Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing

Welcome to the second episode of Mockingbird’s preacher interview series! (See here for episode one.) With so many debates around Christianity focused on high-level theological, political, and moral topics, we thought we would zoom in a little bit and discuss some of the more nitty-gritty issues involved in being the church in specific contexts. To that end, we are interviewing some of our favorite veteran ministers from around the country about what they’ve learned in the course of their careers as to what is really working in American Christianity today and how to do church well. Our second interview is with longtime Mockingbird contributor, author, podcaster, and pastor Jason Micheli.

Mockingbird: Jason, thanks again for doing this. I know you’ve worked at several churches in your career. Where do you currently work and how would you describe your congregation?

Jason Micheli: I serve Annandale United Methodist Church in northern Virginia. We’re just inside the Beltway, so a few miles from DC right across the road from Annandale High School, which is the most diverse high school in the country. It is a community that has a cohort of white families who settled there after World War II, younger families who primarily have jobs related to the federal government, and then a lot of migrant families and immigrant families. So it’s a diverse community. It’s also the economic base of the Korean community in Northern Virginia. The church does not rise to that level of diversity, but for a United Methodist congregation, it is more diverse than others.

M: So I guess if there’s a particular quirk to your church — something that makes it stand out from other local or UM churches — it would be that level of diversity?

JM: Yeah, but also I’ve had a number of people follow me from my previous church to this church, because it’s not very far away, and they all made some comment about how it’s a uniquely religious church. I think what they mean by that is that, by and large, everyone is there because they care about the gospel and are quite interested in Jesus and sincere about their faith. So I do think it has an unusual character in that regard. It’s not a neighborhood church that people go to because their neighbors go there.

M: Is there a Eucharist then every Sunday?

JM: Yes, that’s something I’ve chosen to do every week, and if you do it fast enough, no one complains.

M: Right. So what aspects have you found to be the most successful at attracting newcomers, families, and younger people?

JM: I do think one of the unique things about northern Virginia is — and it was true of my previous church, but it’s especially true at this church — we have a number of musicians who are professional musicians for the Army, Navy, and Air Force bands. 

M: That’s really cool.

JM: So I think part of what attracts people in my experience is quality. It’s not about the genre of worship so much as how good is it. And I don’t know that even a particular kind of sermon matters so much as one that is thoughtful and convicted.

M: Right. And full of the grace message that we all seek and need.

JM: Yeah.

M: So how do you make newcomers feel welcome and get connected?

JM: You put Pam Jones at the front door of the church.

M: Haha. Every church needs a Pam Jones.

JM: I think if you delegate that role to people who are good at hospitality then it becomes something I don’t need to worry about.

M: So she greets people when they first come in?

JM: Yeah, she’s my lay leader, so I use her name. But she has a whole team of people who are good at hospitality. And during COVID, too, it was required of us to register people as they came in for worship, so we’ve just kept doing that. We make them check their name at the welcome desk. Because before that we used the attendance pad that you pass down the pews, and, like, one out of every nine people might actually fill it out.

M: So I guess people just get used to checking in?

JM: People get used to it, and it’s not like if they want to walk by it we’re going to tackle them or something.

M: Right.

JM: But yeah, I do think it’s important to just informally recognize people’s gifts and empower them to take care of the church’s ministry.

M: So, what in your mind is the single most important thing that happens in church on a given Sunday?

JM: Word and sacrament.

M: Right, and by word and sacrament you mean the Eucharist and then the preaching?

JM: And the reading of scripture and the proclamation of it. The gospel is a word in which Christ gives himself to us, and all the other goods that happen on a Sunday morning are secondary to that good.

M: What, would you say then, is the relationship between proclamation and Christian theology?

JM: That’s a good question. I guess I would say that one of the roles of theology, and in particular the doctrine of justification, is to provide a rule of speech for Christians to speak the gospel to each other. The purpose of justification, for instance, is not for Ben to believe in justification. It’s to remind Ben that when he speaks of the gospel to someone else, he must do it in a way that both allows God to be the active agent of what you’re saying and also demands that it land on the listener as good news, not bad news. So I think a lot of theology functions that way, as a way of governing our speech. And enlarging our speech, right? A lot of Christian theology is just about, well, who is the Jesus that is risen? A lot of theology is to provide identifying information for people to grab a hold of the promise.

