Dear Friends

   I'm the associate pastor at Mill Creek Parish in Derwood, MD these days. I have just completed the four Sundays serving in worship while our Pastor Rev. Joan Carter-Rimbach was on vacation.

   I offer the four sermons that I preached there this summer for you to look at if you would like by going to Mill Creek Parish. org. follow the Worship button and see sermons.

   The series is on the vision of Mill Creek Parish, Disciples are MADE at Mill Creek. The four letters represent the ways Discipleship, students of Jesus develop and are encouraged at Mill Creek Parish.

   M stands for Mission

   A stands for Adoration

   D stands for Discipleship

   E stand for Embrace your neighbor

   The four week series of sermons was to high light the four letters and to give encouragement for being involved in each of those areas as those who are developing their following Jesus.

   I recommend you go and watch them.

Thank you, and blessings to you all.

Pastor Jeff

Do I Stay Christian?

    The other day I had lunch with Brian McLaren, an author of many books, and a former neighboring pastor. Our lunch the other day was with 135 of his friends, via zoom, but it did bring back memories of our occasional lunches back in the days when our churches were close by. Brian was presenting his latest book Do I Stay Christian?, coming out next week, on the issues facing Christians who are aware of how much negative publicity and public opinion have come upon Christians lately. It was a fascinating conversation, and I will put that book in my Kindle as soon as it's available. Perhaps I'll do more blogging when I've had a chance read it and reflect upon it.

   The main point is that for some followers of Jesus, the problem is the label "Christian" rather than the commitment to follow Jesus. This problem has occurred over time in other cultures, and in other times in history. We may just face more backlash now because of Social Media and piles of news and stories about fallen Christian leaders. For many very conscientious followers it is very difficult to find ourselves in so much pain. Christian has been a good label for a long time, now not so much.

   If you haven't confronted anyone who says they don't know whether to be Christian or not, or they say they are not religious, but they are spiritual, that's a part of the conversation that I am talking about. I would have to agree, it's a very tough time to be a pastor trying to encourage people to be followers of Jesus, and not be "Christians" because of the negativity associated with this word.

   To give you some ideas, the label gets put with some who attacked the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. For some the label goes with the news that Jerry Falwell has been ousted from his leadership of the largest Christian University because of sexual scandals and objectionable behavior for a Christian University leader. Or maybe it's in the face of several major mega church leaders who have fallen from grace because of sexual unfaithfulness or other accusations of inappropriate behavior as a church leader.

   In other cases it's that there is now an association with"Christian" and racial hatred especially anti non-white people. Whether it be African Americans who have been here over 400 years or new immigrants who have fled the horrors of persecution to come to a better life in the US. Or even toward native American, who have been here for thousands of years, after coming across the land bridge between Russia and Alaska, and then wandering down the coast and across the nations. Many have decried and complained and hurt people who are not white in the name of religion. And yet, our faith is very, very clear we are to welcome the stranger, and to support immigrants as people of faith, because we are to remember, as Scripture reminds us often, that we too were immigrants in Egypt before Moses led the people to freedom.

   In still other cases, the wanting to distance ourselves from the name of Christian, is because there is a lot of anti-science and anti acceptance of truth from scientific resources. Over 1 million citizens died because of Covid. The best prevention is vaccination and yet many church pastors have spoken out in their pulpits against vaccinations. Those outside the church, yet believers, don't want to be connected to that kind of attitude if it represents their faith. Global warming is another topic which some Christians are trying to deny exists, yet Scripture clearly demands that we are responsible and stewards of our mother earth. It becomes the difference between what our Scripture teaches us and what we say and do. The farther apart this is, the more likely people are going to want to get away from Christians.

   Love One Another, is the summary of what Jesus taught. In the years before Christianity changed from being persecuted by the Romans, to making it the official faith of the Empire, was the discovery of how much Christians loved one another, and loved their neighbors, especially in difficult times. Christians nursed sick Romans back to health, when the healthy Romans fled the disease. When the sick recovered, they realized what a blessing being cared for by one who practiced loving one another really meant. It changed the world.

