Tag Archives: Marriage

No. You don’t want your uncle Jimmy to get ordained online to do your wedding.

Posted in Culture, Leadership, Millennials by

white-wedding-1

Snark MeterrealMID.003

It is trendy to have someone you know buy an online ordination and do your wedding ceremony. Every year I have multiple (otherwise solid) Christians contact me to ask where and how to find the “least weird” way to be ordained. Here is my response:

It is an honor to be asked, and good on you for wanting to make it as right as possible. Unfortunately, what you are asking just isn’t. Would you ask a teacher help you get a “less weird” online teaching certificate? Or a doctor to help you get a “less weird” online medical license? Getting ordained through Billy Bob’s Online Church of the Twenty-Buck Blessing may seem like a good idea, but it overlooks the training and experience needed to do a wedding well. A teacher does more than pull off classroom management as a one-time substitute, and a doctor more than demonstrate mastery of the tongue depressor in a routine visit. In the same way, a pastor does much more than simply read a wedding service.

Your friend will be putting someone who has never done a wedding in charge of the single most expensive and important party of their life. Will they also be asking a friend who takes nice Instagram pics to be photographer? A minister is air-traffic control. They make all of the many parts and people move in coordination. Brides are under a lot of stress. They do not need a rookie at the helm.

More than that, a non-ordained friend doing the ceremony is a bad setup for the marriage. Marriage is a sacred act originating in the mind of God. Marriage is tough. It needs God’s participation to have more than a Powerball player’s chance of making it after you scratch the ink off and see what resides below the surface of each of us. There are important roles in a wedding a friend can handle, but when it comes to making the vows, you want to have every bit of oomph possible behind those promises. You want a couple, even ones without faith involvement, to say, “I promised God and God’s representative in front of all of my friends and family in that church that I will love this girl/boy no matter how bad a time I am having of it. I’d better make good on this!”

Do them a favor, ask them to find someone duly ordained. Probably not what you wanted to hear. 🙂

Matt

Usually my friends then respond with: That’s a lot to think about, but my niece/friend/neighbor is really important to me. I’m the only Christian they know and being connected to a church isn’t a priority for them. I think this is a great opportunity for me to ask some good, tough questions to her and her fiancé. Don’t you? 

I love your heart. You don’t want an online ordination.

You are wise to see your friends’ need for preparation. Marriage preparation from someone who is in a good marriage, like yours, is a good thing. But why not also connect them with someone who has helped lots of marriages? Good churches typically do a 4-6 session pre-marital course. Your friendship gives you traction to say, “Trust us, you want one more person involved: a real pastor…with their experience, preparation program, and the encouragement of other couples who will also be making new marriages work. All of that will be really helpful!”

On top of that, encourage them to try a church. You and I have both experienced the support and perspective that faith and a multi-generational church community has been in keeping the wheels from coming off our marriages when they might have otherwise.

Matt

The friend then generally responds with some version of: “Matt, you really don’t get the situation here. Our friend doesn’t going to church and they aren’t going to. She wants ME to do it and I want to do it because I love them.”
I have learned to have this part of the conversation in person because it looks so snarky in writing:

I have been at this a long time. I actually do know what is going on. 99 couples out of 100 come to clergy and ask for a “great wedding.” The fact that you think you are their best option for that, friend, reveals their need for an actual pastor. It feels good to be asked, and it feels good to give someone what they want. But that doesn’t really help them. Pastors do not to acquiesce to people’s whims and wants, but move naive couples off of the dime of “great wedding” to “great marriage.” The first is a one-off. The second is a lifetime.

I am not saying, “Let a friend down.” I am saying be a great friend: Give them a third party – one who can say things important for their life together, but hard for them to hear. Then you and your wife are free to take the role of wise old married friend confirming the ancient wisdom offered by that pastor.

Many have been burned by the church and ministers, or, not knowing or distrusting the church, have failed to engage. But, to bring this full circle, bad ministers and bad churches do not invalidate the help provided by good ones any more than being harmed by bad public school teachers or bad doctors invalidates teaching or medicine. Don’t fall into the trap of reinforcing the perception of irrelevance of some of the most potentially helpful relationships in their marriage: a church and qualified, called, experienced clergy. Make their circle larger: Include a real church and a real pastor.

Matt

Ordination is not a piece of paper. 

Ordination is a long process that begins when the community sees someone’s calling. A person confirms that call through a period of prayer and community discernment. Then the person endure rigorous preparation that typically culminates in a 3-year Masters of Divinity degree program. After seeing the faithfulness of the person in their faith journey, service, and spiritual preparation, then the church ordains them, setting them apart and asking God to make them, by His grace, up to the task of leading God’s people.

