it will nevertheless be a very different kind of weeekend.

deep church, occasional church

    Make no mistake, I'm a church geek. Long before I was ordained I went to every Holy Week service available. Easter Vigil was not part of my childhood church life, but once I discovered it as an adult, it became indispensable.
    Vigil is wonderful for a lot of reasons. It engages all the senses and both the sacraments. It moves one physically from a womb-like darkness to the bright loudness of resurrection joy. It rehearses some of the most dramatic stories of the Old Testament, including  my all-time favorite, the farcical tale of Shadrach Meschach and Abednego. (Try reading it some time with the rhythms of Dr. Seuss.)
    I've wished for years that we could get more people engaged in this service, but, of course, it's usually just church geeks like myself who show up. This year, however, Easter's early arrival gave us an opportunity to draw in our Sunday School families in a new way. Hardly anyone was on spring break yet, so every class was given a story to tell, and no one was exempt since it was just part of the Sunday School time during Lent. And, in deference to small children, we started at 6 and kept the service short. We had 133 people there on Saturday night -- easily three times our average.
    A good Easter Vigil is really all the Easter I need. (I made a point of telling families that Saturday night "counted" as Easter church). I have long admired the Holy Week practice of  St. Gregory of Nyssa in  San Francisco. Easter Vigil is unquestionably the year's highlight, and the next morning there is no liturgy -- only a community picnic. (They also make the eminently practical move of having "Maundy Tuesday," partly to spread out the liturgical commitments of the week.)
    After gathering with the most involved members of the community around the most central part of our faith for a few hours at Vigil, Easter morning often feels almost a letdown to me. Sure, there are 500 people through the doors, but many of them are people I don't see very often the rest of the year. It's hard not to be cynical about the ratio of energy put out to community return. I'd much rather have a picnic with the folks who just helped make Holy Week happen.
    But, of course, the hospitality of Easter morning is undeniably a resurrection practice -- maybe an indispensable one. All those people who only show up two or three times a year are not going to come to Easter Vigil. They come Easter morning, and the Gospel is for them, even if they do see it as an obligation to be done before brunch. In fact, one could argue that Jesus' resurrection appearances focus on those whose faith is most at risk -- Thomas and his doubts, Peter after his denials, and the two leaving  the disciples in Jerusalem and heading to Emmaus. Jesus spends his limited post-resurrection time on them.  It makes sense for the church to do the same.

new models needed

    There has been much rich conversation today about upcoming sabbaticals, sabbath, and pastoral ministry. My favorite definition so far, from David Wood, one of our co-facilitators: " A sabbatical is a time when all that has been 'background' to your ministry -- your own spiritual life, your family, the origins of your call, your passions -- is given time to be foreground, while the foreground of ministry -- the tasks of preaching and pastoral care and administration -- drop away for a time." Exactly.

    On another, crankier note, I was reminded again how little we know about doing ministry in the era of co-parenting and new gender roles. Eugene Peterson is often held up as a model for how one can be in parish ministry while still doing serious reading and writing. Here's a man who served a congregation for 28 years, with only one sabbatical in the midst of it, and still wrote countless books. His secrets? Well, he clearly had a strong vision of the ministry of the laity and handed over many tasks to his members. But there's another thing -- he has a wife, one who clearly was happy to take the traditional role of pastor's wife and see that as a calling.

    Well, I don't have a wife. I have an active father to my children, but definitely no wife, and not one eager to be an upfront pastor's spouse either (not that anyone at my congregation expects that of him). It's really hard for me not to be resentful of the many men in generations past -- and quite a few still today -- whose careers benefit from the fact that their spouses have willingly picked up the slack.

