PAYING THE PIPER [Sat, 6-13-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Story Teller—PAYING THE PIPER [Sat, 6-13-26]

 

I was chatting with a medical professional, an obviously competent woman, who laughed brightly when she said, “You’ve been retired longer than I’ve been alive!” Great; I was already feeling old enough.

I retired 30 years ago today, the last day of the Central IL Conf. of the UMC, last day both for 1996 and forever, since later that day the CIC was merging with the S IL Conf. to form The Illinois Great Rivers Conf. When Vernie Barnett, the head of pensions for our conference, introduced each of us who were retiring, he told how many years each of us had preached. For me, it was 30. Which was both right and wrong.

It was right because I had 30 years of pension credit. It was wrong because I had been preaching, under appointment, for 40 years. But I had the kinds of ministry that didn’t always lead to pension credit.

Counting part-time interims in retirement, I preached a total of 60 years.

I was good at preaching from the start of those years. I don’t know why. I certainly did not have much self-confidence. But from the first, at age 19, I was good at it. Not really at preaching, the way it was usually understood in those days, but at just standing up in front of people and talking, telling stories.

I think I was comfortable, standing up in front and talking, because, if you don’t get in the way, you can let stories tell themselves. I wasn’t up there by myself. I knew the stories had my back.

One man said, “You don’t talk at us or to us. You talk for us.”

There was one problem, though, with being a preacher, all those forty years: people.

That’s the same problem in a lot of jobs. People have a tendency to get in your way in almost any job. The problem is exacerbated, though, by the strange backward familial nature of the church—the preacher is the parent, but the children [congregants] handle the money and provide the housing. They are sometimes [often?] parents who say, “My house, my rules.”

If the children don’t like the rules you are laying down as the parent--about how you should treat black folks and women and immigrants the same as everyone else, and how you should not be greedy but share your toys with the poor, and how you should do your chores and get to bed on time and leave them downtown women alone—they get back at you by cutting your allowance.

In the Methodist Church, the pastor’s salary is set each year at the Church Conference [annual business meeting], which is presided over by the District Superintendent. I had a District Superintendent who told me, as he completed his term: “I have sixty pastors in this District. I have spent more time during my six years on your salary than all the others combined.”

One year, Harry Keal came to Charge Conference to try to deny me a salary increase. And those increases were never really increases in buying power; just cost-of-living adjustments, like 2 %.

Harry agreed that I was a good preacher, but he did not like the stuff I preached, the stories I told. He did not want to say that, though. Indeed, every time someone tried to lower my salary at Charge Conference--and that was pretty much every year, and sometimes in between—they said it was because of budget constraints. Everyone saw through that, because there were other lines in the budget that should have been cut, too, if we really had money problems, but they never even mentioned those.

Harry was a farmer, and tried to make his case on the basis of free trade economics. “When I take my corn to the elevator, I have to take what the market dictates.” Young farmer Steve Holaday said, “Yes, but the other farmers in the Co-Op don’t sit down and decide what you’ll get for your corn. That’s what we’re doing here.”

Today is the anniversary of my official retirement from the ministry. I look back on those 40 years before retirement, and I give thanks. It was a great honor to get to stand up in front and tell the stories of God. But I also give thanks that there isn’t anyone available to say my pension should be cut, because I’m not giving thanks in the right way.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

MAKING HAY [R, 6-11-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of Lost Skills—MAKING HAY [R, 6-11-26]

 

It’s haying season.

When we moved to the farm, I was ten, and a city boy. The concrete sidewalks of Indianapolis were my world. That concrete was hard, but reliable.

Suddenly, in a day’s time, there was no concrete anyplace. It was all dirt and gravel.

I had loved listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio, and watching Red Ryder and Little Beaver in Saturday matinees at the Tacoma Theater on Washington Street. So, at first, I thought the farm was neat. It was like living on a ranch. It took me a while to realize that we had a horse because we couldn’t afford a car, that we were the kinds of farmers the cattle barons pushed off the land because we didn’t amount to anything, that primitive farm life was hard work. I didn’t get to ride in and solve a problem, like The Lone Ranger, and ride off again, with pretty girls swooning and asking, “Who was that masked boy?” I was stuck there, putting up hay.

