Five Steps Toward Agrarianism

"I'm small and it's God who makes the sun rise, the moon spin, the springs froth, the rain pelt, the mountains quake, the oceans surge, the deserts spread, the wind rake, and the snow to muffle. Not me. God."
That's the testimony of the Psalmist and all the other Old Testament saints.
But we have an inflated view of our importance and a diminished view of God's involvement. This leads to all manner of folly and harmful mischief.
When it comes to our environment, right living is a great aid to right thinking. The Bible assumes at least an agrarian awareness in its audience, if not an agrarian existence. The Jewish liturgical calendar is remarkably agrarian. The imagery and metaphor of Scripture is predominately agrarian. The curse in Genesis is agrarian and the depictions even of the New Jerusalem in Revelation have an agrarian dimension.
So here are five suggestions that even urban people might act on in an effort to get into our right minds.

1. Follow the Moon
     If someone asked, would you be able to say what phase the moon is in today? Is it waxing or waning? To know requires the discipline of stepping outside in the dark to scan the sky, and that alone would be reason enough. We do far too little stepping outside in the dark and looking up.

2.  Take a Constitutional
     My grandmother was fond of taking a walk after a meal. It was very Victorian and quaint, but it served a valuable purpose beyond helping to digest one's food. Nature is obscured in direct observation, but reveals itself in the sidelong glance. If you would know creation well it's no good making a point of looking out the window or reading books on the topic. There is no substitute for strolling, for aimless walking.
     Honestly, when was the last time you walked beneath the trees with no haste and no object?

3. Keep a weather journal.
    My friend has a journal in his milking parlor. His grandfather kept a similar journal, containing notes about the weather mixed with observations about the goodness and majesty of God. There is something about accepting today's weather and jotting it down, whether with glee or resignation, that takes from tomorrow the power to distress.  Knowing what happened a day ago and a year ago makes me much less anxious about what will happen a year from now.

4. Experience extremes of weather
    If the wind never ruins your umbrellas, if the rain never soaks you, if the sun never warms you to the touch, if your return from the snow storm never means booby traps of icy puddles for your family to discover with their stocking feet you are soft and experientially impoverished.

5. Celebrate extremes of weather
     When confronted with weather extremes people are most likely to cry for legislation, but there is another, more legitimate response. When trees come down cry "Glory." When the thermometer rises cry "Glory." The wild variability of nature is not something of which we are guilty and it's not something we're responsible for fixing. It is a pointed reminder that our God is great, big, and thrilling. Let him thrill you and applaud him when he does.

Five Ministerial Titles in Order of Preference

There are so many things to call the leader of a local congregation and all of them are heavy with associations and connotations. And even though I have my preferences I have very little control over which ones people use or how they refer to me in my absence. But for what it's worth these are the ones I prefer.

1.  Pastor*
     It's awfully bland, I know, but it works across all sorts of contexts and requires no explanation. The word comes from the Latin word for shepherd, which makes it rich with all sorts of Biblical references. And "shepherd" is, while metaphorical, perhaps the most comprehensive description of what it is I do. And one of the things that I like about it is that when referring to me in Latin, "Pastor Tate," I am just a simple leader of a congregation. Whereas, if you switched from Latin to English, "Shepherd Tate," I would suddenly be a cult leader overseeing the construction of a compound.

Can you imagine calling this fellow
"Pastor John?"

2.  Preacher
     I have a dear woman in my church who calls me "Preacher." Just "Preacher," whether referring to me or addressing me. And I kind of love it. It makes me feel frontier, if you know what I mean. It's what John Wayne would call me. Straightforward and unpretentious.
     I've noticed that when people in the community meet me and figure out who I am they'll usually say "You're the preacher, right?" It's interesting that unchurched people immediately use that designation to identify me. It is the most public aspect of my role.

3.  Vicar
     Another of my parishioners has affectionately dubbed me "the Vicar." Again with the Latin! The root meaning of the word here is "substitute," and it shows up in "vicarious." I am, in a very real sense I hope, Christ's stand-in, where he'd like to be, doing the things he'd like to be doing. And he's pleased to accomplish those things through me, vicariously.
     That's lovely and all, but the reason "Vicar" is number three on the list is because it requires a lot of explanation. That, and it makes me sound like I should have my own sitcom on the BBC.

4.  Minister
     I do minister, but it's just so vanilla. And it's a term that gets shared with political office holders.
     And you can refer to me as "the minister," but it wouldn't work to call me "Minister Tate."

5. Reverend
    This is, sadly, a title that sinks under the weight of all of its negative associations. It sounds, to most ears, like a horribly pretentious and stuffy title. It could be redeemed, but it's probably not worth the effort. I sign my name "Reverend Tate" for official business and I make no objection when, in a public capacity, I am introduced as such, but I do nothing to promote the use of the title.


My least favorite title, by the way, is "Team Leader," or any other such modern foofoo-ism. Any pastor who elects to change his title to "team leader" ought to be forced to preach out of the Book of Numbers for a year as penance. The Book of Ecclesiastes if he thought he was being particularly clever.
The effort to come up with less churchy sounding names for church offices and activities is misguided folly. It does not succeed in making church more relevant or accessible. It removes no obstacles. And it has a very short shelf life. No one calling himself a "team leader" today will be doing so ten years from now, or will be willing to admit that he ever had.

