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Spoiler alert: it’s flexibility! Why you need it, how to develop it, and how to encourage your congregation toward it – plus an ear toward the Holy Spirit’s leading.
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Our Reads of the Week
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About Called – At the Intersection of Life and Ministry
For 50 years between them, Pastor Bill Smutz and musician Sarah Bereza have survived and thrived in churches big and small, urban and rural, good and not so good. With generous hearts and healthy boundaries, they share practical advice for church staff about working smart, cutting out the bs, and embracing the good in ministry. New episodes on 1st and 3rd Tuesdays.
Check out all the Called podcast episodes here, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcription of Called Ep. 8: The One Thing You REALLY Need in Ministry (That You Didn’t Learn in School)
Sarah: Welcome to Called, a podcast where we explore the intersection of ministry and the rest of our lives as church workers.
Bill: I’m Bill Smutz.
Sarah: And I’m Sarah Bereza.
Bill: Join us on the first and third Tuesdays as we talk about cutting out the bs in our lives and embracing all that is good.
Sarah: Between the two of us, we have ministered in churches for over 50 years, and we haven’t burnt out yet.
Bill: It’s been close, but we’re not there yet. I have pastored primarily Presbyterian congregations, urban, rural, big, small, and and for the last four or five years I have been doing interim transitional work in United Church of Christ congregations.
Sarah: And I have been a church musician all over the denominational spectrum – Mainline, Evangelical, Catholic. Basically if they hire organists, I have probably worked for them.
That One Thing They Didn’t Teach You? Sarah Learned It in Middle School
Sarah: Today we are talking about the one thing you need in ministry that they didn’t teach in school. You never took a class on this. You probably didn’t even hear professors talk about this in seminary or grad school. But you have to have this, or you going to be miserable. So let’s see if you can guess what this is. We’re going to start out with a story.
Sarah: I was 11 years old, almost 12, and the lead pianist at my little Baptist church moved away and at nearly 12, I was the next person in line. And so for the next six years I was the lead pianist in a Baptist congregation where that meant, I was like the main lead musician for the church.
Sarah: And I played for three services a week, and the choir, and most of the solos and the prelude and postlude, all that. Not always , cause there were other musical people in the church, but I was the person. And what that means is that I was the person who got hymns that morning right before the service started. And I was the person who a visiting evangelist would call up during the middle of the sermon. “Hey Sarah, come accompany me while I sing this hymn.” I was that person as a middle school, high school student.
Sarah: And you know what, as I look back on those six years at that little Baptist church, I think that was the best training I could have had. I mean, yeah, I had great music lessons, I had good teachers, all that good stuff. But that insistence on turning on a dime, of suddenly in the midst of a service, “Oh, here’s the hymn that the Holy Spirit has led me to sing for our altar call.” That kind of stuff. Like, go right now. Do it now.
Sarah: What is it that we’re talking about? Flexibility. Flexibility is where it’s at for church workers.
Bill: Anybody in a ministry setting knows that or is suffering because they don’t.
Why You (and Your Church) Needs to Practice Flexibility
Sarah: But I think it’s something where we need it, but we might not realize that we need it until we’re actually in ministry. And so I think a lot of times, people are like, “I was a religion major and then I did an MDiv and I’ve done some CPE, but I haven’t really spent years in the trenches.” You might not think of this as a skillset that you have to consistently develop in your life and be intentionally even seeking out opportunities for developing your personal flexibility. You might not think this is something that you really need because probably your teachers never told you that you need this, even though it’s so fundamental to the work that we do.
Bill: It is. And in my experience, if we don’t have some base level of flexibility, it may affect us physically. It certainly affects us emotionally. And it can have real negative consequences on our interaction with the congregation. It gives us a leg up in our interactions with people. And how we can help a congregation engage in ministry in just innumerable ways, that we need. I’m serious, if you don’t learn to be flexible – I also like to throw in the word nimble – I think you shrivel up and die in ministry. And churches shrivel up and die if they don’t learn this as well.
Sarah: This is kind of like a pro and a con. Probably most people listening to this are “Okay, yeah I see why flexibility is important.” But flexibility is important because of the good things that it brings. I like to think of it as similar to how we think about luck, as in luck is something where the good opportunity comes, and you were ready to take that opportunity. And flexibility is part of what makes you able to embrace things, good things as they come along. But the negative side is that flexibility also helps us avoid a whole host of problems that churches in particular are beset by. I mean, if people in general are reluctant to change, churches are even more so. We are kind of like a concentrated, “All the people reluctant to change get together Sunday morning, 10:00 AM.”
Bill: And we’ll remind ourselves why we don’t like it.
Sarah: So I feel like there’s that “both and” side of things. Like we want to be ready to embrace the good things when they come along, and yet we also want to avoid just being totally stuck in concrete.
