an audacious community… the other evangelical
Only at the Other Evangelical would we watch the stock market tank and immediately announce the beginning of a Capital Campaign. After all, we are the church that ignored conventional wisdom and declared ourselves to be the first Open and Affirming UCC church in suburban St. Louis (2001). We had likewise been early on the scene in calling a woman as our Pastor (Stephanie Weiner in 1980). Taking extravagant welcome to an edge, we invited SpongeBob to share in our Rainbow Fish Tree and were delighted to share our story on Keith Olberman’s Countdown (2004). Clearly audacious moves are part of our identity. Still, I find myself a bit puzzled about how to share our most recent bit of audacity. Last week our Governing Body reached consensus in embracing a plan to grow our congregation and has invited all team-members (new team-members welcome!) and leaders to join staff for a day of delineating an action plan towards that endeavor.
At first blush, it would seem a foolish notion. The statistics are startling clear – this is the decade of church closings – not church growth plans. The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the Southern Baptist Convention, even the breakaway Presbyterians (PCA) reported membership declines. The only thing keeping the Roman Catholic Church from numerical decline in America is the wave of immigrants coming pre-baptized! Church leaders in all denominations meet for hand wringing and talks of mergers. To be sure our architectural footprint became ungainly in the last half century – there are 15 United Church of Christ church buildings within a 4-mile radius of the Other Evangelical! Some downsizing is, in the least, a good stewardship endeavor and too often is mandated by serious declines in membership and participation. Did we miss the memo?
Nope. We are clearly aware that church as the institution at the heart of American culture is waning and rapidly. For most of us this news flash is not totally negative. Our experience with the institutional church has been a mixed bag, and the potential of a kinder gentler access to sacred space is welcome. Where, though, will the access be visible? Who will be the voices offering such access? Indeed, as church becomes a voice in wilderness, will the voice be one of orthodoxy or a voice of compassion on behalf of our still speaking God? How will our children’s children learn the story of Jesus’ inclusive love?
As we face our own congregational challenge with a building boasting too many years of deferred maintenance, we looked beyond this year and the next and began to talk about what a faithful community of faith might look like over the next decade. We talked about the needs of our wider community, and we talked about what a sustainable model for our church might be. Although most of the people not already churching (a growing majority in St. Louis county) are not interested in traditional church, we are not traditional church; who we are and what we offer is exactly what many of our neighbors are seeking. Now is the time.
Quite frankly, the stakes are high. Although the rise and fall of any particular institution does not keep me awake at night, the cumulative loss of social capital should. Addressing the issue in his book “Bowling Alone”, Robert Putnam remembers a similar dearth in social capital in the underbelly of the Industrial Revolution when Henry Ward Beecher advised churches to “multiply picnics”. Our proposal is not rocket science. We will have more potlucks. We will invite our neighbors. We will wear nametags, volunteer to help in the nursery, and bring cookies.
Our endeavor to grow our community will also make good use of the social networking and media tools of our day. Craig Watkins (The Young and the Digital) points out that, “connecting via a mobile or Facebook is a different way of bonding, but these practices are expressions of intimacy and community.” Multiplying potlucks and virtual connections, we seek to grow our community in both faith, strength and, yep, numbers.
At the Other Evangelical, we’ve recognized a troubling trend as an opportunity. We recognize that something as precious as the welcome that we’ve found at EUCC should be respected, protected, and most importantly, shared. Some things never change.
time to turn on the light
I’m sitting at my laptop in my living room and I just realized that it is dark, very. The only light is the light outside my front door and the night seems to be deep. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact when I sat down with my computer, the light was the enticing twilight that can be so compelling, betwixt and between. My eyes have become more sensitive to light, too much makes me squint but not enough makes it hard to read. Still I didn’t notice the darkening room. And now it is dark, very.
The gradual nature of the waning light allows it to come into our lives painlessly. When entering in a most gradual fashion, we navigate situations that would normally splinter our fragile human selves not unlike the mythical frog.
If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death. (The Story of B, Daniel Quinn)
I’m told that biologists dispute the literal truth of the story, but the metaphorical truth remains irrefutable. We accommodate to a lot of darkness without realizing it, and it can actually be painful when the light comes on.
