One can never know how delicately balanced a long-term truce is until its equilibrium is shattered by the weight of a straw. A straw that lands as if it were a ten-pound hammer.
That straw was a few kids wearing ball caps in the worship service.
The church was a hundred years old in a town barely older. Both showed their age. The town and the church stood as landmarks to human determination to beat a living out of poor soil and bad weather. These people were tough. They put up with a lot to live there, and generally they put up with a lot from each other. Their main prejudice was against disingenuousness. The rule was, “Don’t act like one of us if you ain’t.” People who moved in and bought fancy western clothes didn’t last long.
One Sunday, a mother of teenage boys, who was also the church pianist, came to me right before the service and said, “I hope you don’t mind if the boys wear hats in church today. They got in late from the game last night, and they didn’t wake up in time to take showers, so their hair is all messed up.”
I shrugged my shoulders. Once, when high school kids took the Sunday morning offering wearing cut-off sweat pants and T-shirts ripped halfway up, no one said a thing. It was football clothing. High school sports is god in little Montana towns, so even though their dress seemed inappropriate, wearing football regalia made cultural sense. It made us feel proud to be so open to high school kids.
Montana schools are so far apart that it is not uncommon for teams to travel six hours to a contest. The boys hadn’t gotten in until 3:30 in the morning. A lot of kids in athletics don’t make it to church at all during the sports seasons; I figured it was better to have them in church with caps on than not at all. I respected the family’s desire for the boys to be in church.
Thinking back on what they’d worn in the past, I said to their mom, “I don’t see why it should be a problem.”
When I entered the sanctuary, I saw the boys—wearing nice clothes and ball caps. The service went fine, and I didn’t hear a word from anyone about it. Naturally, the boys wore their caps in church the next week and the next … It took a month before the sheep began to bleat:
“I wish the boys wouldn’t wear hats in church.”
“Pastor, do you think the boys should be wearing hats in church?”
I consistently defended the boys with passive responses: “It’s just good to have them in church. Hats aren’t such a big deal.” That would end the conversation.
This pattern continued for about four months, but pockets of resentment existed like heaps of dry tinder around our feet. It would only take a spark to get the fire going. The steel struck the flint in an unexpected way.
Twinkie Man’s confrontation
It was a clear, cool Sunday morning in July. The sun warmed the earth and the water in the Bitterroot River as the congregation gathered for worship, anticipating our annual river baptism and potluck picnic afterward. The biggest thing on most of our minds was potato salad.
While I was in the back room with the accompanists, making last-minute preparations for worship, a man in his mid-twenties, an East-Coast out-of-towner with a shaggy mane and a fast motorcycle, walked from the rear of the sanctuary to the front where the boys were seated. He asked them to remove their hats out of respect for the house of God.
This man, who attended worship regularly, was loved by everyone. I called him “Twinkie Man” because he distributed Hostess products to valley grocers as he pursued graduate studies at the University of Montana.
The boys, unaccustomed to taking orders from anyone, refused. He insisted. They balked. The stepfather of one of the boys came up and silently placed his hat on his head, and sat by the boys.
This ended the confrontation.
When I entered the sanctuary seconds later, I noticed the dad sitting next to the boys wearing a cap. I didn’t think much of it. At the end of the service, as the boys’ parents came through the line, they said, “The boys shouldn’t have been treated that way,” as if I knew what had happened.
My pastoral visit initiated the decapitation of Mount St. Helens.
The stepfather, who had pulled off ball-cap solidarity resistance, said essentially the same thing and mentioned something about the guy who’d perpetrated the injustice. Others said, “We’re glad the young man confronted them.”
When the Twinkie Man came by, I asked if we could talk afterward.
He told me what he’d done, and I became mad at him. I defended the boys’ right to wear hats in church. He said what they did offended older members of the congregation. I told him I didn’t think they had offended anyone. He disagreed.
Why wouldn’t the little game eventually lose inertia? Didn’t we all love each other?
