Letter/Sandwich to FPC

Because our tour group visited some of the 7 Churches of The Revelation of John last week, I delved into the Biblical book of Revelation again to review those famed messages to the churches. I discovered that Jesus was ahead of his time in the personal feedback department.

Jesus – when sharing feedback via revelation through John – used the familiar sandwich model: Begin and end with positive feedback (the bread) but stuff it with critical substance (the peanut butter and jelly/ the chicken salad.) For example:

Bread: I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance . . .
Sandwich Fixin’s: Yet . . . you have forsaken the love you had at first . . .
Bread: But you have this in your favor: you hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

The metaphor of an Oreo also works, except that the creamy center is usually our favorite part of the Oreo and this is not usually the case for a Sandwich Performance Review.

David C. Novak, CEO of Yum Brands (Pizza Hut, KFC, etc.), said in a recent  interview that his workers are “starving for feedback.”

FPC – as a congregation – does not seem “starved for feedback.” But isn’t the nature of spiritual development that we make changes to become more like Christ? If we are more interested in being cared for (casseroles) or merely eligible for sacraments/rites (baptism/marriage/funeral), then aren’t we missing the point of Christian spiritual growth? God tells us things about ourselves we need to know but don’t always want to know.

I – as your pastor – long for feedback that is substantive and ministry enhancing. It doesn’t help to hear “Nice sermon” because I don’t know what that means. I’ve heard that “management” is not my gift which on the one hand makes me think, “Good, because I am not called to be a manager” but on the other hand makes me wonder “What does better management look like for you (give me specifics) and what does that say about our vision for the church (because management that looks like “the pastor is a chaplain who serves us” might conflict with my theology.)

So, with the hope of lots of comments here, I’d like to offer a sandwich of sorts, in the model of John’s letters to the 7 Churches:

To the Church of Fairlington Presbyterian, you have endured enormous challenges over the past 63 years: divisions, disappointments, transience, and cultural shifts. You have displayed many examples of personal sacrifice for the sake of the gospel. Your love for each other is demonstrated in hospitality that overlooks individual differences. You’ve shown genuine love and concern for each other.

But you love institutions more than you love Jesus. (NB: This is my sin too.)

Institutions are important. Marriage. Denominations. Universities. Hospitals. Particular Church Structures. Clubs. They order human life and service.

But they are merely the instruments for serving God which is our basic life purpose. They are not God. We don’t worship the PCUSA or our particular church or a particular entity within our particular church. We don’t worship our jobs, our children, our spouses, or our favorite things/organizations/ideas. That would be idolatry.

We are really good at idolatry.

However, if we are faithful, even to the point of death, Christ will give us life.
Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the Churches.

Chances are that consuming that particular sandwich makes our stomachs hurt. It is digestable or not.

Whether we trust the one who delivered the sandwich is crucial. (Example: if I trust the person who gives me constructive feedback, it might hurt but I will readily accept it with thanks. If I don’t trust that person, then I won’t give it much creedence.) Am I still trusted? Are the elders and deacons trusted?

This question requires more than a blog conversation. But maybe the conversation could begin/continue this summer.

Where to Worship??

One of the unspoken joys of professional pastors is the treat of worshipping with other churches on “Sundays off.”  Some congregations write into their pastor’s Terms of Call that they are to take 4 Sundays away from their own church to worship with another congregation 4 times a year (and it’s not counted as part of their vacation/study leave time.)  There is one pastor in our Presbytery serving a mult-staff church who takes one Sunday each month to worship somewhere else for his own spiritual enrichment (and new ideas.)

I love to worship with other churches – and I’m using the traditional Sunday-everybody together in the sanctuary definition of worship here (rather than the Benedictine everything-we-do-is-worship definition, although that is also true.)

So far in this sabbatical, I’ve worshipped with Chevy Chase Presbyterian in Chevy Chase and in Montreat, NC, and at St. Paul’s Church in Antalya Turkey in terms of formal worship services. Sadly, much of my travel has been on Sundays so I haven’t been able to walk through the doors of a sanctuary, sit down with other people of faith, and sing, pray, and celebrate communion.

