This Week's Sermon: "The Year of Jubilee"

Leviticus 25:8-17

8 Count off seven weeks of years—that is, seven times seven—so that the seven weeks of years totals forty-nine years. 9 Then have the trumpet[a] blown on the tenth day of the seventh month.[b] Have the trumpet blown throughout your land on the Day of Reconciliation. 10 You will make the fiftieth year holy, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee year[c] for you: each of you must return to your family property and to your extended family. 11 The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee year for you. Do not plant, do not harvest the secondary growth, and do not gather from the freely growing vines 12 because it is a Jubilee: it will be holy to you. You can eat only the produce directly out of the field. 13 Each of you must return to your family property in this year of Jubilee. 14 When you sell something to or buy something from your fellow citizen, you must not cheat each other. 15 You will buy from your fellow citizen according to the number of years since the Jubilee; he will sell to you according to the number of years left for harvests. 16 You will raise the price if there are more years, or lower the price if there are less years because it is the number of harvests that are being sold to you. 17 You must not cheat each other but fear your God because I am the Lord your God. (CEB)

Behold a New Thing: The Tribal Church, Week Two

It has happened nearly 50 times now, in just under a year.  This young man had his brother pass away at only 30 years of age, and was surprised to see this in his brother’s last will and testament: a wish that he—his brother—go out to eat, and leave a hugely extravagant tip.  As he put it in his will: “and I don’t mean 25%.  I mean $500 on a (expletive) pizza.”

Well, this man who had just lost his brother did exactly that: he scrounged up $500, went out to eat with his family, surprised their waitress with the $500 tip, and posted the video to Youtube.

As videos are sometimes wont to do on the internet, this one went viral in a big damn hurry, and suddenly, people were stepping forward, asking if they could donate to make more $500 tips happen.  Enough people, in fact, that the $500 tip has been given 49 times in just under a year.  For those of you keeping score at home, that’s $24,500.  From a man who had just lost a brother.

Each of these tips is on video, and posted on Youtube, and you notice a remarkable, but sorrowful thing: a number of the waiters and waitresses, after they get over the initial shock and joy of receiving such a tip, talk about what they could use the money for, and a great many of them, it involves paying off debts: car payments, student loans, credit cards, you name it.

The videos are heartwarming and inspiring and in every way encouraging to watch.  But they also highlight a new undercurrent running amidst my generation: the sheer amount of debt we face as the price for our educations and our cars in the face of an unyielding economy.

And all of the sudden, this year of $500 tips begins to look a bit like a latter-day Year of Jubilee.

Now, we tell ourselves churches must look a certain way and beat ourselves up when they don’t.  But the church is what I imagine a child must be like—as Tina Fey puts it in her memoir Bossypants, yes, you can teach a child manners and dress her up in embarrassing little sailor outfits, but at some point, that child is going to be whatever she is going to be (which, ironically or no, harkens back to the Divine Name itself--I Will Be What I Will Be!).

And that’s kind of what it is like for us, you know?  Lots of people would say they know what we should look like—they want to tell us which little sailor outfits to dress up in—but at some point, this church is going to be whatever this church is.  And after being here as your pastor for nearly two years, I have found the closest thing possible to describing what this church is, and what we can become: a so-called tribal church, ministering to a missing generation of believers.

This term comes from a 2007 book of the same name by Carol Howard Merritt, a Generation X evangelically-raised Presbyterian pastor and author.  And we will be basing this new six-week sermon series on this book, as we look at what exactly a tribal church is, and what it can truly do.  Last week, we kicked off the series by examining one of the initial—and crucial—tenets of the book: “fostering intergenerational relationships.”  This week, we turn to the next chapter’s theme of “encouraging economic understanding.”  Carol writes in this chapter: 

During stewardship time, when we plan how to encourage giving in our congregations, I often hear, “We are the most prosperous nation to ever live.  We’ve got to teach these young people how to give.”

As a person in her thirties, I wonder how this claim of prosperity holds up for my generation.  Can we be counted as part of this prosperity when our debts so heavily outweigh our assets?  We have lovely commodities available to us, but many young adults do not actually own much.  We are so busy paying off the interest that we rarely get to the principle.

