Care a Little, Care a Lot

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton IL on Feb. 1, 2009

Something has begun to happen around here recently.  It’s happening more and more, and now happens quite a lot, actually.  Someone will come up to me after church or during coffee hour or during other meetings or call me on the phone or send me an e-mail.  And they’ll say something like, “You know, I noticed during the service or some other time that so-and-so seemed to be upset or out-of-sorts or just not quite themselves.  I didn’t know what to do so I thought I’d better let you know.”

This shouldn’t be unusual, you’re thinking.  This guy’s the minister –that’s part of his role to be caring and to try to keep up with people.  And you’re right… 

I’d like not to consider it unusual, either, that you notice each other and want to get help for someone you might see having trouble.  So even though the situation is not unusual, I think it’s still worthy of comment because it indicates three things to me, one of which is pretty mundane if critically important to the life of this community, and the other two of quite a bit more gravity and even potentially transcendent.

First of all, the mundane:  beginning a ministry in a smaller church as the new guy in town, sometimes a new minister will find that the members of a long-established congregation take care of themselves pretty well in the ways they’re used to doing.  Their numbers are small so they can know each other really well and they can rest assured that they already know what each person in the congregation is likely to need.  In a small church, everybody knows everybody else, and when it comes to pastoral care with church members, the incoming new minister – or even a seasoned one - should know better than to get in the way of a system that works. 

Now, when more and more new people begin to find the church and decide that its message is something they need to hear and something they want to then share with others, it’s a good thing, maybe even something the longer-term members always said they wanted.  But, when any small church starts growing, the members that have been there through thick and thin soon begin to find that it’s impossible to know everybody anymore.  And as happens with any kind of change in the status quo, there are stresses and strains, what we euphemistically call ‘growth opportunities.’  One of those growth opportunities is that it takes more time and effort to find out everybody’s life stories.  In times of growth, it’s hard enough just to remember names - which is one reason we ask each other to wear name tags each week.  All this points at the first remarkable thing about a congregation that’s beginning to include the minister in the pastoral care network:  it indicates that a congregation is moving functionally from one size church to a larger size church. 

In the literature these days, some of the people who study churches use four general categories for sizes of congregations:   the family-size church, the pastoral-size church, the program-size church, and the corporate-size church.  The family-size church is just what it sounds like:  a small number of attendees (under about 50) that acts like an extended family, where intimacy is easy to find because everyone knows everyone else.  The pastoral-size church is a bit larger, from about 50 to 150 in attendance, enough people that they can’t know everyone else so they depend on a central person like a pastor to keep things cohesive and working together.  Hence the name pastoral.  The program-size church is necessarily a different animal, from about 150 to 350 people that’s too big to depend solely on a central person so it focuses on the programs of the congregation to give it focus and to give people a way to connect to the community.  The corporate-size church, then, is one that is has more than about 350 people and generally depends, not on just one or two key positions or a few programs, but on the workings of a whole staff of people to drive programming and to see to needs of the community.

This church has acted like a family-size congregation for a long time, but we’re seeing evidence that we’re growing into the pastoral-size category.  With our increasing numbers, one thing you might notice is that intimacy is harder to find – you don’t see just your closest friends in Coffee Hour anymore.  That’s one reason we’ve developed Chalice Circles:  these small-group ministries are a way for people to engage with each other, to share their experiences, and to develop closer relationships with fellow members.  There are other indicators that things are shifting, too:  in the committee structure, information is being shared more widely, decisions are being delegated differently, we have a new Program Council that should help relieve the Board of some of its burden of responsibility.  The literature is correct when it says a church can’t make these kinds of change without a few stressors, and we’ve had our share.  But at this point, it looks like we’re coming out the other side of some of those issues, though only time will tell.

This is all well and good, but don’t think that it’s over.  Numerically, we’re not far from needing to make, not just the transition from family- to pastoral-size, but a double transition all the way to program-size.  I have said to many in leadership roles here that I think this congregation shouldn’t be satisfied with simply getting from family- to pastoral size and then sitting back and becoming complacent again.  It’s obvious to me and I hope to you that there are yet more people in this geographic area who are ready to hear what we have to say, more people who are hurting and in trouble and need to hear our saving message, more people who want the voice of liberal religion – a liberating religion - to counterbalance the kind of religious fundamentalisms most often practiced in the public square these days.

I’ve asked our leadership to consider adopting the mindset of preparing to become not just a pastoral-size but actually a program-size church, a church not centered on one or two people but one driven by programs and initiatives, a church fully engaged in its mission of in-reach within its members and outreach to the wider community, a place where the spiritual lives of members are nurtured and developed and then turned outward in sharing what we’ve learned.  In the language of our mission statement, this church should be “committed to nurturing lifelong spiritual growth and to inspiring lives of love and service” – as the Mission Statement says, both in-reach and outreach are important.

In-reach and outreach brings me to a second item brought to my attention by your including me in the pastoral care loop.  When we begin to learn how to care for one another, that has both an in-reach component and an outreach one.  If you’re truly looking out after somebody else, it can’t help but change the way you are on the inside.  That’s in-reach.  When you look out there and begin to notice how each other is doing and when you actively reach out one another, that’s in the direction of outreach.

