Nominees announced

The nominees for the next bishop, the bishop ordinary, the chief honcho and hierophant, have been announced.   The news, of course, is that one of the candidates, Tracey Lind, is married to someone of the same sex.  Nothing about her extraordinary competence.  Her reputation is of someone who gets things done, a woman of high expectations.

I’m not sure if she is the best candidate for this diocese or not, but she should be judged on her talent and the quality of her public relationships; not on her partner’s gender.

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The Bills

Over the last few years, we’ve been getting some bills.

It started with false fire alarm bills.  A couple hundred a shot.   Then the rectory was set a sewage bill.  More recently, the city mistakenly invoiced churches a few hundred dollars for a service.

I’m not against charging churches for services.  I think we’re lucky to be tax-exempt, and cities have a right to establish some criteria for churches who benefit from the support of the community.  But as the Wall Street Journal reports, there is a major shift on the horizon, and it will put pressure on our institutions.  Enormous pressure.

About thirty years ago, churches often benefited from the noblesse oblige of wealthy members.  They would sometimes pay down the end of year budget.  They might pay the first check at the beginning of the year.

Ironically, when tax rates were higher, churches probably received more donations from its prosperous members.  But over the last couple of political generations, we’ve not seen a rise in donations among the powerful.

In part because our assumptions regarding how the prosperous spend money are wrong.   Nobody has an instinctive urge to give.   As classes interact less the powerful become a little more arrogant and impatient.

The second is that an individual with money behaves rationally with their money.   Money does not bestow wisdom; it does not insulate from error.  They can be tyrants or indulgent.   They can be whimsical or intentional, magnanimous or miserly.   But there is no reason to idealize their smarts or energy.

What does this have to do with churches paying more bills?   As the “resourced” abdicate their responsibility to maintain the social contract, states are too afraid to ask them to pay their fair share.  This means more will be expected from those who are active in not-for-profits, churches and other institutions that rely on public support.    Lower taxes upon property owners and the well-paid means that we’ll be expected to pay for more.

It’s optimistic to assume that lower taxes mean that people will be more generous with what they do have.  I’m sure some families will do so.  But we are inclined to adjust to our incomes, and at some point what was once an unexpected windfall becomes our perpetual expectation.     It’s easy to think we deserve our wealth, and that we are instinctively generous toward others.   The church, however, teaches that it’s all a gift of God, and that we our generosity is never enough, except through His grace.

I think there might be good criteria to keep ourselves off the public dole; but we’ve implicitly rejected the idea that there is a common good worth having, or that the prosperous might willingly sacrifice for the sake of others.   The survival of the third sector economy, and its ability to take care of the least fortunate, requires the commitment of all stripes.  But alas, too many think they give enough.

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Nun Embezzles

Every now and again one of my “anti-” religious friends sends me an article of some priest doing wrong.  In conversation they are usually polite, but inevitably the link has to do with bad clergy, bad religion, or an atheist insight they guess I’ve never heard.

Recently a nun was charged with embezzling at a local Catholic college.

Of course, I’m always disappointed, frustrated and saddened whenever this happens.  Not just because it’s bad for the institution and the individuals who are hurt, but because it affects me.

Whenever a priest or a nun is accused of a crime, of any denomination or tradition, it wears off a little.  I become embarrassed and ashamed, even though I did nothing wrong.  A conviction of one priest, and we’re all convicted.  One accusation, and we’re all accused.

I don’t think that one’s religion or faith has much to do with why or when a crime is committed.  It may be that, as churches are fundamentally trust-based institutions- it’s easier to commit crimes without being detected.  It’s easier to avoid the normal controls that businesses have.

Plenty of churches operate more responsibly.  The Episcopal church, by and large, has systems to encourage churches to monitor their money.  The priest in my church, for example, doesn’t count the money – in fact, the entire vestry is trained to do the work instead.  We have two, not one, treasurers, so that power isn’t in the hands of one person.  My discretionary account isn’t separated from the main account, and is easily tracked by the wardens.  Churches are required to have audits.

And when someone gives me cash, I remind them of a simple rule:  never give a priest cash.  I remind them that the $20 will either sit on my dresser, or be a part of my clergy beer fund, to which I buy rounds of drinks for anyone who joins me.

Priests often feel that they work hard, and are undercompensated.  When they are disconnected from their own congregations, they justify to themselves taking a couple dollars here and there.   It’s an insidious cycle.