   Now we are in a similar opportunity. With so much strife, hatred, confusion, grief and lack of hope, we need to love one another, more than ever. Maybe we just need to figure out a better way to put a label on our love. Follower of Jesus, may work for a while, and we choose not to mention Christian, so that we don't put a barrier up to being able to share the faith. St. Paul had a lot to say about doing what is needed in order to win some who doubt, over to the Jesus follower side. Try it, you'll like it!

    Blessings

    Pastor Jeff

The Struggle of Low Morale in Churches

 Do you agree that clergy morale is currently at a low ebb? If so, what factors are contributing to this low morale? 

   I would have to agree that clergy morale is low for several reasons. The cartoon/photos of a person juggling a couple of balls to represent Seminary and the photo of several balls in the air to represent the actual church, and the hands reaching out of the ball pit representing the current situation is right on. It was on facebook, I believe.

   One of my contributing factors is that the resources we have to do the ministry we were trained to do has shriveled up. People to volunteer, money to do ministry, and the training to operate in the current situations are all extremely volatile. I was trained 45 years ago by teachers who were themselves in ministry 30 years prior to that teaching. What worked for them has not spanned the distance from their experience to ours in the world today. They taught us what succeeded for them, which I appreciated, but realized, especially recently that mindset is not really available anymore. As the church participants aged, and we are in the most vulnerable to be sick profile, they held back their participation. The loss of gathering for obvious reasons, affected the income sources. The givers in the church responded after a while, but the rental income was severely cut off. Right after the book published to help churches to diversify their income streams to rentals came out, by the way.

   Another major factor in reducing morale, I think, was the challenges related to the political atmosphere and the racial tension in the air. We've probably not been good at those, but the news and the tension in the air, certainly pushed those issues to the surface more readily. The Covid pandemic and the response, or lack of support for the common sense vaccinations and common decency to all wear masks, added to the difficulty of creating a supportive community we once knew was the congregation. The lack of support from media and the highly publicized controversy from religious leaders as well, doomed our chances of working together and hope of seeing any kind of progress. since we are being "results oriented" for so long, can really take its toll on you when all your numbers are going down and look like they will for a while as well.

   Producing quality online services required a great deal of flexibility and a change from a verbal to a visual skill, I think that hurt some who were more verbally skilled and couldn't quite get the hang of everything needed to do quality visuals. Too much was just talking heads for the online experience, rather than the amount of video that was available to help in worship. The abundance of that material required an exorbitant amount of time to review and get permission to use in an online worship experience.

   Another factor is the shriveling of the attention span for most adults. We were trained that a 30 minute sermon was required, especially to use all the background resources and research. Today 7 minutes of attention span or less is available to the average human, camera angles, changes in scenery on all forms of media makes talking to people a burden, if you are not conscious of the need to change focus every 6 or 7 minutes. Being creative in the sermon/message slot took on a whole different approach and not having real comfort in that ability has lowered the morale of preachers.

Finally, what strategies can clergy engage in to help them deal with low morale?

   Our clergy cluster group, all UMC pastors in a region, found that we needed/wanted more time together to help each other, to be a listening and supportive colleague so much more important than just gathering to coordinate church calendars and the requests from the conference for agenda and support items. We offered each other what was working and became less competitive than we had previously.

   I think we are going to need a lot more resources given to us to train us in dealing with the ever changing world views among our communities and parish participants. In our UMC world, we are going to need a great deal more support for the loss of certifiable progress, we have been so numbers conscious, baptism, conversion, small group participation, volunteers, worship attendance, finances, that are all not very good in comparison to former years, can really hurt morale. It is hard for a supervisor to say well done thou good and faithful servant, when it looks like you are seeing the destruction of Jerusalem going on all around you.

   Anyhow, enough ranting and raving. I retired, thinking I could help my church recover some of the income they were paying me. I had a promise of another appointment, thinking I could offer a whole package of ministry for a lot less being retired, that hasn't happened yet, which is affecting my morale too, is all a part of the scene.

   Thank you for listening to all of this.

Pastor Jeff