Preacher: Pastor Jennifer Hosler, PhD

Date: October 29, 2023

Scripture: Deuteronomy 34:1-12, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

Image: John August Swanson, Moses, 1983

Audio coming soon

In our two passages today, we have two vignettes of leadership in religious communities. The first vignette is of Moses at the end of his life, while the second is of Paul and the early church is Thessalonica. Between each vignette, I will dedicate some time for us to pray, both silently and out loud, as people feel led. 

Our first passage is found in the Hebrew Scriptures, commonly called the Old Testament by Christians. Many churches use a lectionary where certain scriptures are assigned each Sunday based on the church calendar, which starts at Advent and runs through about 30 weeks after Pentecost. Similarly, Jewish tradition delineates weekly liturgical readings for Shabbat services. Each week has a portion from the Torah, which refers to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Readings go through the entirety of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Today’s passage in our Christian lectionary comes at the very end of Deuteronomy. Millions of Jews recently read this passage (October 8^th) to close out their liturgical year. At the end of Sukkot, Jews celebrate Simchat Torah, which means the joy of the Torah. The end of Deuteronomy is read, followed immediately by the start of Genesis 1. Commentators and Rabbis I read say this reminds Jews that the Torah is continuous and circular, and it points everyone back to the Creation story. 

The year ends at the cusp of the Promised Land and at the hinge of major leadership transition. Moses climbs up the mountain and views the Land that will be a future home for these formerly enslaved people. Moses dies with the knowledge that he has brought his life’s work of leadership to completion. The people mourn Moses for 30 days but they can’t stay in mourning. They must continue on under Joshua’s leadership, into the unknown, following the LORD, Yahweh, in faith. Instead of turning the next page into Joshua, the Jewish liturgy goes back to Genesis 1. The story of God’s Creating is once again fresh in the peoples’ minds and hearts. 

Leaders change and community circumstances change. Even someone as important as Moses dies and someone else needs to take their place. Communities of faith move forward, trusting that God will see them through into the unknown what lies ahead. For Jewish communities reading the Torah on Simchat Torah, they are reminded transitions, death, unknowns, and promises waiting to be fulfilled. They are reminded, too, of the Creator’s divine power of ordered matter out of chaos, crafting light amidst the darkness, speaking life into existence, crafting humanity out of the earth. The loss of an era is not the end. Melech haOlam, the Creator, the King of the Universe, is continuously renewing all things. 

Leadership is hard. Church is hard. Urban church renewal in the 21^st century has a million challenging factors. Housing costs are high, people move in and out of cities, and people have many reasons not to be committed to either churches or institutional Christianity on the whole. I have been in this church more than 11 years—I recently found a note card from a former church secretary who thanked us for visiting our first Sunday. A lot has changed since then and changed again. We’ve had at least 4 or 5 cycles of church and core group transitions, which a church planter tells me is pretty normal.  

We are transitioning as a church. Again. Someone asked yesterday at a district event, how is the church? It felt honest to say that we are in transition, but that we are meeting and having vital worship together. God is with us in this space. God is with us when 5 or 50 are gathered. 

We have had leadership transitions in the past two years. Jeff Davidson moved to a full-time, paid pastoral call in Illinois. Jessie’s tenure as Community Arts Minister came to an end in December, when she was called to a full-time role at Wesley Seminary. We had Chibuzo as an intentional interim to do some process work and it helped our preaching capacity after Jeff left. When we designed the interim job description, we had hoped to end that interim time with a clearer vision of how we could build a new pastoral role. However, it didn’t turn out that way.  