In ordination, the community of faith, below, around, and above invests in a person’s training, and then asks them to, as Eugene Peterson said, “Lash themselves to the mast of Word and Sacrament” on that communities’ behalf. Ordained people pledge to be the one whom, when the storms of life come, the community can count on. They pledge to be there when we are married, when our children are born, when they own their faith, and when we are ill and when we go and meet our maker…and every week in between. It is a sacred covenant between God, the ordained, and a community. Because of our relationship with our clergy: we have an awareness of the sacrifices they have made, and knowing that they literally risk their supper if they offend us, we trust that the occasional hard things they say and we don’t want to hear deserve a listen.

Googling an ordination makes a mockery of that process, real pastors, and the communities that call them. And it doesn’t help the people getting married.

Buying an ordination does two things well: It gives pastors lots of complements from people whose last wedding was officiated at by a bogusly ordained friend, and it feeds a side of the one buying it that really doesn’t need feeding. 

Photo from: wedding photo

The roomy church: Uniting around what unites us.

Posted in Liturgical Church by
Minolta DSC

photo credit: Oh My Apartment. http://tinyurl.com/o4ouzg2

Snark Meter Sorta Snarky.002

A somewhat sarcastic yet serious call to our GC78 delegates to under react.

This post might be the blogospheric equivalent of whistling in the dark. You are pretty sure it won’t really help, but you do it because it makes you feel as if you are at least doing something…

To those of you packing your bags for General Convention let me share a story: Last year I was at the gathering of province VIII ministry leaders. (For non-episcopalians “the province” is episco-speak for one of 9 geographical regions in the Episcopal Church.) At the meeting we were discussing how difficult it is to get folk from the 19 diocese’ and jurisdictions in our province to work together. There was a good deal of frustration at parishes lack of participation in collaborative efforts. We discovered the reason was a lack of understanding of what we were united on. “We aren’t sure other folk are the same kind of Episcopalians we are?” several said. I suggested, “It might help us get buy-in if we had a statement of what we do agree on.” The consensus in the room was that we were such a diverse church that it would be impossible to agree on any kind of a statement. I pushed, “Can the youth people give it a try?” It took one draft and three edits for two liberals, a conservative, and a moderate to hash out a statement of “shared values.” Task completed in one day.

As we showed it around a fascinating thing happened: Other provincial ministry areas saw it and asked if they could use it too. An even more fascinating thing happened when I showed it to two groups of friends. One a group of progressive youth ministers from a variety of traditions (including those the Episcopal Church is in full communion with), the other a group of senior youth directors who lead the group that left us…you know, the grumpy quitters who say we drove them out. Here is where it gets really interesting: Those we are in “full communion” with said, “Those don’t describe us at all.” One, a person with a PhD in theology, said, “I’m not sure I know what half of those points are even about.” The response from the group led by former Episcopalians? “Those are fabulous. Far more descriptive of us than what we wrote!” Now the punchline: The former Episcopalians asked, “Can we use your statement?”

Insert snark: Yes, the theologically pure schismatists asked to use the shared values from a liberal province of the heretic church, while our other pure and undefiled progressive partners, with whom we have so much in common, didn’t even understand the statement.

My point: What unites Anglicans as Great tradition formed, prayer book using, rejectors of the modern pattern of song and sermon for the ancient pattern of scripture and supper, is still far greater than what divides us.

Please remember that as you travel to Salt Lake City. For all of our lawsuits and counter-suits and leisure suits, what unites Episcopalians, even today, is greater than what divides us. That will not be true, though, if you over-define and over-canonicize us. When you go to general convention, do work hard to shrink our national structures to keep resources in the parish for evangelism and discipleship. But PLEASE resist the urge to over-define and consolidate progressive “wins.” Because, as the Reformed Episcopal Church who left us in the 1870’s over two candlesticks and one word (“regeneration” in the baptismal liturgy) show us, what we are arguing about today is not what we will be arguing about tomorrow. Just ask someone from the REC. They put “regeneration” back into their baptismal liturgy in the 1980s. They put the candlesticks back on the altars in the ’60s. No, we will not be arguing about these things in fifty years. Or even twenty. Time will sort out our sexuality stuff. Canonical over-definition and prayer book revision always peels off another 100,000 Episcopalians. And in case you haven’t checked recently, we don’t have them to peel off.

