Dance With the One That Brung Ya

In early to mid-1991 I was kvetching in my journal about those on the fringe of Santa Margarita Community Church.  I had only been pastor there for about 6 months and I was complaining about those people who seem to only show up when there’s nothing else to do or on major Christian holidays.

In my May 23, 1991 journal entry I include a confession of my poor attitude toward these people on the fringe.  It also includes an extended quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book, Life Together.  The entry makes it plain that the conviction about my attitude and my confession to God about it were both prompted by Bonhoeffer’s book.

“The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realize it…The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others and by himself.  He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren accordingly…He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together…

"When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash.  So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself…If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ…

"This applies in a special way to the complaints often heard from pastors and zealous members about their congregations.  A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God…Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”

I’ve read through the end of 1992 and so far I haven’t seen another complaint about the church collectively.   Maybe I learned an important lesson that is echoed so many times in the writing of Eugene Peterson.  Every pastor must acknowledge that his ministry is to “these people in this place at this time.”  If you want to minister to another sort of people in another sort of place in another moment in history, go there.  God is not asking what you’re doing somewhere else with someone else.  He only wants to use you with these people in this place at this time.

Oh, that all of us who minister in a local church, whether paid or unpaid, full-time or part-time, would allow this truth to marinate in us and then find its way into the way we speak to and about our local church.  May this truth overflow into the way we relate to the local body of Christ of which we are a apart.