I’m heading North to a festival in Minnesota for the next couple days. I’m doing a very short set of music and then talking about Compassion International - all of this just before the headliners for the night. The festival doesn’t have video capabilities (to play a Compassion video) or a speaker that works with Compassion so I’m the representative/talker/guy for Compassion at the festival.
A little nervous about that. There are thousands of folks at festivals you know? Not the hundreds I’m used to. But there is also funnel cake, and this, while no help on stage, comforts me none-the-less.
I’ll have lots of downtime so I hope to make a video or two. Maybe I’ll get to interview some artists or something or the folks selling really really bad Christian t-shirts. Maybe I could chat with the uberbloggers Mercy Me. Or maybe I’ll just consume my body weight (no jokes please) in funnel cake. Better: How about a funnel cake eating contest between me and Bart of Mercy Me. I could take him. Seriously, I can down me some funnel cake. FUnnel cake is no respecter of Grammys. It cares not.
Speaking of which, Bart has a new solo CD I’ll be buying my mamma (Shh, don’t tell). She’s a big Bart fan. Go grab one for yourself.
I have an idea but I’ll need a rockstar Flash expert to pull it off. This job pays. Let me know if you’re interested. It would be great if you live in the Nashville area so we could meet face to face about this. Free food will definitely be involved.
Last night at my gig I said something about how we’re saved to bring the kingdom to earth, to fix what’s broken, and part of that is caring for the poor. I pointed out that 80% of American pastors say they’ve never spoken about the poor, though there are more verses in the bible concerning the poor than there are concerning heaven and hell - and there’s no shortage of talk about those two places.
It was a different kind of gig for me. A pastor was supposed to pontificate between my songs and the audience was supposed to ask questions. There wasn’t a whole lot of either - which was fine - but after my bit about poverty and the silence of pastors one audience member did ask a hard question. “Why don’t we hear more about the kingdom and poverty in church?”
I looked at the pastor to see if he wanted to take a stab at that and he nodded me on. And I went on. If I had another shot at answering I could be more coherent and complete I think. My rambling answer’s been bugging me all night long. So, here’s another attempt.
THREE REASONS
In my experience, when a pastor explains to me why he won’t allow me to speak about poverty at his church, it is because of one of three reasons.
First, the pastor may have a financial need he perceives as more important than the needs of the poor. These have been everything from the need for an upgraded sound system to the need to get started on phase four of a building program.
Second, the pastor may not understand how connect poverty and kingdom come issues are to all of scripture and therefore worry about how to connect the topic to the worship music set, the announcements, baptism and other elements of the Sunday morning service. A pastor once told me it was too big of a downer subject for Sunday morning, meaning, I took it, relative to the rest of what his church service usually contains.
Third, the pastor may feel that it is inappropriate and/or offputting to his people and especially to visitors for him to ask them to give time or money beyond the usual church offering, believed to be ten percent (not at all a New Testament figure, but that’s another post). A pastor once told me he’d just asked his people to get involved in vacation bible school, to volunteer, and he didn’t want me to then talk about poverty with them because he didn’t want to make another “ask.” Of course he did make another ask - he passed the offering plate as usual and out of that offering he paid for air-conditioning and his salary etc. That ask seemed necessary to the purpose of the church and meeting the needs of the poor did not.
ONE PROBLEM
So, in the end, I think the main reason
pastors I’ve encountered are reluctant or unwilling to talk about poverty in church is because they are uninformed, not because they are unloving. The central role of the needy in the story of the kingdom come, and the present tense right-now nature of the kingdom, was not taught to them or impressed deeply enough while the necessity to administrate a church as a CEO/CFO does has been deeply pressed into them. So their own “needs” supersede, at times, the needs of the poor and the coming of the kingdom - The greatest need of the CEO/CFO/pastor sometimes being to please the congregation.
As the Church Administration Handbook taught to me in Baylor University’s religion department states, a pastor has the “need to budget, subscribe the budget, and use the funds from this limited resource in keeping with the wishes of the congregation.”
SPEAKING TO SPIRITUAL PEOPLE
The reality is though, I’ve experienced over and over again, that the congregation is not upset when asked to help the poor. It is not against their wishes.
Ezekiel tells us it’s the Spirit of God who moves us to obey God’s commands and so anyone with the Spirit in them is not immovably opposed to the will of God or the words written down under the guidance of the Spirit. The task for the person speaking about the poor (pastor, blogger or whatever) is to frame the discussion spiritually, not politically or in purely humanitarian or financial terms - to illustrate persuasively that caring for the poor is deeply inseparably Christian. And, I’ve found, when that’s done, spiritual people the pastor assumed would resent an “ask” are quick to respond to the need they’ve been presented with. The wishes of the congregation, I’ve found, are very much in line with the wishes of God when the values and plan of God are simply explained to them.
Does your pastor ever talk about poverty and the kingdom? If not, kindly ask them why not and let us know what they say. I’m curious if the pastors I’ve known are representative of pastor on the whole.
For a brief time, when I was an opinionated loudmouthed argumentative teen, my mom thought I should be an attorney. They get paid to argue with people, she reasoned. Mom’s smart.
This morning I hit the road at 4AM. (Previously, scientists believed musicians were incapable of standing and walking around at this hour but I showed them.) I drove to Louisville, Kentucky to face a judge on account of a little driving infraction. It wasn’t traffic court. It was criminal court, on account of my little infraction being not so little: I was driving way over the speed limit. You can loose lose your license in Kentucky for such a thing. I live in Tennessee though, and I don’t think Kentucky can take away my license here, but I started talking anyway—like the opinionated loudmouthed argumentative informed verbose persuasive adult I am.
Thank God the prosecutor was a middle-aged Christian female in the South. I know middle-aged Christian females in the South. I have a middle-aged Christian female in the South Jedi/Christian-artist-mind-trick thing I’ve honed over eight years of soft rocking churches packed with middle-aged Christian females in the South.
I got the charges reduced to plain ol’ speeding. And I think I have to play at a seven year-old’s birthday party now. And make balloon animals. I’m not sure what went down really. I went all Perry Mason in the courtroom, called a side-bar, yelled “objection” a couple times, then left my body for a few minutes and when I came to again I was forking over $200 to a disgruntled government employee moving papers around all slothlike behind bullet-proof glass. And somehow 20% of the courtroom sponsored children.
Quite the morning, let me tell ya.
I’m home now. Taking a nap before the gig tonight in the Nashville area. I’ll see some of you there I hope.