There was a lot more farm work than just making hay, of course, but hay season takes on gigantic proportions in my memory of farm life. It was only one season of the year, only a week, maybe less. But when I think about farm life, I don’t think first about gathering eggs or slopping hogs or chopping kindling or carrying water. I think about making hay.

The main things I remember are the humidity and the heat. I guess that is because you can only “make hay while the sun shines.”

 

Also, of course the dust. My father loved [soy] bean hay. It wasn’t like what I call grass hay. Bean hay is mostly fine dust. At least, that’s what got down my shirt and into my hair and nostrils and lungs.

And the thirst. We had no ice to mix with the water we took to the fields, and we had no thermos jug to keep it cold, anyway. We just had a glass jar. We kept it in the weeds on the shady side of the field. It was a big jar, but we gulped from it every time we got to that side, even though the water was hotter every time. Soon it was gone, and we had to wait until a load was done and back to the barn before we could get a refill.

And the sun burn. I don’t think we even knew about sun screen then. Maybe it didn’t exist. I know it didn’t for us. Every year or so now the dermatologist removes a malignant patch of skin from my face. They got their start back in the hay fields.

And the fatigue. Making hay takes all your muscles and all your lung capacity. Chemo fatigue is the only tiredness I’ve ever known that was more depleting than haying fatigue.

Finally, though, I remember the satisfaction. I had survived the heat and the dust, and I learned how to build a load.

We had no fancy new equipment that did baling for you. We put up hay “loose.” My father would walk along beside the wagon--pulled by Prince, the horse who thought he was too good for pulling wagons--and get a big forkful of hay off the ground and pitch it up onto the flatbed wagon, where I stood with my own fork. I built the load.

In doing that, I had to be careful not to stand on hay I was trying to move. I had to build the load in such a way that hay already on the wagon would not fall off as new hay came on. Most important, it had to be unloadable. When we got back to the barn, we needed to take it off the wagon a forkful at a time, just as it had gone on.  As the load got bigger and higher and more complicated, that was harder than it sounds.

Like so many of the skills I learned as a kid, building a hay load is one that I’ll never use again. No one else will, either. But it has served me well. When times get tough, I can always say, “It could be worse. I could be making hay.”

John Robert McFarland

“I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” Playwright & author, Jerome K. Jerome.

A CHURCH WITH NO FUTURE [T, 6-9-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Campus Minister—A CHURCH WITH NO FUTURE [T, 6-9-26]

 

The church is irrelevant and has no preachers because it has sacrificed its future to spread frankincense on its dead corpus. It won’t be resurrected until it knows once again the importance of ministry on the  campuses of higher education.

Years ago, I was appointed by the bishop to a Conference committee. It was his way of punishing me for making a motion at Annual Conference that we have no conference committee meetings for a year, and spend all the time we would have spent in committee meetings in evangelism, and then come back the next year to see if we might be better off. It failed, but by a surprisingly slim margin. The Bishop had an elevated sense of his status as an agent of karma.

That committee was tasked with learning what help congregations wanted from the denomination staff, to be more effective witnesses in their communities. We sent a survey for each congregation to fill out.

The churches were very cooperative. They all completed the survey forms and sent them back. All the members of the committee read all the responses. Or, at least, I did.

Almost all the congregations felt the same need—help with education, meaning, primarily, Sunday School and youth groups. And, more importantly, they wanted it right where they were. They wanted the helpers to come to them.

So, the committee met. In the Conference office. We came from all over the large geographical area of the Conference to meet. I myself drove 94.31 miles. [Yes, I had to look it up.] The Conference Program Director welcomed us, thanked us for our good work, said that the survey results were clear—we needed more Conference programming about Christian education. Fifteen minutes. He said we could go. Folks started to get up. A day wasted by 15 clergy and lay leaders of the church.

I didn’t get up. I said, “That’s not what the surveys said at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“They didn’t want Conference programming. They didn’t want to drive all day to the Conference headquarters. They wanted Conference staff people to come to their churches, to help them right there…”

The other committee members began to sit back down. “Yes, that’s right. That’s what the surveys said. They want local programming…”

The Conference Council Director was dumbstruck. He had never imagined such a thing. The purpose of being an administrator is to sit at headquarters and have people come to you, isn’t it?

