Did the Romans Swipe Left or Swipe Right?
“First of all, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because the news about your faithfulness is being spread throughout the whole world. I serve God in my spirit by preaching the good news about God’s Son, and God is my witness that I continually mention you in all my prayers. I’m always asking that somehow, by God’s will, I might succeed in visiting you at last. I really want to see you to pass along some spiritual gift to you so that you can be strengthened. What I mean is that we can mutually encourage each other while I am with you. We can be encouraged by the faithfulness we find in each other, both your faithfulness and mine.” (Romans 1:8-12, CEB translation)
About the same time this blog goes live, I will sit down and teach five brave souls the final course in Bible in the United Methodist Course of Study curriculum: Acts, Epistles, and Revelation. I have spent much of the evening prior prepping for our week of “live” (on Zoom of course) classes. When we are on Zoom together, we will study Acts, Romans, and Revelation. And because this year is what it is, they are getting some highly customized discussion opportunities. At the risk of spoiling what lies ahead for them, here are some of them:
Now-sight is 2020: How Reading Acts, Epistles and Revelation Shifted this Year
Who Was the Church? Who Is the Church?: Reflecting on the 1st and 21st Centuries
The Apostle Paul, K-Pop Fans, and TikTok Users: How Hidden Transcripts Overturn the World
Teaching Revelation Using 2020 Memes
It occurs to me that those would all make potential blogs. Share in the comments on social media or below if there is one you would like me to write on sooner rather than later.
But today I find myself swimming in one of the topics we will cover in Romans: “Did the Romans Swipe Left or Swipe Right?: Pastoral Transitions 2020.” Today was my first Sunday at First United Methodist Church in Conway, Arkansas. I am joining them as an Associate Pastor. The senior pastor there, Rev. Dr. Michael Roberts (check his blog out at connectedinchrist.net), has helped make a wonderful welcoming space for me. One of the things he has done is give space these first two Sundays in the sermon time to interview me. The hope is that it is allowing the congregation to get to know me and make connections. It is also helping them to see that Michael and I are building rapport too. I am grateful for such an experience. (If you want to see it, check it out here in our worship service).
Our worship aired about 12 hours ago. And I cannot articulate what a weird day it has been. Primarily it has been weird because I have literally seen no other human being. All day. I have not even needed to get out of my pajamas. And now, in the darkness, having spent the day surrounded by silence, the weight of this transition is sitting heavy on me. I have texted some friends, and in the course of that exchange, I realized how much my pep talks about this pastoral transition sound like eHarmony commercials. I am trying to sell myself on the success and longevity of relationships that start online. And once I made that connection, I could not help but think…
“Did the people of my congregation swipe left, or swipe right?”
That’s the pressure of this year. Because for the first time ever, basically all across the United States, changing church became as easy as a click of a button. As easy as a swipe left or swipe right. Geography doesn’t even matter anymore. There are no limits to where people can go now. Which means we have to ask the question, “How do we get them to stay?” And then we also have to ask the question, “How do we get more to come?”
They are questions we should always ask ourselves. They are questions the church should have been doing a better job of asking and answering all along. And I think the church on the other side of all of this will be stronger as a result. We have now been forced to diligently ask and answer. Some will answer it well, and they will thrive. And some will falter, and they will struggle. And some will put their fingers in their ears and mutter “nah nah nah nah” and not ask or answer. And they will die.
But then also, each pastor has to ask and answer that question too. And I have to say, sitting here with no deep relationships with the people I am now called to serve, I hope my answer is good enough. Actually, I hope my answer is phenomenal. But in reality, it feels average. It feels average because I do not know, outside of a few social media comments and emails and pretty steady viewership during the sermon’s broadcast on Facebook, I do not know if my people stayed or left. Or never came in the first place.
So tonight, I feel a great kinship with the Apostle Paul as he sat down to write the letter to the Romans. Unlike all the other letters of Paul that we have in the Bible, the letter to the Romans is written to a congregation Paul has never met. He is on his way there, but he has never been there. His reputation has preceded him, but he does not really know what that reputation is. Could be good, could be bad. So Romans is really like sending his pastor profile ahead of him. And it reads differently than all his other letters. It is a little more formal. A little stiff. Less like the Paul of Corinthians, where he seems to say two different things at the same time but must be relying on them to understand what he means because they know him, or like Galatians where he just yells at people and honestly speaks rather bluntly. No, he is fairly polite (especially for Paul) in Romans. He also gives an overview of his theology, in case people have heard weird rumors about him. And then, because ministry is what it is, he also preps them for the fact that he is going to ask them for money to further his ministry. But he does all this letting the Romans know that he is praying for them, and thinks of them often, and is looking forward to being with them.
He sends this note at a time when the Roman church is trying to find ways to come back together. They were separated from one another by a government order – the Edict of Claudius – from somewhere between 41 CE to 54 CE, when Jews were expelled from Rome. The Jews had to leave, the Gentiles stayed and kept the church running. These two groups have very different understandings of what church is supposed to be. They are fighting over things from proper understanding of the faith to questions around sexual relations. Now they are struggling to be in community with one another. It is into that situation that Paul is trying to build and be accepted by community. And Paul did finally make it to Rome. But when he got there, he was immediately placed under house arrest.
All of this sounds strangely familiar.
We don’t know what happened in the two years Paul was in house arrest in Rome. In particular, we don’t know what influence he had over the people in Rome. But we do know he likely wrote Philemon and the letter to the Philippians. And we are still reading those letters today, and we are reading the letter to the Romans, his online dating profile. So in the midst of this strange pastoral transition, I think I will spend some time with Paul. I will learn from him. I will pay attention to how he grabbed attention for Jesus. And then I will do whatever necessary translation I need to do to make the 1st century applicable to the 21st century, though as I am affirming in Course of Study this summer, sometimes that needed translation is minimal.
I will seek to empower the people I serve to use their gifts for the glory of God. I will encourage them. I will be grateful when they encourage me. I will preach the Gospel. I will lift them up in prayer. And I will pray we all grow strong in our faithfulness, even (especially) in the midst of this challenge.
And then I will trust God. I will trust that whatever transformation I am supposed to be part of, if I keep seeking God’s will in it and not getting too bogged down on how disruptive this all feels, if I open up to the new power we have to carry the Gospel to the farthest reaches of the known world, just as Paul sought to get to Spain and hoped the Romans would help him get there, but also realize that I may only make it as far as Rome in the end, I will trust that that work is what God intends me to do. And God will make something of it, big or small or somewhere in between.
And I will love the people I am called to love. Whether I ever meet them face-to-face or not. And whether they swipe right or swipe left. Either way, I am called to swipe right on all of them.
