A little over a year ago, in the fall of 2019 to be exact, a group of clergy colleagues in our Flathead Cluster met for a series of deep and intentional conversations about our various congregations. The discussions focused on the cultural landscapes of our communities, strengths of each of our congregations, histories of pastoral leadership, and the various challenges that each of us and our communities face. After I shared about our congregation, highlighting the stagnation and growth that we have experienced here at Faith Lutheran over the past decade, as well as listing out the wide range of ministry responsibilities that fall into my lap, one colleague made the comment, “It looks like the pastor needs to be healthy in Ronan for the church to be healthy.” This was a small comment that struck me in a big way, inspiring me to think differently about my call to our congregation. In particular, she inspired me to think differently about our need to begin discussions around a sabbatical policy which we started at the council level and ended up passing via mailed ballot in May, 2020.

I am tired. This simple fact has been difficult for me to honest about because it has long felt selfish to focus on taking care of myself. It is a quirk of my personality that I find it easier to take care of others than to take care of myself. This tendency is usually a strength in ministry as I am professionally called upon week after week, day after day, to help others with a range of needs – from all things spiritual to the folks who knock on the pastor’s door every week asking for food and gas money. However, as my colleague so helpfully pointed out, taking care of myself is part of the work of taking care of others and taking care of the church. Faith Lutheran Church deserves a pastor who will do the healthy thing and take care of himself (or herself). There are many instances of pastors dealing with their need for rest in unhealthy and toxic ways. It is far more common than you might expect for pastors to turn bitter and angry against their members when they are not given space and time to seek rest and renewal. Other pastors descend into various forms of addiction. Others break the congregation’s trust by seeking affairs or other acts of sexual misconduct with members who are not their spouse. Others dwindle and die on the vine, metaphorically speaking, if their congregations do not give them space to recuperate and seek faithful renewal as servants of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Ministry is difficult and tiring and there are better and worse ways for churches to deal with the difficulty and exhaustion of ministry that weighs on pastors. By moving to adopt a sabbatical policy and supporting me in my need to step away from my regular duties for a few months is the better way.
           
An intentional, pastoral sabbatical is a new thing for our congregation (at least to my knowledge) and I expect that it will take time for some of us to understand its full benefit. To some, this time may seem more like a perk than a necessity, more of a vacation than a time of spiritual rest and renewal. For my first few years of ministry, I must admit that I used to think that it was kind of whiny and weak for pastors to say they needed time away. Yet, after years of being on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, barely getting even a full day off a week for months on end, having been stretched and pushed to adapt centuries of church practice to try to meet rapidly changing realities, and having helped lead a great number of projects around the church and parsonage to get things back on track after years of neglect, I have come to realize that pastoral work is uniquely exhausting in ways that should be dealt with differently than other jobs. While pastors have far more freedom in our schedules than other careers, it is hard to describe how difficult it is to be constantly at the ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice and show up when others need us. While this is an important part of the job, it also wears on ministers over time in ways that are hard to see or understand from the outside.
           
So, this month, on Tuesday, May 11th, I will begin an intentional sabbatical period of rest from my regular pastoral duties. I will not be leading worship, funerals, or weddings, I will be unavailable for visits, I will not be attending committee meetings, I will not be responding to emails, calls, or texts, and I will not be holding office hours. My work for this period will be to focus on taking care of myself so that I may be in the best shape possible come Thursday, August 12th when I return to my regular pastoral work. We have arranged for other preachers to fill in throughout my absence and have trained members to run the camera so our online worship can continue while I am gone. Our retired pastor, Rev. Carl Rohr, has agreed to do pastoral visits if members end up in the hospital or have other emergencies, and Cheri Rowbury has agreed to be a back-up preacher to make sure that Sunday services can happen as planned, even if the scheduled preacher falls through. Some have asked if my family and I will be traveling for the full duration of my sabbatical. The short answer is no. While we will take several trips (and finally get to spend weekends together as a family!), we will be in and out of Ronan throughout the summer. Jen will still be working for most of my time away and the kids will need someone to watch them, so I guess they are stuck with me. Additionally, Freja will be having surgery in June, so part of our sabbatical journey will be comforting her through that. We welcome your prayers for her well-being, too! I am sure you will see me around town with a degree of regularity (Ronan is not very big, after all!), and I ask you not to be offended if I do not stop and chat as much as I normally do. Additionally, if you see things are not getting done around the church like normal, (difficulties with the online service, the grass is not getting cut, things start piling up at the church, etc.) it is most likely that I have been taking care of those things behind the scenes. Feel free to jump in to make sure things get done while I am away from the office as you see a need.
           
