Saturday, July 18, 2015

The Role of a Pastor

The pastoral ministry is a haven for multitaskers. Running a church is a great remedy for those who tend to get bored with their work. No two days are the same. There is a wide variety of things to be managed and looked after, and at the end of each week there still remains an enormous amount of work to be done. Hospital visits, sermons, Bible studies, committee meetings, weddings, printing bulletins -- these are (almost) all thrilling activities. That doesn't even touch the personal spiritual work of prayer and contemplation, which most pastors would rather do more of.

Some pastors may have formal job descriptions, but I doubt that most do. It would simply take too long to list all the things that one has to attend to. Besides, what church board or committee would want to actually wade through that long list on a regular basis when doing an evaluation?

Instead of providing a detailed job description, the United Methodist Church lists four main areas of responsibility for its pastors:
  • Word: preaching, teaching, and counseling
  • Sacrament: communion, baptism
  • Order: administrative oversight, financial operations, budgeting, reporting to the denomination
  • Service: extending the ministry of Christ into the world
The explanation of these four areas takes more than two pages in the Book of Discipline (Paragraph 340). While this kind of broad overview is helpful, it doesn't help to create focus. In fact, it can even be discouraging, especially when a pastor might feel that they have to excel in all these different areas.

For the pastor who needs things to be boiled down, let me recommend what Eugene Peterson has written on the subject. Peterson says that the real work of a pastor is to cure souls. Even if the day-to-day responsibilities of running a church involve a variety of other activities, the basic job can be boiled down to these three things: teaching prayer, developing faith, and preparing for a good death (The Contemplative Pastor, page 59). Those responsibilities aren't easy, but I find that Peterson's short list keeps me focused on what really matters.

If you are a pastor, I encourage you to focus on the three-fold task of curing souls. If you are on the committee that evaluates your pastor, then encourage him or her to stick to what matters.

Saturday, July 11, 2015

The Call to Servant Leadership

Jesus taught his disciples that the one who serves the others would be the greatest among them. These moments in the gospels happen as Jesus announces his own impending death, even as the disciples jockeyed for positions of authority amongst themselves (Matthew 20:17-28; Mark 9:30-35, 10:33-43; Luke 22:22-27). Jesus’ pathway of suffering inverted his followers’ expectations about what it meant to be revered and honored: the path to “greatness” includes a cross and a tomb. But it also demonstrates what service should look like -- it is about imitating Jesus. Just as his initial call beckoned them to watch how he fished for people, their ongoing discipleship should also be about doing things the way he did them (Matthew 4:19; Mark 1:17). This calling to discipleship is still about following Jesus, especially in two essentially sacramental ways: we follow him to the river and to the table.

When we follow Jesus to the river to share in his baptism, we are reminded of the commonness of our calling. Through our baptism we become a part of the family of various others. As Rowan Williams puts it in Being Christian, “to be a Christian is to be affected -- you might even say contaminated -- by the mess of humanity” (p.6). Our initial calling is to be baptized, and in doing so we plunge into the chaotic waters of this world and join with God’s other creatures. Only after we accept this general calling of baptism do we receive a specialized, individualized calling. It is quite easy to invert this, as James and John do in Matthew 20:20-23, and assume that as called ones we are necessarily entitled to specialized positions of privilege. Instead, by following Jesus into baptism we are reminded that our individual callings are for the sake of others. Os Guinness writes in The Call that we have individual giftings for the very purpose of giving them away -- that specific and individual callings must be balanced by our general calling to serve others (p.48). It is only within the context of worshipping and serving with our baptized brothers and sisters that we can flesh out an individual calling.