So please, deputies and bishops, as you meet and deliberate our future, please make the hard decisions to shrink our top heavy structures. But when it comes to theological and canonical decisions, especially decisions around marriage, remember that success strategy that you learned in your parish ministry: the power of the under-reaction. You have the votes. You can win. But you can win in a way that creates so many losers as to erase that win. To quote a bishop friend, “Anglicanism, at its’ best is tentative, nuanced and compromised.”

Delegates and bishops, I beg you, under react. Keep us roomy. In a roomy church everyone wins.

Shared Values.001

Polygamy/Polyamory: CNN feeds us their agenda. Do you like how it tastes?

Posted in Culture by
Photo credit: CNN

Photo credit: CNN

Snark Meter Sorta Snarky.002

Poly is the new Black.

CNN appears to have a new agenda this fall: Broadening the definition of “marriage” from the not yet universal “two people” to “whatever.” The specific terms for “whatever” are polygamy and polyamory. What is polyamory you ask? And you should ask. You are going to be hearing much more of these terms, especially from CNN, since they appear to be engaged in a systematic attempt to make sure you do. Consider this sample of the diet CNN has fed us this fall:

December 18: CNN runs a belief blog by an Episcopal priest, Danielle Tumminio entitled, “How I learned to love polygamy.” (Her post is so chock full of theological problems that it warrants response from the blogosphere, but our seminaries’ apparent weakness in explaining basic trinitarian theology, why supporting the release of “spirit babies” to work their way to heaven by people holding an adoptionist view of Christ’s deity are a separate issue.)

December 16: CNN runs an opinion piece by Mark Goldfeder, from the Center for Law and Religion entitled, “It’s time to reconsider polygamy.”

December 14: CNN runs a news piece on the Utah polygamy law being struck down as unenforceable.

These could be considered “responding to the news,” except that on October 26th, CNN ran this seven page puff-piece in support of polyamory: Polyamory: When three isn’t a crowd.

CNN can’t wait for the ink to dry on Same Sex Marriage, before feeding us the next thing up. It appears that for CNN, “poly” is the new “Black.” And yes, the mixing of the wardrobe metaphor with the genetic-causality argument is strictly intentional. Many African Americans have long been incensed by the LGBT community equating race with orientation. Now the LGBT community will get to experience having their argument co-opted by another’s agenda (“It’s my Civil Right…my right to privacy as an adult…who are you to tell me not to be who God made me to be?”).

Many will say the move from judgmental narrowness to freedom is a good thing…that telling people how to live is invasive and repressive, best left on the dung-heap of a once Christian culture. Has anyone bothered to ask, as we rush pell-mell into a wholesale rewriting of cultural norms, if this brave new pansexuality CNN is proposing has ever worked in any other culture in any time in the known history of our species?

By the way, the church is not immune. Polyamory is in the church already – and not just in the pews. The week before CNN ran the “Three isn’t a Crowd” article I was at an ecumenical Christian formation conference. Although the information at the conference was very helpful, the level of cultural accommodation among some of the conference’s SF Bay area attendees was stunning. Over lunch a very nice Children’s minister asked a clergy person from Idaho (a heavily LDS area) if she had access to LDS children’s materials. Since the LDS are non-trinitarian, I curiously asked, “Why would you use LDS stuff?”  The answer: “Oh, their materials are helpful in our polyamorous context.” Taken aback I asked, “You have polyamorous families in your church?” She seemed to think I was pulling her leg with the question. “Seriously?” she asked. “The definition of families is changing, you know.” Surprised I responded, “Wow, that sure sounds like the ‘slippery slope’ conservatives are mocked for fearing.” A clergy person at the table jumped in: “And what’s wrong with slippery slopes?”

Apparently slippery slopes aren’t a problem for a growing number in the church, nor for CNN either. And apparently we are to be fed a steady diet of CNN’s new “whatever” agenda.

I have one question: Do you like how it tastes?

Illegitimacy: A far bigger “fiscal cliff”

Posted in Multi-ethnic Church by


mentor-200x300

Soon, we are told, we will go over the “fiscal cliff.” When it happens our politicians and corporations will make a beeline to our tv screens and exhort us to do our part: spend money.

No one is talking about it, but we have a much bigger drag on our economy than the fiscal cliff. It drags our nation down every minute of every day. It is children born out of wedlock, what used to be known as “illegitimacy.” 42% of American children are now born out of wedlock. Why is this a problem? Because, generally speaking, 3/4 of children born OUT OF wedlock are born INTO poverty.

I have spent 30 years in youth ministry. Largely this amounts to being a friend and a mentor…sort of an uncle to young people during their critical adolescent period. What I have seen time and time again is that to successfully make the jump to adulthood means making just a few big decisions right. With those few big decisions, people generally end up in a pretty good place. You don’t have to be anywhere close to a perfect person, but for life to go fairly well for most of us, meant three choices:

  1. Don’t do anything in which the worst thing that could happen is for you to like it. (ie. addiction)
  2. Get an education (in something that will get you a  decent paying job)
  3. Get married.