Though I am tired, I will miss seeing you all every week. Please know that my need for a period of rest and renewal is not a failure of the church but a fulfillment of Christ’s model for ministry. After many of Jesus’ miracles – after he fed thousands, after he healed people, and even after he cast out demons - he would go off by himself to pray. Often times, the disciples were eager to get back out there and have their leader do more, preach more, heal more, (all good things!) but Jesus knew better. He modeled the healthiest leadership possible by retreating up into the mountains to pray. I intend to do the same and appreciate your support while I do so.
 
                                                                              In Christ,
                                                                            Pastor Seth

Questions arise quite often anymore about the role religion plays in public life. Many people who are not involved in a church do not see the relevance of our age-old institutions, prayers, scriptures and worship practices in our 21st century world. However, one thing is clear - the church is basically the only place that speaks theologically about events and experiences in our personal lives and the in the life of the world. Is there spiritual significance and meaning to natural disasters, wars, economic crises, etc.? Yep! Indeed there are! Is there reason and meaning behind the cycle of life and death that we all celebrate and grieve at various times in our existence? Of course! And, it is the business of the church to interpret these things. Can the church help me to understand why I am here and what is the meaning of my life? Absolutely!
               
So, the question that I am sure you have all been begging your pastor to answer follows: What does it mean for us, as people of God, to have to endure the COVID-19 pandemic? Is this disease a curse of some kind that God sent to punish us? Does our faith protect us from this disease, and, if not, does that mean our faith does not have power to heal? I am sure that there are many questions that follow this line of thinking, but these are just a few to get us started.
               
The shortest and simplest theological response to these types of questions is that we live in a broken world and this pandemic is just another aspect of that brokenness. In much the same way as our children are vulnerable to school shooters, a drunk driver can kill an innocent, sober family through their recklessness, or anyone of us can face a life-ending cancer diagnosis without warning, this COVID-19 pandemic is part of living in a broken world with all of our normal problems. Stuff happens, as they say using a different word than “stuff” that probably should not be published in a church newsletter, and this pandemic is stuff!
               
Still, we are left wondering about whether God sent this virus to punish us somehow and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of our faith in protecting us against it. First off, if this virus was sent to punish us, it is pretty unclear who the “us” is. This pandemic has swept through rich and poor countries alike, infected Christians, Muslims, atheists, Hindus, and Buddhists, and exposed the strengths and weaknesses of not only the United States, but also Communist, Socialist, theocratic, and autocratic nations the same. If God is punishing us and trying to send us a message somehow, it is a very unclear message as this virus seems to show no partiality whatsoever. Epidemics in the past, like the Black Death for instance, spread much more sporadically and hit one place hard at once while sparing other areas. Not so with this novel corona virus. It is hitting all of us all at once so we would be hard pressed to discern who God is talking to if there actually is a message behind all of this.
               