In a family-size church, there’s little need to systematize the pastoral care function - everybody already knows everybody else.  But as a church grows, there are more people and more issues to keep track of, which is why we’ve put in place what we call Care Teams, where each person or family in the church becomes part of a smaller group of 15 or 20 people.  Each care team, then, has a leader who works to keep up with the people and families in her or his care team.  Our care team leaders currently meet once a month or so to discuss issues we may be facing and to find help in dealing with those issues. 

I can tell you that the work of those care team leaders is often intense.  Trying to move beyond what we’ve traditionally considered as caring - saying hi at church or, when something really awful happens, delivering a casserole - is hard work.  Not that delivering casseroles isn’t important work, but moving beyond that to something deeper shifts paradigms, it requires new pathways in the brain, plus it can bring up all kinds of resistance from deep in our beings.

See, as a generally happy person, I don’t want to be faced with hard stuff.  Hard stuff comes in all shapes and sizes:  serious illness, lost jobs, troubled kids, torn families.  Brokenness is such an intrinsic part of the human condition.  And then we die. 

Most people find death to be disturbing enough – but from my experience it’s not death but life that’s the hard part.  It’s ongoing life that gets ya.  Living one’s life in the face of all this pain and loss and brokenness?  That’s the hard part.  That’s what theologian Paul Tillich addressed in his now-half-a-century-old book, The Courage to Be.  Tillich took existentialist despair seriously in a way that more popular preachers never do.  Tillich knew how hard it was just to be: to get up everyday and look life in the barrel once more.  Courage, he said, will not overcome fear, will not eradicate fear, is not the opposite of fear, but is simply how one must face the reality of fear.

If it takes courage to face some of our days, then it also takes courage to walk with other people through their dark times, what the Hebrew text calls “the valley of the shadow of death.”  I like being happy, I don’t like being sad, I want everything to be rosy and bright rather than dark and foreboding.  But life is not like that all the time:  life is great many days, but it’s not all peaches and cream, and I think it helps to know we don’t have to go through the dark times alone.  That means we need to learn to be there with and for each other.  And I think I’ve said from this pulpit more than once, if we can’t learn to do that for each other, then we ought to lock our doors.

I’m not just pointing my finger at you.  Here is the main reason I’ve thought so much about this:  I noticed my own reaction when I got a couple of these messages about people potentially needing a call, and I didn’t like it.  At least one of those times, I felt really busy and thought, “I can’t be bothered with this right now.  Can’t you see how important what I’m doing is?”  Another time, a person was telling me about someone else who was having trouble and – I have to confess - I clearly remember thinking, “Hey, why don’t you make a phone call and see if you can figure out what’s going on?” 

Neither one of these reactions is anything like what I expect from myself, and so I had to reflect long and hard about it.  And I came to the conclusion that those reactions come from basically the same place inside me:  a place of fear, a place where I feel like I might be engulfed by all the pain around me and by all the loss in the world.  It’s not that I don’t care.  It’s not that I don’t genuinely love the people I was being told about.  It’s that there is a place within me that is afraid that I am not enough, that I am not worthy, that I don’t have the tools, that I don’t know enough or have enough experience or enough empathy or enough commitment.  That’s not a place in me I like to go, but I am driven by that place of fear more than I would ever wish.  And if I can find that place of fear within me, I’m betting I’m not the only person in the world who has one.

The upside is:  I may not know this about myself if I hadn’t been seriously engaged in the work of caring for others.  Like I said, the work of the Care Team leaders is often intense, and not only about scheduling and organizing and making a list and checking it twice, but about inner journeys where the real demons lurk in the shadows.  It is not work for the faint of heart, but it’s vitally important that some of you are willing to do it.

As an antidote to all this misery and fear and confession, one of the joys of ministering in a vibrant and growing congregation – a congregation blessed to have the challenges inherent in making the transition from family- to pastoral-size – one of my extreme joys is that I get to sit with several UU&You! orientation classes every year.  It is beyond fulfilling to hear people’s stories of where they’ve come from in their faith journeys and how they found this church and how happy they are to be in a place where they can ask questions and how much they need to know that they’re not alone in their questioning.  It impresses me every time I meet with one of these classes just how special it is to find a place where we can share ourselves, our successes and our failures, our anxieties and our misgivings, where we can think out loud without having to plan what we’re gonna say next and where we can question authorities of all kinds using language that the rest of the world finds suspect. 

I always wonder how we’d go about institutionalizing such freedom and such intimacy, and the Chalice Circles at their best serve this purpose well enough.  But how would we make coffee hour such a safe place?  How would we recreate such an atmosphere of openness in committee meetings?  How would we act that way with each other so much that we couldn’t help but take that way of being out into the wider world?

Which brings me to the third point brought to my attention by your including me in the pastoral care loop:  this is a community where we practice loving each other.  Not the sappy, gooey, “anything-goes” “you-do-whatever-you-want” irresponsible kind of love, but the serious, challenging, responsible kind of love where we learn to give each other the freedom to be, where we genuinely care for and look out for one another, but also where we say “no” to things that endanger our neighbors.

It’s that kind of love that will ultimately carry this congregation through the transitions from one size to another.  It’s that kind of love that will ultimately power our engagement in justice work in the wider world.  It’s that kind of love that will ultimately build our individual courage for facing our days and counter those places of fear and shadow and existential despair we find deep within ourselves.

It’s that kind of love that ultimately makes all the work of building this kind of community so worthwhile, and that ultimately makes being a member here so gratifying.

So may it be.