We may need to learn how to give, but there’s something even more basic than that.  Some people in their twenties and thirties need to learn how to be a part of a supportive spiritual economy.  We do not know much about an ecosystem in which we can thrive, where our bodies are cared for and nurtured.  We have difficulty giving and receiving.

While on its face, this passage looks like most of Leviticus: dry, stultifying, and perhaps more than a little Big Brother-esque, it was in fact one of the great innovations of its day, and one that was a source of great hope for more than a few people, because it took the principles of the Sabbath, whirled them through a Scriptural centrifuge, and produced something that actually leveled the playing field for the masses through that difficult means of giving and receiving.

The Sabbath—that seventh day of rest—is incredibly important in Mosaic law—so much so that honoring it is one of the Ten Commandments.  And its importance got extrapolated beyond just the seventh day to the seventh year: Leviticus also commands—just before this passage on the Jubilee year--that every seventh year, farms and fields are to lie fallow.  Centuries before the invention of crop rotation, that was a big deal: to allow for the soil to regenerate itself with nutrients and rest in order to sustain generations more of Israelites to come.  Additionally, Mosaic law mandated that Israelite slaves be granted their freedom at the seventh year of their servitude, ensuring that enslavement did not have to be a lifelong institution.  And for laws which originated over 3,000 years ago, this is all extremely enlightened thinking.

And the Year of Jubilee takes the seventh-year law to the next level.  It says that every seventh seventh year—aka, every 49 years—all property will return to the original owner (or as Leviticus puts it, we shall return to our property).  This served a pair of functions: first, it ensured the prevention of the rise of a landed aristocracy that could simply buy up all the land and keep the people permanently enslaved as serfs or sharecroppers.

But second…think about one of the purposes we use real estate for today: as collateral for our own mortgages and loans.  It would have been exactly the same then as well.  And by returning all property—all collateral—to the original owners, the Year of Jubilee functionally brings about a forgiving of all debts, even debts in default.  If you have lost your property to a loan, it returns to your family sometime within the next 49 years, guaranteed by God’s own law.

Think about that for a minute—an unconditional forgiveness of all debts and defaults.  Does it sound like the action of anybody else we know of?  Of God Himself towards all of us, through Jesus Christ?

God forgives us our own debts because He understands our economic condition, as it were: He knows that we cannot possibly repay all the wrongs that we have ever done to one another, nor repay all the wrongs that we have ever done to Him.  We simply don’t have that kind of spiritual wealth.

Jesus’ death—and here, I’m probably going to shock a few of you with something you might consider heresy—was not payment for that debt.  Nothing can act as payment for that debt, for an entire existence of wronging one another and of wronging God.  It’s too much.

Instead, Jesus’ death represents not a payment of that debt, but a forgiveness of that debt.  Forgiveness is that crucial first step to true reconciliation, to being put back into a right relationship with one another—and the other, in this case, is both God and neighbor alike.

So maybe the takeaway from all of this is that we’ll never again sing the hymn, “Jesus Paid It All.”  But it’s a whole lot bigger than that.  It’s about God guaranteeing for us, just as He did for the Israelites at Sinai, a Year of Jubilee.  A forgiveness of debts.

That is the kind of economic understanding that we have come to hope for from God, but not yet from one another.  And perhaps that is the difference between a divine economy and a materia economy.  But that is also the difference between forgiveness and retribution.

The generosity to forgive is fundamentally borne out of understanding.  And understanding one another’s economic circumstances is a critical part of church vitality and church life.  Just as we understand each other to have a variety of spiritual debts that need to be forgiven, we must recognize that we all likewise have a variety of monetary debts that need to be forgiven.  And that sometimes, those debts are like weights upon our shoulders and chains about our legs.  Understanding that reality is the first step to true generosity and true forgiveness of debt.  So the question then becomes, how can we be as generous in our economic understanding as God is in His for us?

49 times thus far, a $500 tip has been given to a waiter or waitress in the name of a now-deceased young man.  And with every 49 years comes a Year or Jubilee.