As the numbers of church members have declined, precipitously, the number of administrators in headquarters has increased. We have fewer members and congregations, the reasoning goes, so we need to create more reasons for them to leave their locales and come hear experts, instead of going out into the highways and byways of their own towns and inviting people in. [Look it up. In every denominational headquarters, staff members have increased in direct proportion to the decrease of members and congregations.]

A huge number of pastors—and lay leaders--have come out of campus ministry. Starting with the time I was campus minister at IL State U [1966], more than 100 young people have gone into the ministry, from just that one campus ministry unit. Multiply that by campus ministries at every university.

As denominations have declined financially, though, church leaders have chosen to sacrifice the future of the church to prop up a moribund and outmoded system by cutting funds to campus ministries and adding more and more irrelevant administrators for “development,” who sit in offices and think up “programs” to be executed by non-existent preachers.

[Do I sound like an old curmudgeon, or what? Yes, but it’s all true.]

If you want to revivify the church, put whatever money and energy it has left into campus ministry.

John Robert McFarland

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

HOW ABSENT ARE THE FEET… [Sun, 6-7-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings About Irrelevancy by an Irrelevant Old Preacher--HOW ABSENT ARE THE FEET… [Sun, 6-7-26]

 

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” [Isaiah 52:7]

So far, I have said that no one wants to be a preacher because they are irrelevant, primarily because the church is irrelevant. But there is a specific irrelevancy of preachers…

THE IRRELEVANCE OF PREACHERS

The church is no longer relevant or necessary in American society, so preachers are irrelevant and unnecessary. Who needs a preacher in a church that is irrelevant?

Preachers aren’t even needed for funerals and weddings. Officiating at those events was the main reason the larger society beyond the church put up with preachers and their annoying talk about God.  Now anyone can officiate, even at weddings. “Anyone” is often preferable, because there is no religious language to negotiate. Couples can write their own self-centered, temporary vows for weddings [‘til love do us part], and no one has to speculate about heaven or hell as we “celebrate” the life of some secular reprobate.

On TV shows, preachers are rarely even shown. If they are, they are usually bumbling buffoons. On a recent Grey’s Anatomy, all the doctors were complaining that there were no chaplains in the building to do an emergency wedding. One of them said, “How can that be?  Chaplains are supposed to be here all the time” But this was the 10^th season of Grey’s Anatomy, and in the 225 shows before this episode, not only had they not mentioned or shown a chaplain, no one had even acknowledged their existence. Of course, it provided a good excuse for some bed pan operator to get ordained online to do the wedding. That’s how important and relevant preachers are, with their seven years of higher education.

{The episode aired originally in 2014, but we have only recently started watching Grey’s Anatomy, via Netflix. We’ve still got 12 seasons to go.}

When we graduated university, my roommate, Tom Cone, went to law school. The guy in the room next door, Tom Lucas, went to medical school. I went to theological school. All our peers, all of society, considered that we would be three equal professionals. Everyone knew that the Toms would earn a lot more money than I did, but we would have the same level of education and respect.

When we got our professional doctorates, that was true. All the newly married and doctorated couples socialized together. Our main friends were young doctors and lawyers and their wives. [There were some women lawyers and doctors then, but they didn’t live in the towns where I was pastoring.]

The main virtues then, the ones that society valued, were education, patriotism, civic involvement, moral living, and respectability. It was the church’s responsibility to encourage [enforce?] those virtues. The primary encourager/enforcer, of course, was the preacher.

Then came the upheaval of social values.

The Viet Nam war was fought, we were told by “the establishment,” to protect those values and virtues. But, no, that war was really fought to protect interests antithetical to traditional values. The values being protected were greed and power. Young people developed a counter culture, a drop-out culture, of drugs and non-involvement, a culture that saw traditional values as corrupt or irrelevant or hypocritical.

When people give up on traditional values, and replace them with greed and drugs, who can be more irrelevant than a preacher of traditional values?

Yes, there are people who still believe in the traditional values, but to exist in a nontraditional culture, they have to “double down,” become strict and inflexible in upholding those values. Mainline denominational churches are seen as wish-washy, cooperators with a lax culture, accepting non-acceptable people. The code word is “obey.” Mainline churches and their preachers don’t use it. They are accepted by neither the traditional religion nor the libertine culture.

Oh, I so wish I could start as a preacher, again, right now. This is just about the best time ever to be a preacher. What a wonderful opportunity, to preach the Gospel in a culture that is so ready for it, and doesn’t even know it!

