I’m attending a conference yesterday and today on the work of Hartmut Rosa on “resonance.” It’s intriguing to me the majority of attendees are from Canada, Germany, Denmark and some other places where religious decline has meant almost no one today is connected to church.
One attendee I met from Canada mentioned his own children, who are now in their 20s, are strange among their friends in actually having an experience of church, and that ministers he knows, when they introduce themselves as pastors, get a response like “oh that’s quaint, like a blacksmith! I didn’t know people did that anymore!”
Living in Arkansas I have a radically different experience. Sometimes I wish the young adults I meet, and many people I meet more generally, could have been blessed to grow up WITHOUT a church experience.
Our church is a landing place for many people who have experienced religious trauma. So much trauma. When people arrive here, they don’t arrive from a lack of religious experience, they arrive out of a surplus of NEGATIVE experience.
It means it’s really hard and idiosyncratic because we are building community with folks who are reeling from what they left, discerning whether they can trust where they’ve arrived, and then working to create new patterns for themselves.
This dynamic can explain why so many of the things I do here as a pastor are quite intentionally non-religious. Sometimes I’ve felt guilt about this, about dropping the habit of praying before meetings, etc. but often it’s very intentional, like offering Queer Camp as intentionally non religious space because the last thing we want to do is re-traumatize campers coming out of places of alienation and trauma.
I guess I could say it’s not that I don’t believe in prayer but my practices of prayer have shifted to a kind of solidarity with the hundreds and hundreds of people I know recovering from trauma.
I do not abandon my faith. I maintain the silence and the safe space precisely because of my faith.
This ends up making how I feel about the conference somewhat complicated by my social location. Resonance reflections are about recovering aspects of religiosity that have become entirely secular.
In the South, a progressive church like ours has aspects of this same need for rediscovering resonance, but… and this is the huge point… we experience this in the context of overwhelming surplus of religiosity all around us.
It’s like being a little bubble in a big pond, where all the other fish are swimming and you find yourself in the air, having to learn how to breathe while surrounded by water in every direction.
And for those who feel like they are drowning in the pond, it is incredibly brave and not without risk to leap into the bubble and see if they want to stay there.
SO glad you're attending that conference (which I had no time to do), and SO glad that you are offering this thoughtful insight!
I'd be cautious with words like "almost no one". I have maintained contact with Lutheran pastors and communities for decades, both EKD and SELK, where membership is still active even if the churches aren't packed any more than ours are. I just returned from a trip in which I visited with pastors and worshipped on two Sundays with congregations. Lots to talk about here. I enjoy reading your mind.