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My Faith Is Why I Wear a Mask

World's Worst Pastor Blog - By Tom LeGrand, a bona fide candidate for the World's Worst Pastor Faith and Christianity, Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Limiting “The image of God” to physical appearance may be downright blasphemous enough. Using our faith as an excuse for not protecting others is actually the very opposite of the image of community in which God calls us to live.

We hear the endless drone of commercials telling us about these “challenging times,” to the point that I am monumentally sick of that phrase. When exactly are we not facing “challenging times?”

Our current “challenge,” however, is not much of a challenge for me at all. It seems that we are now in a battle over willingness to wear a face mask in public. According to some, doing so is the same as covering up the image of God.

We probably do not have time in a blog post to go into the blasphemous idea that God’s image is contained within physical appearance. Does this mean that white people look like God, but people of color do not? Vice-versa? What about people with facial disabilities or other issues society deems “deformities?”

The image of God is much more deeply ingrained within us in a way that extends far beyond physical appearance. I will leave it to my friend Zack Hunt to give a full explanation of what the phrase “image of God” truly means.

But some Christians are now latching onto another angle to justify not wearing a mask or other PPE in public. The newest declaration of “faith” is to state out loud or on social media that “I will not live in fear.”

Allow me to begin my thoughts by stating why I do live in fear, and why I consider wearing a mask because of that fear to be an act of faith.

Our family is partially responsible for the care and well-being of my 80-year old mother. She does well on her own, but we often have to be in contact with her. We also serve as guardians for a long-time friend who had a stroke and now resides in assisted living. Although the facility has restricted visitors for over two months, he now goes out at least once a week for necessary doctors’ visits due to other health issues.

Yes, I am very afraid. Not for myself, but for them. What would I say if they got sick and my defense for this was a refusal to wear a mask, or to take any other recommended precautions?

As for the effectiveness of masks, I have no idea. I am not a doctor or biologist or epidemiologist. But if the majority of doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and medical personnel think they are important, I will side with them. My own discomfort or inconvenience seems fairly petty when it comes to the health and well-being of those that I love.

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Actually, maybe the masks are an improvement???

Some may respond, “Well, that’s you. You do what you think is best, but that’s not me.” Rest assured that wearing a mask is not me. But this is not about me. This is about the health and well-being of other people. And if my fear of harming others requires living and acting differently, then it is both faithful to Christ and to Christ’s purpose.

Refusing a mask, social distancing, or other life changes because “I will not live in fear” also strikes me as completely disingenuous. How many people who say this also have insurance? How many are ardent defenders of the second amendment because they fear that someone could attack their home and family? Do any of them have a savings account, an alarm system, or a password on their wifi?

Maybe the word “fear” only applies when something makes us feel uncomfortable or inconvenienced. Or we just do not want to do it.

While my personal circumstances drive these decisions, they really should not matter. Christianity is not a call to unrestricted personal freedom. It is a call to sacrifice personal convenience, and even personal rights in Christ, for the good of the whole community. Numerous passages illustrate this point, but I will focus on two: 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 14:13-23.

The passage in Corinthians tells us that WE are the “Body of Christ,” with many parts that all serve different functions. But all of us, with individual lives and gifts and talents, all work within the Body of Christ. No one can live fully without recognizing the importance of the other, and the necessity of working together for a good that is far greater than our personal choices.

Verses towards the close of the chapter sum up this position: “But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it” (NRSV).

Individual citizens may claim that their personal freedom takes precedent over the concerns of others. Those who claim to be followers of Christ have renounced that luxury. We are called to put ourselves aside for the good of the whole.

Perhaps no passage illustrates this better than Romans 14. Here, Paul completely acknowledges the right of Christians to exercise their personal freedom.

He then turns around and asks them not to exercise that freedom for the good of others.

According to the scriptures, exercising your personal freedom could do harm to other believers, and may drive them away from the Body of Christ. No personal claim is worth the cost to the lives and well-being of those who are—or may become—disciples of Christ. For the good of all, we are expected to set aside any issue of personal privilege, freedom, or convenience.

This is not because we are afraid. It is to help others to deal with whatever risk they face, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem to us. God’s true image is demonstrated when we strive to live as a part of the community of believers rather than trying to spiritual superiority as individuals. When we act for the good of others in community instead of in our own personal self-interest, then we are truly showing the image of God to the world.

Following safety protocols in light of a virus that has killed over 90,000 people in three months is surely an inconvenience, to all of us. And it is impossible to make anyone follow those protocols. Trust me when I tell you that my mother will defy my objections and high-tail it to her hair dresser and nail salon the minute she gets the chance.