Bill: So should I use my great athletic metaphor now? Okay. Physiologically I am one of the most inflexible people you will ever meet. In my more athletic days, I had to spend extra time stretching just so I wouldn’t pull something or rip a muscle or a tendon or ligament. And as I’ve gotten older and less athletic, walking has become my thing. But I’ve learned that if I don’t take time to stretch my calves and my shins, I will develop shin splints because I’m so inflexible that there’s then a physical issue that pops up. And I want to morph this over to churches that don’t take the time to be flexible, to work at flexibility, and all the good things that can offer. Then, as you were saying, have to deal with some negative consequences.
Bill: If a church isn’t flexible enough for a great ministry opportunity when it comes by it, it loses all the potential that that ministry opportunity could have brought to the church. If a church can’t be flexible when the needs of its members change or the needs of its youth and children change, they’re going to lose those. They’re going to lose those members. They’re going to lose the ability to relate to those young people and children. And so paying attention to flexibility, trying to be nimble. Expecially if a church wants to be vital in the 21st century.
Sarah: And how can churches develop their flexibility? How can they learn to be more flexible? I think that starts with church leadership.
Flexibility and Church Governance
Bill: I think it does. It’s church leadership that’s open to change because flexibility and nimbleness often interact with change and yeah, go hand in hand. I think it has to do also, and you’ve heard me get preachy on this but with our governance structures. In my Presbyterian world and now in my experience in the UCC world, how governing boards are put together with officers rotating on and off on three year terms or maybe they can serve a maximum of six years before they have to rotate off for at least a year. It creates this short term mentality. “I don’t want things to fail on my watch. So for the next three years, the next six years, I’m just gonna make sure we keep doing the same thing so that nothing fails.” What this kind of board has lost is the ability to look bigger picture or to look longterm. It’s a maintenance board versus a leadership board.
Sarah: And this can set up a conflict between pastoral leadership who is hopefully having this creative vision for the church and hopefully living into flexibility and quick response to the needs of the congregation and to the leading of the Holy Spirit. But if you have a board that is really not able to see beyond that very short term mindset and that like, “Well, we just need to keep the roof watertight,” that, that kind of thing. It puts a conflict into the very system of the church. It might not even be that the people themselves are in conflict with each other – it’s that the whole system was built on this conflict.
Bill: And I wouldn’t want to blame it on individual board members, but it’s a culture, a board culture where there is this dichotomy created. When I’ve gone into different congregations, my charge is to provide vision to help lead this congregation into God’s future and that runs smack into a board culture that is built upon, “We just gotta survive for the three years or the six years that I’m on without failing, and I don’t care what else goes on.” And maybe “don’t care” as too harsh of an expression, but their vision is limited to that tim they are inactive service. And so pastors and boards are almost set at odds from the get go.
Listening to the Holy Spirit’s Leading
Sarah: Can we bring this to the really important theological thing that’s going on here, which is the openness to the leading of the Holy Spirit. I’m seeing this as something that can be like a pastoral teaching on this topic, but also something that we need to live into what we believe about the Holy Spirit.
Bill: Correct. And I think the Holy Spirit is hard for us to talk about in churches because it’s Spirit. It’s less visible than even a distant Jesus or the God of creation. You know, they at least get some airplay in the Bible. The Holy Spirit is here and there and everywhere, but doesn’t get real solid descriptions. And we don’t have long parables from the Holy Spirit. What we do have, and one of my favorite references to the Holy Spirit is the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10 and 11 where Peter’s having all these great visions that all food is now acceptable. You don’t have to worry about kosher. And then he gets contacted from this gentile Cornelius and his household, “hey, come on and tell us about what God is doing these days. And so Peter goes and tells them, and signs of the Spirit appear, is what the scripture says.
Bill: And in the early church when signs of the Spirit appear, baptism follows. That baptism is in reaction to the Spirit appearing. And so Peter baptizes all these gentiles, thinks nothing of it, and heads back to Jerusalem. And he gets back there, and he’s telling all the gathered leaders of the church in Jerusalem how God has been using him and what the Holy Spirit’s been doing. And he tells the story of baptizing these gentiles and they, everybody freaked out. You did what? Because that act of baptizing somebody who wasn’t a Jew was in violation of the dictates of the Hebrew scriptures. And so the text says there was a big discussion that ensues, and much prayer and that the group that was gathered came to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit was leading the church in new directions.
