The Plague Catches You And You Run
A Picture Of Church Life Fall 2023 (in which I save the cool theological quote for the very end)
Lately I've been sitting around thinking that I wish I had a big picture view of church life in North America in the fall of 2023.
Then I realized having a big picture view is probably a pipe dream.
I mean Robert Wuthnow rather definitively argued in Inventing American Religion the futility representing American religion with a bar chart. “Not all statistics are created equal, of course. Many rely on tiny samples or skewed audiences or biased responses, or are produced by firms with a vested interest in reaching a certain conclusion.” (Emma Green)
So, then I thought it might be worthwhile to just tell the story of our church. Narrative is good, right? Sample size of one, but stories are helpful.
So I hope this post offers a little more for you to know about me, our church, and maybe also yourself as you bounce your own story off ours.
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So this is what it's like right now in August of 2023.
It's just really, really hot.
It's been over 100 degrees every day for the last week. Sometimes the heat index has gotten up into the 120s. And this is true not just in Arkansas, but all over the country.
School has just started. The university students are back and the kids are back at the public schools. The University of Arkansas has more Texas students than Arkansas students so a lot of big pick-up trucks have arrived in town and all the sororities have been hosting pledge week.
Everything is about the sports. Tonight is the first high school football game, and I’ve been busy installing Seatbacks at Razorback stadium as a fundraiser for the high school marching band. Enough money trickles down from the Razorback athletics to basically fully fund our high school marching band program.
But practices for band and soccer and football have been cancelled, and the football game has been moved back to later in the evening to accommodate the heat.
Everyone is at a base line of alarm because we know that this heat that we're experiencing is a byproduct of the climate change that is in a seemingly accelerating manner impacting life on our planet.
So part of life in the church is 2023 is a basic acknowledgement of climate change and wondering what our complicity is in it as a church and also what if anything we can do. I’m already planning my sermon for Labor Day weekend, and it will be on the topic of Climate Change and Labor. I anticipate shifting much more of my theological and practical work in the direction connecting the impact of climate change to everything else we do as part of our call to participate in God’s liberative work.
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Another part of life in the church in 2023 is just who's here and who isn't.
During the pandemic churches like ours took a very long break. We did not meet in person for almost 18 months. When I write that right now, I can hardly believe that's the case… but it is.
During the pandemic, large groups of people joined our church. We designed really unique ways of receiving them. The first summer we had a whole series of baptisms outdoors on the church grounds, where each of the families did their own baptism socially distanced from the other families.
Later in that summer, we hosted outdoor services in person and people gathered in circles that we painted out on the grass so that they could meet outdoors for worship but at an appropriate distance.
By the time the pandemic was coming to an end and we were gathering again in person, it was all of those people who arrived during the pandemic who built more resilient habits of worship, and so now that we're back meeting together, a very large percentage of the people who join worship weekly in person are the people that joined during the pandemic or right at the end of it.
In the meantime, a lot of our active members weren't in church during the pandemic. They watched the services from home or took a break, went back to live-streaming churches from where they used to live, etc. Many of these members have been struggling to rebuild a habit of being in person for worship. I'm not even sure that a lot of them plan to ever be back.
Although… people do keep coming back, so every Sunday yet this late summer there’s been at least one person or household who arrived back in worship after a year or longer hiatus. Everyone has handled the grief and trauma of the pandemic at their own pace, I think.
More intriguing to me than the standard measure for church (butts in pews) are some of the really big changes that happened for us these last few years.
Perhaps the biggest is that hundreds if not thousands of people participate in the life of our church even if they don't attend worship on Sunday morning.
We may have somewhere between 60 and 80 people in worship on Sunday morning—small in comparison to a lot of the evangelical or mega churches around us.
But there are literally hundreds of active people in our congregational life, who contribute to what we do in a variety of ways. They give financially, so even though our worship attendance is down from before the pandemic, our actual overall giving is up.
Post pandemic they support the aspects of our church life that impact our community. And they literally show up and help us. The last few times I’ve asked for help on projects around the church (replacing mulch in a playground area, doing repairs, etc.) it was “non-members” who chimed in on social media and showed up to do the work.
And… if you travel around Northwest Arkansas or Fayetteville and you mention Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, even though we're a very small church, there's a strong likelihood that people not only will have heard of Good Shepherd, but have quite a bit of an awareness of the impact that our church has had in the community. Much of this is attributable to our/my social media presence. But also just because we are a show-up church, at city council and county meetings and school boards and down in Little Rock for trans rights, and so on.
A big split that happened in our church a few years before the pandemic (over same-gender marriage) freed me up as a pastor to serve in rather unique ways. After the split, when the congregation shifted even more toward inclusion, increasing numbers of people joined who were committed to pride and affirmation of the LGBTQIA+ community.
It moved us in certain directions and it freed me up in a lot of ways. Sometimes, maybe I'm even a little too free as a result, but I'm given the latitude to really be present in our community in unique, noisy ways. A key part of my ministry now is advocacy. Over time, this has allowed us to make significant impact in our community around refugee resettlement and immigrant rights, walk in solidarity with workers and renters, build systems for the food insecure and those who are homeless, and partner with the large Marshallese community in our area.
We have also become younger. Lots younger.
It has also opened us up so that we think of ourselves as a campus, a “community center with a chapel” within our neighborhood that many outside groups access.