Hats of rebellion
The next week the comments against the ball caps came in like high-and-tight fastballs. So I wrote a letter to the congregation. I defended the boys’ right to wear hats in church from Paul’s letter to the Galatian church. From my perspective the boys were simply exercising their freedom in Christ. I thought about Paul’s admonition to the Corinthian church not to offend fellow Christians and the importance of not making the gospel incomprehensible to local culture, but I dismissed it. I was in the mood to be a hero, and I was afraid of the family. If that sounds like a contradiction, it is; I thought if the church could cut the kids a little New Testament slack, everything would settle down.
As I reread that letter today, it sounds like NRA or ACLU rhetoric:
Do we really want to go back to dress codes? Where will it end? If we start to take away people’s freedom about something like a hat, what about when people start demanding that women wear dresses? Or that men must wear coats and ties? Don’t laugh. If we take away freedom and begin with dress codes, where will it end?
We can’t let an issue like hats in worship divide this church and stop our work; the times are too dangerous, Christian faith is too rare, churches around us are dying, and people in our community (some of whom wear ball caps) need to hear the good news. After all, someday the kid who comes to church with a ball cap eager to hear the gospel might be your child or your grandchild.
The congregation said little about the letter. One man, whom I’d baptized in the Bitterroot River with his cowboy boots on, had the guts to come to me and explain that for a man to wear a hat in church just wasn’t right. I ignored him.
Of course the boys’ families loved the letter. A family member said, “Thanks for taking our side.” That should have signaled to me something deeper was going on. But I had seriously misjudged the congregational, cultural, and pastoral dynamics of the situation.
The Twinkie Man knew, as I did not, that to this culture, wearing hats in worship wasn’t simply a matter of personal discretion, it was a matter of the profanation of worship. The men in the community wore hats in restaurants, in their homes, at dinner, and at school concerts, but when the flag was presented, the hats came off. I should have remembered that. They wore hats at graveside services, until we prayed, and then the hats came off. When they walked into a church building, the hats came off as a sign of submission to a higher authority.
Wearing a hat in church was deeply offensive to these people. While at the time I wasn’t willing to admit it, I didn’t like seeing the hats in church, either.
The boys were vaguely aware that hats were a sign of rebellion. The parents knew it acutely. For the boys the hats were fashionable. They definitely enjoyed stirring things up a bit, and we’d let them. They were rascals in a culture that rewarded rascalism. For the parents, particularly the mother, the hats symbolized a power struggle that had been going on in the church for decades. I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to. The family was dear to me; I had baptized the boys. Through hours of talking over coffee and working shoulder to shoulder in ministry, I had become part of their extended family that included Grandma and some aunts and uncles. I did not want to lose these relationships
The issue became a crisis. No one called special meetings, no one talked about a church split, the Twinkie Man cooled his engine, but the tension in the fellowship was overwhelming. When we gathered for worship, fellowship, or business, it was as if we were walking barefoot on shattered glass, smiling through the tears; no one wanted to admit that it hurt.
Sky-high explosion
Feeling I needed to act decisively, I went and made the worst pastoral visit of my life. I met alone with the family of two of the boys. I had no clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish. I didn’t understand the issues. I was ready to accept any settlement that offered me relief. The mother had insisted the boys be allowed to make their own decision. After a long discussion in which I pretended to talk tough, I agreed with her.
I should have realized that this was her battle.
How could I have put a decision, upon which the future of the church depended, into the hands of two high school kids? It was too much responsibility for them and so much irresponsibility from me. Of course the boys did not remove their hats.
Did I pray? Constantly. For hours. For answers. For wisdom. For mercy. For resolution. For anesthesia. But nothing came of it.
I was not to be allowed under any circumstances to come away from this debacle as the hero. God wasn’t leading me; he was using me. He was using the family and the church. I had some things to learn that only something this painful and befuddling could teach me.
Finally I asked for advice outside of the community. I telephoned two veteran pastors, each twenty years ahead of me, each a mentor. Neither knew the other, but their conclusions were unanimous, and their words bore uncanny similarity: “You need to save the church. Go to the boys privately and ask them to remove their hats. They will respect your authority.”
I knew they were right, but I knew it was risky. I was going back on my previous stance, though I was willing to admit I had been wrong. But doing so meant I had to choose the church over the family. My battle-toughened mentors knew this.