Bill: And so for me, that’s not just an invitation to flexibility and nimbleness, that’s a requirement for flexibility and nimbleness. If we’re going to take the Holy Spirit seriously and believe that the Holy Spirit is constantly inviting us as God’s people, as disciples of Jesus, into God’s future, we’ve got to be open to that leading and be able to move at the Spirit’s speed, not just at our own speed. “Oh look, the Spirit’s taking us someplace. Let’s form a committee and talk about that for the next 9 to 12 months and then do a survey of the congregation and maybe within three years we’ll be ready to try something new.” That’s not gonna work. The church will be dead before then.
Sarah: I feel like we have like two sides of this that are, are really difficult to navigate. And one is that on one hand, you want to be able to move quickly. You want to be nimble, you want to have the ability to follow the Spirit at the same time. In case anyone couldn’t tell from this podcast, we are not, “one person on the throne of the pulpit, leading the church by the will of God” kind of people. And so I can see how the committees come up, or the church structure comes up as as a means of guarding against that kind of cultish, “We have the one person and we follow that one person’s leading on all things.” But then we also have this thing that flexibility is not – and sometimes people think it is but it’s not – which is that flexibility is not the same as not planning.
Planning for Flexibility
Sarah: Planning is absolutely vital to what you’re doing. You’ve got to plan, you really need to be thoughtful about what you’re doing. You need to think longterm. You need to think short term. But having a plan doesn’t mean that your plan can’t change or that your plan doesn’t have built in built in room for flexibility. It’s kind of like having that open space in your life intentionally saying I’m going to leave some open space in my life so that it can be filled with wherever God leads me. And in the church we can do that. Also in the church planning structure, we can have that built in. You know, this is so mundane: I’ve got all these anthems planned for the year. Well I know I’m going to be able to add a few, in part because I’m intentionally leaving room for what I think is the Holy Spirit leading me. So mundane. But this is a really practical way of living into that flexibility.
Bill: Correct. And I think in all our planning, whether it’s as as specific as setting up anthems for particular Sundays or thinking about whether this is the right building for the church or not – in all our planning, somewhere along the way, somebody needs to say, “Where’s the Holy Spirit in all this?” And often in my experience, that’s been part of my role as I’m providing pastoral leadership. But I think it’s got to be more than just the pastor doing that. It’s got to be all the members of the church staff. It’s really got to be all the members of leadership boards. And it would be ideal if it was all the members saying, “Where’s the Holy Spirit in this? Where do we sense the Spirit is taking us?” Because in my good Presbyterian theological background, we believe that the Holy Spirit will take us places as a group of believers that’s greater than what we might perceive as individuals. The whole is greater than the sum of our individual parts.
Sarah: And that goes back to the whole culty kind of leader thing, which is that God doesn’t lead one individual person into some wackadoodle direction. I don’t mean to say God cannot lead an individual person, but you know, if the Spirit is moving in a particular direction, it’s not just that one person.
Bill: And I think our scriptural witness is that God tends to work with God’s people. Yes, there are individual leaders that crop up that are very important, but it’s usually within a communal context that God is speaking, and God has moved.
Flexibility Is a Practice
Sarah: Let’s bring this back to where we started. When I was in a church where I was demanded to be flexible, expected to be flexible at all times, I didn’t realize that that’s what I was learning. But now as an adult, as a full time practitioner, I can choose to seek out opportunities for flexibility, and I can live into that kind of “yes” to God, “yes” to the Holy Spirit. “Yes” to God’s people around me in an intentional way. And I think that’s something that we all need to consider. What does that actually look like in real life? We want to be flexible, but what does that actually mean Sunday to Sunday, week to week.
Bill: What does it mean without having to become the church’s primary musician when you’re in sixth grade?
Sarah: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s just an example of like how flexibility is a practice.
Bill: How do we all develop that openness, or create that openness, because it does take practice. It doesn’t just happen.
Sarah: The lesson here is that it is a practice. And just because, “Well I did that one flexible thing this one time” does not mean you’ve learned this thing. It’s kind of like going to the gym. “Well, I went to the gym once, so now I’m an athlete.”
Bill: So this is an ongoing thing. Practice. I’d be interested if any of our listeners have practices that help them with flexibility and nimbleness. Are there things they do that are intentional, or are there things they’ve just figured out?
Sarah: I’m being open to how people are going to answer questions in ways that I don’t expect. I do when I ask people in the church if they want to participate in the music program with their instrumental gifts. And I don’t know what’s going to come from that. I don’t know what piece they’re going to bring in. That’s a one specific thing, but the practice of asking for something, not knowing what you’re going to get, is a practice of flexibility.
Bill: This summer in our worship services where we’ve been working on creativity and faith formation, one of the things we’ve tried to do is invite people to offer testimony. And the instruction I’ve given is, “Talk about a moment in your life where faith was really important to you or where you felt yourself connected to God in a unique way.” And we haven’t known what we were going to get. And each testimony has been very different than the others, but each has been so powerful and so meaningful. And the surprise, I think for us who plan these services, has been the vulnerability that those testimonies have invited in the congregation.
