Dreams

Dreams

I had another horrible dream last night. It’s a repeat dream. I am back in the first parish I served. The parish was a nightmare beginning to my parish ministry career. The senior pastor was a drunk. The associates who served prior to my arrival were equally disturbed. The one I replaced was raping high school girls. Another was attempting to date several women in the congregation while his wife was back home trying to make arrangements to travel to this large city located in the South.

The saga ended badly for all. After sending the senior pastor to treatment, which only made him angrier than before he left, and dealing with the breaking news of the rape allegations, the congregation imploded, as any congregation would. The larger church structures were of no help at all. It was back in the day when sweeping stuff under the rug was the prefer action of the church. However, this mess was simply refusing to be swept away. After several special meetings of the congregation the senior pastor finally left, and the associate accused of raping high school girls was finally removed only after repeating this behavior in another congregation. The devastation these events wrought are still around. The congregation has never really recovered.

In my dream I take another call to the same congregation with the same senior pastor. It doesn’t work any better the second time. In fact, it’s worse.

I am a fan of Jung’s understanding of dreams. This dream seems to come from my personal unconscious, shaped by my personal experience. The question is what is this dream trying to tell me? I believe it is, in Einstein’s famous words, the definition of insanity. I go back hoping the outcome will be different only to find it’s not only the same, it’s actually worse.

Could it be that the dream is trying to tell me that the vast majority of the church is caught in a cycle of insanity; doing the same things over and over again, hoping against all hope that it will turn out differently, only to find that it’s not just the same old same old, but worse?

I don’t mean to condemn the whole of the institutional church. There are many gifted people serving in leadership positions all across the church. People who are desperately wanting to fulfill the words of Christ to care for the least of these in our midst, to be a light in the darkness, and to be the voice of grace in a sometimes cruel world. Yet, I know that these good people are up against incredible odds these days. Many watch helplessly as their congregations grow older and fewer, their buildings, many built fifty years ago or more, demand more and more of the scarce resources, and the larger church expressions demand more and more of the annual budget under some rather dubious definitions of missions which look a lot like paying salaries for bureaucrats. Unfortunately, far too many of these gifted leaders simply give in to the despair hoping to make it to retirement before the ship goes under.

We continue to do only what we know. We continue to do the same things over and over with the same diminishing outcomes. Each time we truly believe that if we could just get the right stewardship program, the right educational program, the right contemporary worship team, the right pastor, then the outcome would be different. It won’t be.

What’s the answer? “Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit.” It’s time to let the church as institution die so that the “new thing” God is creating can come forth. “See, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

People are leaving the institutional churches and joining true missional communities. These communities are small groups of people centered on a simply mission: to make an impact locally and beyond without the baggage of institution. They meet in the strangest of places: bowling alleys, homes, warehouses, movie theaters, and even in bars! They belong to no one. They are dis-organized in the truest sense of the word. They have little, or no, structure. They care about each other and the communities where they live. They see a need and they respond. Unencumbered by denominational and structural baggage, they simply nourish one another and bring the light of Christ into the world.

It’s at this point that someone will argue the issue of accountability. “Without denominational oversight bad things can happen! After all, who is holding these folks accountable?”

My cynical response is, “You’re right, the denominational structures and oversight have done a bang-up job of holding folks accountable – not!” My actual response is: scripture!  What a radical thought.

“Do you not perceive it?”