"Use your words. Please use your words." That's what a friend said to me yesterday during a phone conversation regarding a decision I've been contemplating for the last couple of weeks. I had called her to ask for both advice and help. Advice about whether or not to take a particular step and then help to take that step. It is a step that I've spent most of the last 21 months thinking I wouldn't (couldn't) take again. But my friend encouraged me that I both could and should take this step. Her voice is one of several who have talked with me over the last 2 weeks, each of whom giving the same encouragement as did my friend yesterday.
The step is a return to preaching (I actually hesitated just now before I could type the word. I wanted to just type "speaking" instead. I knew that doing so wouldn't be honest). A return to preaching. Years ago the idea of a "return" to it would have been foreign to me because I would not have been able to picture myself having left it. Over the last almost two years the same idea seemed just as foreign, but instead due to having done it, having been part of "organized Christianity." I grew up in organized Christianity and have spent most of my life trying to make sense of it as a human being, because the two (organized Christianity and being a human being) have seemed pretty incompatible for most of my 53 years.
Plus, I grew up in a preacher's home, so I grew up with an insider's view of the industry of religion, church, whatever you can call it. Feeling a calling to preach in my late teens pretty much scared me to death and I spent the next 17 years avoiding that sense of calling, primarily because I just wanted to be happy. Life in the church, and especially as a preacher, seemed to me to be the farthest thing from happiness I could imagine.
Over time, however, the calling began to feel more like an invitation than a life sentence of misery. So, as a man well into my 30's, I began the journey of moving into ministry, specifically preaching, which led to becoming a pastor. I did that for over a decade. It nearly killed me.
I could outline numerous reasons why the experience almost did me in, but suffice to say the incompatibility between organized Christianity and one's desire/hope of becoming fully human is still alive and well. The more serious I became about my own journey of faith and the process of becoming a human who endeavors to reflect and live out the image of God, the more the gatekeepers of organized Christianity dug their knives into me. The fact that I had no interest in speaking in such a way that fed their self-focused, consumer-driven approach to faith and spirituality only made me more of a target.
So, they drove me out, drove me away. And then after a while I kept myself out, away. Because of my work with Second Life of Chattanooga, speaking has remained a constant in my life, but preaching has been something I considered to be part of my past. Even when a friend asked me to preach at his church this past September, it seemed like a one-off event for me, something that I appreciated but did not expect to happen again.
I realize that much of this has been self-protection, not allowing situations and people who seem dangerous to me to get near me, or me near them. But the past few months have brought about some conversations and consideration that led to the advice I've sought over the last couple of weeks. The conversations, consideration and advice have now brought me to this place where I can write these words, these words where I out myself as not just being willing to preach again, but actually seeking opportunities to do just that. It is my hope that 2014 will be full of those opportunities.
I know that I have been called to do this. I know that I am once again answering that call. I have been given words. I will use them.
