I’ll admit, I initially found Lenny Duncan’s main thesis off-putting. Twice on the first page they write:
Dear Revolutionary: it’s time to prepare for a world beyond the church.
The thesis puzzled me on a multiple levels. Some questions ran through my brain:
Aren’t most revolutionaries already out in the world already?
It’s time now to prepare for a world beyond the church? Like didn’t that happen a long time ago?
Is it possible to make such a defined distinction between “church” and “world?”
In their preface, which they call “a field guide born from the pain and the victories of the people,” they claim that “every major American mainline denomination failed us at a critical time in salvation history. Every leader. Every bishop. Every pastor. Including me.”
This again was off-putting, not because it’s radical but just because I don’t think it’s descriptively true.
Everyone? Really?
The specific apocalyptic moment that brought about this final revelation for Lenny was summer 2020, the pandemic and George Floyd and especially the protests and resistance to fascists that took place in Portland, Oregon (of which Lenny was a part). They lament that while there was a global pandemic, major uprisings, and an attack on the peaceful transition of power in the United States, during all of this many denominations felt the most important thing to discourage was online communion.
True.
Prior to 2020, Lenny traveled the country addressing the church, especially our denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, calling for reform and repentance. Their first book Dear Church came out in 2019 and was widely read across the denomination. It was a powerful cri de cœur.1
Of that experience Lenny writes in this book, “It was exciting at first, to hear the language you know you introduced to the church here in the atmosphere. To see quoted tweets about your work with hundreds of retweets, or a TikTok with seventy thousand people talking about your book. To eventually be invited around the country and actually be listened to, to be centered, even falsely, can be rather intoxicating. I can tell you at the time I knew I was becoming part of what I call the ‘thought leader industrial complex.’” (28)
But the glamor didn’t last very long, and the record of the falling out between Lenny and our denominational leaders and the church more generally can be read by anyone who wants to visit Lenny’s blog (which I recommend, because it’s honest and in their own voice).
Our denomination appears to have a tendency to listen to witnesses like Lenny only long enough to use their message as a kind of veneer, as if a book study or a visiting speaker can replace the hard work of liberation.
Eventually all the disappointment and trauma and so much more piled up, and Lenny just quit.
Literally. They write, “So I quit. The church. I quit trying to revive the church as we know it. You should, too” (8). And they really have quit, having resigned from pastoral ministry and the clergy roster of the ELCA.
Having listened as Lenny published their experiences over the past few years, I can truly empathize with them. We have disappointed Lenny, sometimes harmed them, set them up on a “prophetic” pedestal no one should be placed on, and in this this way have failed them.
Once I realized I agreed with Lenny on this point, it made it easier for me to disagree with them on a central point: I understand why they quit, but their personal experience need not become a rule for everyone. Inasmuch as they are generalizing their experience and offering it as an assignment for others, there are a multiple problems, not the least of which is that some who have experienced trauma share the opposite narrative of return to church as important in their healing.
And inasmuch as they still propose forms of community that look and are a lot like church, I wonder if perhaps their definition of a “world beyond the church” lacks as dialectical counter-point an adequate ecclesiology.
However, although we may disagree on whether the [institutional] church can still serve as the organizing context for the spiritual practices recommended in the book, nevertheless we agree on a lot of the present-day analysis.
Like Lenny, I believe “we have passed the point where I believe we should spend any more energy "‘waking people up’ to the realities of white supremacy.” As they say, “[White supremacists] know… And they don’t care” (12).
We also agree that “we are starting to sense there isn’t a place, or a category, that is God or religion separate from the concepts of language, culture, or ‘history.’”
It’s just we draw different conclusions about the place of “church” once that wall of separation is gone. I happen to think if we drop the sacred/secular division, the church becomes an incredibly robust organizing power that can align with individuals, other orgs, and even political structures to work for justice and liberation together. I’d invite Lenny to consider this in their own power analysis.