It is one reason dioceses encourage churches to compensate parish priests enough so that they do not have to be stressed, worried or resentful.  Nobody becomes rich when they decide to enter the ministry – we are fully aware that we won’t have a Mercedes, send our children to Switzerland for skiing trips, and routinely go to fancy restaurants.  It is enough to have a wage that is just, that allows a priest to have a family without being afraid of what the next day brings.

Jesus sacrificed his life, so that we would not have to.

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Juan Williams

Juan Williams, a reporter and analyst has been fired.  I don’t think it was because of his admission of bigotry, but for confusing confessional with analysis.

I’m one of those who have found him irritating on NPR.  He’s found a niche becoming the moderate, the centrist, the skeptical liberal.  I found his analysis of Obama particularly grating, a little churlish and usually pedestrian.   Too often he takes a David Brooks-like attitude: a little self-righteousness, a little smarmy, a little slippery, and usually patronizing.  The smartest kid in the class, who never had to learn from anybody, surrounded by the rest of us idiots.

It wasn’t always the case.  Once he was a reporter, and a very good one.

But I also sometimes enjoyed watching him on Fox.   He was the token liberal, a little more aggressive and thoughtful than Alan Colmes, trying to understand the conservative mindset without getting in too deep.

The quote that began this kerfuffle was kind of like the liberal who says, “hey, we’re all racists, right?”  Williams then didn’t defend racism but challenged O’Reilly to reconsider his views.  He honestly tried to change O’Reilly’s mind.

Self-revelation is one way we try to describe what is true.  Sometimes, such as in group therapy, it is useful.  It is not part of the traditional culture of public debate.   Perhaps NPR could have quietly suggested that he’s got to find other ways to share his analysis.

I can’t help but think that there were already plenty of people thinking of ways to get him out of NPR, and this was just an excuse, the final straw, an opportunity to cut him loose.  After all, he’s been a headache for NPR for a long time.

I won’t miss him, but I think he’s been wronged.  An apology and a reprimand would have been enough.  That said, now that he’s been fired by NPR, perhaps his credibility among conservatives will soar.

But please, Juan, handle this like with magnanimity and grace.  Handle this as if you’d like your job back.  Don’t feed into the madness.

The NPR Ombudsman argues the firing could have been handled differently, although it was probably legitimate.

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God Loves a Bully

Over the last few weeks, several teens over the last few weeks have committed suicide.  The pundits and the prophets have been reflecting about the problem of bullying.

To some, the current discussion seems different than the everyday cruelty of a group of teenagers or children testing out their power, their desire to determine who is in and who is out.  It may be how easy technology connects us to each other and makes harming others easy.  Give a teen ager a cellphone, a twitter account and Myspace and it’s hard to avoid the potential for taunting, teasing and emotional brutality.

Most of us have experienced fickle friendships, inconvenient infatuations, and the occasional betrayal, and  the disinvitation to a party.  It’s not just those who played Dungeons and Dragons and ran the math team; the awkward, poor and pudgy.   Even the talented find themselves harassed by the envious and resentful.

But bullying isn’t just a confined to high school or prisons.  A waitress related the story of a internet tycoon who threatened to have her fired waving around a couple dollars, declaring his superiority; the unemployed are taunted by those who shout at them, “can’t you just get a job?”

The teased are offered advice:  walk away; ignore the bully; say “thanks for sharing” and roll your eyes.   But when these become impossible, the victim becomes both enraged and powerless, at which point they turn upon themselves.
The heart of the Christian story is about bullying, although a more academic word could be “scapegoating.”    The victim takes the place of the rest of the class, who is terrified of breaking the rule of power the bully has.    One person bullies and the others follow.

And the consequence of standing up for oneself, or for others, is intrinsically risky.  It requires being strong enough to tell the truth; to resist manipulation; to take the side of someone who is defenseless.   That strength is learned, and it is fostered through love, the encouraging support of family and friends who can’t always be present.

Christians have themselves been bullies.   Our anti-semitism, gay-baiting and alliance with racial supremacists have enabled sorts of Christians to justify all sorts of cruelty.  And yet, it would take a certain kind of blindness not to see that how progroms, gay-bashing and lynching are analogous to the cross.   The cross signifies this:  we scapegoat people, and it does not have to be that way.  Any religion that denies the brutal fact of this all too human tendency also denies our own inclination and power to hurt others, if only to protect ourselves.

