This is the last of a three-part series. Click here for Part One, which lays out Parker Palmer’s description of how we “kill” people. Part Two talks about how anonymity fosters killing.
More than a decade ago, as I was just beginning to imagine shifting from “lawyer” to “pastor,” a fellow layperson dared to say some true words that I’ve never forgotten. He said I must pay more careful attention when someone spoke to me. “What?” I said (because I hadn’t been listening very well). He explained that sometimes, when he was speaking to me, it felt like I was distracted, looking for someone else, someone more important. “What I’m getting from you is thinly veiled contempt,” said this fellow lay leader.
I was shocked.
I did not feel contempt for this man; I respected and valued him, his ministry, and his friendship. Had I really done that, even to him? And if to him, what about others with whom I had less connection, less history?
To use Parker Palmer’s metaphor, I think I was killing them off. Rendering them irrelevant, with a word or a glazed expression, because I had more important people to talk to, more urgent things that needed my valuable attention. I’ve always appreciated my friend’s well-placed words. (Iron sharpens iron, right?)
(Perhaps you, reading this, think “Yes, and she still does that”; if so, please tell me! Even so, I hope you can appreciate that I’ve really tried to be truly present, even amid the bustle and distractions of a busy room full of dear people. I truly am better about this than I ever would have been if my friend hadn’t said what he did.)
A lot of “killing” goes on in churches. It happens in that way we overlook one another. It happens more insidiously, when we give up on having good relationships with the persons who go to church with us. How many times do we settle for indifference or, say, thinly veiled contempt that arises out of some real or imagined disagreement or slight from months ago—or perhaps years? Or maybe we have the impression that they think they’re better than we are, so we don’t talk to them, so they think we are mad at them, and so on.
I do violence to another person—I kill her off!—when I can’t meet her eyes, when I complain about her behind her back, when I render her irrelevant with a phrase of dismissal or diminution.
Of course there are many more ways we “kill” one another in church. People’s lives are ravaged by sexual (and other) misconduct perpetrated by pastors and other persons they encounter in church. Too often, that wounding continues when the church’s response is meager and mistrusting. We “kill” our LGBTQIA siblings when we do not welcome their gifts and their ministry in our midst, and when we are complicit in systems that silence their voices and push them out. Some traditions similarly “kill” women with theologies that render our leadership illegitimate.
Let’s stop the killing. The institutional kind and the interpersonal kind, both. I can’t fix all the traditions and institutions that I’m not part of, but I can try to live consistent with an arc that bends toward justice for all.
And in the places I can make a difference? Truly, I want all of them to be no-kill zones. The church seems like a good place to start. Will you join me?
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