The River of Ministry

I've been in a strange place in recent months.  I quit one bus driving job because I couldn't stomach a terrible administration and am getting ready to start one in another district, hoping that things will be better.  My kids are getting older, and rarely do they need me much anymore beyond just me being the 'provider' so they can do their own thing.  My body in recent months has finally started to feel older than the young man I thought I was, even into my mid-50s.  My heel has been through a period where insoles and stretching are necessities; my flesh continues to grow as my energy seems to wane; waking up in the morning do I rarely fly out of bed; even my libido seems to finally be slowing down.  

And my ministry, the thing that sometimes I feel has been my defining quality for almost three decades, seems to be in a strange place.  Church attendance is down everywhere: the amplifying COVID shutdown pushed people out of church, increasing secularism means that people realize that they have options that make it where they don't 'need' organized religion, and the realization that many 'Christians' are little more than MAGA acolytes means that genuine evangelism is getting harder all the time.  Even here in the heartland of America, where trends finally arrive years or decades after the begin on the coast, I'm seeing this more and more.  In my own ministry I've seen numbers go down, and even those who have come to our little church as the effects of consolidation mean we get members from closing churches have not offset the deaths of older saints and the indifference of too many others.  Far too often I wonder if my preaching and teaching and ministry is making a difference with people.

I still love to preach.  But I wonder if my life of being a Preacher is coming to an end.  I'm starting to think about what my next decade looks like, and more and more I can see that perhaps the other aspects of my life change are just preludes to a different career altogether.  Lots of churches would still need me to come and fill on occasion, as there are less and less people willing to preach almost everywhere now.  But the adminstrative side of being a preaching minister may end sooner than I once thought.  I don't have any desire to move to a new full-time ministerial position, as I don't know if I could start all over again.  What has been my second job for the last few years may well now be the first job or the gateway to some other kind of career entirely.  

So what does all this mean?  Several times this summer I have been taking days to pray and spend out in the wilderness to consider this question.  Today I went down to a place near the river that has a bunch of nice hiking trails, and I spent a few hours in consideration of the Future.  Through the heat and the spiderwebs I made it down to the sandbar and saw that the river was very low, as it has been around here for almost a year.  Even as we have had some summer rains and it is surprisingly green almost everywhere you look, almost a year of drought meant that the river remains low and slow.  

But I took time to watch it, and yet it continued to move.  Slowly, without any sense of urgency the waters continued to flow.  The mosquitos and water bugs would make little indentions in the water, small branches would float by, and patches of riverbeds that are still uncovered continued to sprout green grasses that normally are drowned.  And it hit me in this that perhaps this is my stage of ministry.  I've never been much of a raging river like some preachers, crashing down like a mountain stream or even at times flooding so much that destruction followed in its wake.  I've prided myself on always been a simple, steady kind of mature river that never got much out of the banks but nourished everything.  Maybe now, in my later middle ages, after years of spiritual drought of COVID, exhaustion with aging and family and driving, and just the increasing apathy of American culture when it comes to the Lord, slower and drier is now the norm for my life.  Maybe I shouldn't get so upset that the expectations of a young man to do great things are no longer realistic.  Like the river, I'll be low and slow yet perform a vital function in ways that may not be awe-inspiring yet are vital to the health of everyone.  

I don't know what this means for my life as the Preacher.  But I trust that somehow the Lord will find a way to use me to his glory.  I just wish I knew what that is...

What's Next

Summer 2023.  Much of the country is locked into a heatwave deathcycle brought on by climate change, or it's just a hot summer.  I don't really know, but it feels like nothing ever seems to change this time of year.  We're just hanging on until the start of the school year, hoping that then we'll be so busy that when the inevitable cooldown happens, we'll not even notice.  