M: So like fleshing out details for the story that we can identify with?

JM: Yeah, and I also think — you know, I just saw my oncologist yesterday, and I trust my oncologist in a way that I don’t trust WebMD. So part of theology, too, is to remind Christians that we’re not the church of what’s happening now — that we stand in a tradition, and we’re not the first people to think about these things. And so to remind them that there is wisdom from the communion of saints that we draw from.

M: Which is incredibly comforting and helpful. Okay, what sort of offerings do you have for children and youth, on Sundays or otherwise?

JM: We have a children’s Sunday School program, and then we do a robust children’s church program during the worship service. So they leave during the announcements and they come back for communion. 

You know, we were just talking about Vacation Bible School yesterday in our staff meeting, and I think with children and parents, we’re in a transition period where the old standby offerings have a built-in audience. And I think maybe something like Vacation Bible School is a thing that people did before they could have their kids at a camp at Audrey Moore Rec Center all day long, every day all summer long. So things are just different and you have to adapt. The older I get, the more I’m aware that a lot of the parents of these children did not themselves go to church, and so they don’t have assumptions about what programs to provide. 

M: Are you skipping VBS this year?

JM: No, no, we’re still doing it. 

M: Oh. It’s just something that’s evolving.

JM: Yeah. Then, I think for youth, we have acolytes and crucifers, and I think that having kids participate in worship is important. But I think for kids and youth both, the priority is to make them feel comfortable in the church itself, that they feel safe and at home. That they develop a relationship with an older person in the congregation who cares about them, and that pastors and staff are unafraid of their questions, open and ready to have fun, but also, in their bearing, convey that they take the faith seriously.

M: Yeah. And when it comes to having fun with the kids and youth, there are all kinds of things you can do. It doesn’t always have to be something theological, right?

JM: No! On more than one occasion, I’ve been paintballing with youth and sometimes I think, I don’t know that we should be doing this, but they seem to be having fun, so …

M: I bet. It sounds fun to me. So what is your best advice on preaching?

JM: I think what makes for compelling preaching is the Holy Spirit. I’ve heard compelling sermons that were bad, simply because it was apparent that the preacher believed that God could use her words to speak a word to someone. So I really think it just comes down to faith. That there aren’t enough preachers in the church who actually appear to believe what they’re saying. So yeah, I think it’s just a matter of conviction. It’s not a matter of rhetoric, or personality, or depth of thought, or any of that. I think it’s just faith.

M: And so, as you’re preparing a sermon or preparing to preach, what do you do to get in the right space to be a kind of conduit for the Holy Spirit?

JM: I spend a lot of time with the text. Usually most of the day on Monday, and then a chunk of the day on Wednesday. And then I’ll usually write it out on Friday and save the last bit for Saturday evening.

M: So you allow it to simmer?

JM: Yeah, and it’s the faith thing and the prayer thing. It’s much easier to preach every Sunday. When I take a break, coming back to it is really hard. It always feels like I don’t think I have anything for Sunday, but somehow it always comes.

M: Yeah, and you always seem to still have  a lot of vivid stories.

JM: Although I always worry that people will remember the story and not the scripture.

M: How so?

JM: In homiletics there was something called narrative preaching that started in the late 1960s, and I think people who didn’t read the books thought that meant just tell a lot of stories. Really what it was trying to get at is that in every passage of scripture, there’s a plot to it, and there’s a narrative tension in it — it raises some question in the reader or the listener, right? And so the purpose of the sermon in part is to push on that tension for the congregation, to get them to care about the question, the ambiguity, the claim. I think stories from life are a way to advance the plot, resolve the question, or point to a resolution.

M: Right. But it needs to have that basis in the actual scriptural text?

JM: Yeah. I mean, just telling stories for the sake of stories is a waste of people’s time.

M: How do you deal with difficult people?

JM: The best advice I ever got was from Paul Zahl, who told me people don’t change, and once you realize that people don’t change, you might be able to love them, and by loving them, they might actually change. That was freeing. We’ve got difficult people, and I have no expectation that they’re going to change. And that means I don’t have to be threatened by the fact that they don’t like me or aren’t happy. I do think that’s where the value of Family Systems Theory comes in for people who work in a church. To be aware that just complaining very often is the goal for some people. They just think the way they exercise their discipleship is by complaining, and you know that they’re getting the solution that they’re seeking. So I don’t feel like I need to accommodate those people. It’s much easier to spend time with people who care about the same things and want to advance the mission of the Church.

