AN EXERCISE IN SELECTIVE AMNESIA

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What if you as pastor-in-charge woke up one Sunday morning with a case of selective amnesia? You remember enough to eat your breakfast, shower, and feed the family pets. You check your e-mail, give a quick "see you later" kiss to your spouse, and drive to the congregation of ninety, or sixty, or thirty souls you lead. You arrive thirty minutes before the gathering music. And somewhere between the car and the front steps of the church the selective amnesia sets in.

You do not remember the rhetoric of mainline decline. It's not only the facts behind the rhetoric that escape you — the decreased numbers of membership and worship attendance, the absence of younger generations, the outdated and oversized buildings, and so on — but the rhetoric itself, the embellished, argumentative, phrase mongering use of those facts to diss present forms of the church and offer new products in their place.

You do not remember that this form of organizing life together as a people, this church, has been variously criticized as outdated, inflexible, racist, classist, out-of-touch, isolationist, and in denial of its own imminent and certain death.

There's another rhetoric slipping from memory this morning, the rhetoric of post-Christian America. Nobody is sure when that "post" began. Was there some sort of pristine colonial America height from which we have been falling ever since? Is the decline synonymous with the rise and decline of that uniquely American form of connection of churches called a denomination? Did the fall begin on a Sunday evening in 1963 when the Fox movie theatre in Greenville, South Carolina, started to show movies in head-to-head competition with the youth group meeting at the Buncombe Street Methodist Church?

Whenever that "post" began, the corresponding rhetoric goes something like this. "You are no longer the dominant voice in social laws and customs you once were — deal with it!" "You are not above scrutiny and liability for the way you have and do hurt individuals." "Your claim to superior religious truth no longer has favored status; you are in level-field competition with other religions, cults, and a growing preference for a world without interference from any sort of god." As potent and pervasive as that rhetoric may be, it is erased from your memory this morning, gone without a trace.

Gone with it is the memory of a marketplace logic that bigger is better. You do not remember that within a span of fifty years the smaller community schools were swept away by large regional campuses and it was called good; that small specialty businesses were swallowed by big-box chain stores and it was called good; or that television channel options exploded from the basic four (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS) to hundreds and it was called good. Or that such developments and their counterparts in the church growth movement (consolidation, convenience, options) were declared very good.

There are certainly other marketplace logics like the logic of a small business where you maintain certain values alongside the profit motive or the logic of sustaining a dynamic equilibrium in an organization, but most days these logics are eclipsed by the "bigger is better" scenario. And in this setting your congregation of ninety, sixty, or thirty is like a passenger who lost her ticket to ride, an office manager left behind because he missed the memo about an important meeting. It is the specter of being displaced that haunts you some days. But not today. Today you have a temporary reprieve from that memory.

On this day, you cannot for the life of you remember a single one of those "life cycle of a congregation" charts comparing your congregation to the one-way ascent, peak, and descent of an individual person and locating your congregation at various points along the downward slope to death. So you are not prone to dismiss your repeat pattern of worship as creeping middle age, your investment in the right ordering of life together as the onset of poor health, or the keeping of certain persons with certain gifts in office as the rise of an end-times aristocracy. The all-too-easy comparisons between the lifespan of a human being (in the United States, eighty-four years for men, eighty-six for women) to the lifespan of small tenacious congregations (routinely one hundred to two hundred years) are forgotten this morning.

Forgotten also are all those caricatures of small churches you have accumulated through the years. Caricature: "A representation in which the subject's distinctive features or peculiarities are exaggerated for comic or grotesque effect." So you do not remember your congregation as a dysfunctional family system plagued by symptoms of poor communication, codependent personality disorders, or a tendency to pounce on scapegoats. You do not remember remarks by a denominational official or consultant hired by that official that small churches are a "drag to the system," demanding supervisory time and leadership resources far out of proportion to their contribution to the larger connection of churches. And most of all you do not remember the false memory of nostalgia, an idealized image of the past that exchanges vague emotions of misty-eyed longing — think "There's a Church in the Valley by the Wildwood" with its complete absence of God-talk — for the plain courage to face present challenges.

Add to the list of things forgotten the economics of scarcity surrounding your financial support. You are given a respite from the constant tension of whether this congregation is a viable economic unit as measured by its capacity to sustain your base salary, health insurance, and pension. You forget their injured confidence born in a series of defensive moves over forty years: from pastoral staff to solo pastor, from solo pastor to solo pastor of lesser credential, from solo pastor of lesser credential to pastor shared with another congregation, and from shared pastor full-time to shared pastor part-time.

How does a congregation scale back its self-worth in keeping with such a descent in the status of its leadership? Is it less church under the shared pastor part-time than it was under the staff that led in the same building forty years ago? This morning, for a few minutes, you are spared these questions that dog your ordinary working days. You are spared as well their counterpart in your psyche, those two nagging questions that can quickly deflate best intentions of pastoral leadership and compassion. How long can they afford me? How long can I afford to stay with them?

And one more thing: this morning you do not remember the sting of career competition. You forget that hideous little voice of doubt that asks, "Is this really the rung of the ladder I should be occupying at this stage of my life?" You forget the mental ranking, the envious gazes at larger congregations with imagined perks, and the anxious comparing to colleagues, especially those younger. By a temporary loss of select memory, you are at the right church at the right time, the congregation worthy of your best efforts.

You park your car in the...