Of course, like the hellish summer we have endured so far we're continually stuck in the cycle of Trump.  He never went away, not even after trying to get his armed acolytes to ransack the halls of Congress because he got his butt kicked in the 2020 election.  The indictments are piling up, the force of law and order are finally breathing down his neck, yet his 38% continues to hang on and glorify his Orangeness.  It's pathetic to be honest, but I don't really fear the man.  I fear what comes next.

A year or two ago I read a book about Mussolini, the awful fascist dictator of Italy who came to power in 1922.  He was a horrible leader but probably not as horrible as he could have been.  Filled with personality and charm, he made some great speeches to bring out the worst in people but seemed to more content to bang a series of mistresses before going home to his overbearing wife every night.  His squad of thugs would beat up dissenting fellow Italians for the sheer pleasure of it and used nationalistic and Catholic fervor to give a voice (and some substance) to antisemitism.  But for his incompetence, he could have been far worse.  

Perhaps one of the biggest legacies about Mussolini was that he was an inspiration for one Adolf Hitler.  Hitler liked Mussolini's style, as well as his fervent nationalism that saw Jews and other minorities as objects belittle, persecute, and eventually destroy.  Eventually he started a world war that led to the death of millions and destroyed his own nation, all because he lived in a world of Aryan resentment that found nothing constructive to create.  

Mussolini was bad, but it took Hitler to take fascism and transform it into a wholly destructive Nazi movement.  It took Hitler's 'competence' (I hate using that word as it sounds like I admire him but it's just descriptive of the effectiveness of his evil ideals) to grow this rage into something beyond a bunch of Angry White People with no outlet.  I wonder if history is repeating itself, not across international boundaries but in the United States itself.  Trump is the Mussolini in this analogy, something of a clown who screams a lot and glorifies himself and talks about the 'greatness' of America...but in fact he's not really serious about anything but his own power.  Just like he never could be bothered to actually march ahead of his minions on January 6th, neither did he really take seriously his power.  He was too busy playing golf and humping a flag and rage-tweeting while watching Fox News to really do all those things he ranted about.  Part of me believes that he never really believes anything he says; he'd parade with the Gay Rights people or feed the homeless if he thought it would be politically advantageous.  His incompetence, always real, found the full force of its might during the COVID pandemic as he mismangaged what could have been a triumphal event of his legacy and blew a winnable election against Mediocre Joe.  And even though he's trying to make a comeback, he's becoming an increasingly old man who even with his 38% is being marginalized for the things he has done through his legal troubles and through a death by a thousand cuts.  One of these days he'll have eaten one too many Big Macs, have a massive heart attack,and he'll be gone.

But my fear is that his movement will be taken over, just like Hitler eventually ursurped Mussolini.  There's already a gang of fools trying to position themselves now to be the Next, people like MTG or Ron DeSantis whose own idiocy makes Trump look reasonable.  These are people who scream and plot and stoke various resentments among people, but they just don't have IT like Trump.  Instead, they're transitional figures, whose weakness amplifies the stupidity of this whole movement rather than strengthen it and make those of us who groan at the thought of the Democrats ultimately vote for them.  One of these days, though, somebody else is going to come along and know what to do with this unruly mob.  The red hat dummies will be organized effectively into a modern version of the brownshirted thugs, who will actually have the discipline and organization to do those things that Trump could only dream of.  

I don't know who that person is going to be, but I'm guessing it's somebody who either we haven't heard of yet or is still totally unknown.  Maybe a Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who leads a state small enough that she isn't well-known except in political circles.  Maybe somebody like Elise Stefanik, a congresswoman from New York who started off as a reasonable republican but quickly turned into a Trump die-hard.  What both of these women have in common is that they are young, attractive, reasonably smart, and likely savvy enough to not tip their hands.  I fear that the Hitler that is to come will be somebody whom we might not expect, somebody young and attractive and seemingly a reasonable alternative to the madness we have seen.  But once they arise and seize their power like Hitler in 1933, their true evil will come out.  And when that happens, this country will really be in some deep s*it.