I also truly feel with Lenny as they describe 2020. “After a week of trauma chaplaincy, I was in the midst of a neurodivergent burnout moment. I had discovered mental, physical, and spiritual limits since the uprisings of 2020 that had almost killed me several times” (21). Having lived some comparable moments that year, I can still feel in my body that which some of us carried through that year. I’m thankful to Lenny for naming it.
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We get to the heart of Lenny’s profound disappointment in the chapter they poignantly title “There Is No Two-Day Training Or Book Club For This Shit.”2
A passage in that chapter is worth quoting in full, because it articulates the real lament of Lenny as they came to the realization our church was failing them:
I truly thought I had a sincere partner in the church. I mean, the trajectory of the church and the cries of the oppressed seemed to be on a collision course, moments like Occupy Wall Street were going to become more frequent, and I knew the people would need spiritual care. I thought being a pastor would help me gain the skills I would need to serve my people through difficult times, that many of us could see clearly coming because of our social location. But even that is white supremacy and colonialism in action. Instead of thinking of gaining skills to share widely—of the proliferation of free thought and spiritual care—I thought of being credentialed and becoming the ‘expert’ the people needed. My mistake early on was thinking that the people didn’t already have everything the community required among them.
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So what are we to make of a book like this? I’m a pastor who still believes in church as an organized structure and even the role or function of professional clergy within it. I’m also a pastor who shares many of the same doubts about the value of the denomination, and sees the value of reorganizing power structures in order to develop communities of mutual aid.
Perhaps what we have operative between us is the dramatic tension Paul Tillich argues for when he writes, “Religion is truer the more it cancels itself out.” Somewhere in my continuing argument for church over against Lenny’s call to leave church, we discover the truth?
Either way, where we also share common ground is in commitment to practices and community over doctrines or beliefs.
Lenny provides some resources in the book I just love. They’re very transparent that the book is simply a narrative of how they have ended up where they are now. They’re willing to admit they may be wrong, and point out ways they’ve been wrong previously. There’s something about that level of raw transparency that is transformative, because it creates space for the reader to be confronted by Lenny’s forceful argument while also remaining force-filled back in their own truth.
And intriguingly, although Lenny opens the book with the recommendation that we “prepare for a world beyond the church,” they end the book, and include within it, recommendations for a variety of practices that are quite, shall I say, church-y?
Lenny recommends a set of spiritual practices, roughly one per chapter that are pleasant to read at least in part because of their brevity. They are practices learned or received from other organizers that Lenny says contributed to their own survival.
These are what you might call shared spiritual practices for the revolution, ways of experiencing the Divine and liberation together. Without repeating them here in the blog (I’d rather you bought the book and then learned the practices that way), they include a focus on ancestor work, home altar building, the art of neighboring3, one-on-ones, and asset-mapping.
I’ll end with this. For some time now I’ve been especially interested in Lenny’s proposal of ancestral practice as anti-racist esoterica. I first came across a similar proposal in another book, Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization. As I talk to folks who are exploring paganism in relationship to their Christianity, or doing some of their own genealogical work uncovering past trauma and harm as anti-racist work, I believe Lenny is onto something crucial in their “trying to synchronize, quite openly, the message of the Liberating Christ I encountered in the Gospels, and the earth-based practices (Ifá and other African diaspora practices) that connect me to the Divine in ways that I believe are truly emancipatory” (77).
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You can support Fayetteville’s local indie bookstore ordering the book through this link, or find it wherever fine books are sold.
I reviewed the book here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/clintschnekloth/2019/02/dear-lenny-a-love-letter-to-a-black-preacher-from-the-whitest-pastor-in-our-denomination/
I am amused, however, that the exercises Lenny recommends at the end of some of the chapters, and at the end of the book, are to be done when possible with… your book club.
Actually going to use this one as part of Ash Wednesday observances this week.
I’m always amazed that you not only find the time to read as much as you do but then to write a lengthy review of what you read and give references.