M: Do you have other people on staff who can do some of the pastoral work?

JM: Yeah. I’ve got an associate pastor. I have a director of Christian formation, and I’ve empowered her to kind of be in charge of everything at this point. And a children’s pastor. I think it’s especially important to have, if not a female clergy woman, at least a woman on staff who is empowered to have a pastoral role for people, because she has access to some people’s vulnerabilities that I never will.

M: Yep, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, how does your church raise money? What are your best fundraising tactics?

JM: So, because this is Mockingbird, I think the two areas where the law refuses to die in the church is children’s Sunday School curriculum — so much of it is just moralistic — and the other area is stewardship and finances. I can’t tell you how many people over the years have been like, you really need to preach a sermon about stewardship. And I’m like, well, that’s not a sermon. If you’re telling me what I should say, independent of any scripture passage, that’s not a sermon. When it comes to money, I think the mistake/sin is to think of it in terms of tactics. I think what motivates people to give to their church is a love of Jesus and a passion for the gospel, and so if you do that, people will give. And I think part of that focus on grace recommends a kind of transparency, too. We don’t need to drape talk about money in a whole bunch of spiritual language. I think it’s important as a church to just transparently talk about the cost of doing business. And all this stuff about well, the Bible says blah blah blah, and if you just step up your giving to this percent, the Lord will open up all these blessings to you … That may happen and it may not happen. 

Is money an idol for lots of people? Yes, but I don’t know that telling them to give more money to the church is a way of freeing them from that idol. I think it’s really just about keeping the main thing the main thing, and being transparent about the needs of the church. Or even being transparent about like hey, like, you all could do better. Some of you spend more on Netflix than you do the church.

M: But in general, the sermon is not the place to have that conversation, anyway, right? I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a good stewardship sermon.

JM: Yeah. I’ve been part of projects that have raised a lot of money over the years, and at the end of the day, I am appointed to my church by the bishop and it’s not my congregation. So, I think it’s important for members of a church to take ownership of their church, and encourage one another to step up their giving, help pay the bills, do what’s needed to be done.

M: Interesting. Okay, in general, what kinds of people are becoming new members at your church? Is it new Christians, lapsed Christians returning to the church, people joining from other churches? And what is it that’s getting them in the door?

JM: It’s all of the above. I think they come because we’re an open, welcoming church that still cares about the gospel. We don’t have different signs and flags out in front of our church. We’re not ideologically left or right. So I think people come because they think, I can bring anybody here, they will be welcomed, and Jesus will be taken seriously. We’ve got immigrants, retirees who’ve moved to the area, younger families, people coming from other churches, people who are returning to the church, people coming to the church for the first time. Over the last five to eight years at this church, I’ve done more adult baptisms than I’ve ever done in my vocation.

M: How do you promote the ongoing spiritual formation of the adults in your congregation? I know you said that you have an unusually “religious” or “religiously serious” type of people coming to your church.

JM: Yeah, I mean, I would use the word “pious” if it wasn’t so loaded with negative connotations. We have Sunday school. I try to make myself available. I have a group on Sunday morning where the people can just show up and ask whatever questions they want, so there’s no agenda. It’s usually about the passage or the sermon from the previous week, or something like that. 

M: Wait, so the Sunday School is before the service?

JM: Before the service yes. And people seem to like it. And again, if you’re going to focus on the gospel and grace, you need to try to find ways to embody it, so that they believe what they hear. So I think it’s important for people to be allowed to ask me a question and then see me not feel threatened by their questions, that I can be patient with their questions. And you asked about theology earlier. One of the points Robert Jenson always made was, if you can’t distill your theology down to a couple of sentences that you can say to a child, then you don’t know it very well. So I think it’s important that if someone shows up on a Sunday morning with a question, I’m able to proclaim to him as simply and quickly as possible.

M: That’s interesting. What do you wish you had known when you first started ministry?

