There are many things a blog can do well. Talking like this and running through all matters theological not only keeps us interested in each other and in church, it creates a kind of closeness with a completeness and complexity that you can't quite duplicate other places. I'm not suggesting that this medium is better or worse than any other, nor that it can replace face-to-face contact. Rather I'm suggesting that standing still and listening to the intricate theological work we're doing here would probably drive you crazy. Being able to digest at your own pace, reading and re-reading as necessary, is easier than bending your ear my way for the half hour or more it would take to talk about many of these things in person. As such this is a great supplement to our daily and weekly faith routine.
This is also a fantastic place to find announcements, the calendar, and to check up on things you might have missed. Church information is available 24/7 at your fingertips at this site, plus the means to ask for clarification if you need more. We can even have discussions in the comment section, expanding on things these posts bring up even if we never have time to meet "live" during a day! That's a powerful tool for people with busy schedules but active minds.
For all its great properties, one thing I don't feel comfortable doing here is sharing bad news about people in our congregation. Since this site is open to anyone on the internet who can type "Genesee" into a search engine there's no guarantee of privacy here. As a pastor I have a responsibility to not break the seal of confidentiality even when I'm fairly sure both the people suffering and the congregation could benefit from the situation being known in a wider sense. That's not my call to make. It is, and will always remain, the judgment of the people involved who they'd like to tell, when, and how. I suppose if someone asked me specifically to ask folks for prayer through the blog I'd do it, but I don't feel comfortable asking about that if they don't offer first.
That means the responsibility for communicating prayer needs and difficult circumstances runs through you and it runs the old-fashioned way, person to person. I can't let you know here if someone is sick or undergoing some difficulty. You'll have to depend on them or perhaps the friends and neighbors they've asked to spread the news.
While we're on that note...we all need to work on being good custodians of this kind of news and of prayer requests in general. In small towns news spreads quickly. Sadly it's often spread inaccurately as well. Many times it's not just a matter of a missed detail, but outright embellishment. Sometimes it becomes a game of "telephone" where the message starts out simply but ends up wildly afield after a few transfers.
Not being responsible with someone's personal information can be painful to the parties in need of honest prayer and help. It's like they don't matter as much as the story, which is now being spread almost as a form of entertainment. ("Did you hear about _______?!?!") Our society encourages us to view other people's misfortunes as tidbits to be consumed for our pleasure. Any glimpse at reality TV or daytime "helping" talk shows will show you that. We need to stand against this temptation, offering help when we can and not puffing ourselves up with gossip otherwise. Deriving pleasure or fame under the guise of being informative breaks God's commandment against false witness. This is not our calling.
This is especially important since, as we just said, you are the only conduit through which this information can flow. It's not like I can open my mouth and set the record straight when the story starts getting out of control. Several times I've been put in impossible quandaries over issues like this. What do I do when I've talked to the people involved and gotten the actual story and then I hear the sixth "telephone game" transfer in which the facts have been distorted? If I step in to correct people I've violated confidentiality. If I let the wild story go on I'm a party to continued harm and falsehood. If I call the people involved to ask if I can tell the true story I've potentially added to their burden, worry, and stress in a time when we all should be helping to ease them, taking the focus off of important matters to deal with spiraling chatter.
Clearly there's no way out of this except to not get into the gossip situation in the first place. That requires care on the part of everyone sharing news in this community. To that end I'm writing out some simple suggestions I follow in my daily life to ensure I'm doing the best I can in handling this kind of information. Click through to see them.
1. If I don't know the story I don't tell the story. It's just that simple. Note that I don't define "know" as heard somewhere, guessed, assumed, or witnessed just part of. "Know" usually means, "know first-hand or have talked to someone who knows first-hand". If I'm not totally sure, it can wait until I am.
2. Before I tell the story I ask myself who needs to know and who will be helped by that knowing. If I can't identify specifically how sharing would be helpful to the people affected AND the people I'm telling the story to I keep that story to myself. If I'm not sure how helpful it would be I wait until I can find out from the people involved.
3. When I am relaying the story I tell people specifically how they can be helpful. My stories don't start with, "Did you hear?!?" They start with, "Could you pray for..." or "Could you bring a lasagna to..." If there's not an important action involved then I'm spreading gossip, not grace. Prayer DEFINITELY can be an important action but make sure that's what you're really asking someone to do instead of using it as cover for your urge to be the one who delivers news!
4. When I am relaying the story I take a breath, remain calm, and keep it short and factual. It's easy to get carried away when excited or under stress. It's easy to get details mixed. When my manner is tense it's easy for the listener to mis-hear what I'm saying, reacting to the tone of the message more than the substance. Therefore after my action request ("Could you please pray for...") I relay a short, simple description of who and why ("...James because he broke his arm and needs surgery"). Done. End of story. If I know how it happened and someone asks I might tell them ("He did it picking coconuts from the tree.") but usually I will downplay that aspect. That detail isn't the important part. Coconuts don't matter. What matters is that it's James and he needs our prayers.
5. If I'm ever in doubt in any way I will ask before I speak. The best people are the actual folks involved, of course. If I know them well enough that's where I'll go. I won't just ask them to verify, I'll also ask what they need and offer assistance. If I don't know them well enough to call them up and ask I'm probably going to decide that it's not important for me to pass the story on to people they know even less well, so I'll offer a prayer for them and leave it at that. If neither direct contact nor prayer alone seem like the right option I will contact the pastor involved. He or she might not be able to tell me the whole story but they can probably tell me what course of action would be best from here: share, pray, act, or just let it be for now.
6. Note that there's always a possibility that the pastor has not been clued in to the situation, so calling and asking them might be a decent idea anyway.
Note that when I say "I" in all these places I'm talking about Dave in a non-pastoral sense. When I'm acting as a pastor, as I said, the rules are even stiffer. But they're stiffer for good reason. Pastors have access to information that others don't. That gives them extra responsibility when handling that information and the trust of the people who gave it to them. I'm not asking you to be a pastor nor to think like one. I am asking you to adopt a similar outlook, however: the more sensitive and important the information the more responsible you need to be when sharing it. This is the key to all of us being able to get through times of crisis in our little town together, offering the strong, unified support that is the hallmark of God's children.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Well said, Dave. Thank you for this compassionate perspective.
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