Passion Play

This week I went to the local Passion play with my mom. I wasn’t going to go, but decided to because my dad had a big part in the play and I wanted to see him with his hair down and glasses off. I have nothing against the play itself, but I find myself these days attending less and less traditional church events.

As I sat there, I became more and more uncomfortable. This event was, of course, a very concerted effort on the part of the churches involved (including people from ours) to reach people with the message of Jesus. For some reason, however, I felt weird--like I didn’t belong there. It wasn’t the people--they were friendly and genuine. The actors were sincere and I could tell they were there for the best possible reasons. It was me. There was something about me that felt wrong in that place. I thought about how long it had been since I’d been in a church building (the place we meet doesn’t have the same feel as a normal church along with the fact that we only meet there now once a month), and I began to reflect on my life and relationships.

I spend less than an hour a week--if that--in my church office. In fact, if you went in there, the only evidence that I have anything to do with that office is a small book shelf in the corner with the hat I inherited from my grandpa that says, “if you ain’t chicano, you ain’t caca.” I don’t have a staff, so there are no staff meetings. I work more hours at The UPS Store than I do for the church (I get paid far less--nothing--for the church work as well). When I hear my kids answering the question “what does your dad do?“ I hear them say I’m a raft guide or a substitute teacher. My weekly spiritual interactions consist of a small group that meets in my house and a bizarre group of guys who meet in a bar to talk about the Kingdom on Wednesday afternoons. Most of the people I am around throughout the week are not church people--James, my homeless friend, angry people at the UPS Store who think that as a cashier I have some secret plan to rip them off on their shipping needs, raft guides, coffee shop people, elementary school parents, neighbors, etc. The phone number for our church in the yellow pages is the number to my cell phone. Once a month, if that, I get a call that has to do with the church--usually asking if we’re the false prophets who use the devil’s NIV version of the Bible, or demanding that we change our name because the Lutheran church had it first. When I meet with a couple who want me to do their wedding, I get to share Jesus with them, but I don’t get to tell them what they need to do with any authority because I’m just the preacher, not any person of authority in their lives. The people in our church community are different than any church people I’ve ever known. Our conversations are more about things going on in their life outside church than things that happened at a service or something I said when I was preaching. The people in our church have all experienced some pretty deep levels of pain--much of it self-inflicted and a lot of it out of our control.

As I thought through my life as a pastor, it become harder to identify it as the life of a pastor as I‘ve understood it in the past. In fact, as I sat there watching the youth group kid in front of me trying to put a piece of duct tape down the front of a girl’s shirt, a sickening sensation began to swell in my stomach. “What if I’m no longer really a pastor?” What if I’m doing it all wrong? Am I living out some weird pseudo-pastoral fantasy? Could I be leading this group of people way down the wrong path away from what God has clearly established as the way of doing church? I began to have a little panic attack in my seat--until a roman guard ran by me complete with plastic helmet and surfer sandals.

I came out of my head for a moment and was able to watch the play for a while. My dad was a high priest trying to plot the murder of Jesus. I watched as Jesus cried out to God in the garden, was arrested, and then nailed to the cross.

I continued to think about what I thought being a pastor was supposed to be like. My friend, Joe recently asked me if I had written down what I thought God’s calling on my life was. He said it would be good to have it written down to go back to when I had doubts about what I was doing. Since this was definitely one of those moments, I walked through, in my mind, the ideas I had been thinking of in terms of what God was asking me to do here in Durango.

There is a phrase that’s been going through my mind when I think of what God has called me to do in my life and here in Durango. My calling, as I see it, is to lead in poverty and weakness those who will not be led by strength and competency. There are people in the world who need a strong leader to guide them. They need pastors who will take the reigns with confidence and lead them where God wants them to go. These people are looking for leaders who know where they are going and how to get there. They want to hear what the plan is and then follow that plan--success is making a decision, following through with that decision and seeing it happen the way it was envisioned. There is another kind of person in the Church, however. Often, this other brand of Christian has been hurt by their past church experiences. They’ve been abandoned or betrayed by confident and driven leaders. Sometimes, they have been told that they don’t measure up to standards of excellence, or that their struggles and shortcomings were too much for that particular community. These people have a difficult time with strength and confidence. They are turned off by anyone who appears to have it all together or knows all the answers.

This is where I come in.

I have no doubt in my mind that God has gifted me as a leader and as a shepherd of people. It is as much a part of my DNA as anything. The problem is that I am extremely relational and emotional. I don’t fit the profile of a typical pastor. I’m not driven to excellence--I like to do a good job, but the experience is often more important to me than the goal. I don’t command decisions and follow through with them--I try things. I often try things that don’t work out the way I intended, and yet, God always seems to accomplish something in the midst of my imperfection and weakness. I am discovering that there is a section of society that is looking for this kind of leader--my kind of leadership. They want to know that their pastor is their friend and that he is more interested in their heart than their behavior. They need a shepherd who will walk with them through weakness and failure and not abandon them when they blow it or fall short. These people are not hard to find--they just aren’t at church. Many of them have been on hiatus from going to church for quite some time, or have quit altogether. They tend to struggle with the idea that God doesn’t love them because he doesn’t seem interested in miraculously delivering them from their problems.

As I continued to tune in and out of the Passion play I realized why I felt strange in the church world I had grown up in. It wasn’t because there was anything wrong with Passion plays, or youth groups, or traditional church--or me. It was because I have been designed for and called to reach out to a group of people who exist outside that sphere of reality. They are being left behind and abandoned or disqualifying themselves from church altogether. I’m not just called to be with those people, I am one of them. I don’t fit in that world. I’ve been hurt by it. I don’t fit it’s standards of leadership. I don’t go about business in the same way. The things I keep telling my people about how God can meet them even outside the “normal” church goes for me as well.

I watched Peter run into the empty tomb and listened as he sang a song I had heard for the first time as a small boy. I smiled as I remembered Speedy Ramirez singing “He’s Alive” in the Easter pageants at the church we went to when I was a kid. I had come to a good place--fully appreciating, both the excitement of the church presenting Jesus’ resurrection in such a creative way and my own reality as the bastard preacher with the strange assignment in God’s upside down Kingdom. At the time, I didn’t even know that, 24 hours later, I would be sitting in a sweat lodge praying with an accompaniment of Native American chants and drumming--fully completing the picture of what it means for Chip Johnson to be a pastor.