a beautiful mess

At this very moment I am sitting at our kitchen table and while I’m typing my wife is tidying up our disorderly house. As I look from where I sit, I notice stacks of unread material piling up on the kitchen counter; stray toys scattered throughout the living room; I see a bag of trash waiting to be taken out to the garbage can; and I also remember that my workshop needs to be cleaned up from the mess I made there several weeks ago. But the untidiness doesn’t stop there – it just goes on and on (I don’t even like to think about the state of my kids’ rooms). I like a tidy house. It doesn’t need to be spotless or perfect – just tidy. And when I see all the things that need picked up in the house, I wonder why on earth would I venture into full-time vocational ministry where nothing is ever tidy? There’s a saying that goes something like: “There is no such thing as the perfect church…and if you find one, don’t go there because you’ll mess it up.” Church is messy. Life is messy. Church and life are disheveled and dysfunctional. This is the reality we live in and if there ever were a reality where life was all neat and tidy with large church budgets, beautiful buildings, the best children’s curriculum, where the preacher preaches the best sermons, etc. – don’t go there because we’ll mess it all up.


But the strange thing is this is the way it’s suppose to be, isn’t it? Life isn’t always neat and tidy and that affects the way we function as a church. In the midst of the messiness, there is beauty and creativity to be found. Eugene Peterson’s chapter talks about the messiness of creativity and in any creative enterprise there are “risks, mistakes, failures, frustrations…but out of this mess – when we stay with it long enough…there slowly emerges love or beauty or peace” (164). It’s in this spirit that the church is a “beautiful mess.” And pastoral work is imaginative work. As I read Peterson, echoes from one of my favorite preachers, Barbara Brown-Taylor, rang through my mind. On this very theme she once wrote: “It is an imaginative enterprise, in which I must first of all give up the notion that I know what I am looking at when I look at the world. Al I know is that there is always more that meets the eye and if I want to see truly I must be willing to look beyond the appearance of things into the depth of things, into the layers of meaning with which the least blade of grass is endowed” (The Preaching Life, 49).

Peterson goes on to say that when tidiness and structure become the dominant values, creativity is at the very least inhibited. I wholehearted agree with what Peterson and Brown-Taylor are saying here. It’s only when we are free (loose from the bonds that hinder us) that we can be most creative and imaginative. But this raises an issue because my experience in churches tells me that our churches prefer tidiness and neatness over creativity and imagination. And this saddens me because it’s also true to my own life. “Imagination,” Peterson says, “is the mental tool we have for connecting material and spiritual, visible and invisible, heaven and earth” (171). Therefore, I believe one of our principle tasks as Ministers of the Gospel is to help cultivate creativity and imagination in the life of the church – to help our congregations value these just as much as organization and tidiness. In other words, we ought to help our congregations become a more beautiful mess by entering into each other’s lives more deeply and imaginatively than ever before. And when we do this, everything changes for us and in us. As Peterson rightly says: “The place we stand is no longer a station for exercising control; it is a place of worship, a sacred place of adoration and mystery where we direct attention to God” (176).