tearing down idols

Exodus 34: 11-15 -- Observe what I command you today. See I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Take care not to make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you are going, or it will become a snare among you. You shall tear down their altars, break their pillars, and cut down their sacred poles (for you shall worship no other god because The Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God).

We've been at Annual Conference for a couple of days, and I've noticed this issue of Idols appearing everywhere around me.

When one does budgeting in the millions, idols are certain to appear. One clergy's most important issue, can't not budget it, can't live without it, is another clergy's least important issue, don't need to budget it, certainly life will go on type of thing.

Our main speaker, Bishop Palmer, pointed out Monday night and Tuesday morning that we, the people of the United Methodist Church, used to be the largest protestant denomination. He said we were quite proud of that, and we existed in our pride. Then our numbers began to fall, and we were both shocked and frightened.

Our identity, he said, was bound up in those numbers.

I'd liken it to having a covenant with the identity, rather than with the one who gave us that identity.

Now, Bishop Palmer said, The Lord is not through with us. In this dry and weary land, there is hope for every man. There is love that never dies, or if it does, it is resurrected better than even before. There is peace in our wilderness, if we understand we were led (or shoved) to this wilderness by a loving God who wants the wilderness to knock some of the rough edges off but eventually lead us not only out of the wilderness but to a great and green land of milk and honey.

I can speak only of myself.  A year ago I was so filled with enthusiasm I wanted nothing less than complete change for my three (count them, three) churches. why? I guess I had it figured that was the one with the answers, or at least the proper questions.

A year later, I've done some of what I had read I must do, or at the least all Adam Hamilton said I must do. I had numbers that would rival anyone's proportionally in one of the churches. I loved the people of the other two churches, though they do not do all I would like for them to do.

And I'm worn slam out.

I always feel I'm one step away from Jesus' leaving me, letting me wander in a wilderness at least partially created by myself.

Why? Again and again, why? Why do I have the consistent thought pattern that the wilderness is something bad, awfully bad, and therefore it is somewhere I SHOULD actually be.

Some of it, I believe, comes from the fact I didn't tear down any altars, didn't break down any pillars, and certainly didn't cut down their sacred poles. In other words, I tried to find what each of the churches' did, liked to do, etc., but then I just did them. I kept their sacred ways sacred. I didn't lead them into the future. I didn't change anything, really. Why? That's the 64-thousand dollar question. I suspect it is because I have a far too great of a desire to be liked rather than do what I truly feel needs to be done. What I've learned about clergy loneliness I could write books about. 

There. Said it. Did it. Aways do it. Perhaps in the end, that's the difference in leading and managing, this ability to get people to do things they reaaaaaalllllyyyy don't want to do. Perhaps.

What now? The wilderness grows larger, the weeds bigger, the darkness darker, the dryness acute.  Water is much harder to come by. A fleeting piece of bread is difficult to find. Wilderness is, well, wilderness. 

I enter my second year in these parts in wonder as much as anything. My being tells me I can't stay the same, just can't. It isn't part of who I am at my core. . I pray (still) that God uses me in a manner than He chooses, even while I know that I am holding out hope He uses me in the manner I have chosen.

 I pray that the music that lifted my spirits on Monday night be somehow part of the Sunday routine. I pray that the hymn God lifted me becomes a record of my life, that I tear down the routine and begin to have the courage to make the right choices and right changes to build up the uncommon and the unseen.

Then the wilderness, though remaining dry and rock-covered, will be an incubating area rather than a death bed. God can use this wilderness to build upon.

As Ohio Bishop Greg Palmer said in a voice that God must have borrowed on occasion, all deep and forceful and such, "when next we see Jesus (after the temptations in the desert), he is in the Temple. When he leaves the wilderness, it is ON."

When the day comes that we, that I, leave the wilderness, let it be ON like Donkey Kong, as Si Robertson would say.

Then and probably only then will I being in the tearing down idols mode. Let it be so, Lord. Let it be so.