Sarah: This is kind of going back to, you plan and then there’s the flexibility that comes into your plan. And so we can plan all these testimonies, I can plan all this music stuff or whatever it is. You can plan your sermon series, but you don’t know what’s going to happen, how things are going to change. And you want to be able to respond to that.
Bill: That’s right. And I’ve said to everybody “three to five minutes,” and I don’t think there’s anybody that’s even close to five minutes. So we’ve needed to be flexible. But it’s been so worth it.
The Holy Spirit Is Worth It
Sarah: It’s like the Holy Spirit is worth it or something.
Bill: Gosh, what a concept. Maybe that’s where we ought to leave things. The Holy Spirit is worth it, folks. You heard it here first.
Sarah: So email us calledpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. We would love to hear from you.
Read of the Week: Gossip by Rocky Supinger
Sarah: And now we have our reads of the week. Bill, you want to lead off?
Bill: Yeah,I’ve got a brief read. You’ve heard me mention this person before, but Rocky Supinger and his blog, Yo Rocko, he blogs five days a week and there’s been a recent post that that really hit me. It was talking about gossip and, and how we have to be so careful that we’re not the source of gossip or the gossiping we’re doing is not within the systems that we’re operating in, so that we don’t tear those systems down. And then the last sentence in this post says “Reconciliation starts with prevention.” And so I think what Rocky’s trying to say is, maybe we don’t need to gossip in the first place. And that if we want to be reconciled to each other in the systems in which we operate, if we want to be reconciled to God, it begins with our not gossiping, with our preventing that by paying attention to our words all the time. Because words have consequences.
Sarah: That starts in childhood.
Bill: Yeah. And you know, it’s the sticks and stones type lesson. Those things seem trivial almost, but they’re so vital, so important.
Sarah: You know, I was recently working on something with my son who’s a preschooler. And he’s not at the stage yet because he’s three, but later on in preschool, apparently becomes really normal for kids to say, “you’re not invited my birthday party.” As like a,” I don’t like you, I’m unhappy with you” kind of thing.
Bill: I’m cutting you off from the cupcakes!
Sarah: I think that if we’re thinking early prevention, that’s where those lessons start. Thinking about like, well how do your words hurt other people? How do they help other people? And maybe when you’re three, four or five, you don’t really care how they help or hurt other people cause you’re really self-centered. But I think part of the project of working with our young people in our families and in our churches is helping them imagine how other people respond to their words.
Bill: Well and obviously we’re living in America in a time culturally and politically where a lot of our leaders aren’t paying attention to their words and we see the destruction. If they had any ability to self reflect, I think they would step back and say, “Oh this isn’t helpful or this isn’t healthy for the larger whole.”
Read of the Week: The Color of Life by Cara Meredith
Sarah: This is the perfect segue into my read of the week. The book is The Color of Life: A Journey Toward Love and Racial Justice by Cara Meredith. It’s is a memoir written by a white woman, Cara Meredith, who is married to a black man and has biracial children. And her father-in-law is the civil rights activist, James Meredith.
One thing that really impressed me in this memoir is how Cara Meredith was able to learn from things that she had thought, things that she had never even considered, and grow as a person, even as an adult.
She started out as a person who would be like, “Well, you know, I’m not racist because I don’t see color” and has ended up in a very different place in life. So for me as a white woman who has a biracial child and is in a biracial marriage, that perspective was really interesting for me in the book. But especially in how Cara grew as a person through her experience and was able to learn different ways of thinking and different ways of being in the world than she had been raised.
And the other thing that I think is really interesting, depending on the backgrounds of all y’all listening to this, is that she grew up thinking that to be not racist was to be colorblind. And I realized I didn’t actually grow up like that – my older brother is Hispanic, and I was aware of race at a really early age.
So for me reading this book, it was just really interesting as someone who didn’t grow up in a colorblind household to just understand someone’s experience growing up that kind of way.
And I bet there are other people out there who didn’t grow up in a colorblind household and are just kind of like, “Well, how would you even, how would you live like that? How would you come to that kind of cultural understanding of race?” And so I think for those two kinds of readers, it very interesting and a thoughtful kind of book.
Outro
Sarah: So that’s it for this week’s installment of Called. Look for new episodes on the first and third Tuesdays of the month.
Bill: You can find our show notes at calledpodcast.com and if you’re enjoying the show, please share it with your ministry buddies. That is a great way for them to find the show.
Sarah: And please leave a review of the show wherever you listen to podcasts. We appreciate your feedback.
Bill: I’m Bill Smutz.
Sarah: And I’m Sarah Bereza.
Bill: Until next time, cut out the bs and embrace the good.