Secondly, and perhaps the most pressing, what is the role of our faith in this time. I had a short conversation about this recently with Tommy Parker, a veteran who grew up in Ronan, but, tragically, lost his legs and several fingers to an IED while serving in Afghanistan. He asked me when we were at Harvest Foods how Christians (typically Pentecostals) can handle poisonous snakes as a test of their faith, but our faith is not keeping us from being infected? I did not have time to dive into a better answer while we were trying to keep our distance in the grocery aisles, but I should have said that it is precisely for trying times like these that we place our trust in God in the first place. God is not some sort of genie who focuses on wish fulfillment and makes sure that everyone can eat ice cream everyday while staying skinny and beautiful! We place our trust in God because God promises to save us from the brokenness of this world. Our faith does not vanish when life becomes challenging; our faith is revealed when trusting in a good and loving God becomes difficult.
               
​May your faith be revealed in new ways this month, just as I am sure it has been up to now.
 
In Christ,
Pastor Seth

School buses are criss-crossing the valley once again, taking kids to their classrooms for another year of learning. Though, I have to say, it almost feels like the summer we are leaving behind never really arrived in the first place. Sure, there were some sunny days and I saw many kids living it up on playgrounds and basketball courts these past few months, but this was by far the coldest and rainiest summer we’ve experienced since I have lived here. My wife, for one, likes her sunshine and she has reminded me many times that this summer in the Mission Valley did not deliver it for her!
                
I suppose that is how many things in life go, though – we have our expectations of the way things will turn out only to have everything end up far differently than we wanted or planned for. It could be plans for where your career would take you, who you might marry or how long you would stay with them, who your adult kids would grow up to be, or how the world would look as you aged. I have thought about that last one a fair amount this past year as I have done funerals for several people who were born in the depression years. Could they possibly have imagined what life in the 21st century would be like – with internet, driverless cars, social media, globalization, and cell phone shopping? It is pretty wild to think about how drastically the world has changed in the lifetime of one generation! Makes you rethink having expectations about the future at all, ever again.
               
​So, what should we expect from our next year of church programming? (Hah, hah!) This year, we will be doing what Christians have been doing for centuries. We will worship on Sundays, preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, administer the sacraments, bear witness to the Good News to our neighbors, and do our best to pass the faith on to the next generation. Rain or shine, cold or warm, familiar world or radically different one – Jesus Christ is the same today as he was yesterday and will be forever. That is one expectation we can hang on to until the end of the age.
 
                                                                                In Christ,
                                                                              Pastor Seth

I like to think of myself as a “doer” – that is, somebody who likes to get stuff done. If there is something that needs to be done, well, let’s just get it done. Is there a problem to solve? Let’s find a solution. Is there a role that needs to be filled? I often find myself stepping in to fill the role with rarely a second thought. Things need to happen, so let’s make stuff happen.
               
I think my doer attitude has been beneficial as your pastor at Faith Lutheran. With the help of our many capable members and friends, my desire to get things done has helped us to accomplish many long overdue maintenance and upkeep tasks around the church and parsonage. Though you may not like all the changes we have made, I hope you can at least rest easy knowing that our potlucks will no longer be invaded by sewer water via the downstairs toilet! As of this month, I have now been your pastor for a full five years, and I am proud to say that the church and parsonage are in much better shape than when I arrived half a decade ago.
               
Yet, if I am being honest, my default stance as a doer can be counterproductive to the ministry. Often times, pastoral care is not about really doing anything at all, but letting the world stop for a moment. What do I mean? When you lose a loved one, for example, doing stuff can often be the least productive way to deal with your grief, at least right away. Doing things can be a way for us to avoid dealing with the difficult feelings and emotions that accompany loss, especially since it can seem like we are working through stuff when we are actually practicing avoidance. Even more so, though, in moments of grief, it is terrible for those around you (especially your pastor!) to be more focused on getting stuff done than simply stopping and being present with you in the moment. Often times, the last thing you want to be as a pastor is a doer.
               
The late Rev. Eugene Peterson captured this sentiment well in a famous quote (at least it is famous on Twitter). He wrote, “The busy pastor is a lazy pastor.” Starting out five years ago, I admit that his words were difficult for me to really take to heart. I thought to myself, What does that mean? An inactive pastor is a lazy pastor, not a busy one! A few years later, I am humbled to say that I am beginning to understand the profound truth of his words more and more. I have been called here to kneel and pray for you, to slow down and listen to the needs of others, and to busy myself with making sure that I am never too preoccupied to sit for a moment or two with anyone who could use a pastor.
               