There is no longer a civic legal requirement for a Year of Jubilee.  There is no government statute, no Presidential proclamation, no Congressional decree that says we must forgive each other our debts, much less offer any understanding and generosity for them.

And so we create our own Years of Jubilee, such as they are.  We get this radical notion in our heads that maybe, just maybe, we should live out that “do unto others” and “love thy neighbor” maxims the Bible piously says to us, and what happens as a result often goes viral and shocks us.

But it should not.  God has been teaching us these very things for millennia now:  Be generous with your forgiveness.  Be quick with your understanding of circumstance and condition.  Be radical with your generosity.  And everything else will take care of itself.  

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

June 9, 2013

Sensitive Little Snowflakes: Being Christian on Twitter

Full disclosure: I love Twitter.  I'm probably unhealthily addicted to it.  (Shameless plug: you can follow me at @RevEricAtcheson)  I enjoy being able to follow my colleagues in ministry (as well as to troll them mercilessly), as well as the authors I read and many of the journalists who inform me.  And I have a particular soft spot for Twitter handles that spoof the church because, hey, we need to be able to make fun of ourselves.

But man, people get mighty agitated over a whole lot of nothing on Twitter.  In the last several weeks, I have had people unfollow me--ALWAYS accompanied with a parting message of either anger or snark--for the following reasons:

-Me pointing out that the Bible does not uniformly say that marriage is between one man and one woman (Deuteronomy 21:15).

-Me re-tweeting a tweet from Rachel Held Evans, an evangelical Christian author who believes in the shocking notion that men and women can perform the same tasks equally well.

-Me suggesting that Scripture, while complete for the means of salvation, is not a complete accounting of Jesus' message and ministry (John 20:30, 21:25).  In this particular case, I was told that I was accusing Jesus of being a liar...by a fellow pastor.

Each time, by itself, I simply thought to myself, "Hey, haters gonna hate."  I'm not the least bit hurt by all of these internet trolls, and I certainly didn't lose any sleep over any of them.

But I also started noticing a larger pattern of people getting angry over me pushing an idea outside of their comfort zone.

Now, had they simply unfollowed me, I would have totally understood.  There are loads of people I would never follow on Twitter simply because I value having a fantastic resting pulse rate and normal blood pressure--though there are a number of folks I do follow with whom I don't agree on everything because I have come to enjoy their perspective and value what they have to say.

Point being, though, is that my own theology and politics do not fit in with a lot of other peoples', and they don't have to hear what I have to say if they don't want to.  That's completely their right and prerogative.

But jumping ship while hollering insults as you leap...that's a different kettle of fish.  It's cowardice...digitally enabled cowardice.

You don't get to try to knock someone down while running away from them.

That's not how this works.  That is NOT how Christianity is supposed to work.

In Christianity, we are in the business of building people up, not tearing them down.  We build people up, enrich them with Scripture, nurture them with spiritual discipleship, and we tell them that we are there for them if they should stumble in any of it.

And if getting agitated over a smartass pastor like me tweeting something you don't like keeps you from doing that...I'm sorry, but that isn't a very Christian thing to do.

Agree with me, disagree with me--I'll be humbled that you're listening to me either way.

But sniping at people in 140 characters because you disagree with them?

That's why a lot of unchurched/spiritual-but-not-religious/whatever-you-refer-to-em-as folks don't like us.

Seriously.  That's why.

They see us as too quick to judge.  And based on some of my interactions on Twitter, I would be hard pressed to tell them that they are necessarily wrong.

I wish I could, though.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Seriously, Kids These Days, Right?

I got a lot of great feedback on Sunday's sermon--both online and in person--and I want to thank y'all for that.  It was a message that honestly has probably been a long time in coming, and that has been rolling around in my noggin for quite a while.

It is also a message that--and I say this as humbly as humanly possible--I think way more people in my town need to hear.

I love reading the letters to the editor in our local paper--it helps me keep a pulse on what people care about, and if the writer is a total crackpot, reading can be pretty amusing sometimes.  But other times, things jump out at you, like this one from yesterday's set.

On its face, it is a wonderful, kind letter, praising a teenaged hospital volunteer for all she does to selflessly give to her community, and I really like that this fellow took a few minutes out of his day to write her an extremely thoughtful open letter.

