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What have we learned from COVID-19?

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Someday the extreme dislocations of COVID-19 will end. The question being asked throughout American society, economy and politics is: What then? What will be the new nature of things? Many hope that everything will “return to normal” — whatever your world was doing in February, that’s the way it will be in August or November or next year when a vaccine appears. Don’t count on it. The “old normal” is long gone. For one thing, it’s quite likely we will emerge from COVID-19 into a depression unlike anything since the 1930s — with high and persistent unemployment, shuttered restaurants and stores, entire companies gone, irresponsible banks again in crisis and inequalities of wealth and privilege more severe. Moreover, the lockdown has changed many minds about the fundamentals. Parents and children are in new relationship. Many have found better ways to shop. Congested urban living no longer looks so desirable. Many workers have delighted in working from home. Only a fool … [Read more...]

Tagged With: COVID19

Knock on the door and listen

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Trauma ministry begins on a small stage. It might stem from crime, accident, sudden illness or natural disaster. But the ministry tends to begin with a simple scene, as I recently experienced. At dinner, a wife notices that her husband is panting for breath and calls 911. Within a few minutes, two EMTs and a fire chief arrive. The EMT captain does a quick assessment. She directs her assistant to slap an oxygen mask on the patient. While the fire chief comforts the wife, the EMTs prepare the patient for an ambulance crew. Within minutes, he is loaded onto a stretcher and wheeled to the ambulance for transport to the hospital. An EMT drives, while the paramedic rides in the back with the patient and begins assembling data for the hospital. At the hospital, a team of physicians and nurses takes over. More tests, a CT scan of the patient’s lungs. A diagnosis: bacterial pneumonia. A decision: lung surgery ASAP. The hospital’s thoracic surgery team steps in. Over the next few … [Read more...]

Tagged With: grief

Oh my God

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It was irritating, and yet it was fascinating — in an “oh my God” sort of way. On the morning Amtrak train to Penn Station, two 20-something women sitting behind me kept up a nonstop dialogue for nearly two hours. Their topics were inane with not a shred of content. No listening, just pushing out words intended to be clever. Every now and then, one or the other would say, “Oh my God,” and then voice some surprising situation, like a boy who never called or a friend who was trapped in bad hair. On the one hand, “Oh my God” was verbal filler. But it also expressed an understanding of God as the one who explains the surprises of life, the one who makes sense of the perplexing. This wasn’t the expletive that calls down God’s fire. Or the teenager’s “Oh God!” aimed at snarking a grown-up. No, this was different. The two young women clearly were grappling with issues for which family, schooling and life hadn’t prepared them. They were at sea. They had a friendship and a birthday … [Read more...]

Shaped by Scripture

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Read correctly, the Hebrew Bible offers necessary understandings of God’s nature, God’s desires and humanity’s journey in God’s creation. It doesn’t offer scientific knowledge. Genesis 1, for example, isn’t a science of creation. Nor does Genesis 2-3 tell us a historical story about the origins of humanity. Deriving such science and history from the Old Testament would mean reading it incorrectly. Fundamentalists do that, and they make much of it. But it’s still erroneous. The first question we face, therefore, is whether to read the Old Testament correctly. Do we struggle with its language, narratives and overwhelming concern for topics such as menstrual blood, sexual relations, ownership of people, land and animals and religious rituals — all of which were important to ancient Israelites for practical reasons of their era, but of no apparent interest whatsoever to Jesus. Or do we read it incorrectly and enjoy the fantasy world that such a reading offers? Literal days of … [Read more...]

Confronting fear and selfishness

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The most fraught time in a congregation’s life is transition. A new pastor arrives, a new cohort of leaders emerges, the world we serve demands new ministry from us — and things fall apart. The new pastor is often gone within 18 months. The new leadership cohort gets frozen out and leaves. We ignore the emerging world outside our walls. When I began to see this happening, I developed strategies and methodologies for handling change more effectively. I led workshops, leadership trainings and spiritual retreats. I wrote a book on the subject and a weekly newsletter. Others were doing the same, because we all recognized the same problem: poor transitions were killing our congregations. But nothing worked — because our dilemma isn’t methods or strategies or training. It’s fear and selfishness. Here’s a story: On a drive through rural Ohio, I stopped at a restaurant that was a shrine to the 1950s. Red and chrome decor, leatherette booths, perky waitresses slinging burgers and … [Read more...]

Tagged With: transitional ministry

Tackling tough topics

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When I trained to be an emergency medical technician, this was a paramount lesson: Identify the life threats. Your patient might be complaining about a sore shoulder, but if blood is spurting from a ruptured artery, deal with the bleeding first. Don’t pursue the problem you understand, like splinting a bone, but fail to see the problem you don’t understand, like inhalation of toxic fumes. When well-meaning believers want to work on having conversations about tough topics, we need first to see what is truly tough — not the issues that make us squeamish or angry, but the issues that are life-threats: the ones destroying human lives and drawing our neighbors and us into the orbit of evil. We will disagree on what the tough topics are, but one thing is clear: Tackling the issue we tackled last year just because we know how to have that conversation is a mistake. The point isn’t to get better at having a conversation, but making sure we are talking about the right things. I know … [Read more...]

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