When I learn about the cruel inhumanity of Jim Crow America, I am most troubled by the preponderance of silent people who would want to be counted among the faithful. I do not understand how people of faith, reared with the goodness of Creation, Jesus embracing the children, and the Golden Rule, could allow such a systemic denial of humanity. With the clarity of the review mirror we know that the complicity of silence was a critical and damning tool for Jim Crow’s heinous success. The conspiracy of silence is seen wherever horrific acts of human genocide have mushroomed and is a mystery that can be explained only by the gradual accommodation. I would like to think that I would have recognized the injustice of segregation and raised my voice to change laws, minds and hearts. But as I sit in the darkness tonight, I am reminded of how enticing the darkness can be when it covers us so gradually.
We are not born racists. Children instinctively notice difference, but they must be taught to assign privilege and scorn based upon difference. Slowly and most often without notice, we teach our children that the difference they see has implications. Children are still very young when they begin to discover that they were in fact born in different places, different hospitals, different states, and even different nations. Placing value on these differences often begins as subtly as an expression or tone, seemingly insignificant but light dimming nonetheless.
Thinking about the relative status we assign culturally to naturally born citizens, naturalized citizens, legal immigrants and illegals, I cannot help but wonder if all of our carefully defined status codes are reflective of water that has come to a boil.
In seminary, I learned an important if unpronounceable phrase: the epistemological privilege of the poor. The idea is that when there are competing claims to truth, our faith compels us to pay close attention to the voice of the most vulnerable. The fancy schmancy language seems to be out of vogue (if it was ever in!), but the imperative is timeless. The voices to whom we must listen as we attend immigration reform in America are the voices of those most at risk.
A group writing in defense of Arizona’s new law points out that 31% of Arizona’s school children have immigrant parents. I suspect that no one is more vulnerable than these children, and I can think of no better place to look for truth than in their eyes. Regardless of where a child is born, regardless their ethnicity, regardless their parent’s circumstance, the spirit of God beckons from within each child and asks us as a culture to extend the human decency of a healthy, moral, and safe start in life.
In Arizona, it’s time to turn on the light and embrace the children. So too in St. Louis.
the middle seat
Recently I told a friend that I am trying to sit in the middle of the boat. This is a phrase that I often hear and have begun to repeat, but as I sit in the quiet early morning I am struck by the power of the image.
My canoeing days were as a young adult on the Red Cedar River in northern Wisconsin. The water was clean, the air dotted with bald eagles, and the beer flowing. With my friend, I could throw the canoe atop the car and tie it down with ease. Together we had the boat off the car and into the water with few if any words. And then the afternoon belonged to the movement of the water. Even now I can feel the rhythm of the water beneath the boat, the feeling of being carried. It was a heady season of life.
Years later, with a different partner and now a toddler in tow, I got back into a canoe (sans beer), this time in the Current River in Missouri’s Ozarks. But everything was different. I had no sense of balance and placement in the boat. I had learned to ride the water by feel, but this partner expected a logical engagement with the craft and with a toddler in the middle, the stakes were indeed higher. Still, I was perplexed that something I had known so well could feel so foreign. Now I sat alert and reactive to every movement and the boat lurched in rhythm with my anxiety.
Abiding are the lessons of the boat itself. A boat is crafted to ride the current and instinctively moves into the stream of life, moving most efficiently as our reactions minimize.
There are seats in the front and the back, with the back steering and the front functioning as look out and support (and my personal favorite, hood ornament – think Cleopatra). The safe seat is in the center of the boat, which actually has no seat. The toddler, preferable de-squirmed, is given the most stable seat and reminded ad nauseum that the safety depends upon sitting still. The child has the view, but his only power is to subjugate his own to a combination of the water below, the wind above, and the adults on either side. Truly the seat in the center of the boat is a lesson in vulnerability.
And it is not one that comes instinctively to most of us.
The fight or flight instincts are those with which we bring into adulthood well honed. The spiritual acumen required to ride the current of life totally dependent upon a power beyond us is perhaps also native but almost certainly buried beneath a lifetime of ego-trained impulses. The instant nature of communication today fosters a false sense of control, tempting us to stand and wave, capsizing the boat before we are even aware that we stood. We can start a major church squabble, quell a budding romance, and permanently estrange a family member with the ease of one finger on the electronic envelope. Many a humorous verse has been penned with the title “don’t hit send” and nearly all of us have a story to tell. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power, we have guided missles and misguided men.” To that I would add a corollary, “Our electronic acumen has outrun our spiritual acumen, we have connected lives with disconnected hearts.”