John Robert McFarland

“When old men become irrelevant, young men become irresponsible.”

 

HE IRRELEVANCE OF DENOMINATIONS [F, 6-5-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Irrelevant Old Preacher--THE IRRELEVANCE OF DENOMINATIONS [F, 6-5-26]

 

I know you are eager to hear about the irrelevance of preachers, and I did promise that for today, but my scheduling is unreliable, and first we have to consider the irrelevance of denominations…

The original purpose of denominations was so that you knew who to avoid. You could go to any town and know that Catholics would not recognize Lutherans, and Lutherans would not recognize Baptists, and Baptists would not recognize one another in the liquor store.

I love that sort of joke, but it takes us away from the main point. There were theological differences between denominations, and people were convinced they would go to hell if they got mixed up with the wrong belief system. More importantly, there were cultural differences. Often language differences. A denominational label was a handy way of knowing who to avoid.

Gene Matthews was the preacher for a while at Forsythe Methodist, the little open-country church that nurtured me. He was a factory worker who got the call to preach in middle age. He took the courses to get a License to Preach and filled in part-time wherever he was needed.

One week, that was the Methodist Church in Darmstadt, near Evansville, where he lived. He was newly licensed and wanted to show off his preaching skills. That was back in the day when many churches had open Bibles already on the pulpit. Gene decided he would study the scripture for the day and just preach directly from the pulpit Bible. When he got there, though, he discovered that the pulpit Bible was in German! It had been a German Methodist congregation. They had given up worship services in German during WWII. But they had kept that old Bible. It was as much a part of their Methodist heritage as Wesleyan theology.

Denominations are about connections. In a denomination, congregations aren’t separate entities; they belong to something bigger, a system that works together, to establish and sustain colleges and universities and hospitals and missions and children’s homes and old folks homes.

Now, though, all those institutions have been taken over by government or rich people on boards of directors. A university or hospital might still carry the name of a denomination—Lutheran or Presbyterian or Whatever—but the church has no say about what goes on there.

I started these irrelevancy columns by saying no one wants to be a preacher. Well, that’s not true. There are plenty of folks who want to be preachers, but they don’t want to be part of a larger church, a denomination. They don’t want to go to seminary, or be vetted by peers, or know anything about comparative theology, or be questioned about whether they have the necessary “gifts and graces” to be effective pastors. They don’t need a degree or an ordination. They are “called,” and that’s all they need. They are business entrepreneurs. Denominations are irrelevant in a culture that is entrepreneurial.

Ordination is outdated. Now, whoever wants to be a preacher, they just declare themselves a preacher. They rent an empty building, give it a name that includes words like journey or harvest or new or start or, especially, community, and they’re a preacher, although they rarely call themselves that. They are the messenger or the leader or the prophet.

We don’t want to relate to other people in other congregations. We want just our own little New Start or New Life or New Hope or New News congregation, our own bunch of people self-selected to be like us, our own preacher who has no responsibility to anyone but us.

In a non-connectivity culture, indeed an anti-connectivity culture, denominations are irrelevant.

John Robert McFarland

“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is to try to please everybody.” Herbert P. Swope

 

 

 

ONE MORE THING ABOUT CHURCH IRRELEVANCY [W, 6-3-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings About Irrelevancy by an Irrelevant Old Man—ONE MORE THING ABOUT CHURCH IRRELEVANCY [W, 6-3-26]

 

“Just one more thing…” That’s what Lt. Columbo always said on the “Columbo” TV show of the 1970s. He was on his way out the door, hand on the knob. The killer looked satisfied. The police detective was leaving without learning the truth. But “Just one more thing…” was preface to the question that would befuddle and expose the murderer, every time, for ten years.

So, just one more thing about the irrelevance of the church, before we go on to the irrelevance of preachers… 

If you take a quick look at America today, it does not look like the church is irrelevant. In fact, it looks more relevant than ever. There is a strong Christian nationalism movement, from The White House on down. Indeed, surveys show that almost all the people who voted for Donald Trump are in church every Sunday, and he is the kind of president who gets whatever he wants. That’s relevance…

No, it’s not, because politics and culture are very different creatures. The church is relevant to current politics but not to culture, what people really believe and how they really live.