But then I stumbled upon this line towards the end: "More of our young teens need to have this mindset to succeed by giving rather than (by) what they can freely get without effort."

And I wanted to scream.

But I was sitting in my office, so I didn't.

The implication of this line is, of course, that most young people are just interested in being moochers, getting by on whatever freebies or handouts they can bilk from everyone else.

It is a stereotype that is not only hurtful, but also often inaccurate.

Because, first of all, lazy people exist regardless of age.  But second--and far more importantly--I know MANY teenagers and twenty- and thirty-somethings who are going all out in their lives to try to achieve their goals.

It's an interesting paradox: there are tons of news articles playing up this stereotype of young people as slackers, but seemingly just as many playing up the stereotype of young people as overstimulated, overscheduled, overprogrammed zombie drones being controlled by their parents and the adults of their parents' generation.

These are stereotypes that are mutually exclusive--you cannot have your cake and eat it on this one.

And while I think both stereotypes are inaccurate, I think the latter is far closer to the truth than the former.

Expectations for Generation Y are stratospheric.  We're the first generation to grow up with widely accessible internet and personal computers and all the other trappings of the technological revolution.

And it's fine that expectations are high.  They should be.

But only so long as everyone else knows that their expectations of us may not precisely match up with our expectations for ourselves.  Yes, we can respect the tradition we have inherited from the generations that have come before us, but we are not here to recreate it.

In other words: we, the Generation Y young'uns, are not here to bring back the glory days of the Boomers and Greatest Generation.

We are here to create something new.

That is why I used the "Behold, a new thing" phrase from Scripture as the tag for my sermon series on Carol Howard Merritt's Tribal Church book: because I think we have something to learn from Scripture in understanding how different generations view themselves and view the goals they set for themselves.  Humanity is set on a timetable of newness: remaining static has never been enough for us, nor should it ever be.

Which means that newness is integral to who we are--not who you might want us to be.

And so bringing back the glory days of the past may be what you want for us, but it is not what we want for ourselves.  Especially in the church.

All we ask is that you respect that, and not think ill of us for it.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Saul's Spears"

1 Samuel 18:6-11

6 After David came back from killing the Philistine, and as the troops returned home, women from all of Israel’s towns came out to meet King Saul[d] with singing and dancing, with tambourines, rejoicing, and musical instruments. 7 The women sang in celebration: “Saul has killed his thousands, but David has killed his tens of thousands!” 8 Saul burned with anger. This song annoyed him. “They’ve credited David with tens of thousands,” he said, “but only credit me with thousands. What’s next for him—the kingdom itself?” 9 So Saul kept a close eye on David from that point on. 10 The next day an evil spirit from God came over Saul,[e] and he acted like he was in a prophetic frenzy in his house. So David played the lyre as he usually did. Saul had a spear in his hand, 11 and he threw it, thinking, I’ll pin David to the wall. But David escaped from him two different times. (CEB)

“Behold a New Thing: The Tribal Church,” Week One

The soccer legend’s face was a mask of grief.  Tears rolled down his cheeks as he haltingly explained to his club’s legions of fans that he would not be back for next season.  It isn’t something you usually expect from athletes whom we associate more with big contracts and mercurial spirits.  But it was a humbling sight to behold because of everything that has happened to him in the last three or so years: one of the world’s very best at this sport was let go by his massive club, FC Barcelona, after making a successful comeback to the game after undergoing a liver transplant as part of treating a malignant tumor that had threatened his life and livelihood.  The presser where the move was announced was wrought with understandable emotion—this great player was openly weeping at the thought of leaving this club that had stood by him for so long during his many treatments and operations, and as he left, he hugged and kissed on the cheek every single member of the team, the coaching staff, and the medical staff.  Every person.

The kicker, though, is that he probably wasn’t let go because of his medical history.  He had already come back—was playing in games and everything.  No, he was getting too old.  At 34 years of age, he had become too old.  And, as a player at least, he was being shown the door.

