"It's like we didn't pray"

Let's reflect a moment"

(From the AP) The annual National Prayer Breakfast bills itself as a celebration of faith and togetherness. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama noted, that spirit doesn't last much past the coffee.

During his speech at the breakfast Thursday morning at the Washington Hilton, where he spoke before community and religious leaders as well as some lawmakers, the president lamented the current tone in Washington.

"I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast, everything we've been talking about the whole time at the prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten. On the same day of the prayer breakfast," Obama said, and paused as the attendees laughed. "I mean, you'd like to think the shelf life wasn't so short. I go back to the Oval Office and I start watching the cable news networks, and it's like we didn't pray."

Well, there you go.

I think the best way I could put it is this, from a line in a song by Rich Mullins called Elijah: People been friendly, but they can never be your friend; sometimes that has bent me to the ground.

My experience, as limited as it is in ministry, points out to me that divisiveness or the lack thereof, is the answer to the biggest problems in churches. People, being well, you know, human, want power. Power is there to be had in churches, as in any other thing.

Who has it? Who makes decisions? How do we reach agreement on the things that separate us?

All these things are what makes leadership, well, leadership. Having the nerve, which I'm not sure I've ever had through 27 years in management in newspapers across the country and then 14 years in ministry, to hold ones ground and then compromise at the proper time and in the proper way, is a great, great talent.

I've spent much of the past year on this blog talking about those forces that are so much at odds with each other. I've always come down on the side of let's talk it over; let's find a way. Let's be about something better or something more than just ourselves.

Clearly I'm not always -- ah, heck I'm never -- victorious in this regard.

But I want to be. Maybe in the end it's about being a pastor more than being a friend. Maybe in the end it's about taking the greater good as the way to go and not caring who gets credit. Maybe it's about Jesus and not about us.

Maybe.