Full Stop

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been going through something. I still don’t know how to name it, and I’m still having trouble even describing it. The best that I can do is to refer to it as an internal shift, though I’m still struggling to grasp what exactly is shifting.

Here are a few characteristics of the shift:

• A growing awareness of just how quickly the shrinking of my denominational tradition is occurring, along with a growing anxiety and sadness about it.
• An increased annoyance and even anger at the buzzwords and jargon that are usually trotted out in response to that decline, including lots of talk about “becoming nimble” and “making room for something new to emerge,” and blah blah blah, usually because…
• …there isn’t always a real tangible plan for pursuing whatever that “something new” is. The mere phrase is meant to be the comfort, rather than indications or actions toward bringing a real new thing into being.
• My long-present frustration that we’ve had opportunities to embrace new methods for decades, but have ignored or scoffed at them under the assumption that we’d exist forever, and it’s only those church traditions that do such things.
• An almost exclusive interest in harder forms of music. Such a taste has always been part of my palette, but various forms of metal have been a mind-quieting source of respite these past few months. (I know that this is related to the others, if for no other reason than because the music expresses how I’ve been feeling about all of this, and also the general state of the world.)

Two recent articles have given voice to these churning thoughts and emotions as well. The first is by my friend Katherine Willis Pershey:

I am desperate for mainline churches to shake off any privileged lethargy and spiritual malaise they might be experiencing. I pray for a renewal of conviction and confidence in the resurrected and ascended Christ.

That phrase “privileged lethargy” perfectly describes some of my recent frustrations, and I was glad to receive it from her. The rest of the article is very good, as are the articles her article is reacting to.

The second article is by Daniel Pioske in a recent issue of The Christian Century regarding the closure of a Lutheran seminary:

Communities, including ecclesial ones, rise and fall, particularly in times of pronounced social upheaval. The ELCA is not alone among deteriorating church bodies, nor is my generation alone in the sense of loss it confronts. But what is unique to our experience is that as we watch the wreckage rise around us, holding the hand of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, we are told to understand such developments as nimble, strategic, and bold.

There is something more at work here than another denomination falling into dissolution. The overwhelming impression this moment conveys is that my generation has been cast as stewards of decline, our energies and resources used to stay the senescence that has taken hold of the body, devoted to prolonging its life, dutifully and without question, while our own lives slip gradually away. If we ask what the previous generation has handed down to us of what was safeguarded for them, the answer appears to be incapacitated institutions, their communities worn thin. Worse, the decay is concealed by marketing slogans designed to dull our sense of what is true and what is not.

This watching the wreckage build while papering over it with buzzwords, this realization that my generation of ministers have become stewards of decline, has lately been hitting me harder than it has in my previous 20 years of ministry.

I was once a purveyor of jargon and a champion of church influencerspeak, and now that I have been embroiled in such work in a different way via my position at the UCC National Ministries, I’ve become weary and wary of such an approach, especially when such stewarding of decline only has the jargon without a follow-up plan. Nowadays I would rather block it all out with the latest Lamb of God or Imminence album and leave The Discourse to those who still want to engage it in the usual way.

For all of these reasons, I am especially looking forward to my 2-month sabbatical from my denominational position. As I recently wrote, I didn’t come up with much of a plan for this time, mostly because my Doctor of Ministry program came up with one for me. I’ll be reading and writing and studying for that, and it will certainly be enough.

But I’ve also decided that this will be a time for me to step away from The Discourse. I need to engage it as part of my work, but I just flat out admitted on the podcast that I’m burned out on it at the moment. I need to have the energy and creative spark to continue, but that fire is burning awfully low right now.

So as part of that stepping away, I won’t be blogging in May and June. I won’t be podcasting, either. And I’ll be keeping my distance from social media, although I’m sure I’ll allow myself occasional check-ins.

But this feels like a good time to make a full stop to my usual content creation in order to recharge for the ongoing work. That’s what a sabbatical is supposed to do, anyway. I don’t expect that I’ll be able to re-embrace the buzzwords or engage the conversation in the same way afterward, but I don’t anticipate that being a negative, either.

So here’s to a true sabbatical from almost all the things. I expect that I’ll have plenty to write and talk about when I return in July.