The first time I came to awareness I was becoming a Christian was church camp. Our large urban congregation in Davenport, Iowa had in the 1970s purchased a tract of land among the bluffs along the Maquoketa river about a forty minute drive from the Quad Cities.
I’ve seen photos of the early stages of the camp: if you combine “started in the 1970s” with “Camp Shalom” you can just about guess the spirit of that founding moment. By the time I was going to camp in the 80s, a few more cabins had been built, meals were served out a very rustic mosquito-screen protected hut, and the church school bus would drive us daily along the meandering drive from the camp to the highway and into town for an afternoon swim at the community pool
In this camp environment, I had a sense of release, of being myself. I loved basically everything about it, all the campfire songs and all the hiking and all the games and also the Bible study and the staying up late at night telling ghost stories and pretending to fart (or actually farting) in order to keep the counselor awake.
The spirituality of the songs in particular formed my early spirituality, a strange admixture of 1960s era peacenik music and emerging Christian radio anthems.
My heart was overwhelmed with love of Christ during some of these weeks, and I continued this commitment to camp well into college, when I served as a camp counselor in Iowa (and met my wife at Riverside Bible Camp in Story City, Iowa), Colorado (at Rainbow Trail, among counselors who taught me how to truly pray), and then back to actually direct the camp where I had first cut my teeth as a camper.
Meanwhile, weekly attendance at my home church also had a tremendous formative impact. It was there I learned to love the liturgy (even if at times I was tremendously bored and would read fantasy novels acquired at Waldenbooks… this mostly during the sermons from the one pastor who repeated sermons and always did the “three points and poem” thing… But I digress, our church hosted very robust liturgical worship, with a cranking organ I often sat right in front of when I sang in the high school choir in the choir loft.
To this day I can credit the repetition of that liturgy with carrying me in those moments when I need prayer. I have at least three full settings of the liturgy memorized, and many hymns. Active repeated participation in those creeds and prayers has had a huge grounding influence on my spirituality.
Plus, the church was my second home. I knew every nook and cranny from weeks and weeks of youth group and other events just hanging out and exploring (largely unsupervised by adults, I might add). Any skill I have at ping-pong or foosball was sharpened there (plus camp).
And again, through those times, I discovered over and over again how willing I was to claim the identity: Christian.
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Jump ahead to seminary (I’m skipping college for now because I’ll be telling that story next week when our congregation observes Reconciling in Christ [Inclusion] Sunday). Seminary was my first exposure to the reality that there are different “camps” within the Lutheran fold. The professors I studied under during that period were mostly (though not exclusively) committed to a movement in Lutheranism labeled “radical Lutheranism.”
Essentially, radical Lutheranism strove to focus those who confessed it on the freeing power of the proclamation of the unadulterated gospel, which they understood as saying unequivocally to sinners, “You are forgiven, for Christ’s sake.” Such a word “kills” the old self and “raises” a new self. There was a kind of purity to this viewpoint that has some riches to it I can hardly articulate in short form.
As an example, I love the notion, which I learned from them, that “confession is for the sake of the absolution,” meaning the whole point of confessing sins isn’t to enumerate them but to hear the orally spoken absolution, “You’re forgiven.” And also the idea that one need not agonize over whether one is saved, but rather focus on what one has already heard, “By Christ alone you are.”
There was a kind of sheer Barthian severity to this, and the faculty who led this way of thinking were often aggressive and stark in their claims. I found the stridency of the position breath-taking, and attractive. I joined them. And since I am indeed “fierce,” as my friends will say, I joined the fierceness. For a time. As just two now somewhat embarrassing examples, I refused to even use the “Eucharistic Prayer” from the hymnal in my worship class videos, because radical Lutherans were opposed to it. And also I considered for a time resisting having non-Lutheran bishops at my ordination (again, because radical Lutherans were for the most part opposed to full communion with Episcopalians on the grounds that we had to embrace apostolic succession).
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In the meantime, however, I took two steps that broadened my horizons ecumenically. First, I spent a semester at the Lutheran House of Studies in Washington D.C., taking courses at Catholic University, Howard Divinity School, and Gettysburg Seminary. While there (worshipping weekly in churches all over D.C.), I decided to fill a position that had opened up with the global mission of our denomination, volunteering as an English teacher at J.A. Komensky Gymnazium in Košice, Slovakia. My (now) wife had taken a position there after college, so I joined her. We even decided to have our wedding in the Lutheran church the next summer.