​This summer, I am working at unbusying myself. I do not wish to be a lazy pastor, and I see that I must unbusy myself to do so. By doing the work of unbusying myself, I am following the work of our Creator who rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2), the third commandment given to the Israelites at Mount Sinai (Deuteronomy 5:12), and the example of our savior, Jesus Christ, who did not busy himself with making sure everyone received a miracle during his lifetime but took time to rest and pray after doing miraculous things among us. It is important to get things done, but it is holy and good that we take time to rest from our labors, too. I pray that we all can value rest just as much as we value the work that we do, and this is my prayer as a doer…
 
In Christ,
Pastor Seth

Where has the summer gone? It is August already!? I can’t believe it! Of course, this means that our annual worship and potluck will be happening this month at the National Bison Range. This is a tradition for our congregation that, as many of you have told me, goes back decades. We let it go by the wayside for a few years, but we have brought it back and I am digging it! It is good to worship out in God’s creation beneath one of western Montana’s hidden gems. I know they named Montana the “Treasure State” for all our mining activity back in the day, but I believe that natural wonders like the bison herds on our hillsides give the name new meaning in our own time. I look forward to seeing you all at the Bison Range picnic area on Sunday, August 12th at 10 am!
           
This month is also very important to me because 10 years ago, on August 17th, my wife Jen stood in front of her parents, family, friends, and even her pastor, and publicly agreed to put up with me for the rest of our lives. I couldn’t believe it! When I asked her to marry me a year before that, she responded by saying, “Your crazy!” I had always assumed that the question “Will you marry me?” was supposed to evoke a “Yes!” or “No” answer, but she used the occasion to call my sanity into question. Fortunately, she did not have me committed and our marriage has been the greatest joy of my life.
           
She was right, though, to boldly claim that our journey together would be full of craziness. Ten years-ago when we stood before the congregation and promised our lives to one another there was no way that we could have known what this decade would entail. We did not know that Jen would have a terrible time finding work in one of the most hirable professions because the greed of the world’s biggest bankers rocked our generation of graduates the hardest in 80 years. We did not know that we would be moving to Iowa for seminary, Wyoming for internship, and had no idea that ten years later I would be writing this from the small town of Ronan, Montana. (I had never even heard of Ronan ten years ago!) I had no idea then that I would write a book, Jen would surprise me with a trip to Greece, or how much our two beautiful children would one day love to pee in their kiddy pool! I suppose that is the beauty of marriage – you don’t know where the journey will lead until you travel life’s paths together.
           
One of the readings we used for our wedding service was the popular passage from 1 Corinthians 13. “Love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious or boastful…” I have always loved this passage because it lays out the virtuous aspects of what love entails and what it does not. I especially like the last verse of this passage: “Now faith, hope, and love abide; and the greatest of these three is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). These words of Paul speak truth through the ages. There is much that can get us worked up, worried and afraid, but, at the end of the day, the love that we share with others is what really gives our lives meaning and purpose. A life lived in love of others, is a life worth living – the life that God wants for all of us.

In Christ,
Pastor Seth

“I lift my eyes up to the hills – from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.”
(Psalm 121:1-2)
 
I am a little ashamed to admit this, but when I moved to Ronan it took me about a year and a half before I could clearly see the Sheep’s Head in the Mission Mountains. Everyone around here seemed to refer to McDonald Peak with the assumption that everybody else could clearly see the image of a sheep’s head pointed toward the sky in the beautiful mountains that watch over us day and night. I didn’t doubt that there truly was this image up there somewhere but I just could not see it for myself. Like the image of the man on the moon or finding where Waldo is, some people just see these kinds of things quicker than others I guess. Thankfully, the outline of the image was finally pointed out to me so I can now see for myself what so many others have told me about.