Multiple organizations have been formed out of our congregation but are unique from it. Canopy NWA. Queer Camp. Ozark Atolls. The Rainbow Closet. Little Free Pantry.
This may be kind of a hallmark of the way we move in the world now, in 2023, unique compared to what people knew of church 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. It's just that we're very porous.
We have people who aren't Christian who are present in worship regularly. We have people who support the ministry of the church who never thought they would be connected to a church and really don't actually plan to convert/join in any traditional sense, but are part of our shared mission.
This has become a part of the identity that we have. It's about this mission, a sense of being an outpost for God's love and justice in our community.
Personally, serving in this context is incredibly satisfying and thrilling… and sometimes terrifying. I honestly go back and forth even on a given day from feeling like a rock star to feeling like I'm hanging from a thread that might get cut.
Sometimes the risks that I get to take result in tremendous new emergences. Sometimes I go too far and turn people off. I don’t always know until I do something which way it will go, and I live with a certain ongoing risk of self-righteousness because I’m offered the opportunity so frequently to advocate for issues of justice.
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What's our congregation like? Well, we are predominantly Anglo. And this is one of the struggles of the kind of church that we are in the place that we are.
It's hard to know how to truly be more ethnically diverse.
We don't set it as a goal to try to reach other groups. I have a problem with that way of trying to become diverse, diversity for diversity sake or to appear more diverse. I'm much more interested in partnerships and mutual aid, which is why the development of our Marshallese community ministry has been a real gift. We have a significant relationship with the Marshallese community that does not involve trying to get Marshallese people to become Lutheran because we fully recognize that a majority of them have their own religious traditions already. Our Marshallese staff person is also the youth director for his UCC congregation.
It's about our partnership together rather than getting us to go to one another's worship services or to join each other's churches that is the point.
But diversity is still a struggle. If you are not white and you come to worship with us, you are definitely in the significant minority, and other than working on reparations and striving for mutual aid with non-white congregations, I’m often at a loss how to address this particular issue.
On the other hand, if you're queer you'll feel very much right at home. A significant portion of our lay leadership is LGBTQ and a majority of our church staff identify as queer.
Here we are truly unique, especially if anyone has perceptions of what church in Arkansas is like.
But returning to my point at the beginning, life as the church in 2023 is also very beleaguered. We've lost a good number of members and some staff in the last year just because they could no longer live in this state and feel safe.
They've moved to places around the country where they feel like their gender identity or sexual orientation will be more affirmed and safely welcomed.
It's very difficult being the kind of church that we are advocating for the things that we advocate for because we stand so frequently at cross purposes with the political establishment and the religious establishment and a lot of the power brokers in our community. There’s a certain feeling of powerlessness, of everything being hard, of being so unique as to not have a lot of comparable models to work with, of not knowing whether anything we do can have an impact, whether it's worth staying, whether we have the energy to pursue the things that we believe we should pursue.
And a very real and significant part of our church life is the religious trauma members have experienced that impacts their participation here. I can’t really spend more than a day in ministry without someone processing some aspect of their religious trauma that resulted in them leaving some other church space and eventually finding themselves in connection here.
And yet for all of that, when the next struggle shows up, whether it was the pandemic or now the current housing crisis, or families seeking sanctuary or a storm of anti-trans legislation, what it’s like in 2023 is to see the plague coming and run in whatever direction we think we can to help our neighbors.
Church is the community who runs roughly in the same direction together.
As a favorite theologian writes, “The church must understand itself and prove itself as the public witness and bearer of a dangerous memory of freedom in the ‘systems’ of our amancipatory society" (Johann Baptist Metz).
For Metz, the dangerous memory was of Jesus, the one who “declared himself to be on the side of the invisible ones, those who are rejected and oppressed, and in so doing announced to them God’s coming dominion as the liberating power of an unconditional love… this memory is no bourgeois counter figure to hope. On the contrary, it holds a particular anticipation of the future as a future for the hopeless, the shattered and oppressed. In this way, it is a dangerous and liberating memory, which badgers the present and calls it into question, since it does not remember just any open future, but precisely this future, and because it compels believers to be in a continual state of transformation in order to take this future into account.”
In a nearby community there is a biker church. The pastor was so out of control in his youth, he was called Trash. Most of the people there have been ostracized by their earlier congregations. Attending a service is an experience, people going to the refrigerator during worship, getting a soda, and drinking it in the seats. And after the service there is a meal. The feeling of real love of God was present, even if the song leader sang off key and they had to start I'll Fly Away three times before we got it right.
Another church started in our town. I gave them my catalog of praise and worship songs for projection. When I attended a service, they had not corrected my spelling errors. A member complained to me that people would come from other churches where there was some dispute, get their bearings spiritually, and then go back to their original churches. I was impressed and told her I had not thought of a church being a spiritual hospital, healing the suffering and sending them back to their own congregations well.
It is so rewarding to attend and belong to an all inclusive congregation at our advanced ages, 86 and 88. Getting used to the mixture of pipe organ and instrument music has been interesting and slowly acceptable. Seeing so many children in attendance and so anxious to be involved is a joy because we were child deprived in our former church in Denver. Please keep doing the work of making us aware of needs in the church, like the food pantry, free food bank and refrigerator, clothing closet, special items of food for the Marshallese community and encouraging us to meet and greet those sitting close to us in church, which most Lutherans tend not to do. We are glad we found you.