May 1, 2024

 

When I was in college, I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Sinclair wrote the novel after working for several weeks undercover in a Chicago meatpacking plant. He was gathering information on corruption and unsanitary practices in the industry for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. The newspaper published his story in serial form in 1905, and the novel was published in book form the following year.

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I remember being shocked and deeply disturbed when I read the novel as a young college student. The working conditions and extreme poverty that it depicts are horrendous. And though Sinclair wrote the book to advance the cause of socialism, its lasting impact was the public outcry it evoked over public health violations and unsanitary practices in the American meatpacking industry. That outcry led to various sanitation reforms, including the passage of the American Meat Inspection Act.

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And it no doubt helped coin the phrase, “No one likes to see how the sausage is made.”

I thought about the book the other day when I was talking to a church member about the United Methodist General Conference under way in Charlotte, NC. As I have shared, General Conference is the governing body of the worldwide United Methodist Church. It typically meets every four years, with both lay and clergy delegates from around the world, to set church policy, budgets and, probably most important, speak on matters of church doctrine. There are eight delegates in Charlotte representing our Central Texas Conference, and a couple of them share videos on Social Media several times a day updating what is going on. This particular church member had seen a couple of the videos and commented that the delegates seem to spend a lot of time talking about issues that have little to do with faith.

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And my first thought was, “Yep, no one likes to see how the sausage is made.”

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I have had that feeling often as I have sat through similar meetings on the Annual Conference level. I remember one year in particular we spent two hours debating whether churches that provided parsonages for their pastors should have to include a chest freezer, as well as a refrigerator. Similarly, one of our General Conference delegates posted the other day that they had spent four hours debating whether the continent of Africa should receive two new bishops, or three.

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To be fair, delegates spend a good amount of time in worship together, and they hear many reports and stories about how God is moving in and through our churches. But there is a lot of sausage made as well. And it can quickly make holy ground feel like, well, common ground.

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But here’s the thing. It’s true that few people want to see how the sausage is made. But it’s also true that it is through the sausage that we are ultimately fed. At the heart of the debate over chest freezers in parsonages was the earnest desire for churches to care for pastors and their families. At the heart of the debate over African bishops was the joyous reality that the church is growing like crazy in Africa, and we want to ensure that nothing stands in the way of the spread of God’s Word.

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A few weeks ago we had a new family visit Ash Lane for the first time. They have been back every week since their first visit. The mom told me this past Sunday that her family feels like they have found the place where God wants them to be. They came the first time after they took an alternative route home and happened to drive by our campus. The building caught their eye, and they thought it looked like a nice place. So they decided to give it a try.

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That happened because faithful people like Judy Tribble and the rest of the members of the Building Committee spent hour upon hour debating minutiae – Pews or chairs? Carpet or not? What color paint? Brick or stone? And they spent hours agonizing over the whole financial side of the deal. And I’m sure the days that Judy spent wading through the mud of the construction site as the building slowly took shape didn’t feel much like holy work. But it was.

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The truth is I spend some days completely engulfed by work that doesn’t feel much like ministry. And yet it never fails that I am able to look back and, at some point, see where God was moving in the minutiae.

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And the ground becomes holy once more.

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See you Sunday.