Random Thoughts on the Pandemic

DISCLAIMER: Before I begin, allow me to be transparent with the reader. I am a realist leaning toward being a cynic. I don’t trust the government because those in the government have given me little reason to trust them. The system is flawed and the people in the system are flawed. And the flawed people in power are not in the least bit interested in changing the system. And I am not just referring to those “serving” in the present government. The dysfunction has been going on for decades (at least). I will discuss this distrust in an upcoming blog.

THESE ARE MY SEMI-RATIONAL, PRAGMATIC THOUGHTS

The same distrust goes for the media. They have THEIR story to tell and, facts be damned, that is the story that will be told. That is true for both the Left and the Right. Now if you trust the government or your political party and/or the press, I am concerned for you. Whatever motivates to have such trust, in my view, is not good. Perhaps you have not been paying attention. Perhaps you have drunk the Kool-Aid. (Thanks to Rev. Jones for the illustration.) Perhaps you are dense (Sorry, I couldn’t find a good word for what I am trying to express – dumb and stupid are just too rude) or naïve, which is the worst because that means you are smart enough to see the truth but refuse to believe it.

It immediately struck me as ironic that my mother’s mother (my grandmother Redding) died in 1918 of the Spanish flu pandemic and I am in the age and health group most likely to die of the Covid-19 virus. Could it be hereditary?

This is the first declared pandemic I have experienced. I think I have been through at least one other, but no one labeled it as such. Let’s face it, pandemic sounds much more exciting than the flu season.

The media coverage has been more than interesting to watch. From the beginning they seem to have intended to, and succeeded in, scaring the wadding out of the public. They have interviewed doctors and nurses and health officials, all telling horror stories. It has been the worst news possible, heartbreaking stories and one “CRISIS” after another.

First CRISIS – we wouldn’t have enough hospitals to treat the sick. So the government provided more. Which were rarely, if ever used, and are being disassembled.

Next CRISIS – there was not enough protective gear for medical staff so companies producing other products were forced to produce protective gear, masks, and sanitizer. The day was saved.

Next CRISIS – There weren’t going to be enough respirators to treat all of the sick so businesses capable of producing respirators were forced to do so. And then we discovered there were plenty of respirators to go around. Go figure.

Next CRISIS – People were making other sick. (Which was nothing new.) To solve this, the economy was shut down and social distancing was enforced. Suddenly, more people were out of work than during the Great Depression. The financially secure media people and politicians thought was a great idea. The unemployed workers and small business owners; not so much.

THEN WE REALIZED THE WORST CRISIS WAS UPON US – The government bestowed the power on itself to make personal decisions for "we the people". And I understand why. They are so much wiser, smarter, and well informed than we ignorant peons. (Take a moment to look up the definition of sarcasm.)

There is great power in creating fear. Fearful people become quite pliable, open to suggestion, and submissive to government control. I thought it odd when President Trump declared “war” on the Covid-19 Virus. I just considered it a sample of his usual overblown rhetoric. Then, as the situation unfolded, I realized what powers had been made available to the federal and state governments. Now THAT scares me. Just in their everyday attempts to govern they show themselves to be incompetent so why do we believe they will suddenly become capable because there is a crisis? The government makes a rule or suggestion and we tend to label, ridicule, mock, and even confront those who fail to follow the directions. In some states, people are encouraged to “rat out” the un-submissive. Such behavior causes me deep concern.

I will admit that I am naturally not compliant. (Read – rebellious.) Perhaps mistakenly, I believe myself to be intelligent and seasoned enough to make my own decisions concerning my health, personal safety, and behavior. I haven’t always hit the mark with my decisions, but I have been much more successful than the government. I’m pretty sure I can decide when to go out and when to stay in.

THESE ARE MY MORE CYNICAL THOUGHTS

• Have you considered that this “epidemic” is just natures way of thinning the herd? Being at the top of the list of candidates likely to die of this virus, it has occurred to me.
• China may have pulled off a great plan to screw the rest of the word – physically, emotionally, and economically.
• Wearing a mask has no effect on spreading the virus. Wearing them just makes us feel safer and more in control.
• Social distancing is a waste of time and effort.
• Being locked down will cause more deaths than it will save (WATCH THIS!) from suicide, murder, domestic violence, shortage of staff in healthcare facilities resulting in a lack of care, lack of family ability to oversee the care of loved ones, among others.
• We have discovered who are non-essential workers and with this knowledge all CEOs and many managers will be dismissed.
• Essential workers such as janitors, maintenance workers, truck drivers, delivery people, garbage collectors, healthcare workers, and many more would get substantial salary increases.
• Churches would realize they could use their income for helping others instead of building magnificent buildings.
• After the epidemic dies down we can open a whole new classification of Darwin Awards.