In the absence of someone else to pay the bills, if you don’t make the Big Three major decisions in order, life gets very difficult, very quickly. 

You might ask, “Where is faith in this equation?” Faith is the fourth predictor. My son is in Student Council at a Title IV high school. Of the students whose homes kids go to for events, it is the 1/3 who are church members whose homes are invariably used. That is because they tend to be the ones at the school with homes large enough to use. Their faith gave them a moral framework and supportive relationships to make the Big Three! For me, the Big Three decisions are 2nd, 3rd, and home plate. First base is faith. In baseball if you don’t get on first base nothing else really matters. Yes, someone can have a decent life in the here and now without faith because, as Jesus said, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45) People can engage the faith decision anywhere around the Big Three and end up fine. But without the Big Three young people send themselves into poverty and set up their children to continue that dangerous cycle.

We have to help young people know the consequences of their life life choices. Here is a web link to a NJ news article that describes the connection between poverty and out-of-wedlock childbearing: (http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2012/11/qa_why_marriage_may_be_the_str.html) It is controversial if you are a progressive, but in my experience, spot on. Helping young people with the other big decision, education, is controversial if you are a conservative and want to cut funding for public education. Isn’t it time we put our young people ahead of our politics?

Amare Stoudemire used to have a non-profit called, “Each one. Teach one.” I have no idea what that organization did. But the idea is right. If every person who reads this blog forwards it to your fb friend list and every one of us mentor one young person of poverty, from today until the day they graduate from college…we will have done far more to help our nation’s future than anything else in our power. So forward this to your friends and then become a Big Brother/Big Sister, a Young Life leader, join Mentor Kids USA or become a volunteer in your church’s youth ministry…find a way to longitudinally follow a young person as a wise aunt or uncle.

It will matter to them. It will change you. And the nation you save may be your own.

Won’t you join me and find a young person to share your life and wisdom with?

Epic Fail: TEC/SC Issues Boil Over

Posted in Culture by

Prelude: I am in grief. The conflict between the Diocese of South Carolina and the national Episcopal church leadership has been brewing for years. The boil-over is like a bad divorce between two people who, in your mind, should have been able to work things out. You love them both and, even though you saw it coming, you keep wondering, “How did it come to this?”  I wrote this post on Wednesday evening. I have sat on it for three days hoping that my grief would subside. It has not.

“I ask…on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one…so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” –John 17:20-21, NRSV

 Epic Fail. It’s a junior high expression overused to meaninglessness: Dropping a pass. Spilling coffee on your laptop. Tripping in public. Yesterday an actual Epic Fail occurred. The Episcopal Church brought abandonment charges against a bishop actively trying to meet to work out differences. It was my worst day in five years as an Episcopalian.

This is where decades of disagreement over biblical interpretation and human sexuality have left us. If you are not a Christian you are probably wondering why we can’t just treat each other like Christians. If you are a Christian, and especially an Episcopalian OF ANY STRIPE, you will almost surely take issue with what I am about to write.

I write, however, as one who loves his church. Five years ago I walked away from reductionistic evangelicalism to embrace the wisdom of the ancient church, the beauty of liturgy, the soul enrichment of spiritual practice and social engagement as a force for good in the world. As someone who always rejected the small box of fundamentalism, I was enthusiastic to join a church that promised to be a big tent welcoming all to the table. You see, unlike other Christians, Episcopalians were never really a confessional church with long detailed doctrinal statements. We are a CHURCH UNITED BY OUR WILLINGNESS TO PRAY WITH THOSE WE DON’T AGREE WITH, and in what we do believe, we keep it simple – We are a creedal church (the brief Nicene Creed-a large tent with lots of room for disagreement). That room was necessary in England where one church contained Catholics, Protestants and the publicly religious.

If you are not an Episcopalian you probably have no grid in your experience for what a church united around the willingness to pray together might look like. My first Sunday in an Episcopal Church I sat with a friend who worked for our bishop.  He answered for me all the usual questions about the Catholic practice and Protestant theology that characterize us. Then I asked about the political stances of the church. The friend explained that with Episcopalians agreement was not expected. Diversity of opinion was considered a strength, a charism. On one end of the spectrum we had diocese’ that pushed the envelope to bless same-sex couples and, on the other, diocese’ that did not ordain women. As someone with every inclination toward including others, reconciling those in conflict, and whose life’s ministry has been to work across boundaries in ecumenical evangelism, to say I was intrigued by this commitment to comprehensiveness was an understatement.