It was in this experience that I gained exposure to another broad movement with contemporary Lutheranism that I found, and continue to find, compelling: the commitment to accompaniment. Essentially, our church had committed itself to working against the grain of colonialism by developing a theologically rich account of how the call of the gospel is to accompany others in the work of the church.
In practice, the simplest way I can describe this is that the ELCA (my denomination) doesn’t send missionaries into new contexts to “convert” people but rather joins and facilitates partner churches in meeting their local needs. In the case of Slovakia, this meant helping the Lutheran church rebuild after the fall of the wall in Eastern Europe, including redeveloping their Lutheran high schools.
This notion of accompaniment has remained tremendously important to me as a Christian and leader. I strive, in as many ways as I know how, to extricate myself from the ecclesial complicity in colonialism, and instead come alongside communities, learning what they need, then offering the gifts we can share and also receiving gifts in return. I guess the emerging popular term for this is “mutual aid.”
Also, spending time in Slovakia among Lutherans quite different from American Lutheranism, just taught me more about the limits of the parochialism of the approach taken at my seminary, which I might simply boil down to saying: They had a beautiful idea, then sullied it by acting as if it was the only beautiful idea.
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After Slovakia I finished up studies back in the Twin Cities and my wife and I assembled a kind of hodgepodge of a year, with her working at the Jewish Society of the Upper Midwest, me working at the Global Mission Institute of the seminary while also commuting out weekends to serve two rural parishes in southwest Minnesota. This was a transitional time for me, coming back from Eastern Europe and experiencing what so many of us experience if we’ve lived abroad: home is more strange to you coming home than a “foreign” country ever is.
As I started my call (we moved to Wisconsin for my wife’s graduate school and my first call near Madison, Wisconsin), I found myself in a spiritually odd position. I was drawn to two tracks of spirituality not directly practiced in parish life. First, I tried on (for a time) being what you might call an “evangelical catholic.” Basically, kind of a Protestant group who can see great value in the historic liturgy and the devotional and monastic practices of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
I joined a clergy group, the Society of the Holy Trinity, which would gather quarterly for weekend retreat and prayer. I even bought a cassock to wear at the retreats. I loved and still love the daily prayer offices, but alas, early in my time with the society they made a homophobic shift and took a stand against full inclusion, and I had to unsubscribe (I’ll come back around to this issue in a bit).
Meanwhile, I was also accepted into the Pastor-Theologian Program at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton. This was one of the most stellar experiences of my whole life. For three years, a grant funded the gathering of cohorts of clergy from around the country for very intentional practice as pastor-theologians.
We read great books, completely geeked out on theology, all while striving (as much as possible) to connect theological reflection to parish ministry. I’m still friends with many of the folks who were in my cohort, and I grew so much through this process.
However, both of these were passions of mine detached to a considerable degree from parish ministry. Now, I don’t mean to imply that a pastor can’t have interests apart from their parish. They definitely can and should. However, I think what I’m trying to say was I was cultivating forms of spirituality I had no idea how to facilitate as well in the local parish. They lacked a certain practicality. So I was still searching.
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I’ll just mention here that I went through a little bit of a season of searching, and was fascinated by a few quick moments of energy in church leadership materials: emergent church, the missional movement, ancient/future stuff. But these were ephemeral. I mention them only to illustrate now how they are already mostly forgotten.
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And then it happened. In the last five years of my time at a rural parish in Wisconsin, I started reading long and deep in progressive, social gospel, and liberation theology. Of course, the intimations of this move had been around and in my repertoire for a long time, but they began to feel more salient, more real. During those years in Wisconsin, I was embedded in rural life, and so was constantly reflecting on what it meant to be the church in such a context.
But also, I was near Madison, Wisconsin, the beating heart historically of political progressivism (think Fighting Bob!), and with options for developing ministries of a progressive bent. We helped expand refugee resettlement to Madison, I worked with the local Worker Justice Center to improve working conditions for janitors and hotel workers, and I read a lot about working class theology.
By the time I moved to Arkansas, I had already been doing some public work in the denomination inviting us to really take sides rather than attempt to exist in a bland middle-class middle. Perhaps the most radical recommendation I made through that time was a critique of the ELCA’s decision to allow those in same-gender relations to serve as pastors by stating that the “bound conscience” approach we took didn’t go far enough and instead we should extend full parity for all.