The imprint of God’s creative work in our world is kind of similar. It is there, all around us. Nothing exists which was not first, somehow, spoken into being by our Creator. Some of us know and recognize that God is the source of all that exists while others fail to see it for themselves. Try as we might, we just can’t see the image of God in the world that God made. Like seeing the Sheep’s Head, some people can clearly see the work of God in the world right away while others will always struggle to associate the creation with its Creator.

As the snow is beginning to melt off of our mountains, the nose of the Sheep’s Head will be clearly contrasted once again. There are times during the year when this contrast is clear, making it easy to point out to newcomers in our valley the various details of this image on our mountain. Other times of year, though, when the whole range is engulfed in snow for instance, the image of the Sheep’s Head is hardly clear at all. If you didn’t know it was there in the first place you would probably scoff at those talking about a sheep on the mountain, even if somebody pointed it out. This is kind of how it goes for us who believe that God is real and present in creation. There are seasons in our lives when the imprint of God’s work among us is clear as day, making it easy to talk about the presence of God in our world. There are other seasons of life when the work of God in our lives is hard to see for ourselves. Like Sheep’s Head in winter, we trust that our Lord is moving all around us but seeing God’s work for ourselves becomes more difficult. We may clearly rejoice with God when we meet the one we will marry, land our dream job, or see our first-born children emerge with life in their lungs. Yet, for many, it is harder to claim that God is moving in our midst when we lose those we love, struggle to get by from month to month, or fail in any other number of ways.

We here in the Mission Valley know that the image of the Sheep’s Head on our mountains will clearly come into view again, no matter how long our winters are. Though the snow will obscure our view for a time, the peaks will clear up soon. Likewise, God’s love for us will always be revealed in time. It may be hard to see for a season, but the view will always open up again – revealing a pleasantly familiar view of our beloved Creator year after year.

In Christ,
Pastor Seth

Blessings on your April! Though Easter morning fell on April Fools Day this year, the resurrection is no joke! We continue to live into the reality of the resurrection by observing an Easter season that extends until the day of Pentecost on May 20th this year. May hope in the resurrection bring you joy throughout this season!
               
A hundred years ago Allied forces were bogged down in a brutal, prolonged war with Germany on the western front in France and beyond. The Great War, better known here as World War I, turned out to be far more atrocious than anyone could have imagined at its beginning. The fighting had broken down into an entrenched stalemate with forces on either side shooting at each other from earthen fortifications across “no man’s land” – the area between the forces that endured intense shelling over the years of fighting, a space that few dared to enter because it meant almost certain death. The holes that the soldiers slept in were disease ridden, gas masks were standard issue because of all the chemical weapons that were in regular use, and soldiers’ prospects of survival were bleak.
               
Now, you might think that living in this sort of military muck and engaging the enemy day after day would make you hate your opponent more and more with each passing day. As you looked over the shelled areas between you, trying to pick off soldiers one by one, knowing that their continued survival would keep you from returning home, it would seem only natural for you to hate those you were trained to kill and treat them as nothing but an object to be overcome. Yet, surprisingly, officers on the front lines of this terrible conflict started staggering the times that their men spent on the line because they discovered that if their troops were facing the same enemy faces for too long they would stop shooting at them or start missing their targets on purpose. Even though these soldiers spent every miserable day at the front looking across the destruction that their enemies had wrought on the land, they began to empathize with their opponents and realize that they too were mere men caught up in a larger fight. Instead of developing hatred for their opponents, they grew to see them with greater humanity the longer they faced them. Officers had to keep their troops from looking at the same enemies regularly or they would begin to empathize with those that they were supposed to neutralize.
               