But today, on this Lord’s Day, Libby and I are heading up to St. Peter’s Church – a cave – in Antakya, Turkey. There is no formal worship, so to speak, but it is the site where Christans secretly worshipped shortly after that first Pentecost after Jesus’ resurrection. I’ll report about the experience here (assuming the internet is working.)  As with so many worship experiences, I’ve found that something stirs in me as I stand in holy places, even if there is not a congregation around. Visiting Hagia Sophia in Istanbul last week was such a moment.  But I also miss worshipping with a  congregation.

I understand that priests can indeed be granted special permission to celebrate mass in the St. Peter’s Grotto, if they wish.  But we are expecting to have our own moments of worship – probably by ourselves this morning.

Is the glass half empty or half full?

Phil Tom, associate for the Small Church and Community Ministry Office of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), recently asked the question on his blog, “So what kind of mindset does your congregation and leaders operate out of – a spirit of scarcity or abundance?”

He asked this question as a spiritual version of the famous idiom referenced in the title of this post.  Usually the question is seen as a way to judge whether an individual is an optimistic individual or a more pessimistic individual (research also shows it can help gauge the right language to use in explaining a situation).  But, Phil meant it more generally than a single individual.  He means how we operate as a church, or as leaders of our church, and what our spirit is in making decisions.

Too often church congregations make decisions that are based on a pessimistic, scarcity frame.  Jan has preached on how the traditional model of placing importance on “Attendance, Building, and Cash” (an ABC church) has got to end.  Churches operating out of this frame are struggling and dying all across this country.  There is never enough of either A, B, or C.  We could always have a few more people in worship, or improve our physical space for kids, or have more money for ministry.  It leads to a pessimistic spirit – the glass is always half empty.  In its place she has hoped that we would move to a “Neighbors, Organizational Structure, and Paradigm Shift” focus (an NOP church).

Churches operating out of a NOP frame would see themselves as filled with the Holy Spirit (a church on fire, perhaps?), looking for ways to use what they have to bring others to Christ.  If we operated out of this frame, we would be less worried with the numbers of people attending service than with how those in attendance are finding Christ.  We would be less worried with the deficiencies of our physical space and instead with how to use the space we do have for supporting our common ministry.  And we would be less worried whether we had the money to do things and instead be searching for ideas that would be transformational or a paradigm shift for the community.  We would see the glass not only as half full but as was overflowing with the Holy Spirit and with our love of Christ.

As we think about the rest of the summer and as we prepare for Session-led Congregational Forums in early August on our building and grounds and on Christian education, I plan to reflect on the question posed by Phil this past week.  I will be asking whether we are practicing our faith with a spirit of abundance or scarcity, whether the glass is half full or empty, and whether we operate out of an ABC or NOP model.  And I ask that you consider it too.  What we choose to accomplish from our future shared ministry at Fairlington Presbyterian Church depends on it.

Jan Meets Up with Former FPC Member




Jan and Jon in Istanbul from Jan Edmiston on Vimeo.

In addition to an unintentional Righteous Brothers soundtrack, you’ll hear Jan Edmiston’s interview with a former FPC member whose story as part of our church is similar to many current members: Jon came to FPC as a young adult after college, he got married, and then Jon and his wife left the area after about two years of participation.

In our transient neighborhood, Jon and Sarah were two neighbors who passed through on their way to a more permanent home in the Midwest.

I share this because I sometimes assume that our church is unique in terms of what young adults/young families are searching for. But as you will hear, Jon’s interests and experiences parallel many of ours:

- he has an interest in connecting with other faiths
- he is concerned about his young children’s spiritual formation
- he is searching for community that sometimes begins in casual venues away from the church building.

As part of the Body of Christ, Jon clearly isn’t leaving all leadership in these interests to his church staff.

Enjoy this conversation. It was great to run into him in Istanbul while he was on a business trip.

