Ted, Bart, Larry, and Adam

There's a rock band that I've been listening to since I was a kid in school. The same four guys have been playing music together for more than forty years, which is a long time in any career and an exceptionally long time in the music business. The band's frontman is a loudmouth know-it-all. If there's an issue you can name, he has an opinion on it and shares all those opinions with anyone who will listen. There's also a music-master figure who is more enigmatic but whose sound and arrangements defined a generation. The two of them – the loudmouth frontman and the quirky arrangement master – are the recognizable faces of a four-decade musical powerhouse.

And then there are Adam and Larry. Adam and Larry have been part of the band for the entire forty-some years. That's an entire career beginning in the late '70s with the same coworkers if you can imagine it.  Larry stands in one spot at the back of the stage with no expression playing the bass. Adam sits behind the drum kit, equally expressionless, and he plays the drums. That's all he does. The two of them don't say anything during the stage banter between songs. They don't play other instruments. They don't write songs. They don't dance or move around. They don't dress in a distinctive or flashy way. They have short boring haircuts. They could walk down the street in Portage or MacGregor and not be noticed, even by fans. Just before a live show they walk out from backstage. Each one takes up his station and they are hard to notice after that. At the end of the show, they wave and leave the stage. They almost never give interviews. They rarely sing background vocals. Neither of them has high-profile hobbies or artistic interests or political causes or charitable projects that they speak for. Neither of them ever gets found stoned in a ditch or partying their reputations away. Nobody knows what they do when they're not at work. Whether it's a live show, a recording session, or practice and songwriting time all they do is show up and play music written by others and that's all they've done for their entire long well established successful careers and the band would not be what it is without them.

Jesus had disciples like that. Quick – tell me everything you know about Bartholomew. You know nothing about Bartholomew because there's nothing to know. He showed up. That's all he did. Ready for another one? Thaddaeus. He does nothing at all in scripture unless you subscribe to the idea that he is the person mentioned in John 14:22 named Judas (not Iscariot) who pushes Jesus on why he doesn't get his message out more widely. Thaddaeus either does nothing in the gospels or he asks one very perceptive question and then sits back down. All he does is show up.

I feel like typing a sentence that begins, “In the same way we ...”

Except that I can't do that. My experience of the church is in either the loudmouth know-it-all roles or sometimes in the technical organization roles. I don't know what it's like to spend forty-some years at the back never saying anything because I never do that. I feel like inviting Adam, Larry, Bart, and Ted up to the front of the stage and saying thank-you publicly and pushing them to sing some lead vocals or give an interview or two and let's have a round of applause for them! Except that's what I want. I project my own assumptions onto others when I do that and I devalue the person whose favourite space is standing in the back saying nothing for years. I assume that to be recognized is to be valuable because I sometimes feel that way. I assume that what makes me feel valued is what makes you feel valued and that's not true.

So, what's a loudmouth know-it-all to do in a situation like this? There are lots of rock bands made up of loudmouth know-it-all characters and they don't last 10 years, never mind 40. A group of people only survives if it has a foundation of participants who are committed to showing up and not doing anything else except maybe asking the occasional perceptive question. Here I will say that we are the same in the church. If we expect that mentoring only means mentoring towards public or technical leadership we fail to recognize the importance of Ted, Bart, Larry and Adam. If we assume that teaching is only public teaching we lose the majority of our teachable moments. If we assume that visiting occurs at official events or only during established rituals of pastoral care we disregard most of our care for each other as brothers and sisters in faith. If we assume that to pray is to pray in public we miss most prayer.

The rock band survives not in spite of having half of its members stay out of the spotlight but because of their stabilizing force of being present yet unseen. When loudmouth know-it-all sticks his foot in his mouth up to the knee the whole thing doesn't go off the rails because there are two others who never say anything, never mind anything controversial. When the music arrangement master gets off in the weeds with something weird and experimental and hard to listen to, the group chugs along because there are two others who keep pounding out the oldies or the new songs or whatever they need to without making a fuss.

So then what remains to be said and done? I think two things:

First, we can say thank you. Thank you to those of you who attend this church no matter who is in leadership roles or what direction we are veering off onto or if it's booming or if it's tripping up in some way. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for asking questions or pushing comments in ways that make important things clear at the time. Thank you for your patience with those of us who gravitate towards leading and the misguided things we sometimes say and do mixed in with the better choices. Thank you for your patience when we alternate between ignoring you and shoving you up to the front to be publicly applauded against your will. Thank you for your patience with the experiments. Some of them work out wonderfully and move us along in faith and others don't and we need people who keep on showing up either way.

Second, we can give equal value. All members of a band make up the band and the success of the loudmouth is because of the quiet guy in the back playing bass just as much as the bass player would have nothing to be in the back of if it weren't for the loudmouth. Each of their careers depend on the other and each one drags the other along. Our success as a body of believers in following Jesus relies on those who say nothing as much as it does on those who say a lot and we can say so publicly without singling out individual foundation-stone members of our body of faith. As a church body, we require people who refuse every nomination they are offered and stick to the one thing they've been doing forever, whatever it is. As a church body, we require people who say, “I don't know,” when asked for their opinion on the latest greatest thing. We require people who don't have a favourite song and don't ever lift hands in the air in either praise or protest. Without those people, centrifugal force would take over and the whole thing would fly apart in a scatter of ideas and opinions.  And we can have our eyes and ears wide open for when those who don't usually make themselves known do step forward with insight and questions that have been a long time in preparation. 

Listening to a group of people play music together you might be surprised whose musical voice is loudest compared to who has the loudest opinions in between songs. The bass and drums form the foundation of a performance and the sound of them carries beyond the stadium or festival stage far past the point where you can't hear the singer's words or the guitar player or keyboard player's carefully chosen lead lines. We are known in our community partly by whatever our outspoken people are up to but mostly by the steady presence of people who form our foundation and that is thanks to Ted, Bart, Larry, and Adam.