    I have to constantly remind myself that our mission is together as a family, even though our work worlds tend to pit our careers against one another. Fortunately for Will and me, our passions and commitments are blessedly compatible, even when the reality of modern life makes us feel like we're competing for time.

the last week of my fortieth year

    I'm beginning the last week of my 40th year in Louisville, Kentucky, home of the Louisville Institute, which is granting me funds for my sabbatical this spring.  There's a big Presbyterian Seminary here in an old and lovely part of Louisville, on the banks of the Ohio. If it were a touch warmer I'd be reminded of my years at Vanderbilt in Nashville, where the landscape is flatter but the flora is similar. They had some tornadoes in the region a couple weeks ago, and the evidence of high winds is still around in lots of downed trees.
    I don't know what to expect from the upcoming couple days, except that I'll meet 40 other grantees and get to hear Eugene Peterson in the flesh for the first time. I've always been intrigued by how he mixed ministry and writing for so many years, though now in "retirement" he is much more known as a Bible translator and author than as a parish pastor.
    I have just finished an article with my dear husband on the issue of land use -- and I will note this about Louisville. There are two large seminaries in this neighborhood, with presumably lots of student residents, etc. I went for a walk this afternoon and after 90 minutes walking and jogging in a couple different directions, I came  across NO commercial amenities -- no grocery, no drugstore, nothing in walking distance. Talk about a car-dependent community. Ugh.

Grace Mondays

I've noticed, both in my own preaching and when I teach preaching, that it is very easy to describe the problem, and all too easy to neglect a robust exposition of the Good News. In Lutheran terms, we spend four days of the week working on the Law, and then tack on some Gospel on Saturday night. When we work on human need, sin, or "the problem," we can be specific, tactile, story-filled and relevant. When we get to Grace, we lapse into cliche, jargon and past tense.

So my new discipline is to work out the end of my sermon first. Where am I headed? What is the Good News, for now, today, in terms people can understand and hear? I'm not sure I got as specific as I'd like in yesterday's sermon, but here's where it ended:

In this place, as we’ve had conversations about what it means to follow, there will be unanswered questions. Some of them may be answered along the way. Some of them, to be honest, won’t be answered until we live into the answers. Some maybe aren’t the right questions in the first place.

But what we do know is that Jesus is calling us, from this place, from where we are, exactly as we are, with all our anxieties and worries, all our pride and certainty that we have it right, all our distractions and concerns about everything But God.

That’s OK. Jesus doesn’t need us to know what we want.

He wants to change what we want. He wants us to seek God’s kingdom, to follow, and everything else, everything, will follow from that.

my life in comics

Most days, Baby Blues sums up my home life. But on Jan. 13, it was Stone Soup that summed up my work life. What DID we do before email? There must be a better way.
 

an extraordinary day

Years ago, as I was just starting out in ministry, I read an article in which a veteran pastor suggested that one of the best practices to keep one’s sense of calling fresh was to attend the ordinations and installations of others. I think I was in the New Jersey Synod at the time, so that was an easy suggestion to follow – ordinations usually happened en masse at the Synod Assembly.

It’s still a good suggestion, but one that is harder to follow in this Midwestern church climate, where everything is much more congregational and, since Lutherans are so dense, one could spend an awful lot of weekends attending such services. I tend to go only to the services for people I know really well, and even then the demands of parenting often take precedence over an extra church obligation on a Saturday or Sunday.

Today was a reminder, though, of how true that pastor’s advice was. I suited up for an “extraordinary” ordination, meaning one that the ELCA roster will not recognize because the person in question is in a same-sex partnership. She is extraordinary in many other ways as well, particularly her commitment to mission and her grace under pressure. Unlike most Minnesota ordinations, which can feel very much like small family affairs, this one had pew after pew of clergy from many states attending, all of us decked out in albs and red stoles, including many people who are not connected to the daily life of this particular pastor or congregation. But we were there, because a sister’s ministry is being recognized by her congregation for what it is – Word and Sacrament for the sake of the world.

Since the first “extraordinary” ordination I attended about ten years ago, these services have become less unusual, which is, on the whole, a very good thing for the church. On the other hand, I think it is voices from ‘outside’ the sanctioned roads to ministry that are reminding those of us who are called how precious this calling is, and what joy it is to share in it. I hope that, one day, it will be “no big deal,” if a GLBT person is ordained to ministry; and yet I hope it will still be a very big deal because God has called, and they have answered, "send me."