Jan Leaves for Istanbul Today

Today we leave for Istanbul. Then Damascus. Then Amman.

I am enormously grateful to The Church’s One Foundation and to The Church’s One Foundation. Will be blogging at A Church for Starving Artists and here as able.

Jan’s Visit with Martha Holmes

Martha Holmes became a part of Fairlington Presbyterian Church when she sold movie tickets at the old Center Theatre on Quaker Lane where the church first met over 60 years ago. At the age of 95, she is our senior member. Martha now lives in Texas with her family and Jan visited her to ask about changes she’s seen through the years. As we’ve been discussing the use of words in these posts, note that Martha refers to “church” as the building or the worship time on Sunday, as many of us do.

Martha Holmes from Jan Edmiston on Vimeo.

The Word “Church”

During this past week’s Sunday morning conversation on “Using the Bulletin as a Tool for Hospitality” a participant raised concerns that in written communication we have been substituting other words for church.

It is a concern that I share and have been struggling with for some time (and I am not alone – Rev. Dr. Mark Roberts, a Presbyterian pastor, has an excellent series on the meaning of church on his website).

Church is an amazingly powerful word and an amazing concept.  The theology that I grew up with in Calvinist circles (the same theology our denomination uses as its base) always taught me that church was not a building – it was the people.  We, the children of God, are the church.  Christ stakes his hopes for humanity in us, his church.  This core theological belief has led to many of Jan’s sermons imploring us to “Try and be the church as opposed to merely going to church.”  She blogged on this nuanced word use again earlier this week.

Yet, we often do not think of church as this.  Even with many sermons and with our base theology on the word church, we likely have a different idea of what a church is.  And it’s no wonder – even in the Calvinist circles I grew up in, I learned this nursery rhyme (and accompanying hand-motions pictured on the right) that you may know, too:

Here is the church,
Here is the steeple,
Open the doors,
See all the people.

Likewise, we make statements like these:

• I will meet you at church.
• Church got done late this morning.

These types of statements have us thinking of church as:

This view is also clearly reinforced by our wider culture.  When movies talk about a church, it always has to do with a service or a building.  Television shows, such as the Simpson, indicate church as something that we struggle to wake up for on Sunday morning or something to suffer through.  Even if we reject the struggling to wake up for or suffer through, we likely implicitly agree with/understand the concept that church is something you go to.  Not something that you are.

I think part of the reason for this is an epistemological bind that the word “church” puts us in.  The word actually does not appear in the New Testament.  Instead the word that is often translated as church in our English Bibles is actually ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) or literally “assembly, congregation, council.”  The word church actually comes to us by way of Old English and West Germanic from the Greek word kuriakē, meaning “of the Lord.”  The current English word church is likely a shortened version of “house of the Lord” (kuriakē oikia) and “congregation of the Lord” (ekklēsia kuriakē).  So when we use the word church – it is no wonder that it is used for multiple things and has a tentative link with our theology – we’ve both lost things in translation and we are using it as shorthand for multiple concepts and ideas.

Over the last few months, in things like the bulletin we have been using words like “community” and “gathering” instead of the word church.  After lots of thinking and many discussions, we had hoped that using these replacement words would provide a more precise usage of language and more explanatory of what we thought our church was.  For both new guests and for our longtime members, we would use words with more precise meaning to actually link with the meaning of church that we were intending to use in each separate use.

This brings me back to the conversation on Sunday.  As I said at the outset of this blog posting, I am concerned with using other words than church for who we are.  Church is a powerful theological concept.  We are the church.  We are of God. I do not want to reject the biblical concept nor do I want to reject our theological view.  We should use church.

But my concern is that we do not now think about church as being a people.  We think about a building or a service.  We are more likely to look at the picture on the left and think the church is what is containing the people instead of the people being the church.  We can write “The Church Leaves to Serve” at the end of every worship service till the end of time and we still will not replace the implicit understanding of the word as a service or building.