This is one of the things I love most about being a pastor, and it is also one of the role’s biggest challenges. It takes work to invite others into new roles and responsibilities, especially if they haven’t yet caught a vision for how God is calling them. If pastoral leadership was about racking up individual accomplishments, it would be easy to run everything as the pastor. But centralizing everything in the pastor’s own individual abilities would fall short of the responsibility to “build the body of Christ as a caring and giving community, extending the ministry of Christ to the world” (United Methodist Book of Discipline, p.270). As one who shares in Jesus’ baptism, I’m forced to see my primary accomplishments in what we do together. It is at the baptismal font that we lay aside aspirations for authority and position that come at the expense of others, because our calling is for those others.

The servant leader also follows Jesus to the communion table. In celebrating the Eucharist we are reminded that all are welcomed, and the leader imitates Jesus by extending this invitation to everyone. Jesus instructs the disciples to welcome even little children, and he does this in the middle of his discourse about his death and inverted leadership style (Mark 9:36-37). Who could be more on the periphery than a child? Without marketable skills, a young child isn’t even worthy of being a commodity -- only an expense. There is nothing to be gained in a consumer society by including children. But in imitating Jesus we learn that his welcome extends to all whom we might consider unlikely disciples -- the unmarketable, the inconvenient, and the annoying. Rowan Williams remarks that the sacrament of communion “obliges you to see the person next to you as wanted by God” (emphasis his, p.51 in Being Christian). God’s invitation is not simply an acquiescence that we need to accommodate the less fortunate. It is a call to desire to be with the other in the same way that you invite your friends to a dinner party.

It can become easy to see someone else as a project to be fixed. My own call to cross-cultural mission was, at least in part, motivated by a concern for those who did not have what I have. In a position of relative power and wealth, I thought that being a missionary was about choosing to surrender my privilege in order to provide people in developing countries with what they lacked. My value came in what I could give away, and on the surface this seemed to be like real service. But this concept broke down at the point of invitation. In order for me to be a missionary, I had to be invited to enter into the lives of the people I was trying to serve. As such, I found myself receiving many more invitations that I was able to extend. More than once I dined on a family’s last chicken so that they could serve their best meal to a guest. People with relatively few resources were giving them to me -- not the other way around. The communion table reminds us that Jesus not only inverted the sense of who is important, but he also turns upside down conventional ideas about who is desirable. He personally accepted invitations to the homes of people who were not well-liked (Matthew 9:10-11). And then he rebuked his detractors for trying to fix things instead of living into the hospitality that is behind every invitation: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (9:13, NRSV). As ones called by Jesus, he invites us to follow him to where he is (John 12:26). At the river and at the table -- that’s where we learn from him how to serve.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

What is Universal about Music?

I've gone on record saying that music is not a universal language. That's a foundational belief for people in my line of work. If I thought that one song could communicate the same thoughts or conjure up similar emotions in each and every culture, then I wouldn't have spent most of my adult life helping people create new worship songs in their own language and musical styles. Indeed, the discipline of ethnomusicology itself has been dedicated to proving that music is meaningful only within its own particular context -- that is, that people understand and give meaning to music (and other art forms) according to their own systems of language and
behavior. Moving a song from one culture to another is like using words from one language and hoping they will communicate the same thing to a different group of people.

The field of ethnodoxology was also built on the principle that music does not communicate universally. Some of the church's worst historical moments happened when worship songs and liturgical practices were thought to carry universal meaning. Songs and rituals were imported to new places under the assumption that if they worked in one place (usually Western Europe or the USA) then they could work just as well in another (usually Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia). Even worse, that mindset was usually coupled with a colonial attitude that missionaries were bringing a better form of music (or art or culture) to replace inferior forms. People who say that music is a universal language are usually implying that their music is so great that everyone in the world should be able to appreciate, enjoy, and understand it. Ethnodoxologists instinctively stay away from the search for universals in music because they don't want to encourage this kind of musical superiority. Western pop music is doing enough to wash out indigenous and traditional music; the worship of the church should not add to the extinction of local songs.