I know I make fun of all y’all Mariners and Seahawks fans—and Sonic fans if, you know, Washington still had a basketball team (zing!), but when it comes to one particular phenomena—the treatment and viewing of people based on their age—I think sports perfectly emulates the same fear we secretly have in church, that there is a sweet spot for how old or how young you must be to flourish, to be desirable.  There is enormous pressure for churches, like sports teams, to fit a particular perfect age demographic, lest they be overrun by newer, younger alternatives.

But such pressure is largely our own doing.  We tell ourselves churches must look a certain way and beat ourselves up when they don’t.  But the church is what I imagine a child must be like—as Tina Fey puts it, yes, you can teach a child manners and dress her up in embarrassing little sailor outfits, but at some point, that child is going to be whatever she is going to be...much like the divine name itself: "I AM WHAT I AM."

And that’s kind of what it is like for us, you know?  Lots of people would say they know what we should look like—they want to tell us which little sailor outfits to dress up in—but at some point, this church is going to be whatever this church is.  And after being here as your pastor for nearly two years, I have found the closest thing possible to describing what this church is, and what we can become: a so-called tribal church, ministering to a missing generation of believers.

This term comes from a 2007 book of the same name by Carol Howard Merritt, a Generation X evangelically-raised Presbyterian pastor and author.  And we will be basing this new six-week sermon series on this book, as we look at what exactly a tribal church is, and what it can truly do.  And this first installment of our series, then, matches up to one of the first chapters of her book, entitled, “Fostering Intergenerational Relationships.”  Carol writes this in Tribal Church’s intro:

My husband, Brian Merritt, is a thirty-seven-year-old pastor…at a recent seminar, he referred to the book “Death of the Church,” which identified adults in their twenties and thirties as “Survivors.”  He introduced the term, took a deep breath, and braced himself as if he were driving into a predicted storm.  Sure enough, the sky began to thunder as the familiar outrage began, “Survivors?  Did you say ‘Survivors?’  What have they had to survive?”

“They didn’t have World War II or Vietnam.”

“They didn’t go through the civil rights movement.”

“They’re recipients of unprecedented wealth!”

“I open up the real estate ads, and I can’t believe how much people will pay for a house!”

“They are so materialistic.”

“You know, my nephew is still living with his parents.  He’s twenty-five years old.”

Brian typically (stays quiet) during these long rants.  When the storm subsides, he gently explains, “We’re called Survivors because we’ve had to survive years of being treated like this.”

When Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that the most segregated hour in America is 11:00 am on a Sunday morning, he was referring primarily to race.  But churches get segregated on the basis of age as well.  And some of it is intentional—many church planters are trained to do basically what Rick Warren did with his Saddleback Church in the Los Angeles area: to go all-in to try to serve the needs of just one demographic—in the case of Saddleback, they even created a composite target congregant they wanted, and nicknamed him “Saddleback Sam.”  And if others outside that demographic show up, great, but you’re not going to bend over backwards for them.

And all of that is pretty antithetical to the entire basis of the existence of the Disciples of Christ, where our founders once referred to our unity as Christians as “our polar star.”  But unintentionally, the Disciples has made itself a church that younger people like myself haven’t been coming to anymore.  Believe me when I say it isn’t just here in Longview, it’s everywhere.  It has been a long time in the making, and it has a number of causes—Carol writes about how:

Newspapers and magazines often dressed young adults up as greedy slackers, ever-sponging off our parents never assuming responsible roles in society…even in their most noble struggles, younger generations were portrayed as a bunch of naïve youth who did not really know what they were protesting against…How could the church understand young adults if it continually looked at them through the tinted spectacles of older adults?

And that, I think, is the fundamental dynamic at play in today’s Scripture passage. (Yes…it took me this long to actually get to the passage I’m preaching on.  Carol’s book is that good.)  Saul is jealous of David—Samuel will go on to tell us that God is with David and not with Saul—but David also represents a threat to Saul because he is gaining popularity while Saul isn’t: when the people are chanting about David having killed his tens of thousands, they are, in so many words, saying: “our with the old, in with the new.”  They’re that giant sports team that shows their recovered-from-a-liver-tumor veteran the door, albeit much less gently, and with more fanfare. 