So I ask each of you – how do we solve this?  We will likely schedule an organized Sunday Morning Conversation this fall on the topic but that shouldn’t preclude us from discussing it this summer (and hopefully on this blog).   Help us figure out the answers to some of these pressing complex questions:

• How we claim to be the church in the theological sense and the Biblical sense without losing things in translation?
• Would it help to refer to us, the people, as the church and other things as gatherings or the building?
• Do we go back to Greek and say things like “church community,” “church gathering,” and “church building” and explain that church means “of the Lord”?
• Or do we simply give in to our cultural understanding and continue to use church for multiple concepts?
• And how do we do any of these things while being precise and being true to who we are?

Jan Starts Sabbatical Today

This morning Jan reflected on the start of her sabbatical on her blog, A Church for Starving Artists:

“Everybody should get a paid sabbatical. Every parent who gets too little sleep because she works in an office all day to pay for all the essentials plus childcare, and then stays up late doing laundry and dishes. Every waiter who takes extra shifts to save for a condo. You get what I mean.”

Read the full post.

A Church on Fire

At Sunday’s Pentecost Service, Jan preached of a church on fire. And she did not mean any of the church buildings that had burned down that you can find on Google.

She meant a church that at its core is burning with a passion for ministry and that shows the light of Christ.

I simply cannot get that metaphor out of my head. Fire is an amazing part of our world. From a physical object come light and heat and energy. It almost seems to come out of thin air. It keeps burning, uncontrollably and chaotically at times, unless someone puts it out. And at the end, it has changed everything. What was there before is no more. It has been transformed into something else.

We are a church that has claimed as its mission to be a “transforming force for good in the world in the name of Jesus Christ.” But I’ve always had trouble picturing what that meant. Transforming? Who? What? When? It’s so distant. Not real. Not possible here and now.

But a fire? I see that every day. I know how it can change and transform things. I know how fire has given us improved lives, warmth, civilization, and the ability to control the world around us. I also know that fire has the ability to destroy things and make things into ash or dust. There is a reason that our parents admonished us to be careful with fire and not to play with it. It has the potential to control us.

A church on fire would be chaotic and likely uncontrollable. It would change things – not always in ways that we would see as better. Yet, if we desire to live out our calling and mission in life, we need to embrace it. We should desire to be a church that is neither too cold and impersonal nor lukewarm and only going about its normal business. We should be thinking about how that church giving off the light of Christ and the warmth of all of our being could transform and change our corner of the world. In short – we should be the church on fire!

I wasn’t expecting it, but something changed. After Sunday, I no longer want to be just lukewarm and go about my normal church business; I want to be on fire. And my guess is that I am not alone – you do too. So this summer, as we journey through this time of sabbatical, I hope that we can collaborate on what should be our summer calling – discovering what a church on fire might look like  and how we get there.

Meet Our Summer Ministry Intern

Thanks to the generosity of the Lilly Foundation, our Pastor Jan Edmiston will embark on a sabbatical of spiritual renewal and growth this summer. While Jan will be missed, we are ALL equipped as saints in our community. In addition, Ms. Lakesha Bradshaw has been hired to fill the position of Ministry Intern dur-ing Jan’s absence. Lakesha earned a Master of Divinity degree from Howard University in 2007. She is in the “Inquirer” phase of ordination through National Capital Presbytery (NCP), which is the presbytery or regional body that Fairlington Presbyterian belongs. In this phase, she has served as a church administrator and minister to a local university. Born in Chicago, IL, Lakesha now lives in Hyattsville, MD with her husband Rondolph Codlin, and their pet turtle “Monday”. She enjoys most outdoor activities including swimming, gardening, visiting the beach, hiking, and sitting or lying in parks/open spaces observing nature. Her hobbies include studying Christian spirituality, community building, playing Guitar Hero, and watching Golden Girls reruns on television. Lakesha has had several opportunities to preach, teach, facilitate workshops, and lead small groups in several congregations across NCP. She thoroughly enjoys interacting with and encouraging others, as we all mature and develop on our spiritual journeys. We look forward to being a community together this summer!