Off the Hook

My daily prayer regimen -- "Prayer before Facebook" -- is plodding along, and I have, in fact, been praying every day, sometimes more perfunctorily than others. It has also brought attention to the fact that I don't actually find Facebook that interesting (though it does have its charms), or perhaps, in a moment of cosmic levity, it has become less interesting to me at just the moment I've decided to make it the carrot to help me keep my prayer promise. One reader suggested I write out some of my prayers, but to be perfectly honest they're a bit boring.

A couple of months ago I sent some of you an email about my future at the church -- namely, that there is some buzz about making my position full-time with me in it -- and several of you have been asking if there's any news on that front. The big question was: do I really want to be full-time at a church? Is this the right next step? And it caused no small amount of soul-searching and pondering on my part. I was only asked if I would be willing to have that conversation; I wasn't being asked for a decision, and it could be as long as a year before such a decision even became a live option. But I also indicated in the email that I felt if I leaned into this it would probably happen, so the decision isn't completely irrelevant to the here and now. How I think I'll answer that question when it comes up has some inescapable bearing on how I comport myself in the meantime.

As my wife and I have kicked this around, we keep coming up against our own reservations. There's a kind of built-in distance to being part-time, a kind of buffer against getting sucked in too much. There's a certain attractiveness to not having employment by people to whom my "real" thoughts would be anathema as my bread and butter. And, at bottom, there's just a basic intuition that this is ultimately a bad idea. Seemingly insignificant changes to the church's internal culture or to my own tolerances could leave me desperate to get out, and being full-time could in and of itself prove to be too claustrophobic. Moreover, I think my real passion is teaching and writing, and the church needs someone whose real passion is worship. Not just music, either. I do church music because I'm good at it and I enjoy it, but that's not the same as being a person who sees their life's work wrapped up in the liturgical life of the church.

What's interesting here is that I had one of my regular meetings with our pastor on Monday, which I went into wondering if I should bring this up. I didn't need to wonder, because he brought it up, and it seems there have been some developments in the conversation that I assume come out of a recent elder's retreat. Going for a full-time worship person has been made more of a priority, and the nascent job description leads more toward a comprehensive "worship arts" producer-type person, someone big-picture enough to oversee drama, dance, tech, music, etc. I'm not that person. And the pastor gently articulated some of the same concerns about my academic life; they would expect a full-time person to be "all in" in a way that he thinks would cause me to shrivel and I know I would balk at anyway.

He was hesitant to bring all this up but I saw it coming, and headed him off at the pass, for which he was grateful. My current job is not in jeopardy; the preferred option is to keep me on as more of a musical director (which I like better anyway) and hire someone to be my immediate boss. The pastor also indicated that he had a personal interest in keeping me around for my brain, though he added something to the effect of "If only I had half your brain, or maybe just 40%," an idea that I hope he doesn't take too literally.