JM: I’ve been a pastor for 25 years this summer. I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, which is a Presbyterian school. I was one of a handful of United Methodists, and there was a small clergy-killing church near the seminary. The Bishop of New Jersey called and asked if I wanted to be a part-time pastor there. And so I said sure, having never worked in a church before, and having only been a Christian for a few years. So the first funeral I ever went to was the one I was presiding at, a month later. And I don’t know that I started out with the confidence that the thing that initially made me a Christian — the experience of the gospel — was enough to keep my ministry generative. I think that’s something I only rediscovered later, when I first got cancer about ten years ago, and I was looking back on the years right before that. I think I had lost track of the main thing along the way. 

I just met a pastor in my congregation who retired just a couple of years ago, and then this fall he got cancer and he’s dying. I was talking with him on Monday, because he’s in hospice now, and he was just weeping that for swaths of his career, he lost sight of the thing that made him a Christian in the first place. It’s really easy to assume the gospel in the life of the church and focus on other things.

M: Politics?

JM: Yeah, that’s a big one. Or behavior, or just the busyness of the life of the church — you know, like, we’re a church that does lots of stuff. 

M: Methodists have a reputation for that.

JM: Yeah. It’s easy to lose the gospel in the busyness of doing good things. And it’s not unique to Methodists. I would say that too often we assume the gospel as a denomination. And so therefore, we’re not confident that Jesus is what will make the church go. And we invest too much hope and energy in programs. Like, we’re not going to program our way out of denominational decline; it’s either Jesus will grow the church or he won’t.

M: What outreach ministries have you found to be the most meaningful and successful in your experience?

JM: We’re transitioning to a more narrow focus, and COVID helped a lot with that. Before I arrived at Annandale about twelve years ago, they inherited a church building that had closed, and there was a small food pantry that operated out of the church. They tried various worship services there and things like that, but for a while it was just an old building and no renovations could be done to it because of the zoning. There’s very little parking, and it was just a zoning nightmare. So I spent a lot of money on land-use lawyers to get that remedied. It’s right across the street from Annandale High School. It’s surrounded by apartment buildings filled with migrants and new immigrants, people sending a lot of money back home, people working multiple jobs. And during the pandemic, the need took off. Now we call it the Mission Center. We’re feeding 500 families every Thursday. During COVID we partnered with World Central Kitchen, and we’re serving people out of there. We just put in a women’s wellness clinic and a dental screening office for children. And the county has recognized us as a community benefit, so a lot of the red tape got removed for us.

M: Wow, that’s amazing.

JM: Yeah. And during COVID, God really revealed that as the primary service ministry of the church. We have a board of directors now, and the budget’s almost the size of a normal church’s budget.

M: That sounds really great. But it also sounds like you’re open to adapting the outreach ministry of the church depending on the circumstances.

JM: Yes. We have a lot of volunteers, a lot of people who give exclusively to that. A lot of people find their way to the church by volunteering there first. There’s a couple of families who have come through there that have become important parts of the congregation, too — from client to congregant.

M: Love that. How do you build camaraderie and a feeling of being supported on your staff, while also reducing the chance for burnout?

JM: I mean, they could answer how well I do this or not. What I tell staff is, I don’t really care what your hours are as long as the work gets done. So I try to be as flexible with them as possible, because the nature of church work is that you’re never going to be compensated for the amount of time you actually work. You’ll never be paid like you would in a different organization, so I can at least try to be as openhanded as possible. Especially when I first came here, but over the years as well, I have fired a lot of people. I used to joke that I could be like George Clooney in that movie Up in the Air, like I could just fly from church to church and fire people for pastors who don’t want to do it. And I’ve always tried to do that in as open and transparent a way as possible. I think that builds trust both with the other staff and with the congregation too.

M: I don’t want to get too much into the details here, but what kinds of things, generally speaking, would you have to fire someone for? Just slacking off, not doing their job?

JM: Slacking off. Using church credit cards for things not related to the job. That’s been one. Having antagonism with church members and trying to go around me to avoid resolving it.

At the end of the day, it’s not my congregation, but it is my staff. And so I think it’s important for the church to know that the pastor is willing to make hard decisions and take the arrows that might come for it. And I think it’s important for staff to know that you are flexible and gracious about how they do their work, but you are serious about it.

M: What’s the one thing most churches don’t do, but should? And conversely, what would you say is the biggest mistake that a lot of churches are consistently making in the year 2025?

