January is named after the Roman doorkeeper deity Janus, who, it is said, had two faces--one facing forward towards the future, and another facing backward to the past.
The first time I saw a painting of my birth month's namesake as a kid, I may have freaked out a little bit. It's a bit unusual.
And lying in Janus' appearance is one of the many reasons Christians either describe themselves or are often fine with being described as "single-minded." Single-mindedness, as opposed to double-mindedness (which we have since associated with wrongness or evil--see also the Batman villain Harvey Dent/Two-Face from The Dark Knight), is a divine attribute of the one true God who is of a singular, divine mind and substance, whereas we have pagan deities with multiple faces and heads.
(We'll ignore for a moment that the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel depicts the cherubim angels as having four faces...clearly, we've gone a bit overboard in our colloquialisms that refer to wrongness.)
Nevertheless, a pagan deity like Janus is, and should be, a sympathetic figure to mainline Christians like myself today. Not because we should worship such an idol--we shouldn't--but because his situation of standing betwixt past and future in the mythical doorway of the present is one that we find ourselves in as the Christian Church.
If it's a drum whose cadence I regularly beat, it's for a reason...I remain stuck in the middle of a denomination that looks like it is in its twilight but which expects pastors like me to lead a renaissance of Christian spirituality. I attend clergy meetings in which I am the youngest pastor in the room by 20 years, and I have to tread the line of respecting the work of my more senior colleagues while also making clear that I am making my own path. I have to explain the ways and questions of my generation to those foreign to my generation without turning myself into a token of my generation.
I'm not saying any of this is a bad thing--I'm saying it is simply an unwritten part of my job description, one that I found myself ill-prepared for and have had to teach myself on the job as I went.
Where it does overlap with my job description, as it were, is bitingly but succinctly encapsulated by point #8 in this article by fellow mainline pastor Rev. Gary Brinn. He writes:
When you insist on “the way we do things in this church,” I'm wondering when you stopped worshiping a living God and started worshiping a building and its resident bureaucracy. Give me half a chance, and I'll help you drop the average age of worshipers and give this church a future. Many thousands of churches close every year. This doesn't have to be one of them. But it's your choice. When you are ready to look forward instead of backward, I'll be there to lead the way. That is, after all, what you keep telling me I'm supposed to do.
In a paragraph, this is the challenge and the dilemma that not just Gary, not just me, but all of us, have to rise to meet. It kills me inside that there are Disciples churches that have basically decided to die the way they have always lived and to sign their own death warrants and die a slow, painful, death rather than even take a shot at revitalization. Worship of the past is, in its own way, a form of idolatry.
This should not be confused with respecting the past, which a young whippersnapper like me must always be conscientious to do. But as a church, with so many of our members firmly in the remembering the glory days of the past, we must also take another face to look towards the unknown future, building upon the glories of our past in the hope and prayer of making something even better than what we ourselves had.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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