The church I fell for promised roominess. It welcomed progressives to come in and allowed them to push the envelope on many issues. One would have thought that same roominess could be extended toward those who disagree with the new directions of the church. Unfortunately, yesterday we found out that was not to be.

I have followed things in South Carolina closely, both because of my own wiring toward reconciliation and because I have CLOSE friends on both sides of this issue. I know both sides of this debate well. Both sides have operated in ways that made perfect sense to them in their context and BOTH appear duplicitous and mean spirited to the other. The series of reactions and re-reactions has resulted in broken fellowship.

I realize that there are deep wounds on both sides. I know both sides chronology of what the other side did. I also know that the other side loves God and honestly thinks they are acting in good faith. But do you catch the language? Referring to our sisters and brothers in Christ as sides is tragic. Tragic also is that, in the end, we were the ones who said, “There is a stage leaving town at sundown. Be under it.”

I fear that the “oneness” for which Jesus prayed is going to become defined for us, as in other denominations, as agreement – or at least as the willingness to give the appearance of walking in lockstep with whoever holds the keys of power. That might be the most tragic result of all.

For those not following this situation, here is what appears to have happened in the simplest terms: The husband decided to divorce the wife for quitting on the marriage while they were sitting in the marriage counselor’s office. Did South Carolina really want a solution? I do not really know. They say they did. Did the national church want a solution? I do not really know. They say they did. I do not presume to read minds or motives…of either side. I merely grieve.

South Carolina is unlike the rest of the Episcopal church in many ways. But we have a long history of making room for people who push the bounds of our theology, politics and canon law. We had room for Bishop Pike who literally begged our bishops to inhibit him. We had room for Bishop Spong and his version of the old SNL Fluckers skit, “Here’s a new theology I just made up!” Now, sadly, we do not have room for a bishop and the lion’s share of his diocese, that hold a traditional view of marriage. The truth is that we have changed. We moved their cheese.[1] Why can we not give them room to differentiate themselves?

Last night I was in a car with someone who is a key player in our institution. She is a great person who loves God and the church. I cannot describe the sinking feeling in my heart when she said, “We will be a leaner-meaner church now. One that can stop pretending and be who we are.” Well, we will be leaner- by 30,000 Episcopalians. And we will certainly be meaner as we will no longer be held in tension by opposing voices. Is it really a good thing to silence dissent? Will we be able to “be who we are?” I fear that unless who we are is redefined as “a narrow group of Progressive Puritans” then the answer is no. We have been a comprehensive church – A table with room for all. Will that still be who we are? Or is that day passing?

The saddest part of the whole thing for me is the response on the web-organs of our church. Where is the grief in these posts?

The tone on the South Carolina sites is instructive. Their tone is grief. It is not the tone of someone who took their toys and went home.

I do not judge the motives of those on either side. Although this is a very public dispute, there is surely much information that I am not privy to. It is being said that this is what South Carolina angled for all along. I can say that, if this was a conspiracy, it was the greatest conspiracy since the resurrection. I would have to believe that multiple South Carolina diocesan employees including their bishop…in public and private conversations , within and without the walls of their diocesan offices, face-to-face, over phone and text, over years, faked frustration and fear. I think there is a better explanation: We missed it. Us. Them. All of us. We missed one another. They wanted to be different to be sure, but the South Carolina Episcopalians I know wanted to be Episcopalians.

And worst of all, in the eyes of the unchurched, we have all failed in both unity and love.

The irony of all of this is that the Episcopal Church has and is becoming much more theologically orthodox over the five years I have been here. It is more progressive politically to be sure, but it is noticeably more orthodox every year. If we could only have waited another five years both sides would surely end up closer together.

But we didn’t. None of us. And that is the shame.

We could have done better. All of us. We could have assumed the best of one another. We could have refused to respond out of fear. We could have made the other make the first move…and the second…and the third. I understand why everyone made every move they made. All around people did their best. Yet today we have an…

Epic Fail.

[1]Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life. Spencer Johnson, 1998.

an article about marriage that is really about much more

Posted in Culture by

“Relationships based on self-fulfillment rather than self-denial require a low- or no-maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you. Simply put—today people are asking far too much…” Tim Keller in Relevant Magazine. The principle’s in this article are far bigger than marriage. We want to get without giving in our jobs, marriages, churches and ministries. Give it a read and let the idea that everything worthwhile in life takes effort spread like a virus in your soul.

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/relationship/features/27749-you-never-marry-the-right-person