But there’s an added dynamic to Saul’s jealousy.  Saul is of another, older generation who looks at this young David, this boy shepherd-turned-soldier who has the hots for his daughter Michal and who sits in his court to play music—you can just imagine Saul getting all Clint Eastwood and growling, “Damn kids!  Get off my lawn!”  Seriously—that is what I see in this story, is that kind of dynamic: David is composing his own music—new and relevant and contemporary—and you can almost see Saul thinking to himself, “Kids these days and their noise!”

Yet instead of shaking his fist and moving on—Saul is still king, and in an absolute monarchy, the king can do pretty much whatever he wants—he tries to kill David by impaling him with a hurled spear.  Twice.  He is trying to cut off the source of youthful change in Israel at its roots.

And what Saul’s spears were to him, there are a myriad of things like that to the modern church—tools to cut off the influx of youth at its source.

At a Disciples church I visited once a number of years ago, the far older congregants fawned over me for being on my way to seminary—such a good boy, right?  My girlfriend at the time just sort of stood there until one of them turned and asked her—with what I am sure was the best intentions—“So, now, what do you do, besides take care of him?”

We never went back to that church.

It’s another way of dismissing young people, of dismissing our vitality and vibrancy, when we are put into situations like that.  We know when we are welcome on a deeper level than just, “Yay, new blood!”  You know who else gets excited about fresh meat?  Me, at Burgerville.

No, welcome and acceptance must go far deeper than that.  Acknowledgement, acceptance, and understanding of how young people interact, and how we have relationships with one another, are profoundly necessary because a church—and a tribal church at that—must be relational.

It makes sense, because it is fundamentally a part of Christianity itself--Christianity is a relational religion, built upon our relationship with God through Jesus Christ.  But it is still sometimes tough.

Saul, in what he does here, shows that he clearly has no interest in a relationship with David.  And I have to think that this is largely borne out of fear—fear that like a sporting legend, he will be shoved out the door by his own people when his time is up.

And I am here to tell you this fear need not be a part of our religious life.  Indeed, it cannot—fear of one another does not lead to vibrant church life.  Christianity is built on love, not on fear, and certainly not upon fear of one another.  Being in Christ means that we need not fear one another.

For once that fear is gone, the real ministry can take place.  Incredible relationships can be formed across generations in a church that otherwise would not be formed.  I have found surrogate parents and grandparents here, grandmothers whom I relate to in ways I never have since both of my grandmothers died over a decade ago.  Those are the kind of voids in our lives that an intergenerational, tribal church that cares for one another can fill.  And those are the kind of voids in our lives that God longs to rush into as soon as we say “Yes!” to Him and to Christ and to the church and to one another!

That is what a tribal church is, and can be: a church that cares for its own by filling the voids that our usual circles and ways cannot.  It is what David and Saul miss out on.  But it is, I have to believe, what each of them long for, but could not find.  Let us find it in their stead.  

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

June 2, 2013

The Earning Power of a Religious Studies/Theology Ph.D...is it Worth it Anymore?

While attending a college friend's wedding this past weekend, I sat next to one of our mutual (and now retired) professors from ye old Lewis & Clark College.  And among the many topics we chatted over while awaiting the beginning of the ceremony was the difficulty of newly-minted Ph.D.'s to get into the  full-time academic job market.

This is a topic that directly affects the livelihood of several good friends of mine who are working toward their own doctorates in graduate school right now.  They are intelligent, talented, and driven--and I want to be able to see them find work in their fields.  But I also want to  be able to see them do so at a proper wage, and I'll be honest: on both a micro and a macro level, that doesn't seem to be happening very often.  On a micro level, I see professorships be vacated by retirement and left unfilled--including, in some cases, endowed professorships.  On a macro level, I see pay being stagnant across many fields, but especially in my home field of religious studies and all that it entails: theology, ministry, and Biblical scholarship.

And even though I think to myself that I may one day return to school many years from now, it would not be to become a full-time professor.  Because...honestly, I'm not sure it is worth it for me.

A disclosure: the worry I am about to express should not be taken as any sort of anti-intellectualism on my part.  I appreciate the academy immensely for all it did for me, but I am also well aware of its limitations, especially in the current era of tightening budgets and vacillating enrollments.