The Google dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” One who shows empathy is a person who looks across the trenches, battle lines, and ‘no man’s lands’ that divide us and sees more than an enemy – they see a person who is called up in the same battle that ranges around us all but simply ended up on the other side. In the polarized times in which we live, there are many stark battle lines drawn to keep people behind the thresholds of extremes and these battle lines are keeping us divided. A poll on the news this morning reported that nearly ninety percent of both Republicans and Democrats view those with political differences negatively, effectively proving that right now people are not practicing empathy across political divides. Many in our time are unable to understand or share the feelings and perspectives of others, especially of those with whom they disagree. But, as people of faith, we believe that we are all formed in the image of God and we all share in the love of the One who made us and saves us. If soldiers in one of the most dreadful wars in human history can show empathy towards their enemies, imagine what we can do here on the homefront.
 
In Christ,
Pastor Seth

We are coming upon that special church season once again. It is not a season of cheer, exultation, or anything that is really very happy actually (we even stop saying “Alleluia”!). Instead, it is a season of fasting and intentionally limiting our joy in solidarity with those who have endured and persisted through peril on their walk with God. The Gospels tell us that Jesus went without food and water for forty days while the Israelites wandered in the desert on a whim and a prayer for forty years. Nobody can say that the walking in the ways of God is always easy!
               
And actually, at least in our church, we don’t pretend that life is always easy when God is on our side, but embrace the fact that to get to the promised land of milk and honey, one must scrape by on manna and faith. The forty days in which we observe the Lenten fast is our own attempt to journey faithfully with God by giving up certain worldly pleasures. For centuries, Christians have observed this fast by giving up earthly things that give them great pleasure. Some of these things are simple like giving up chocolate and sweets while other things take more effort like giving up anger or destructive relationships. More recently, some people have started the Lenten practices of taking on new practices instead of giving up others. The idea is that one would take up giving to a new, charitable cause every week, take on volunteering more hours every week, or choosing to practice kindness more. Whether you want to give something up, or take something on, I encourage you to think about committing to a personal, Lenten practice this year that you can endeavor to keep for all forty days. It can be just between you and God, or shared with others, too, but Lenten fasting works best when you at least try to fast in some way.
               
For Lent this year we will once again kick things off with an Ash Wednesday service on Wednesday, February 14. We will have a dinner at 6 pm followed by our service with the spreading of the ashes at 7 pm. After that, for the next five Wednesdays, we will be bringing back Dinner Church! That is right, it was such a hit last year that we have decided we will combine dinner and worship for our Lenten soup suppers in the fellowship hall. Consider joining us every week on Wednesday evenings from 6 to 7 for a meal and worship like they did in the early church.

The topic that we will be contemplating during our “Lentventure” this year is the mysteries of God. Our lives in this world have long been fraught with mystery.  Why do we exist? What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose? Questions like these are very natural, but difficult to answer. In fact, I do not believe that questions – questions which grasp at the mystery of the world around us and the God who created it - are actually meant to be answered. These questions are intended to be struggled with. However, these important mysteries about the way things are and the way things were meant to be are often lost beneath the noise of our distracted world. One might wonder, “Why think about what you can’t understand when there is no end to the information we can consume at our fingertips?” Good question! Join us as we talk about it throughout our Lentventure!
 
In Christ,
Pastor Seth

A blessing for your new year:
               
May the Lord go before you
As you have been led here
May the renewal of time
Bring renewal to your soul
 
May the Lord bless you this year
With new opportunities to grow
Challenges to be overcome
And strength to persevere
 
May you never cease to love
Your family and friends
Your enemies -
All created in the image of God
 
And may the Lord’s favor carry you
To each new dawn
So you may wake in the grace of the Divine
And face each day anew.
 
Happy New Year!
 
In Christ,
Pastor Seth

I am excited to share that Feedspot, a blogging organization, has awarded us with the distinction of being a "Top 100 Protestant Blog"! It is wonderful to see that our work here in the Mission Valley is being recognized across the world wide web! Thanks to all of our loyal readers who make these kind of awards possible!  

In Christ,
Pastor Seth