We’ve spent most of the past year in different circumstances than I would have expected. We’ve recognized our strengths and our capacity limitations, which has led to some creativity around brunch and bible studies, plus a few service Sundays. We’ve had regular worship and, when people or leaders were scarce, we’ve been creative. We had a song-focused worship service while my family was on vacation in August. At the beginning of October, I led a prerecorded service that was a way to honor my own-wellbeing and see my family. It was important to recognize the limits of our non-salaried pastoral team and our very small group and to work with what we could do. Organizationally, we’ve taken on massively important work to welcome migrant neighbors. We were at the forefront of a national and local issue, working together with many community partners to follow Jesus’ message to love our neighbors bused from the border in Texas and Arizona, offering clothing, food, and welcome to strangers in need. We’re working to rebuild Brethren House as an institution to support service and community life (both literally and figuratively). We have beautiful gardens and witness through beauty and small conversations about who we are, through our peppers, figs, and cherry tomatoes. We’re meeting together, despite our small numbers, living into our call to gather, sing, pray, study, and serve. 

While we do not know what lies ahead, I can look back through Scripture (both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament) and see God promising to be present and to be faithful. I can look back through these past 11 years and see God’s faithful provision, out of dysfunction and into health, out of scarcity and into financial stability. I can see creativity and dedication. I imagine that Moses climbed that mountain at 120 years, and he simultaneously saw the promised land and also remembered all of the extremely difficult and precarious situations he’d been through. Moses could simultaneously see grace and abundance and God making a way out of no way, out of Egypt, out of the desert, out of conflict, out of trauma, and more. 

I want to close this vignette with a story and then transition to a time of prayer. Maybe 8 years ago, or more, I was speaking with a pastoral colleague and we were both young adults at the time. I remember saying, it feels like if we could just have a few more people as part of our core group, we would tilt towards a healthier place, be less reliant on a few leaders, and perhaps find a little more vitality in our worship spaces.  She said, “I wish I could just give you 5 people!” Shortly after, I was at a denominational church planting conference and all of the church plants or church renewals were asked to put a prayer request on an index card, to be passed and prayed over. It felt funny to just ask that God would provide 5 new people for our congregation but that is what I did. We spent some time in prayer as a group and I’m not sure exactly where the index cards went. It seemed a little blunt but I continued to pray for God to provide 5 new people to our congregation. Within a year, we had somewhere between 5-10 new people. 

I certainly would like 5-10 more people added to our group now. We need a stronger core group. We also need additional leadership from beyond the group we have now. I think we need to call someone else as a pastor (part-time or whatever role we craft), who has dedicated time to minister within our church and engage our neighbors outside the congregation. Someone who is not part of my family – both for our family well-being and ensuring that the church carries on if ever there are no Hoslers. I’m sure there may be other things you see that we need, prayers that we should be lifting up about our church, that I haven’t mentioned. I invite all of us into a posture of prayer now, trusting that God can bring communities like ours out of seemingly endless transition, that God can continue creating and recreating our church, that we might continue to seek justice, wholeness, and community through the gospel of Jesus. 

Prayer time to transition between scriptures

For a congregation that aims to be nonhierarchical, it has been challenging to understand a healthy approach to pastoral leadership. As pastoral leaders, Nate, Jeff, and I were called out from within the congregation. We were just members at Washington City before our gifts were recognized and we were called to be ministers, though we all had training and were serving through preaching. 

As a young adult in a congregation that had many young adults, understanding what my leadership was supposed to be like was sometimes odd and tricky. The trickiest part was in my own head. I was concerned about power – power has often been abused in hierarchies. So, I tried to reduce my role or to minimize my position. Eventually, over the years, it became apparent that there is always power, even if we are not naming it (so it is crucial to name it). Additionally, even if we are all ministers of the gospel of Jesus and even if we are all equal, we have different gifts and different roles. Everyone can’t have the same role, even if we are all equal in the body of Christ. We’ve seen, at times, the lines of roles and decision making become so diffuse that things simply did not get done. Poorly defined roles can also mean that someone does nothing or that someone ends up doing everything—neither of which are healthy for an organization or a church. 

