Reflection Roundup: Coming Up for Air
Each week we gather news stories, notable pieces, and other important items for Christian leaders today. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but may not concur. Here are 10 things worth sharing this week.
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1. “Finding Friendship,” for pastors and other ministry leaders, is complicated. Listen as Christianity Today’s The Art of Pastoring podcast features a conversation between pastors Ronnie Martin and Jared Wilson on the nuances of this risky topic and ways we can follow in the footsteps of Christ when it comes to our friendships.
2. The news that “For some pastors, the past year was a sign from God it was time to quit” is very sad. Bob Smietana’s piece for Religion News Service facilitates honesty about the challenges our pastors face as people doing their daily and weekly work in the world’s present moment. Smietana’s article is a useful tool for empathy, containing vital information and a real look at the carnage of the past year. Move forward we must.
3. We say we want to be “real” and acknowledge the power of leading with vulnerability, yet tears are scary for many of us. But in fact “Crying as a spiritual discipline may change how you see the world,” writes Benjamin Perry for Religion News Service. “The power crying has to not only disrupt our own spiritual calcification but to prophetically disrupt the world” may be largely untapped for those of us trying to “hold it all together.” We know we can’t selectively tamp our emotions; remember Pixar’s 2015 movie Inside Out? Athanasius, Ignatius, and Margery Kempe were all living testimonies to the powerful gift of tears. What if we led with this, modeled this, or even built allowance for this practice into a rule of life? What impact might we experience in our friendships as well as our vocations?
4. “Our Longing for Friends” is innate and, I would say, wholly reflective of the holiness human essence reflects. We struggle with it; it’s messy and risky. Turns out it cost our Lord his very life in one sense; in another sense, it was and is for friendship that he chose to give it. How can we rightly deny our need for the very thing by and for which we were created? Author and fourth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, Jake Owensby, makes space to process this question.
5. How pervasive are Western ideas of “selfhood as self-ownership” (acc. John Locke)? In Ministry Matters’s “COVID-19 Upended Americans’ Sense of Individualism and Invited us to Embrace Interconnectedness,” Kristin Girten, associate professor of English at University of Nebraska Omaha, writes “a different view of the self is needed,” and expands the idea that we really do belong to each other.
6. In “Transforming Our Pain,” Jake Owensby reminds, “Love is the only power that will transform our pain and deliver us from violence.” Funny; it seems we’ve heard that somewhere before! Owensby reminds this was the modus of not only Jesus, but also “Howard Thurman, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.” Retribution’s relief is fleeting, and once again we find that “compassion is the path to restorative justice. My own pain is transformed when I stand in solidarity with the pain of another.”
7. This week on Mosaic, minister Daniel McGraw writes “The Importance of Operational Pauses,” which is a consummate melding of the ideas fleshed out in the works above. McGraw describes the lengthening lists of requirements we place upon ourselves, not to mention the distended work day in which “we are returning emails while brushing our teeth.” All of this works together to create this complex idea that we can do it, and we should be able to do it. Sadly (or gladly?), this complex has a clinical name – Messiah – and we are not him.
8. We’re in an in-between time in more ways than one as the nation anticipates the sentencing of Derek Chauvin next month. Jerry Taylor, ACU professor and founding director of the Carl Spain Center on Race Studies and Spiritual Action, speaks with Christian Chronicle editor-in-chief Bobby Ross Jr. for “I prayed that God’s justice … would prevail.” Taylor says, “I think spiritual activism must be the root that gives birth to ‘social activism.’ Therefore, I think social activism becomes authentic when it is rooted and founded and grounded in spiritual activism.” Taylor’s comments continue, emphasizing the togetherness with which we must approach this problem, as peacemakers ruled by the Prince of Peace.
9. Could this be why it seems expedient to add things to our already full life-plates, and so difficult to take things away? What has caused the adult brain to differ from the child’s brain, the one who sees the obvious solution as removal?
10. And finally, hear the true heart for the gospel and deepest respect for the church in Tish Harrison Warren’s “I Got Ordained So I Can Talk About Jesus. Not the Female Pastor Debate.” for Christianity Today.