This conflict raised a primary issue that my first twelve years of pastoral ministry had not forced me to deal with: Do I pastor a church, or do I pastor a collection of individuals?
When we gathered for worship, it was as if we were walking barefoot on shattered glass, smiling through the tears.
My theology told me that I pastor a church. I believed the church is more important than its pastor or its individual members. But my heart always told me that I pastor individuals. I figured that if I loved the individuals in the church sufficiently, loving the church would take care of itself.
So I went to the boys when I knew their parents weren’t home and asked the boys if they would remove their caps for the sake of the church. They readily agreed, even seemed relieved. I returned from the meeting exultant. I could see the solution taking shape: The boys remove their caps, and they get the credit for doing the right thing.
This seemed perfect.
Instead, my visit initiated the decapitation of Mount St. Helens, which erupted in my face the next morning after the parents discovered what I’d done.
The process that followed was thoroughly unpleasant and nothing but heartbreaking to the bitter end. During the final period of the conflict, the church was largely silent. Most people knew what I’d done, and they respected me for it. They didn’t taunt or push or even encourage. They just watched and prayed. None of the council members forced me to choose between their opinion and the church. At the final, crucial council meeting, several council members stood up for what I’d done.
One of them, a young man, spoke words I will not forget: “I will admit that I did not like seeing caps in church. But you are our leader, and I was willing to follow your call. You had the right to talk to the boys alone, because you are their pastor, like a coach has the right to talk to his ball players. You have made the call, and we need to stand by it. I agree with what you have done, I respect you for taking a stand. I’m with you.”
That was all that needed to be said. It still amazes me that the council would have followed my lead whatever stand I took. The family, on the other hand, could abide only one solution—theirs. No matter how tortuous and bumpy my road to the solution was, I know now—and I knew then—that I made the right call.
Ultimately, the whole extended family left the church, nine souls in all. At the time, they represented about 15 percent of our worship attendance. Within two weeks, the positions they held in the church were filled. The place began to grow like never before.
God in the foolishness
It’s not difficult to discern significant errors in my management of the ball-cap crisis.
First, I should never have tried to manage it by myself. I should have handed the issue to the church council early on. The problem was that two of the council members were in the family—including the mom. I assumed the council couldn’t deal with it. But I should have let the council struggle over the issue in a fair fight.
Second, I should have recognized how complicated cultural issues are. Before waxing self-righteously about Christian freedom—as if I were the hero of downtrodden high-school kids everywhere—I should have done my cultural homework. The boys could have staked their freedom in Christ—as they already had—without deeply offending the whole culture around them. I learned it isn’t wrong for people to learn courtesy, and it isn’t wrong for the church to require some respect.
Third, I learned how vulnerable I am to entanglement in family systems. I wasn’t prepared to make a decision between dear friends and a church. The friendship I shared with the family was real and positive on one level. However, I failed to recognize the church power struggles as one of the forces binding that family together. I did not realize that, as an adopted member of this family, when a showdown occurred I would be expected to side with the family—or reject the family.
Whereas most of the time we can love both the church and the individuals in it, in this case I was forced, against my will, to choose which I loved the most: the church or that family.
Beneath it all, I was being forced to ask whether I loved the church more than I loved myself. My feelings were being hurt badly, so I didn’t want to love the church. I wanted to love this family. I was required to side with the church against the family and against myself.
That decision changed my ministry. I became a stronger pastor. I became a more loving pastor, because I became better able to distinguish between loving people and loving what people do for me. I became a better pastor because it made me decide to love the church.
Even now as I pastor elsewhere, I love that little church more than ever. I love it more than any of its members. Hidden beneath the human foolishness of a church and its pastor, as they fumbled their way forward, was Almighty God.
He sanctifies the individuals but even more so the church. In this case, the church God planted and preserved for more than one hundred years is, at this time, doing better than at any time in its history.
This article was excerpted from The Pastor’s Soul Volume 1, “The Power of Loving Your Church: Leading with Acceptance and Grace.” This book is now found online in the CT Library. Using the “search by publication” option you can easily find this book and all of the corresponding chapters.
David Hansen is pastor of Belgrade Community Church in Belgrade, Montana.
1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us.
