When Wine Was a Weapon

The most damaging thing that happened to me in church. Probably. There's a lot to choose from.

Wine has always been more than a beverage for me. Like so many of us who end up in the wine industry, wine represents something more than itself for me, right back to those early days of quaffing Yellowtail Shiraz in seminary. It wasn’t just wine. It was the conviviality, fun, honesty, and hint of rebellion within our relationships. In a very real way, wine opened and cemented our bonds. Those early experiences helped me associate wine with people I liked and cared about, and more importantly, people I could trust.

Years later I sat around a dining room table with some church members I thought had become friends, at least in the boundaried way a pastor can be friends with church members, and wine was very present, not just as a beverage but as a topic of discussion and a conduit to open conversation.

Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

The dynamics between a spiritual leader and their congregation are always tricky. The spiritual leader doesn’t hold all the power, but they do hold a unique type of power as the person who gives counsel and direction both to individuals and to the collective, and who holds a great deal of privileged information about the organization and the people within. A number of clergy I know don’t believe they can be friends with members of their congregations at all, and they set very strict boundaries to ensure there is not even the perception that the relationship is anything other than clergy and member. There is a certain wisdom in this, and in many ways it is easier than the more porous relationships I maintained with my congregations. But a number of the members of my last congregation had expressed that they expected to have a friendship with me, and would feel alienated if they didn’t.

Please take a moment and imagine about 150 people, many if not all expecting to feel close friendship with you, including receiving personal disclosure and vulnerability from you, while also demanding that you be their projection of the perfect pastor with infallible judgment who they can come to as a spiritual guide and confidante. Oh, and each of them has a different definition of what the perfect pastor is. What pressure?

Of course, within that number, there are many people who can cope with disappointment. Inevitably, clergy disappoint their congregations as we show ourselves not to be what some of them expected or wanted, since we are, it turns out, human. Some people are able to deal with that reality in healthy ways, through honest conversation, mutual growth, and sometimes simply accepting that you can’t always get what you want. Some people don’t manage their feelings that well, and they might act out in some unpleasant ways, but they don’t react to disappointment by making it their personal mission to destroy you. And then there are the other people - which brings us back to that dinner table.

I was invited to that meal ostensibly as a friend as well as a pastor. I had been learning a bit about wine, and my hosts were curious about my studies. I brought a bottle of something interesting that I had just discovered and was excited to share. With church members, a pastor always has to be “on” in a sense, and while I could be friends/friendly with them, it wasn’t in the soul-baring, seeing the worst of me way I can be with my closest friends, and I was always careful not to emotionally unload on them. But I mistook the casual conviviality for good intentions, and when the conversation turned to some questions about challenging recent events at church, I was honest (although not at all detailed) in admitting that I was struggling with a few situations. I wasn’t bashing the church or anyone in it. I was simply doing willingly what they so often demanded of me: disclosing my personal emotions, which I was working through and directing toward healthy solutions for the church.

That conversation came up again months later, in an email absolutely shredding my character and fitness for ministry, based on the evidence that I had complained about the church, which to this person clearly indicated that I hated everything about church and ministry and had no business being there. But he also made it clear that he never thought I had any business being there. Apparently he had always disliked me and found it impossible to connect with me - which was rather a surprise to me given the number of meals we had shared, the number of times I had visited his home, the conversations we had which, while not always easy, seemed to resolve positively, and the fact that he had repeatedly referred to us as friends. I lost count of how many times I heard him say, “You’re not just here as our pastor, you’re our friend!”

To me, sharing a meal and a bottle of wine is a circle of trust, or at the minimum a circle of positive intentions. That experience around a table and over a glass is a gesture of good faith. But this person stored up what he perceived as the negative parts of years worth of those experiences, and used them to call my entire ministry and my essential integrity into question.

If this had been just one person doing one destructive thing, I would probably still be in ministry. The truth is, by the time this incident blew up, I was already halfway out the door. While there were many factors involved in that decision, this situation was part of a larger pattern that played a huge role in my transition from ministry into the wine industry. Over and over, the members of my congregations demanded personal vulnerability from me, and when I gave it to them, they punished me for it. If I limited my emotional disclosure, they called me unapproachable and cold. If I expressed positive emotions, they didn’t believe I was being fully honest (and I probably wasn’t, because who can be positive all the time?). If I was even the slightest bit open about doubts or struggles, it was used as evidence that I was unfit.

In seminary someone once warned us that it was possible that a church member would someday invite us to dinner, and then offer us a beer - not as a genuine gesture of hospitality, but as a test of whether we were “moral.” This did actually happen to me, and so did the converse, in which I was offered some blackberry brandy as a test of whether I would turn it down and reveal myself to be too uptight for this particular couple. More than once I was invited to meals and was later told about the echoed rumors that I had indulged in an alcoholic beverage. When I attended events and chose not to drink alcohol, the speculative whispers I wasn’t supposed to hear were deafening. That dinner I described above wasn’t the only time by a long shot that someone used a social event to have a seemingly loose, well-intentioned chat with me, that they later turned on me as a weapon.

It took a long time for the many betrayals to wound me to the point that ministry was no longer sustainable, but for me, sharing food and drink is sacred. It’s one of the central observances in the Christian religion, the communion meal that purports to unite the members of the Church with God and with one another. Back when I was in the habit of making spiritual meaning of everything, I would have told you that ultimate table has echoes in every shared meal. Knowing that people used experiences of shared food and drink - one of the things I hold most dear - to intentionally harm me still leaves me breathless with pain. It hurt me more than any of the other things people did to me while I was in ministry, and there is rather a long list of things to choose from. It left an open wound of suspicion where my ability to trust people’s positive intentions used to be.

In the end, my ability to trust church members was eroded beyond recovery, and you can’t be a pastor if you are constantly anticipating the next attack and suspecting your parishioners of being duplicitous. You have to hold a certain amount of confidence in their basic goodness, and mine was shattered. All this expectation of vulnerability had done something funny to me: it made me actually work on becoming vulnerable, and it made me want to be able to be vulnerable in my relationships. But that also meant I wanted to be surrounded by people I could trust with my vulnerability. I needed to be able to choose my self-disclosure and not be beaten with it.

Perhaps I will still be hurt by those I choose to trust, but they don’t have quite the same power to destroy my relationships with an entire community, my livelihood, and my spiritual vocation in a single fell swoop. And if it happens, it will be the consequence of my own choice, not a punishment I suffer because the system is rigged for me to fail no matter what I do.

Thriving for me now looks like choosing with whom I share meals and bottles, and making those tables places of conviviality, fun, honesty, and maybe even a hint of rebellion. I’ve returned to using wine to open and cement bonds with people I like and care about, and most of all, with people I can trust.

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