Our second scripture is a letter from the apostle Paul to the early church in a city called Thessalonica. Paul recounts what he and his co-workers have built with and among the early Christians in Thessalonica. Paul describes how, amidst the difficulties of his apostolic ministry, he came with honesty and integrity to build the church. Despite a culture of people seeking fame and renown as orators, public speakers, and even mystics, Paul wasn’t in it for the money or the applause. Apparently, while it was typical and acceptable for apostles to be financially supported by the communities they served, Paul chose to support himself through his work as a literal tentmaker. Instead of a transactional relationship, Paul describes how they instead built relationships of care and mutuality. 

Paul uses several images here to describe how the apostles and the church took care of each other. He says, “we could have made demands” but instead, “we were like infants among you.” The word translated as gentle here is actually “infants” in the earliest manuscripts, so scholars think it might have been “corrected” or adjusted later on, because it had a weird meaning. Why would Paul say they were infants? Apparently, the hardest or weirdest texts are often the most likely, since scribes were more likely to make things less weird, so we should go with the “infants” description here. Paul says, “we were like infants among you.” We came, not as people lifting up our power or positions, but we made ourselves vulnerable among you. “You had to care for us.” This tenderness went multiple directions. In one view, Paul and his co-workers were like vulnerable babies. In another view, Paul and his co-workers were like nursing mothers, giving of their own bodies’ energy to nourish the fledgling church. “We were like a nursing mother, tenderly caring for her own children.” Paul reiterates that their work is about lives, relationships, and care: “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” The gospel is good news – and draws us together into a community of mutuality and care. 

As I have been meditating on these texts, this example of mutuality and care struck me as one important area of needed growth in our congregation’s journey. One piece that emerged from this year’s interim pastor work was an assessment that our congregation “does not have a culture of pastoral care.” I think that is accurate. However, having a culture doesn’t mean it is a good culture. Some congregations might have specific ways they regularly take care of each other, but those congregations may or may not discuss if these are 1) things they want to keep doing, 2) the best approaches to meet everyone’s needs, etc. Some congregations might have cultures of pastoral care – they could be effective or ineffective. 

If we don’t have a culture of pastoral care, I guess that means we have a blank slate to build what we want – if only we are intentional enough to craft it. We have not articulated or envisioned together what we want or need, in terms of how to be a community of mutuality and care with each other. What would it look like for you to be well cared for by this church? Is it by having people within the church remember and celebrate your birthday, anniversary, or some other meaningful milestone? Is it a weekly check-in by text or email? Or a quarterly coffee or visit where you can be asked, “what is providing delight or peace right now? Where are you having fun? What are you grieving right now? What feels like an area of loss or concern or anxiety?” What type of organizational structures do we need in order to support this culture of pastoral care? Our plural non-salaried setup has had limited resources and time. 

Some churches have cultures of pastoral care—and they also have cultures of caring for pastors. Building off of the mutuality and care between Paul and the Thessalonians, it is important to ask, 1) how can we consider what type of care we want from pastors or deacons (if we had them) or a caregiving team, AND also 2) how can we intentionally care for and support our pastors and other leaders? How can we develop a culture of care that nourishes everyone? I get the awkwardness of saying this as a leader, but I think it works because I’m asking both questions. How do you want me (and others) to care for you? How do you all think you can support and take care of this church’s pastors? In the past two years, we moved from being completely non-salaried to a very small stipend. Other churches pay salaries for pastors. Money is a thing to help take care of needs. Yet money isn’t everything or the only answer. Other churches mark clergy or pastor appreciation month (just so we all know, it actually falls in October every year. I learned about it through a Facebook post). How do we support pastors is an important question. Additionally, how do we also care for our dear music minister, and our ad council members, ensuring that people are renewed and encouraged while they serve faithfully?

I do not have the answers but my goal today is to encourage us into prayerfully thinking about transition and our future, including about leadership and building a culture of mutuality and care. Siblings in Christ, let us close with prayer, lifting up the call of Paul and the Thessalonians, care for each other deeply, nourishing and keeping one another in love.

Prayer time – we are going to take a few minutes to pray.