There are some of my thoughts on our pandemic. What are yours?

Copyright © 2020, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved

Bill McConnell is an Interim Minister, a Church Transformation consultant and a Christian Leadership Coach. He is a frequent speaker at Church Transformation events. His latest book on church transformation is DEVELOPING A SIGNIFICANT CHURCH and is available at Westbow Press. He can be contacted @ bill45053@gmail.com. Connect with him on Facebook @ William T. McConnell or on Twitter @billmc45053 or visit his Amazon Author Page @ Amazon author page

Moving On

If one has lived more than a decade, one has suffered through some difficult times. With age comes experience and with experience comes wisdom. If you are like me, sometimes I wish I had had fewer opportunities to become wiser.

Perhaps your difficult time took shape as the loss of a valued friend; the death of a loved one; having to move to a new home far from where you had taken root. Perhaps someone whom you trusted and from whom you expected a certain behavior failed you and deeply wounded your spirit. If you have logged any mileage on this road we call life, you have suffered disappointments and have been a disappointment to others.

These experiences can and should have an impact on our lives. Occasionally things have happened in my life that caused me to think of a line from Chris Farley in the movie Tommy Boy – “Wow, that’s going to leave a mark.” Some experiences are so positive or so negative that they leave a mark. A big one for me happened my senior year of high school. Like many in high school, I had a high school sweetheart. We dated on and off for several years. I think it is no exaggeration to say that we were crazy about each other. But, we were young and the relationship was rocky and we broke up and went back together with some regularity. In the spring of our senior year we were during one of our “break up” modes. Or at least I thought we were. That is until I received the phone call and learned that she had run off to Tennessee and gotten married. That one left a mark. Ouch.

The question becomes; how do we process these experiences in ways that are helpful instead of harmful? How do we learn from our experiences without allowing them to limit our future or cause us to have a cynical view of life? Such experiences can tend to toughen our approach to life or they can just inform our approach to live. They can harden us or soften us. Such experiences can drive toward God or drive us away from God. Though we rarely understand it as such, it is a choice we make. Our life experiences, in and of themselves, has neither a positive or negative impact on our lives. What impact they have is a choice we make.

On the negative side, we can allow our lives to be limited by our past experiences. Such experiences may cause us to live in the fear of suffering from a reoccurrence. We don’t fully give our whole hearts in a relationship for fear of being hurt. We don’t take on new challenges for fear of falling and hurting ourselves or fear of looking foolish in front of others. We don’t trust anyone because someone failed to keep a trust in our past. We don’t speak up because we fear we will be belittled as we were in the past.

You possibly noticed a reoccurring pattern to this negative approach – Fear. Our past experiences can cause us to fear the future. Living in fear is not a Godly way of life. The most often repeated command from God is, “Fear not.” A God-filled, God-led life is a fearless life. One cannot possibly go where God is leading and one cannot possibly do what God is calling one to do if one is fearful.

There is an interested take on this subject in the New Testament. “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12-14)

Here is what the author is saying to me. Keep your eyes on the goal. Keep moving ahead. Sure, learn from your past experiences, but don’t let them control you. Don’t let your past dictate your future. None of us have arrived. We are all still on the spiritual journey toward maturity. What has happened in your past, God can use for the good in your future. When you encounter a difficult time (or person or situation) don’t stop there. Keep moving. Keep your eyes on the goal. You’re not there yet.

So, if you are more than ten years old, you have had a disappointment or two in life. Perhaps it happened in and through the church. What did you expect? The church is populated by people – people much like you and me. But don’t let that stop you from moving into the future God has for you. Put the past in the past and move into the future. We need to do that as individuals and as a church.

God is already in our future. I am excited to join Him there. Let’s go!

Copyright © 2013, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved

Leadership Takes Courage

The church of the 21^st Century in North America is struggling mightily with some significant problems and challenges. I am proud of the church for being willing to engage in such a struggle. For much too long the church chose to take the approach that there were no challenges; that there were problems, not with the church but, instead, with the culture.