As I sit in the quiet of morning pondering the safety of the middle seat, I am struck by the view. When not preoccupied with the mirage of power, when aware simply of the current below and the sky above, the view is lovely. The instinct to reach, to stir, to try is not gone, but for a moment it is quiet and I feel the sweet peace of serenity. This, then, is what my friends mean by sitting in the middle of the boat. And I like it, very much.
Now, it’s time hit ’send’ on this pondering… 
the glare beyond the closet
Given that I weekly ponder the current events in our world, I often find myself researching furiously to write about topics about which I’ve had previously only a cursory knowledge. Tragically this week’s story is one that needs no research, a topic I know too well. So well in fact that I have avoided writing about it, it’s too close for comfort. After all, I assure myself, there is much happening in the life of our church community that warrants reflection, alternative topics abound, I do not need to weigh in on this one. Determined to avoid the story, I received a Facebook message last night from a high school classmate asking me to weigh in on the Levitical code’s prohibition of homosexuality. Silence broken.
The story in a nutshell: On Tuesday of this week, the Miami Herald published a photo of Dr. George Reker and his (male) escort returning from Europe. Reker was a cofounder of the Family Research Council with James Dobson and another guy; the group that has spearheaded the Christian anti-gay movement offering their belief that we choose our orientation. Reker himself was the author of a psychiatric treatment to ‘cure’ homosexuality and most recently was hired by Florida’s Attorney General as the expert witness to testify against gay adoption. Although Reker has tried all week to deny the obvious, his buddies at Focus on the Family immediately distanced themselves and removed his name from their website!
George Reker is a man who has spent his adult lifetime preaching against homosexuality. It might seem that George and I have little in common in that I’ve spent my adult lifetime preaching about God’s inclusive embrace that includes homosexuality. Both of us have taken very public positions while keeping our own private realities carefully guarded. What George and I have in common is the pernicious evil of hiding. I didn’t help Jim Dobson found his war on homosexuality and I didn’t buy sex on the side. I actually lived a very normal rule abiding life as a heterosexual wife for nearly twenty years while offering what voice I had to make the world (and the church) safer for my sisters and brothers. But the cost of hiding for both myself and those I love is incalculable. The euphemism of being ‘in the closet’ makes it sound innocuous, but it is truly deadly.
As a middle age woman coming out, I am often asked the ‘when’ question. When did I know? Did I know when I fearfully asked a buddy in 8th grade, “What happens if I’m, you know, one of ‘them’?” Following her advice, I prayed to be wrong. Did I know when I found myself in college instinctively drawn to women that I assumed were lesbian? Early on I was suspicious, and with each passing year the suspicion grew more clear. But what to do? I was a lesbian, yes, but also true is that I loved my husband and cherished the life that we had built. What I wanted was to enjoy the precious few years that one has with children and to deal with my own emerging identity after they were grown. And so the closet doors grow thick.
Reker’s ministry project was essentially to pray people into heterosexuality, and I am sure that no one has prayed harder than he. Mine has been rooted in a belief that our orientation is a part of our created being and to be embraced and nurtured. Both of us preached but both of us believed that we were somehow in a category of our own. No one is more sympathetic with Reker’s personal struggle than I. We both suffered under the delusion that we had the personal power to choose our identity. We don’t. We are the beautiful beings created by a power beyond us; our salvation, our hope and healing, lies not in overcoming that power but by admitting our powerlessness and being open to the source of our creating.
It’s time to stop using the tools of religion, the bible and prayer, to belittle, judge, and insult others. When reading the ancient codes of Leviticus or even the letters of Paul, here are my hermeneutical principles: Use the bible to inform your own life and choices but not to judge others. Use the bible to learn about God, but not to recreate old social norms. Use the bible to open your mind but not as wedge to skewer your neighbor. And at the end of the day, close the book and get on your knees to commune most directly with the God who created you. None of which requires making a judgment about someone else.