Once in Arkansas, I intentionally connected immediately to the worker justice center, and also continued to work on a commitment to inclusion. I had gone “all in” on the social gospel, I guess you might say.
I’m not entirely sure how to describe this last stage, those few final years in Wisconsin and now 12 years in Arkansas, because all the various strands of what we might call “liberal” theology (which is writ large the tradition I understand to currently most influence my ministry) are fascinating in their own rights, and worthy of considered expansive reflection. If you’re feeling ambitious, read some Gary Dorrien.
But from my overly simplifying perspective, the issue becomes: will we adopt the basic liberation theology loci that there is indeed a preferential option for the poor. And if we will, does it teach us that indeed we can and should center the experience of “the poor” in our theological reflections.
Which is why for the past twelve years I’ve very steadily led a congregation in a manner that de-centers us so that our identity, as much as it is possible for a predominately white Protestant church in the South, is focused outside of ourselves toward those communities for whom God in Christ has a preferential option.
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That’s where I’ve landed over the past few years, and it’s where I imagine I’ll remain, and the reason I believe I’m here and will stay here in this spiritual space. I’m here because it lands.
I don’t know how else to say this, but I think a lot of the other pieties I’ve mentioned here in this long mini-memoir are, if still impactful for my own personal journey, forms of spirituality that drift away from the here-and-now. They don’t pass the Occam’s razor test of simplicity. They’re in some senses all overly religious, rather than moving in the direction of what Bonhoeffer called “religionless” Christianity.
Camp is literally a “getting away.” It’s a great space, but as my son said recently I’m a pastor who doesn’t seem much like a pastor and someone who loves church camp but more for the camp part.
Radical Lutheranism is profoundly parochial, proceeding as if its one narrow ideological perspective is the true Lutheran way. Plus, in the end it’s just pretty positivist.
Evangelical catholicism is compelling but also an odd and exclusionary kind of co-splay.
Being a pastor-theologian is great except a lot of theology is captive to overly esoteric academic speech.
I don’t mean any of these statements to be too critical, but you can see how each one of these commitments “drifts.”
But the underlying commitments of a progressive approach to theology stay grounded in base communities, in the local people of God, the parish, and specifically how and whether those parishes stay close to the poor.
Perhaps the primary challenge that faces a congregation like ours, or pastoring in the way I pastor, has to do with the way that no particular local community, especially one of our size, can be “all things.” In our case, for example, although we accompany and provide mutual aid by being a sanctuary church (and we have literally been a sanctuary church), offering space for our Marshallese neighbors and their community programs, facilitating the launch of a refugee resettlement agency, and much more, our membership is not predominately made up of members from those communities.
The main community we align with who actually does join our church in large numbers is the queer community. I have found tremendous resources for this within the broad progressive Christian conversation. Meanwhile, some of those movements that shaped me in the past (especially evangelical catholicism and radical Lutheranism) have shown their conservative bent in taking a stance against inclusion, which though I grieved that for a while, more recently has made me wonder what it is about those ways of thinking or believing that can entrench them in historically problematic patterns of bigotry.
So I might end by simply saying I now pastor a church that is especially progressive because it is queer, and it is progressive in aspiration (and also accompaniment or mutual aid) with many of the other communities liberation theological perspectives would encourage the church to see and join.
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On the drive to school today, my kids told me when they talk to their friends about me, their friends say, “Your dad doesn’t really seem like a typical pastor.”
That might be the most adequate summary of everything I’ve written above. I hope the continuing move toward a-typical pastoring has me moving more and more in a simple, faithful, this-worldly Christian direction.
I feel as if I know and like you more after reading this epistle, if I may call it that. You have had the opportunity to live abroad and study at so many interesting institutions, which is why you are so inclusive. I admire you and agree with some who say you aren’t like a preacher at least not a Lutheran Pastor, although I do know a few young Pastors who are much like you. I’m pleased that Pat and I are now members of Good Shepherd and look forward to supporting the good work it does in the name of Jesus Christ with your guidance.
I am not sure the title is descriptive. Perhaps it should be “How I Became The Christian I Am By Becoming A Pastor”. Thank you for this wonderful story of your life and faith, which resonates with this layman