Humble Churches

This fall, we had a sermon series on the letter of James.  Ever since, I keep coming back to the notion of humility.

It comes up in scripture every so often, this virtue of humility.  How it is good to be humble.  It comes up often enough that I even know the pitfalls of humility:  that some people's idea of humility is really self-abasement.  That low self-esteem is not the same as humility.  I say that "humble" comes from the word "human" and that "human" and "hummus" go together, and that to be humble is just to be human, to be mortal, of the earth -- and know it.

That's what I say.

During my studies this fall, I even came across a quote by C.S. Lewis.  The gist of it was that humility is not so much thinking less of yourself as it is thinking of yourself -- less.

It made me think about the Japanese woman who once asked me quite earnestly about prayer, "when you pray, do you think of yourself as an unworthy sinner, or do you think of yourself as a beloved child of God?"  I had no idea how to answer that question, until I thought that maybe the idea of prayer is not to think of yourself so much at all.

Be that as it may, I still find myself caught in the grip of that mistaken form of humility, low self-esteem.  I pick apart my flaws mercilessly, compare myself with any other pastor I can find.  I can count the things I have not accomplished, the gifts I do not have.  I am very good at this.  I am not sure why.  I did not have an especially traumatic childhood.

It occurs to me that churches can have low self-esteem too, for one reason or another.  Sometimes just being small, in an era of super-market sized churches, is enough to affect churchly self-esteem.  Churches are routinely faced with scarcity.  And churches decline.  Or have church fights (Christians should not fight, we are told).  And then feel shame about our size, or our lack of resources, or our bad behavior.

It's not bad to hold up a mirror to ourselves and see our deficiencies.  It would not be honest to deny our imperfections.  But I am beginning to think that poor self-esteem, for me, and for churches, is sometimes an excuse.  It's a way of wiggling out of our responsibility to fulfill the call that God has imprinted on our lives.  God can't possibly expect anything of me.  I mean, look at me!

God can't possibly expect anything of us.  We are small, too small.  We are flawed people in a declining church, after all.  Something is Wrong with Us.

Even so, the world needs us, and we have gifts to offer.  God says so.   To believe otherwise is not humble.  It's a special kind of pride.

Maybe that's the definition of a humble church:  one that knows that the world needs them, and that they have gifts to offer.  Because God says so.