There are good reasons for us to turn away from the cross.   To be so humiliated, diminished, embarrassed is to suck the life out of someone; to render them ashamed and powerless.     This is one reason the cross was so offensive to imperial religion.  Jesus remained weak and powerless – all too human.  What kind of God is this?  A bullied one.  And nobody wants to be on that side.

His response, of course, was remarkable.   It was not to punish those who crucified him; rather, he instead said, “peace be with you.”   The mark of those who follow Christ would be fearlessness in standing against injustice; and reconciliation with those who killed him.  We need not be afraid of the bully; we may pity them.  Instead of fear, a transformation – and an offering of mercy.

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Renegade Priest

It looks like there’s a renegade priest in St. Louis.

It started as a property dispute (isn’t it always, really, about money?).  A parish, with enormous private resources, is worried the archdiocese will spend the parish’s money to pay for diocesan scandals.  They refuse to hand over the money.  So the archdiocese withholds communion.  And then a young progressive priest, Marek Bozek, then holds renegade masses.

He gets excommunicated.

But he still says mass.   He starts sharing what he really thinks.  The church grows.

Clearly the church didn’t recognize  that the parish didn’t trust them.   They simply said, “hand over $8 million.  We know what to do with it.”  It doesn’t sound like they gave the congregation any alternative or included them in the decision making.  That’s arrogance.

They also didn’t seem to understand that withholding communion would not be a particularly effective way to… build trust.

By pushing the envelope and behaving with a heavy hand, the laity has found some new power.  They’ve also shown they’re willing to tell the archdiocese to “shove it.”   Why?  Because there’s no evidence the archdiocese gives a damn about its flock.

It may be that there is a cult of personality around Fr. Bozek.  That is often what happens when the order, the diocesan bureaucracy becomes an object of scorn.    It may be what currently sustains the parish, and it’s current vitality may not survive without him.  But with some charity, forgiveness, and a little humility, the church might find some creative solutions to this mess.

Still, the archdioceses’ current behavior is shameful, a perfect example of why there are so many frustrated RC laity.

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Church Building RIP.

Today the AP came out with the following report.

About halfway through Sunday service at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, as worshipers passed around the collection plate, a chorus of screams pierced the air.

Chunks of the ceiling in the 52-year-old church near Hickory came crashing down on the crowd of 200 or so, striking about 14, who were later treated and released from nearby hospitals. A jagged piece of the ceiling, roughly 10 feet by 10 feet, dangled from exposed wires over the back pews as deacons struggled to guide panicking worshipers from the building.

“My jaw just dropped,” the Rev. Antonio Logan said. “I thought, ‘This can’t be real.'”

Yes.  Real.

Church buildings are an albatross around the church’s neck, especially for small congregations who have, as the cliche has it, an “edifice complex.”

Such a complex would be OK – but many parishioners are not in the habit of funding it; and newcomers haven’t built up a commitment to the church.  And sometimes it takes years.

To fund staff, maintenance, AND church growth is expensive, which is why church plants are often easier than church turnarounds.

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The Tea Party

I’m in the midst of doing some community organizing in my county, and I’ve been struck by the contrast between the work I’ve been doing and what is happening in the tea party “movement.”

Some interesting social analysis has been done about them.  Most of the tea party is white.  They don’t want to be told what to do.  It represents the hyperindividualism that reflects part of our cultural consciousness, and the more recently cultivated antagonism toward the behemoth that is The Government.

Reasonable people can critique the “therapeutic state” and its diminishment of civil liberties.   Institutions, after all, engineer cultures (did you know that the English propensity toward tea was based primarily on a conscious decision to prefer Tea corporations to Coffee corporations?).   Anger toward corporations, generally, is well placed, even if tea partiers aren’t that consistent.

But the tea party, which seems proud that there is little leadership or organization, seems to be blind about the nature institutions, government and the public.  Their view is of the mass, “taking over” which is more like the cultural revolution (choose any) than of getting work done.

The tea “party” ignores that politics is about people in institutions.  Joe Schmoe is just a dude spouting off about paying taxes.  He’s got some anecdotes, and he’s pissed, but just because he knows his car’s broken doesn’t mean he knows how to fix it.   It just looks like another narcissistic blowhard who doesn’t know who’s responsible for his lowered standards.

Good Government requires some leadership and management skills.  Politicians will make difficult decisions.  If tea partiers don’t want leaders, and don’t think government should manage, their task is going to be incredibly challenging as they get stuck in their internal bickering.   They will perpetually seek a consensus that will never emerge.