But why isn't it worth it for me?  To answer that, let's try a (admittedly simple) experiment inspired by the 100 Reasons Not To Go To Grad School Blog.  Here, I am talking largely in utilitarian, dollars-and-cents terms because, let's be honest, student debt is going to get worse before it gets better.

Now, it took me three years of full-time study to earn my Master of Divinity, and I was extremely blessed to attend seminary on full scholarship (though I did go into debt for my living expenses):  I had 80% of my tuition waived by a scholarship from my alma mater, and my denomination covered the other 20%. Compare this to a hypothetical doctoral student. We’ll give this student some advantages that many graduate students do not often receive—we’ll assume that this doctoral student completes their doctorate seven years after I complete my master’s (according to the Washington Post, only 50% of humanities Ph.D. students complete their doctorates within ten years of completing their bachelors). 

We’ll also assume that this student receives a stipend for those entire seven years. Now, graduate student stipends vary widely from school to school and field to field, but humanities grad students tend to be some of the lowest paid. A quick Google search discovered full year (as opposed to academic year, which would be even less) minimum stipends ranging from $15,000 or so at Virginia Tech to over $26,000 at Yale. So let’s split the difference and say that this student’s stipend is $20,000 per year and that their tuition has been waived for each year that they are in the program, so that we are both on equal footing regarding student debt.

Finally, for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that both my current annual pay of cash salary, payroll tax offsets + housing allowance ($45,000 total) and this student’s $20,000 stipend are frozen during the seven years that the student is in school and I am in the workforce. Over those seven years, I will have earned $175,000 more than the grad student, and I will have had over $44,000 contributed to my church pension fund to boot.

Now, let’s imagine that the grad student miraculously avoids having to work as an adjunct for $3,000 per course and immediately after graduation, lands a post as a tenure-track assistant professor at Generic Theological Seminary. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the average salary during the 2010-2011 academic term (the most recent term I could find easily accessible data for) for a tenure-track assistant professor in theology is $52,240, and the average starting salary is only $50,620. 

It generally takes roughly six years to earn tenure, during which time a professor holds the rank of assistant professor. Being generous and assigning the average overall salary of $52,240, rather than the $50,620 average starting salary, that student will earn $43,440 more than my frozen $45,000 salary during those six years (this assumes neither of our salaries are increased), bringing the long-term discrepancy between our pay down to $131,560.

 Our faithful graduate student then earns tenure after those six years and is promoted to associate professor. The average salary for an associate professor of theology or religious vocation is listed as roughly $59,600. So, let’s go through this exercise again. Assuming it takes our grad-student-turned-associate-professor another six years to make full professor, during those six years as an associate professor, the grad student will make $87,600 more than me, bringing the long-term discrepancy between our lifetime earnings down to $43,960.

 Finally, the rank of full professor entitles our student to the relatively big bucks of the field--an average salary of roughly $74,270, or $29,270 more than my salary. It will still take our student roughly 18 to finally be in the net positive in their lifetime earnings compared to mine—by which point we will both be in our mid-to-late 40’s, a full 20 years or more after I have finished my master's degree and have spent those 20 years accumulating experience in a vocation that I love: parish ministry.

So...is it really worth it?  For me, it really isn't.

Now, I get the simplistic nature of this thought experiment: it doesn't take into account huge lifestyle variables like family size, location and cost-of-living, etc.  And as academic gigs go, humanities and religious studies in particular tend to be low-paying, even though I presented a relatively optimistic scenario--ie, a candidate getting a tenure-track position without any adjuncting.

But this whole setup does affect me because I am talking about my friends, good people who will be tasked with the tremendous and necessary job of training the set of religious leaders and clerics who will replace me, and I want them to be able to do that great job without worry for their livelihood.

And I'm not sure that will truly be the case.

It concerns me.  And if you care at all about the future of your congregation or your denomination, or the body of Christ itself, it should concern you as well.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column

(+ a new upcoming sermon series!  Also, on a blog programming note, I will be on vacation until June 2, so posts between now and then may vacillate between sporadic and non-existent.  Consider yourself warned!  -E.A.)