*I'm kind of a stickler for "Pastor Tate," because "Pastor Joel" gives me the heebie-jeebies. I just don't like it. And there are number of other reasons why I'm opposed to the practice - but that's a post for another time.

Five reasons to love the apple

The roxbury russet is my favorite apple. I almost cried
when the Rutland Co-op ran out of them this fall.

1. No other fruit can match the apple for variety. It can be russetted, smooth, dimpled, seamed and seamless. It can be an almost translucent yellow, bright green, or a red so deep it looks black. It can be tart, sweet, juicy, dry, red-veined, pink-fleshed, tiny, and softball sized. Whereas a banana is pretty much a banana.

2. Apples are always being unfairly identified as the fruit Adam and Eve ate to bring the curse upon us all. And despite having been saddled with this monstrous bad rap have you ever heard apples complain of the injustice?

3. Apples require a certain number of “chill days,” times during their dormancy when the temperature falls below freezing, for them to produce fruit. This is a rebuke to the softness of the south, a redeeming feature of our otherwise hateful winters, and a ready made sermon illustration.

4. The trees from which the apples come are uncommonly beautiful in every season.

5. An apple requires no more effort for enjoyment than the effort involved in biting. But it can be peeled and pared and made into a hundred delightful dishes and an indispensable ingredient in many more.

Five Reasons Not to Audition

As a pastor I am very tempted to spend my Sunday mornings auditioning. I want for people to like me and to like our church enough to make it their own, and that's understandable. But spending Sunday morning in an effort to woo potential parishioners into giving us the part represents not only a missed opportunity, but a real failure.

1. Auditioning is exhausting.
     It's not just that auditioning is wearisome, but in the case of a church which will face, potentially, a new set of prospective worshipers each Sunday it means a future of perpetual auditioning, all "once more with feeling," never moving on. That is an unendurable prospect.

2. Someone is always doing it better.
      Whether it's the preaching, the music, or the coffee there is always going to be someone local doing at least one thing (if not everything) better than we are doing it. We can't afford to audition because we can't afford to encourage the assumption that churches should be evaluated on the merits of their production.

3. Auditioning misses the point.
       We call it a worship service because it is a service to God. It's effect as a worship service needs to be judged on the basis of how well God is served. That's a simple point, but judging by how often I seem to forget it, it deserves some emphatic repeating.

4. It's an unattractive quality to the right people.
         All of this needy auditioning expresses a fundamental insecurity. And it's not that insecurity is always wrong, but in the case of the Bride of Christ it is, at the very least, hard to account for. The sweaty anxiety of an auditioning church is going to be a turn off to many people, people like me, people who are looking for an awesome God and the victorious citizens of his coming Kingdom.

5. It is an attractive quality to the wrong people.
        That insecurity, the insecurity of an auditioning church, might put me off but it's catnip to the manipulators, the ambitious, and the advantage-seeking. To those who want influence, position and authority a Sunday morning designed to get their approval is the same thing as an invitation to mischief. And to the spiritually complacent an auditioning church is the safest place in the world. But God wants church to be dangerous, a strait door through which lies the way to adventure and life everlasting.

To the tune of . . .

I am a big hymn nerd. I can't say for sure what it is about hymns that has so captured my imagination, but somehow I have collected a good assortment of hymnals. I've much more to say about hymns, but this is just to highlight some of the hymnals in my collection of some 60 different hymnals, songbooks, and psalters.
And by the way, lest you think that I'm a total poindexter, I'm listening to the indie band Blondfire while writing this post.

Most meaningful hymnal: the red "Hymns of Faith and Life" hymnal with "Houghton College Chapel" stamped on the front.
This was a Christmas gift from Christine our first Christmas together. She asked permission from then Dean of the Chapel, Coach Lewis, and it is a good Wesleyan hymnal with some excellent liturgical resources in the back. But it's the fact that it was hallowed by its use in the John and Charles Wesley Chapel (and that it was a gift from my wife) that makes me love it so much.

Most unintentionally amusing: Metrical Tune Book with Hymns
A collection of hymns from the holiness movement, this volume features a number of hymns by the Free Methodist firebrand V.A. Dake and his associates. "Hew the Agag," for instance, expresses an admirable sentiment but in language so purple and over the top that I could never sing it with a straight face. "Rotten to the very core, Covered with sin's unbound sore, Seed of sin, and daubed with hellish, lustful slime." It's almost enough to drive you into the arms of Hillsong.

Oldest: The Songs of Zion or the Christian's New Hymn Book for the Use of Methodists
Published in 1822, almost thirty years before Furnace Brook Wesleyan was founded, it follows the practice of most Methodist hymnals by inserting "O For a Thousand Tongues" as the first in the collection. As with most older hymnals there is no music included; all of the hymns are text only with a notation about the meter.

Most personally influential: Olney Hymns
This is a reprint of the original hymnal compiled by John Newton and his friend William Cowper for the use of his rural parish. First of all, the preface is beautiful and instructive. Newton had a fine grasp on the role of the hymn writer and he took himself lightly.
 But the hymns themselves are the real treasure here. There is a disarming frankness to them, as when Cowper admits in "Decide this Doubt" that, while others seem to find comfort in the house of prayer, it leaves him cold.