But that's not to say that there are no universals in music. Obviously, for music to be distinguishable from a set of random sounds there has to be some sense of rhythm or pitch and a structure that sets it apart from noises that happen by chance in nature. And the fact that every culture group has some kind of music leads us to wonder if there is something musical that is fundamentally built into humanity. Dear Reader, this may seem obvious to you. But for years this assertion -- that there might be something universal about music -- has been theoretical thin ice in the fields of ethnomusicology and ethnodoxology. Both of these disciplines have been committed to studying a culture or people group on its own terms -- that is, not comparing (or ranking) them to others. This desire to undo the cultural superiority that often lies behind the assertion that "Music is a universal language" has made us very passionate. It has also made it very hard for ethnomusicologists to even want to look for features that all music system have in common. And it makes it nearly impossible for us to have conversations with other scholars who are earnestly searching for ways to compare music across different cultures.

Of those who have attempted to systematically compare music systems, some have relied on dubious methods and assumptions. Alan Lomax, a renowned curator of traditional music, launched a music comparison project that tried to find connections between songs found in different parts of the world. But unfortunately this Cantometrics effort got correlation and causation mixed up. For instance, Lomax determined that people sang with constricted throats (or sang "rough") because they were prudes. These methodological missteps kind of spoiled the whole idea of a doing global music comparisons for a while. But more recently some ethnomusicologists have been trying to use other methods to discover and describe universal features of the world's music systems. This is the hard part. How does one test and prove that anything about music is consistent across all places and culture groups? Some researchers like Judith Becker have tried to use brain scans or changes in the skin (think of the technology behind lie detectors) to measure individual physical responses to hearing music. (See Becker's article "Ethnomusicology and Empiricism in the Twenty-First Century" in the journal Ethnomusicology, Fall 2009 (53.3) edition.) These studies still assume that the physical responses of listeners come from within specific cultural contexts that make the music meaningful.

Others have tried to analyze the musical sounds themselves, attempting to break them down into fundamental building blocks that can be found everywhere. Recently a group of scholars studied 304 different musical samples from around the globe. (See their article "Statistical Universals Reveal the Structures and Functions of Human Music.") The gist of their conclusion is that there are definitely some aspects of music that are in almost every (if not quite all) of the world's music systems. Granted, that claim may not blow your mind, but it is a significant statement that goes against the grain of the very particular and limited studies that ethnomusicologists tend to do. Michael Tenzer, himself an ethnomusicologist, has also proposed that we find new methods for studying and comparing music from different cultures. In a recent article in the journal Ethnomusicology, he called for a reckoning with the wide-spread sense that there is something innate within music that all humans share. (See "Meditation on Objective Aesthetics in World Music" in the journal's Winter 2015 (59.1) edition.) He states that this is probably most evident in the way that humans experience time, since music seems to be a phenomenon primary linked to and defined by the passage of time. He even suggests that music may be, like mathematics, an aspect of the universe that reveals some deeper significance to life itself.

I hope that ethnodoxologists will follow these recent movements in ethnomusicology and open themselves to exploring universals in music. While comparative music studies should never be used to rank some cultures as better than others, I believe that the time has now passed to let this fear dominate the discussion. Today we live in a post-colonial era when any claims of superiority are automatically suspect. Now is the time to engage with others to look for universals in music systems and see if these can reveal something about our shared human experiences. People in other disciplines have already been doing similar work on music as a universal phenomenon. It would be nice to dialogue with them and learn together. Specifically, I would like to see ethnodoxologists engage with theologians like Jeremy Begbie who are critically and carefully examining how music and theology can reveal things about each other.

Music is meaningful in its specific context. This is what ethnomusicology taught me. It's a principle that also guides my work in ethnodoxology. The fact that music is not a universal language should be a bedrock principle for those engaged in global comparisons and the search for universal features in music. If ethnomusicologists and ethnodoxologists don't engage in these studies, then the research will just go on without us. Those searching for the significance of universals in music will be left without the benefit of this wisdom that cultural systems create specific systems of meaning.

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