No government will make everyone happy.   Kenneth Arrow showed, in my view, decisively that there is no perfect government or economic system.  Someone will feel screwed.   Perhaps the rich will find some of their money confiscated; or the middle class will find their pensions cut.  Sometimes liberty wins, sometimes security.  But in a democracy we live together whether we win, or lose.   Although I talked, admittedly, about emigrating to the Netherlands after Bush won a second election.

Leaders will inevitably disappoint some people.  It’s the nature of leaders that they get hit, that they compromise, and choose between two bad, or two good, decisions.   A tea party that isn’t sure what it wants, besides being left alone, and resists any leader trying to compromise between the various publics, will find itself just another discussion group, a loud mob unable to accomplish anything.

I have not been worried about the tea party because they do not take organizing seriously.  In someways, they are like some parts (not all, of course) left – get people angry, hold a couple marches, find some politician who says what you want to hear. The hard work of engaging communities, discerning their values, discovering what keeps people up at night, and then acting upon it, is substituted for quick fixes.  Like corporations, politicians and even some progressives, the tea party thinks there is a quick fix, and that is to vote the bums out.

It doesn’t work like that.  It’s one reason I fell in love with the church. Granted, plenty of priests try to find quick fixes.  The daily life of church, however, resists it. Although I believe there may need to be a reboot of the church,  bodies of people coming together are what the church does.  Perhaps we have not done so well at that over the last 30 years.  We’ve not been able to manage within the new economy of attention.  I don’t think it’s hopeless, but I do think it will require a different kind of work.  The tea-party illustrates what we should not be doing.

I’m not hard on the tea party.  As a reformed anarchist, I’m actually sympathetic, aside from it’s loose resentments that stem from race populism.  I wish that there were some elected officials who would really challenge the economic system.  As it is, some of the tea party officials seem like stooges for state capitalism.    Which is a lot different than democratic capitalism.

One of the reasons I think that democracy, and capitalism, are fruits of some hard consequences of Christian morality is because, in the case of democracy, we learn to lose some times; and when we win, we treat the losers with respect.  Battling things politically is far better than fighting a civil war.  In capitalism, we coordinate desires, trusting in each other’s ability to share goods (I’m not talking about the system of high finance).  They are held in tension – sometimes they contradict each other.   And then we should be able to learn to choose.

The tea party needs to learn how to live within the former.

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Ernesto Cortes, Jr.

I was recently reminded about this fellow.

When one woman asks him to explain how he “motivates” people to support a cause with actions as well as words, the storm rolls in. Cortés can scarcely conceal his impatience. “Perhaps I prejudge you unfairly,” he begins, “but when I hear your question, what I think you’re really saying is, ‘How can I convince people to do what’s good? How do I get them to do what’s right? How do I get them to follow my agenda?’ ” He pauses, frowning. “That’s not organizing. What I mean by organizing is getting you to recognize what’s in your best interest. Getting you to recognize that you have a child, that you have a career and a life to lead, and that there are some things that are obstacles to the quality of your life. I need to get you to see how you can affect those things through relationships with other people. And it’s only going to happen if you engage in some kind of struggle.”

He pauses to let it all sink in. “We organize people not just around issues, but around their values,” he says. “The issues fade, and people lose interest in them. But what they really care about remains: family, dignity, justice, and hope. We need power to protect what we value.”

In churches, we call this asset based congregational development.  Begin where people are, not where you think they should be.

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The Pygmalion Effect

One aspect about church life is that when a congregation believes it can accomplish great things, they are more apt to do the work necessary to get there.  This is not the Law of Attraction, or The Secret.   But such confidence allows goals to be broken down into manageable tasks.    It is not a quick fix, nor is success guaranteed.  New challenges arise even in the midst of success.  We’ve done a great job at St. Barts at balancing the budget, but there’s always another pipe that needs to be fixed.

This idea is called The Pygmalion effect.  Expectations orient results.  Leaders who trust and enable their congregation will have greater success than those who withhold authority.   Students do better with teachers who believe in them. Children respond differently after getting hurt with a parent who expects tears, and a parent who expects tenacity.    It affects creativity as well – feeling like a sucky writer will not make one a better writer.  Writing with encouragement will get the work done.

Not to say that there aren’t times people truly get hurt.  Sometimes we need… improvement.  But a perspective that allows for opportunity and openness is frames our choices we see before us.  It’s not a matter of promoting optimism:  but if I trust my volunteers, we’re likely to do more than if I don’t trust them.  People can rise up to each other’s expectations.  There can be a great transformation.

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