Facing Tragedy, What's A Pastor To Say?

To Stem Losses In Membership, Church Leaders Search For Better Ways To Explain Suffering

(Christian Science Monitor) 
"That really set a cascade of thoughts and issues flowing in my mind," Kay recalled in a phone interview. "I said to this fella, 'I don't believe that's the attitude God has. I don't believe He ordained that [even though] He allowed it. ... I had to determine, 'Can I stay in this church? No, I can't stay in this church.' "

To refine, or perhaps reconsider, their standard responses, pastors here heard heady lectures, ate leisurely meals at long tables, and prayed. It was a time for refreshment, but also for mental wrestling.

For some, it was occasion to be daring. Asked why someone should believe in an almighty and loving God amid evidence of suffering, Magill backed off traditional doctrine. "I give up the 'almighty' part," she answered. "God is as powerful as those who believe in Him or Her and who let God guide them. ... But we don't always do that, so God becomes less powerful."

Death and disease have been accepted facets of life for most of Christian history. But in modern times Western Christians have ceased to assume "that life is fleeting," says David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian at Providence College in Rhode Island and the colloquy's keynote speaker. "Actual confrontation with suffering and death — for modern, Western human beings in industrial societies — comes as a kind of cosmic enormity, a kind of abomination."

Congregants who generally expect that their children will outlive them and that tragedy will otherwise be kept at bay may need to be shaken from spiritual complacency, says Dr. Hart. "It might be necessary for a pastor forcibly to remind people just how terrible" death and suffering are.

No one at the colloquy had pat explanations, and the mysteriousness of God's tolerance for suffering remained, for many, a mystery.

"We don't have easy answers," says Barbara Herber, pastor of First United Methodist Church in North Andover, Mass. "Our primary job is to sit with people in their suffering, because it's really lousy to sit alone."

Still, pastors tried to articulate comprehensive theologies for people experiencing pain.

The Rev. Mr. Coleman recalled leading a memorial service earlier in the summer for an animal lover in her early 20s who died on her morning commute when she swerved her car to avoid hitting a deer. His aim at the time was to comfort her family, but here on the Cape he sought to clarify the logic behind his words then.

"Every death is unnatural and is contrary to the will of God," he said. "But there is not anything that can come between us and the love of God. We have hope that we'll all be raised in the last days."