But this is not justification for me to stop doing all I can to avoid spreading this virus to her. Or to the nurses who take care of my friend. Or to the grocery clerk who goes to work every day to ring up my groceries. Or to the restaurant employee who prepares my carry-out order. Or to the person who brings my mail. Or to the Amazon delivery driver, whom I have kept exceedingly busy over the last 60+ days.

If I am following safety protocols out of fear for their safety as well as my own, then my fear is well-founded and faithful. And if we are not willing to sacrifice our ease and comfort for that, then God help us.

What a Pastor Can Learn in a Pizza Kitchen

World's Worst Pastor Blog - By Tom LeGrand, a bona fide candidate for the World's Worst Pastor Faith and Christianity , , , , , , ,

As many of my friends are aware, my career as professor/pastor abruptly came to an end a few weeks ago. Just so you know, I did not commit some horrid moral, ethical, legal, or Biblical violation. It was just time to move in a different direction.

And what did that direction happen to be? Well, I am now a cook at Farmhouse Pizza in Greenville, SC.

How’s that for career development?

Hence the name of the blog, because you may be a guy who made a few missteps and mistakes if you go from professor to pastor to pizza chef. But never mind all that. There is a silver lining to this looming, somewhat dark cloud.

I thought I knew a lot about the “real world” because I spent my days dealing with people and students and helping with all the variety of problems that they may have in life. A couple months in a restaurant kitchen is teaching me that I’ve lived in an ivory tower most of my life.

The truth is that I don’t have a clue, and neither does the church. We are absolutely naïve to what a lot of people endure just to survive from day to day, check to check. We are equally clueless to think that what we are doing on a Sunday morning is going to connect with people cooking food, tending bar, washing dishes, or waiting tables.

We do not speak their language, either figuratively or sometimes literally. We do not have any comprehension of how hard they work, how little they make, and how they struggle just to exist until the next payday. They are students, gamers, musicians, DJs, or maybe just life-long restaurant employees. Some are college dropouts who couldn’t take on the debt of tuition. Some are ex-cons. Some were once homeless.

They might bounce from one restaurant to the next, taking whatever job will give them the best pay or the best hours at any given. The last two months of my life officially ended the mythology that restaurant workers are lazy or don’t “deserve” more pay because they didn’t get a college degree (yet). It’s thankless job, and we work our asses off for peanuts.

To those who say that anyone could work in a restaurant: You’re wrong. Dead wrong. I’m in pretty solid shape for a 48 year old man. I ran a 10k in 53 minutes this spring. And yet, 8 hours in that kitchen on a Friday night will almost put me face down on the floor.

I bet it would do the same to a lot of people who complain about the idea of raising the minimum wage.

Too many people in the church either don’t know or don’t care about the lives of people who are fighting these battles. They ignore their sorry paychecks, long hours, exhausting work or poor treatment that they endure.

We are too far too preoccupied and passing judgement on the fact that they drop a lot of F-bombs, serve/drink alcohol, and do not want to take their one day off a week (if that) to get dressed up and sit in a pew while someone preaches at them. (Just a side note:  I bet most people would let an expletive fly if they burn themselves on a 650-degree oven).

And heaven help us if we ever get onto the topic of the marijuana that some smoke on a fairly regular basis.

Here’s the thing:  The folks with whom I work are not at all anti-God, anti-Christian, or even anti-church. I regularly talk with them about issues of faith and life, or their struggles with belief. We discuss their church experiences and why they didn’t necessarily stay with it as they became adults. There is often depth, thought, and serious self-reflection in these discussions.

In fact, they are often more transparent, honest, genuine, and real than many of the people I have met in church. They’re not perfect, but they’re also not pretending that they are. There is no effort to cover up their sins and flaws. And unlike many Christians that I know–including myself–they are much more likely to own their baggage in an effort to overcome those issues.

I am learning almost as much from them as I did from being in the church most of my life.

They are exhausted by the judgment, the pettiness, the minutia, and the hypocrisy of those who call themselves “Christian.”  They are tired of people who treat them like a target to be sighted, marked, skewered, and tagged in the name of the Lord. They have no patience for preachers hollering at them or people refusing to listen to them in their “un-Godly” state of existence.

Their view is shaped by those who have told them how wrong they are, and perhaps by the dirty looks they received when they walked into a congregation with their tattoos and piercings. It is skewed by the people who left them a Bible tract instead of cash as a “tip,” or wrote “Jesus loves you” on the tip line of a receipt.

Yes, folks, that really happens. If you’ve done it—or still do—please stop. They’re not likely to care for your evangelism if they can’t pay their bills.

What occurs to me is that none of these people would have darkened the door of most of my former churches, or maybe any other church. And I’m not sure there is a thing that any church could do to change that. It’s going to take much, much more than a drummer and a fancy video system.