Politics is ephemeral and manipulatable. Elections rarely reflect how people actually live. Voters can be manipulated. Elections can be falsified. Courts can declare that the winner actually lost.

People vote on politics. Culture is not up for a vote. We think we make decisions about cultural matters, and we do, but not by vote. Culture just happens, one personal act at a time until the whole world has shifted.

It’s an old phrase now, but I was impressed when I first heard it, 56 years ago, from James Spalding, the Dean of The University of Iowa School of Religion, when I was his graduate student assistant: The axe man of The French Revolution was exceedingly proud of the sharpness of his blade. They put a poor bloke on the chopping block before him. He swung mightily. The man laughed. “Ha! You missed me! I didn’t feel a thing.” “Just wait ‘til you sneeze,” the axe man said.

Political ascendency periods are very short. Usually no more than ten or twelve years. Even the Christian nationalist churches are already irrelevant. They just haven’t sneezed yet.

Yes, of course, there will always be a church. The Body of Christ will always be resurrected. But not in the ways that require preachers to lead them. So, next column, the irrelevancy of preachers…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

STICK A FORK IN THE CHURCH [M, 6-1-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Mutterings of An Irrelevant Old Man About Irrelevance—STICK A FORK IN THE CHURCH [M, 6-1-26]

 

The annual meeting of my United Methodist Conference starts tomorrow. The Illinois Great Rivers Conference comprises 2/3 of the state of Illinois, everything below Interstate 80. There are 646 churches in that Conference. When representatives from those churches meet in solemn assembly this week, there will not be even one new pastor ordained.

For several years now, in most United Methodist Conferences, retirements have outnumbered ordinations about ten to one. Now it’s gotten to be ten to zero. Yes, we have a pastoral crisis. Not just in the UMC, but in any denomination: nobody wants to be a preacher.

At least, nobody wants to be a preacher in a denomination, where there are folks who are checking to be sure you’re not mixing up any kool-aid.

Why are there no new preachers? Four reasons: The Church is irrelevant. Denominations are irrelevant. Preachers are irrelevant. Campus ministry is non-existent.

Today: The irrelevance of the church. I’ll talk about the irrelevancy of denominations and preachers and campus ministry in subsequent columns. [If that doesn’t discourage you from reading, nothing will. There’s nothing as deadly as a preacher who starts a sermon with “This is the first in a series of…”]

THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE CHURCH

Society has evolved, especially in sexual mores and morals, and the church has not. The church still holds to a sexual ethic of no sex except in marriage. The current cultural sex ethic is no sex until you’ve known someone for two minutes. The current church could not possibly be any more irrelevant to the current society.

Nobody worries about going to hell. The church was important when people worried about going to hell when they died. Going to church now was insurance against going to hell then. Now most folks think there might be some sort of afterlife, but no one believes in a physical heaven up there and a physical hell down there. Certainly church attendance, and the disciplines of personal holiness, have nothing to do with what will happen to you in some unknown future, so why go to church and do churchly stuff?

The church is all about personal fellowship. Each of us is a part of the Body of Christ, and we need the other parts of the Body. John Wesley even had his Methodist class members confess their sins to one another. The only way that could be done now is via text or Facebook. We live in a society that has no personal connections. Who needs them when you have a cell phone and “social” media? We are never alone, and incredibly lonely.

 

The church used to have enough hold on government that it could dictate cultural and business schedules. No business or school activities on Sundays. Or Wednesday night [prayer meeting]. When we stopped worrying about going to hell, we had to have a different God, and a different form of relating to one another. If you live only for now… Enter money. Enter making money. Enter 24/7/364 shopping and gambling hours. Enter feeling good, right now, via alcohol and drugs and sex. If going to church doesn’t make you feel good, again, why bother?

Nobody likes to be irrelevant. Nobody wants to be associated with irrelevant losers. People don’t want to be part of an irrelevant institution like the church, so they spend their time and money and energy in relevant activities, like sex and golf, and relevant institutions, like shopping malls and bars and sports arenas and casinos.

Stick a fork in the church: it’s done.

John Robert McFarland

Okay, the next two columns might be irrelevant to you. And boring. Because you’re probably old enough that you are irrelevant, too. If you don’t want more of the same screeds, you might want to wait for the column of June 9, when I talk about the irrelevance of learning to build a hay load with a pitchfork.