Things Are Gonna Be Different Around Here From Now On

I'm just not sure how, exactly

image by KC Green

Largely in the name of politesse and tact, and sometimes also thrift, my family of origin tends not to object to much. I mean, we do, to ourselves or amongst ourselves behind closed doors, but in spite of my brother and me being GenX-ers, we are not naturally Talk to the Manager people.

Well…I might be a Talk to the Manager After I Have Made Friends With the Manager So That They Are More Inclined to Assist Me Because They Like Me person. Failing that and adding codependency into the mix, you can pretty much assume that I, at least, don’t typically improve my life in any initiative-taking way. That time in my 30’s when I ordered fish and it was clearly bad and so I had to tell the waiter about it and send it back is still its own discrete memory, for example. That’s how rare it is for me to do something like that. I’m more likely to just walk quietly away.

Which is what I did in 2015 when I was told I wasn’t fired but it was time for me to find something else to do. To be fair, I didn’t have much of an option at that point, but that job had been toxic for a long while before then and I wasn’t leaving. Then I immediately started CPE¹ and not too many weeks in, our supervisor asked our cohort,

Where do you get your pastoral authority?

I wanted my answer to be “God.” I mean, God sure is the reason I’ve understood for any major decision I’ve ever made, but when asked that question point blank, I didn’t feel like I had authority of any kind, really. I knew that I only ever got my sense of authority from other people’s validation, and that validation had just very recently been pulled away from me, so in the moment I felt like a complete fraud. But an involuntary fraud—one who didn’t even want the authority I was supposed to be wielding in the first place.

There’s been a lot of healing and training and learning and moving into leadership and authority since then. But in spite of all that, and the fact that I’m in my fifties now, and am well-educated in my field and actually do know what I’m talking about sometimes, most of the time I feel like what I’m doing isn’t the real thing. Not a real pastor. Not a real spiritual director. Because—and this is probably the crux of the matter—I never have wanted and still don’t really want, authority. I like autonomy sometimes, but frankly, I don’t want to be responsible for the wellbeing of a community of people—some of whom are older but not always wiser than I—and sometimes have to tell them what to do or what not to. I’m fine to feed the sheep, but when it comes to protecting the sheep from predators or even themselves, well…it’s a lot of pressure that goes against my grin and bear it, INFP² grain.

This past month, a year’s long church concern came to a head and I have been painfully learning that leading from a servant posture like Jesus, my primary authority (and literally the only Reason I do any of the things I do these days because I’m just not that brave on my own) does not always go well for the servant leader. (I mean…I do know what happened to Jesus, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise.) But I’m also learning that servant leadership, when that authority was not sought and was truly bestowed by God, does not mean simply handing over the authority to someone else when God gave you the assignment. I guess you can be a servant with authority who doesn’t abuse people but still takes difficult stands on behalf of the group you have been assigned to serve by leading.

People in my chaplaincy cohorts and in the subsequent SITS courses I’ve taught have been trying to encourage me to operate out of a place of true godly authority for some time now:

I’m still not sure I know what that means, but I already told you how God’s been pointing out the next layer of my self-protective defaults that hinder me in helping you. I guess this is what we (God and I, and you if you want to come along for the journey) are working on in 2025. The last time I had an experience this difficult at a church, I entered a new season of training (CPE and spiritual direction) that bolstered the paradigm shifts that came from that church hurt. My paradigms are shifting again, and a lot of assumptions about pastors and congregations and Christian leadership that I was getting ready to strongly assert right here in this Substack are toppling like statues of Confederate soldiers at the moment—about six months before I begin a DMin in Spiritual Formation for Christian Leaders. It’s probably not a coincidence…

So things are going to be different around here…but it might take some time, and some messiness, and some false starts and stops to figure out exactly how. I hope that I will come out of this both more humble and more confident in the authority that Jesus for some reason wants me to have. Thanks for being here while I work on this. I’d love to hear what God is working on with you and/or what your word for the year is.

Happy New Year.

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1. Clinical Pastoral Education, or chaplaincy training

2. INFP - Myers-Briggs personality type: Introvert Intuitive Feeling Perceiving. The “Perceiving” part indicates that I prefer to just let things play out as they play out and go from there. That aspect of my personality is being challenged as I am realizing that sometimes when the well-being of others is at stake, I need to take a stand and, as it were, “talk to the manager.”