HOW TO PASTOR IN AN ANXIOUS CONGREGATION
(I am drawing upon Brene’ Brown’s work on vulnerability and applying it to the work of ministry.)
Anxiety is a response to what William Butler Yeats spoke of in his poem The Second Coming: “Things fall apart, the center does not hold.” When we feel the ground shift beneath our feet, whether personally or globally, it is as if we have lost control. Our sense of security dims, and we begin to feel helpless to affect the outcome. We have been examining the evidence of distrust in our society that has left us with a pervasive experience of anxiety.
THREE BASIC RESPONSES TO ANXIETY
Brown suggests that there are three basic responses that communities make in response to feeling anxious and vulnerable.
1. They want to make uncertainty into certainties.
They are not interested in questioning, exploring, or theorizing about problems. They want answers–Clear, direct, unambiguous answers. The popularity of fundamentalism and the rise of cults build on that need for certainty in an age of uncertainty. Someone must know the inside secret to how we can solve our problems.
2. They measure things, people, institutions, and communities by the criteria of perfection.
Things should be perfect. If they are not perfect, someone else is being evil. There are no excuses. Only perfection is acceptable. We want our children to be perfect, our spouses to be perfect, our doctors, business people, and politicians to be perfect, and mistakes are not acceptable.
Grace is a nice concept, but we expect our pastors to be perfect pastors and our churches to be successful in all their programs.
3. They refuse to accept responsibility for the consequences of their decisions on other people’s lives.
No general ever looked at the video of the children playing in the city when he decided to order bombing that city. No Senator or member of Congress looked into the eyes of a suffering returned veteran or a small homeless child right before they voted to slash the budget and eliminate programs to assist them. No CEO counted the human cost for the workers when cutbacks were decided or when s/he accepted huge salaries in place of modest raises for those who worked for the company.
Few churches or denominations make pronouncements while being fully aware of the effects that such decisions will have on those who feel excluded by the vote.
Excerpt from Being Pastor in an Anxious Society
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all too true