By Amy Butler
One of the great hardships of being a pastor is that the job involves two very important tasks that generally do not work well together: sales and offending people.
It all sounds very distasteful to call it sales, but really it is. We’re tasked with packaging and communicating the gospel in such a way that people might be able see, feel, and respond to its compelling pull in their lives. Where it starts to get sticky is that if you give them the real gospel, then people are likely to feel uncomfortable — offended, even — which is not exactly the ideal climate for closing the deal, if you know what I mean.
I remembered that tension again the other day as I was driving to church and drove past a campaign sign for a local candidate vying for the chairmanship of the District of Columbia Council. The campaign slogan on the sign read: “THIS CITY OWES YOU.” After I recovered from almost crashing my car into the curb, I got to ranting to myself about several things, not the least of which is the poor quality of campaign-slogan writers in this city. Isn’t government about helping us live in community together? I thought. And doesn’t living in community together mean thinking about other people before you think of yourself? And wouldn’t using phrases like “this city owes me” work against the effort to foster healthy community?
My rant continued until I arrived at church, where I am fairly certain the parking garage attendant became deeply concerned for the state of my mental health. A little later that day I was studying the lectionary passage for last Sunday, Acts 11:1-18, the story of Peter’s vision of the sheet with the unclean animals. It’s a great passage, from which you can easily deduce an obvious message: God loves everyone, everyone is welcome in the family of God, and we Christians should open the doors to anyone who wants to come in. But I felt instantly alarmed at the thought: a message like that sounds really great at first — but it can be awfully dangerous in our entitled consumer culture, where we often feel like the church “owes” us exactly one hour (not one minute more) of good music and witty sermonizing. I started to get nervous. If I tell it like it is, somebody might get offended!
See, the whole “everybody love everybody” message is a tiny bit misleading, not too comfortable and definitely not what people feel like the church “owes” them on Sunday morning. Because first there’s the problem of welcoming everyone (and I mean everyone), which seems easy but really isn’t. And then it gets even worse: once we do that we have to learn to live with each other. And keep learning to live together. Very often, there’s nothing pretty about it.
I guess this is exactly why pastors get paid the big bucks: we’re tasked with selling something — the gospel — but if we’re giving people the real thing we have to keep holding up a standard (not to mention living it in our own lives) that is scary, uncomfortable, and doesn’t often work well with the whole “the church owes me” mentality. I guess we all should have clued in when Jesus kept talking about taking up your cross and all that, but for some reason we prefer to look at church with a sense of entitlement that leads us to believe we should always be comfortable here. And here the pastor is, stuck in the middle, often feeling just as uncomfortable as everybody else. See why I think hardship pay may be merited here?
It’s a tough job, but the thing is, I just don’t think there’s any way around it. Really living the gospel is a rigorous task, one that will challenge our assumptions and change our hearts. And that process is often downright painful. When we commit to doing it together, though, it can transform us — our communities — our world. And I don’t know about you, but I think utter transformation would be pretty wonderful.
And so I go back to the drawing board, waiting for the Spirit of God to show up and teach all of us again how to be okay with discomfort — to embrace it, even — and to stop coming to church thinking about what we’re going to get out of it. Some days I don’t know if the congregation is going to bite, especially when they see me run screaming in the other direction myself sometimes.
But I’m pretty convinced we’ve got to try to stick it out together. I think we owe it — to each other.