Tag Archives: Activism

Activist burnout: A pastor who now focuses on the gospel more than politics

A New York Times article explores balancing activism and pastoral ministry – or as the article suggests – a prophetic ministry vs a pastoral ministry. Here is a full reprint of the article.

BABY BOOMERS supposedly are divisive people, still locked in the political and cultural wars of the 1960s and ’70s. This, we’re told, is why Barack Obama, though technically a boomer (b. 1961), isn’t actually a boomer. He is alleged to be the next generation, a master of consensus who refuses to be bogged down in the old quagmires.

This view of boomers is outdated. It is true we’re a generation with strong opinions. Coming of age in the era of Vietnam, civil rights, feminism and gay rights, we would have had to be dead not to have strong opinions.

But to say boomers continue to promote societal division ignores a change that people go through as they age. It’s not so much that one’s politics change, it’s the need to broadcast them that does. It’s a realization that we can’t change others — not even our own children — as much as we’d hoped.

The Rev. Tim Ives, 54, a Presbyterian minister from Westchester County, has made this transition, which he describes as going from a prophetic minister to a pastoral one.

For 16 years, until 2004, he served the First Congregational Church in Chappaqua, N.Y. (One Christmas Eve, the Clintons attended his service.) Mr. Ives, who describes himself as politically liberal, loved his sermons. “This was always central to my ministry,” he said. “Telling stories gives the greatest joy.”

HE is a pacifist, and often spoke of the mistakes of Vietnam and the folly of war. “I’m very easygoing, but there are just things I believe are wrong, I believe are clearly stated in the Bible,” he said. “We must have nothing to do with violence. It was very important for me to be clear on that, to be right and not worry about people’s reactions.”

Most of his sermons weren’t political. But when they were, they had that prophetic fire. In March 2000, he used Mark 9:1-13 and the idea of righteous power and the kingdom of God to deliver an impassioned plea for gun control as the first anniversary of Columbine approached. “We have allowed, encouraged, looked the other way as we have become the most violent of societies,” he said that Sunday, adding: “If I am being too political, so be it. I cannot see an argument that can stand up to the moral responsibility we have to our children to get rid of these guns.”

“I want everyone to go home, write, e-mail, phone, snail mail your senators and Congress people,” he concluded. “Do it. Guns are about the wrong kind of power and they are killing us all. In Christ Jesus, amen.”

Occasionally, someone questioned a sermon. “I’d listen, I’d nod, I’d smile, but I’d still think they were wrong,” Mr. Ives said.

He assumed he would always be at that church, but after 9/11 things changed. He continued preaching against violence — making clear his opposition to the Afghan and Iraq wars — but now he could see his views were dividing the congregation.

“After 9/11,” said Bob Buzak, a member of First Congregational for 44 years, “people were saying: ‘We can’t just take this. We have to strike back at our enemies.’ Tim was frustrated he couldn’t get his point across. He could see he was losing contact with some of his congregation.”

Mr. Buzak, a retired music teacher, saw the strain. “To me he was quieter, more withdrawn from his usual outgoing self.”

Mr. Ives’s sermons grew shrill. One condemned the violence of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.” “I am so sickened by what I saw on the movie screen,” he told the congregation. “I am so sickened by what I read in the paper daily. I am so sickened by what passes for sanity these days, that I find myself very often near despair.”

He was certain he’d failed.

“I’d come to the point in my life I was no good for the church,” he recalled. “I was mad with God. Here I was taking up the fight for what I thought was a very important issue for God, and it wasn’t working out. I couldn’t understand my failure. I was so right.”

In 2004, after a run-in with a few of the trustees, he took the church by surprise and resigned. He cited the divisions he’d caused and a desire to spend more time with family — he has two children, now 10 and 13, and is married to Ann Guerra, an orthodontist. “I thought I’d never lead a church again,” he said. “I was spent.”

He began studying to become a psychotherapist.

For six months, he did not attend church. But he loves Christmas, and on a whim, during the third Sunday of Advent in 2004, he ducked into one near his home, the Presbyterian Church of Mount Kisco. “I was late,” he said. “I opened the door. Services had started. The first open pew, I sat down quickly as possible.”

And there, sitting beside him, of all people, was a trustee from his old Chappaqua church, a man he’d once exchanged bitter words with. “It could be a coincidence,” Mr. Ives said. “But I didn’t think so.” James Joyce would have called it a moment of epiphany, but to the minister it felt like God’s hand.

He believes he was being reminded that a righteous life is about more than being right. “God sat me down right next to the person he wanted me to reconcile with,” Mr. Ives said. “Life should be about trying to make room for your enemies, loving your enemies. I had missed this. I’d appreciated it academically, but I hadn’t got it spiritually.”

In the years that followed, Mr. Ives finished his studies to become a therapist and served as a fill-in pastor at several churches, before taking over as minister at the Scarborough Presbyterian Church in Scarborough, N.Y., a year ago.