I am now pondering how we create space to connect with people who live in a world that we cannot possibly understand. Maybe in our educated and comfortable state, we are just too far removed from the reality that most people face every day, of how to get by to the next check or how to get enough sleep to have the energy to get through until closing time.

What most of my co-workers seem to want, more than anything, is to see genuine people who are willing to call themselves Christian. They want to know that people are willing to listen, and to act as if they care. They just want to see people act like good people, in line with the things that they profess to believe.

Right now, they overwhelmingly believe those to be rare qualities among church folk. It’s up to Christians to change that view, through actions rather than words.

At this point, I am not sure I have any interest in going back to another church setting where my primary role is to care for the flock or “manage” the daily life of a congregation. While this is worthwhile work, it may not be MY work. I feel a calling to reach out and get to know those people who are out there that feel abandoned by the feel-good platitudes that too often define “church.”

We probably can’t live for a long time on a pizza baker’s pay, but I would really like to find an avenue for connecting with those who are truly lost. No, they are not “lost” in the traditional Evangelical sense of the term, in danger of the fires of some invention of Hell. They are simply spiritual nomads who have no true place to connect and feel at ease to explore their purpose or calling or the work of God in their lives (in whatever form that may take).

The traditional church is rarely—if ever—going to make space to hear or listen to the concerns of the pizza bakers or bar tenders and thousands of other service workers that make the city of Greenville what it is. Instead of returning to one of the Ivory Tower settings where I have spent most of my life, maybe it’s time to see what the real world is.

I’ve lived there far too long, in the cozy Christianity of Americanized faith that largely disregards those who are not part of the club. Somehow, we have to re-discover the thorny path of a suffering, persecuted, down-to-earth Christ that both encounters and engages people beyond any church walls.

Someone has to sit down and listen to people, in an effort to connect with those whose lives are not like ours. Where do we find that space? I am not sure. But I just do not see how we find that in traditional church.

Maybe this is the opportunity to look outside of the typical. I have yet to figure out what it all means for me or my calling, but this is certainly proving to be an adventure. At some point, we need to stop writing about the people we cannot reach with the love of Christ and start doing things to reach people with the love of Christ. And that is going to look dramatically different from what we are doing now.

The Lord only knows what this may be, or what it may look like. The only thing for sure is that it starts with a willingness to step down a path that is unfamiliar, and possibly treacherous. Such a path may be exactly the one Christ needs us to follow.

Missing Church: Why I’m not a “Done” (Even If I Want to Be)

World's Worst Pastor Blog - By Tom LeGrand, a bona fide candidate for the World's Worst Pastor Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A couple of months ago, I posted about the experience of taking a break from attending church. It somehow garnered a lot more attention than I expected, enough that it prompted a follow-up question:

Why go back?

It’s a question that is becoming more prominent even among the most dedicated church members. It seems that even those who are committed to the church are actually showing up less frequently than they once did. Some of these may even fall into a new category that sociologists are calling the “Dones”–Christians who just stop going.

Let me establish that I do not intend to be a “Done”. Sometimes I feel like it–usually around 8 am on a Sunday morning. There are four big reasons why I cannot go this route. While these specifics may not hold validity for you, perhaps they will prompt you to think about where you stand with a community of faith.

1. Mom and Dad will not let me do it:  As a pastor and youth minister, I used to consistently get the question from parents, “Should I make my children go to church?” And my answer was always an unequivocal “Yes”.

Why? Well, after I tell you to get off my lawn, let me give you the grumpy old man answer:  Because my mom and dad made me go to church and it never hurt me a bit. (NOW get off my lawn!).

This does not mean that you do not talk with them about where to go, what to do, how to participate or what they expect, particularly as they get older. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with establishing church as a spiritual standard for family.

The inevitable guilt trip (either real or perceived) that I get from Mom when she calls on Sundays to ask, “Well, did you GO to church TODAY?” will not bring me back. But the education my parents gave me in faith, dedication, and commitment to something more important than myself just might. And they are connected to hours of discussion and exploration about what it means to be Christian, both in and beyond the church.

My parents made faith a part of who I was and who we are as human beings, as family. Going to church is not the only way to do that, but it surely did not hurt. Those Sunday experiences–even the ones I did not like–will forever influence my personhood.

Am I ready to turn my back on what my parents taught me by declaring, “I’m done?”

2. Mrs. Nora and The Ballard Sisters:  If you grew up at East Park Baptist Church in the last half of the 20th century, one thing is guaranteed. You had Mrs. Nora for 5-year old Sunday school, followed by the Ballard sisters through elementary and middle school. In Mrs. Nora’s class, you learned to run string across the room and make tents with bed sheets, so you would have an appropriate venue to talk about Aquila and Priscilla. And you would eat dates and wild honey like John the Baptist (thankfully she skipped the locusts and deferred to more appetizing Galilean fare).