“School’s Out: Here’s a Summer Reading List!” 

Dear church,

 As always, I have been using part of this year to eagerly devour some new and exciting spiritual reading material, and like last June, I humbly offer to you three of my recommendations for books to keep you company during those lazy days of summer:

“My Year of Biblical Womanhood,” Rachel Held Evans, 2012

 I absolutely devoured this book when it first came out last year and am already combing through it all over again!  Evangelical Christian writer and blogger Rachel Held Evans documents, A.J. Jacobs-style, a year of her attempting to live out—as literally as possible—the Biblical commandments found specifically for women in passages like Proverbs 31, Titus 2, and Ephesians 5.  The result is a heartfelt and hilarious memoir—with contributions from her husband, Dan—that I have been unable to put down.

“Love Does,” Bob Goff, 2012

I got to see the Seattle-based Bob Goff speak here in Longview earlier this year (courtesy of the Three Rivers Christian School), and based on what I had learned from him in this book, he could not and did not disappoint.  In Love Does, he recounts a series of memories, stories, and anecdotes from his life, which range from childhood recounting to adventures in Uganda, liberating children from modern-day situations of slavery!  Read his stories and be inspired by the way God continues to work in our world!

“What We Talk About When We Talk About God,” Rob Bell, 2013

Rob Bell, the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been writing thought-provoking books for years—his 2005 debut, Velvet Elvis, has been the foundation of our monthly book study here—and his most recent effort is a thoughtful, reverent attempt to frame who and what God is in new and exciting ways.  Utilizing Scripture, experience, and theological (and even scientific) know-how, he tries to convey the sheer size and scope of God’s goodness and creative power, and he preaches a compelling message in doing so!

So those are some of the books that will be on my shelf this summer.  How about you?

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Eric

And brand-new for June: The “Behold a New Thing: The Tribal Church” Sermon Series:

June 2: “Saul’s Spears,” 1 Samuel 18:6-11

June 9: “The Year of Jubilee,” Leviticus 25:8-17

June 16: “We Were Slaves,” Deuteronomy 24:17-22

June 23: “When Children Ask,” Exodus 12:21-28

June 30: “The Wife of Lappidoth,” Judges 4:1-10

Oklahoma

Over the weekend, I had been putting together a blog entry based on a Washington Post article about how fewer and fewer seminary graduates are going into parish ministry.  After everything that has taken place in Oklahoma, with dozens dead (official counts have varied), and Lord only knows how many yet made wounded or homeless, I'm going to hold off on that post for a day and *hopefully* post it tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, though I just want to say a few of things about the whole when-bad-things-happen-to-good-people question (for which the seminary term is "theodicy"):

One--I do not believe God punishes on a macro scale anymore.  Maybe He did once upon a time--like with the flood, or with the ten plagues--but I do not, do not, do not believe that God sends natural disasters as punishment.  That's superstition, not religion.

Two--I likewise do not believe in the "the dumbass was asking for it" type of argument--the "why did people bother settling down in a place where tornadoes (or earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc) happen?" line of argument.  Because natural disasters happen everywhere, and people don't always get to choose where they live--they don't get to choose where they are born, and have to go where they can find jobs, education, and so on.

Three--as a Christian, as an ordained pastor, and as a human being, I am appalled by people who indulge in either number one or number two (Pat Robertson, Westboro Baptist, and John Piper, I'm looking at you).  Period.

Finally--remember that this will not be the last natural disaster.  Others will come, and Oklahoma will fade from memory.  Honestly, how often do we recall the Haiti earthquake, or Hurricane Katrina, with any frequency anymore, even though Port-au-Prince and New Orleans are still recovering from the aftermaths of both?  I was--am--heartened to see prayers for Oklahoma all over Facebook and Twitter, but please, please, do not let those prayers, thoughts, and actions be a one-time only thing, because others will face the exact same destruction and heartbreak at a later point in time, and we must remember that we are all in the same boat together, even when we forget about earlier tragedies to focus on the one at hand.  Our collective memory can be better, and that's all up to us.

Lord, in your mercy, hear those--our--prayers.

Yours in Christ,

Eric