When he interviewed for the position, he described in great detail the changes he’d gone through, and was selected from 75 candidates. Edwin Payne, a retired bond dealer who was a chairman of the search committee and describes himself as a conservative, said he was not concerned about Mr. Ives’s liberalism. “He’s more focused on a love for Christ,” Mr. Payne said.

While most parishioners are aware of Mr. Ives’s general views — he has mentioned he is a pacifist and has an Obama sticker on one of his cars — politics are no longer at the heart of his sermons.

“He seems to get such joy in just giving communion,” Mr. Payne said. “The way he celebrates the sacrament — it comes across to the worshipers, here’s a man who loves what he’s doing.”

Under Mr. Ives, the church has expanded the Passing of the Peace, with every member walking around the church and greeting everyone else. He has expanded the time spent praying for those in need.

“He has us pray for our troops, pray for our enemies, pray for Democrats, pray for Republicans,” Mr. Payne said.

MR. IVES said his politics haven’t changed a lick.

“I still feel the same about guns and I know I’m right,” he said. “If I thought giving that sermon would be the end of guns in this society, I’d give it again in a second. But it won’t. That sermon was more about placating my need to be right than about preaching the Gospel. It does more to defeat my case than help it.

“I’m standing up on a pulpit, no one can say a thing for those 20 minutes, what I say goes. It’s the wrong kind of power. It undermines the love. You can tell people to do the right thing or you can do the loving thing and get the same result.”

His most recent sermon was about Mary Magdalene somehow finding hope at the lowest moment in the darkest tomb.

It’s 2009. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is?

Bono – Guest Op-Ed piece in NY Times

I AM in Midtown Manhattan, where drivers still play their car horns as if they were musical instruments and shouting in restaurants is sport.
I am a long way from the warm breeze of voices I heard a week ago on Easter Sunday.

“Glorify your name,” the island women sang, as they swayed in a cut sandstone church. I was overwhelmed by a riot of color, an emotional swell that carried me to sea.

Christianity, it turns out, has a rhythm — and it crescendos this time of year. The rumba of Carnival gives way to the slow march of Lent, then to the staccato hymnals of the Easter parade. From revelry to reverie. After 40 days in the desert, sort of …

Carnival — rock stars are good at that.

“Carne” is flesh; “Carne-val,” its goodbye party. I’ve been to many. Brazilians say they’ve done it longest; they certainly do it best. You can’t help but contract the fever. You’ve got no choice but to join the ravers as they swell up the streets bursting like the banks of a river in a flood of fun set to rhythm. This is a Joy that cannot be conjured. This is life force. This is the heart full and spilling over with gratitude. The choice is yours …

It’s Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up … self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.

Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.

It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.

Last Sunday, the choirmaster was jumping out of his skin … stormy then still, playful then tender, on the most upright of pianos and melodies. He sang his invocations in a beautiful oaken tenor with a freckle-faced boy at his side playing conga and tambourine as if it was a full drum kit. The parish sang to the rafters songs of praise to a God that apparently surrendered His voice to ours.

I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.

The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?”

Well, yes. It is us.

Carnival is over. Commerce has been overheating markets and climates … the sooty skies of the industrial revolution have changed scale and location, but now melt ice caps and make the seas boil in the time of technological revolution. Capitalism is on trial; globalization is, once again, in the dock. We used to say that all we wanted for the rest of the world was what we had for ourselves. Then we found out that if every living soul on the planet had a fridge and a house and an S.U.V., we would choke on our own exhaust.

Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption. But redemption is not just a spiritual term, it’s an economic concept. At the turn of the millennium, the debt cancellation campaign, inspired by the Jewish concept of Jubilee, aimed to give the poorest countries a fresh start. Thirty-four million more children in Africa are now in school in large part because their governments used money freed up by debt relief. This redemption was not an end to economic slavery, but it was a more hopeful beginning for many. And to the many, not the lucky few, is surely where any soul-searching must lead us.

A few weeks ago I was in Washington when news arrived of proposed cuts to the president’s aid budget. People said that it was going to be hard to fulfill promises to those who live in dire circumstances such a long way away when there is so much hardship in the United States. And there is.

But I read recently that Americans are taking up public service in greater numbers because they are short on money to give. And, following a successful bipartisan Senate vote, word is that Congress will restore the money that had been cut from the aid budget — a refusal to abandon those who would pay such a high price for a crisis not of their making. In the roughest of times, people show who they are.

Your soul.

So much of the discussion today is about value, not values. Aid well spent can be an example of both, values and value for money. Providing AIDS medication to just under four million people, putting in place modest measures to improve maternal health, eradicating killer pests like malaria and rotoviruses — all these provide a leg up on the climb to self-sufficiency, all these can help us make friends in a world quick to enmity. It’s not alms, it’s investment. It’s not charity, it’s justice.

Strangely, as we file out of the small stone church into the cruel sun, I think of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose now combined fortune is dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty. Agnostics both, I believe. I think of Nelson Mandela, who has spent his life upholding the rights of others. A spiritual man — no doubt. Religious? I’m told he would not describe himself that way.

Not all soul music comes from the church.

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times. Click here for the NY Times link.