In fact, we often tried to sneak back to her class every now and then, even when we were much too old for it.

The Ballard sisters were a little less dynamic, but these four ladies offered unparalleled lessons in faithfulness. They walked down their hillside street every Sunday morning to teach annoying, poorly behaved 10-year olds what a famine was and how Moses discovered a most disturbing piece of shrubbery. Amazingly, they managed us with grace and patience–although they had no children of their own! Maybe they could do that because they knew that they didn’t have to take any of us home.

When we had snow or ice, we called off church because we knew the Ballards would try to walk and were likely to break a hip on the way. And it was not just Sunday mornings. Oh, no…it was Sunday Night Bible Drill and Training Union. It was Vacation Bible School. It was Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.

Ms. Sarah Ballard did not miss a day of Sunday School for 20 years! Actually, she missed one day, somewhere in year 20…and tried to turn down her 20-year attendance pin (a remnant of Baptists past) because of it.

Maybe these ladies are just that, a remnant of a long gone era of church that is destined never to return. It is hard to imagine them teaching with a power point and a YouTube video. But that does not lessen their impact. For all of us who have a story of stodgy, judgmental old Southern Baptist “church ladies”, we also have Mrs. Nora and the Ballard sisters.

Am I ready to insult their legacy by saying, “I’m done?”

Which brings me to my next point…

3. Past churches wrote on me with Sharpies:  I mean this as a good thing.

Certainly, every church where I served made a positive impact, but the churches I served as pastor have left the most significant spiritual marks. That is not intended as a slight to the places where I served on staff. But serving as pastor simply creates a different level of relationship with the whole church, particularly in my venue of call, the small church.

I often reflect back on the positive impact those churches continue to have on me. More than once I have found myself drifting back to the fellowship of a Back-to-School Bash or a Fall Festival. I even miss church league basketball! (Sometimes).

But the indelible mark on my heart comes from the places where the fellowship and spirituality become one and the same. These are the encounters with real people–open, vulnerable, and willingly exposed to the work of the Spirit. These are the life-giving happenings, genuine and as real as they come. They evoke both joy and pain, laughter and tears. It is weddings and funerals. It is sharing celebration and the reality of heartache. It is the Thanksgiving Eve service at Sawyer’s Creek Baptist, where people opened their hearts to share their greatest joys and deepest spiritual hurts–as well as the faith that emerged from those hurts.

It is the baby dedications at Augusta Heights, where we learned to celebrate new life with tears of joy after years of hoping for such celebrations. It is Mrs. Wilma–the AHBC equivalent of the Ballard sisters and the last remaining charter member–offering gracious wisdom to me as the new pastor. It is the irreverent moments and informal discussions that, somehow, led us closer to this Jesus that we strive to know.

Can I possibly ignore the graciousness, honesty, and hospitality of these people, all of whom greatly impacted my life, by saying, “I’m done?”

And finally…

4. It’s the community, stupid!  I hate to go all James Carville here, but it just fits. You may not need a community to be a Christian, but I still believe that you need one to be an effective disciple.

Jesus beckons us to a life of community. And how quickly we forget just how imperfect that life was!

As we roll our eyes over the blatant and debilitating flaws of the church, we often long idealistically for a “New Testament Church”. But in our vision, we skip the jealous bickering, bitter disagreements and theological or practical disputes that characterized the original 12, right on into the formation of that New Testament church. Why do you think Paul wrote all those letters? It was not because everyone was just getting along.

Yet, those disciples managed to learn, grow, bond, and cooperate with one another in spite of their disagreements. The early church learned discipleship together, in and through the hardships they faced and the sharp distinctions of race, class, religious identity and theological point of view.

Sometimes they separated. Sometimes they decided to go in different directions. But there is no evidence that they gave up and quit. And they certainly came together, bound by spiritual ties of love that outweighed their disagreements.

Can I insult the saints, both early ones and those in my own lifetime, by saying, “I’m done”?

I sometimes remember the hardships and bitterness of ministry when considering my past in the church. Much more often, I long for the community, fellowship, sharing and caring that those churches brought into my life. I long for the everlasting friendships and eternal prayers that I know some believers offer. And I want to find that community again, in the here and now, rather than simply leaving it to memory.

Community is challenging and difficult–and more than worth it! It is the imprint of the community past that keeps me searching for the community of the present. Imperfect though it will surely be, it is also the life-giving face of love.

And it is the reason that I cannot say, “I’m done.”

Perhaps we need to recognize that the perseverance of the saints of the past is a fine example to follow in the present.