JM: So Robert Jenson again — he kind of lives rent free in my head — he’s got a great essay where he talks about what he calls “abstracted Christianity.” I think the answer to both of your questions is the same. I don’t think there are enough churches that proclaim and orient the life of the church around the gospel of grace, and in its place they are offering what Jensen would call abstracted Christianity. So it’s programs and messages and causes that you can kind of track back and see how they’re connected to Christianity, but what’s presented is abstracted from it. At the end of the day, I really do think the problem with the church is a theological problem.

Let me give you an example: there was a young mother in my congregation. She’s 37, she has two little kids, and I had no idea that she had a fatal illness. She died suddenly on Epiphany. I had no idea she was dying, and her husband didn’t even know how severe it was. It just happened so fast, and I was so chastened and relieved, because the last Sunday she was in church was right around the inauguration. And I’m like, Oh, my God! If the last thing she heard in the church was me opining about politics, God damn me for that! I’ve heard Paul Walker say that you should preach as though everyone’s going through an existential crisis. And that may not be true for everyone. But every Sunday there is someone, like Laura — that was her name — and so you should conduct yourself with her in mind.

Every year all the Methodist churches in Virginia gather for a three-day conference, and it’s mostly business, but there are worship services and sermons several times a day. A couple years ago, I’m sitting there, and I just start counting during the sermons. I didn’t have to count, actually, because that particular year, in no sermon did Jesus make an appearance. They were all mostly words like “mission,” “church,” “God” in the abstract.

M: Exactly. So, I know you’ve been going through a lot of very serious health things for a long time, including quite recently. And I don’t want to pry into that situation, but it does sound like it would be difficult for you to maintain your work while going through all the health challenges and still find time to recharge. So I guess, as a general rule, how do you recharge spiritually, emotionally, physically — whatever that means?

JM: I think the advantage of cancer is that no one is going to question you taking a vacation with your wife or kids.

M: The one advantage!

JM: Yeah, so we travel quite a bit, try to go on a couple of big trips a year. And honestly, my practice of reading the scripture over the course of the week, in advance of Sunday morning, is spiritually how I recharge. I mean, I’ve been doing this for 25 years now, and it’s just amazing how deep some of the scriptures are. I’ve never really had the time nor the interest in attaching other spiritual disciplines to this one that I have to do anyway. 

M: That’s fascinating. So you don’t feel the need to do some other thing, like some sort of contemplative prayer? You basically just live in the scripture passage that you have to preach on each week, just marinate in it, and that’s enough?

JM: Yeah. I’m enough of a follower of Fleming Rutledge that, like her, a lot of talk about spirituality just gives me hives. It’s not in my wheelhouse.

M: One last question. What aspect of your job do you hate the most? And what aspect do you love the most?

JM: I think love is maybe not the right word, but I guess I’m most grateful in my job to be entrusted with the last moments that a family shares with a loved one. And I think I’m good at that. I know what I’m doing in those situations. That was taught to me by a mentor, because it requires tact and there’s a rhythm to it. And I wouldn’t say I love that. But I think it’s an honor to be entrusted with people’s most vulnerable times. 

Related to that, what I hate the most is, I’ve had to do a number of funerals for children. Those are the most difficult. And then, in particular, when you run into one of the parents several months after that. That’s so hard. Because they never come back to church — they never want to see me again. So, yeah, I would say that’s probably what I dislike the most about the work.

M: Sounds brutal. Out of curiosity, you said you were mentored on how to help families when a loved one is dying or has died. Is there any aspect of that you could share, like an approach or something to keep in mind?

JM: The pastor who made me a Christian then moved up here, and I was his associate for fourteen years. He and I would be with people in those situations together most of the time, and so we developed a rhythm. I can usually tell when a death is close, and so I will gather the family to kind of encircle that person, touch him or her, and then give voice or make audible their gratitude for that person. Or name what they forgive or what they want forgiveness for. In other words, I’ll just have all of them kind of go around and mark the moment with some last words. And then I’ll usually follow that up with me praying in a way that re-narrates what I’ve heard, so they all feel like what they’ve said is being lifted up. Then I’ll usually follow that with the Lord’s Prayer or something familiar. Often I’ll have families sing the doxology. So that’s just one practical approach.

M: Jason, thank you so much. This has been great.