Many have addressed the plethora of problems confronting the church: From a lack of authenticity, to a lack of mercy, to a lack of love, to a lack transparency, to a lack of direction, to a lack of consistency, to a lack of direction, to a lack of hospitality, to a lack of mission, to a lack of whatever. What the church lacks has been thoroughly dragged out and inspected. Except one thing. We haven’t taken a hard look at one of the church’s greatest weaknesses; one of the things lacking that is causing the church the most distress. I believe that to be the lack of courageous leadership.

When I talk about church leadership I understand that churches are led by both clergy and lay leaders. But I, as a member of the clergy, am going to only address the lack of strong leadership that our pastors are failing to provide for the church.

It is more than understandable why our pastors are failing to provide leadership for our churches. Most of us did not answer a call to leadership; we answered a call to the pastorate; to be pastors. Most of us went to school – 4 years of college and 3 years of seminary – to train for the pastorate. We learned to read and write and speak. We learned some theology, Greek and Hebrew, pastoral care, Christian education, spiritual disciplines, church administration and, most importantly, how to run a projector. We took classes in almost everything except leadership. Leadership wasn’t on the agenda and, for most of us; it is not on our radar screen.

In fact, most of us were taught to do church in reverse leadership. Instead of answering a call to a church and leading the people forward in God’s calling for that church, we were taught to go to a church and ask this question: “What do you want to do?” Like most politicians of our era, we attempt to lead from behind. Back in the crowd is a place of comfort and safety. Nothing of much consequence happens in the life of a group (or a country) when such non-leadership is exercised, but one’s life expectancy in the organization is markedly increased.

Most of us fail to lead because we were not taught to lead and leading never occurs to us. We just coast along from church to church to church wondering why nothing particularly significant happens in our ministries and finally land safely in retirement. We become so accustomed to not much happening in our churches we come up with statements like the one a dear preacher friend made to me several years ago: “If you move them and inch, you’ve done some great work.” The truth is we have worked hard but we have not done great work. We have hardly moved them. And we won’t do great work until we learn to lead our churches in the Mission God has called us to.

When we look at the topic of leadership we must think in terms of courageous leadership. Leadership that does not display courage is not truly leadership. And this, I believe, is where we have a profound problem. Like a majority of folks, being courageous day in and day out is too much to ask. We can have flashes of courage. But courage as a way of life is difficult. Because of the personality type attracted to ministry, many of we preacher-types tend to want people to like us and approve of us. More of the ministry we do than we would like to admit is done so people will like us and approve of us. Doing pastoral ministry often brings gratitude and thanks from those receiving that ministry. And that gratitude really massages the old ego. Having people recognize us in public as being “wonderful” for being there for them during a difficult time is addictive. It is not a bad thing, but it can become primarily why we do ministry. And that is unhealthy.

The courageous leadership it takes to lead a church forward often is met with opposition and sometimes with anger, unkind words and even threats of violence. It takes courage and conviction to deal with such criticism and remain on task and on target. In a vast majority of churches I have worked with, any display of opposition immediately halts the forward momentum of new or proposed ministries. We are so afraid of offending someone that we allow the most negative people in the church to “lead” the church. We abdicate leadership for fear of incurring someone or ones’ displeasure.

Bill Hybels, pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, encourages pastors to ask and answer a difficult, soul searching question. “As a leader, how often have I aborted a vision secretly because I’ve lacked the courage to do the hard thing?” This is true in far more cases than any of us would like to admit. Leading a church into change and transformation is difficult, demanding and dangerous. The possibility of verbal abuse, exhaustion from long hours of work and having people oppose every new initiative is extremely high.

Many clergy look at that and decide to not take on the challenge. Instead, we quietly exist in dying churches patiently waiting for the day of our retirement. I say, shame on us. We are afraid someone may not like us. We are afraid we might be fired. We think: Life is good, why upset this good deal? Brene Brown challenges us: “You can choose courage or comfort. But you cannot choose both.”

For those of us honest enough to answer yes to the question Hybels proposes, he also says: “Don’t go to your grave with you cool visions and dreams. Don’t die a coward.” Strong words but good words. As many have already said, I want to come to the end of life regretting the mistakes I have made instead of regretting the many things I did not have the courage to attempt.

The church in our culture is losing ground in any way you choose to measure it. Most of our churches “leaders” choose to wring our hands, bemoan the demise of the church, encourage our people to hang in there and invite others to join us in dying as an organization, and continue to do business as usual. This is not leadership. The most often repeated command from God, “Be not afraid,” was not given by chance. If you are going to be a God follower and a church leader, be of good courage. Please.

Copyright © 2013, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved