Dear Readers,
I’m often asked something along the lines of, “Don’t you think one can be a Christian without going to church?” As the rector of a parish, I cannot answer that in an unbiased way, but the question has become more pressing post-pandemic with people leaving churches in droves, out of the habit of in-person Sunday attendance. Some started out watching livestreams, then watched less and less, and then…dwindled away.
Worshipping God in community is the most beautiful expression of my Christianity, and it can be problematic, because people are involved. I love baptisms, with everyone renewing their own baptismal covenant along with the candidate (or the candidate’s sponsors in the case of a baby or young child). With a baptism, as the rector, I am stationed at the center of the action, but another of the most moving things I experience in church is watching lay unctioners anoint and lay hands people who have come to the rail seeking healing prayers. Sometimes they know why someone has come to the rail, and sometimes it may be someone they don’t know at all, but they make the sign of the cross with the blessed oil and whisper prayers I cannot hear.
Watching church members care for each other stirs me in a way that watching a livestream or a slick video does not. And sure, I also find God in sunsets and birds and flowers and snow, but I consistently have spiritual experiences in church, whether watching a child mimic an older child in prayer, or breaking bread a parishioner baked over my head, or pressing the body of Christ into the hands of someone undergoing a loss.
For the first couple weeks of this month, I worked on a “developmental edit” of Blessed Are the Barren returned to me from Eerdmans. After being accepted for publication, manuscripts generally have three phases: a developmental edit, where much of the book may need to be rewritten. Once the developmental edit is set, the book goes to copyediting. I used to work as a freelance copyeditor myself years before ordination, ensuring consistency in books, following a particular style guide. The final step in the process is proofreading. Writer Heidi Haverkamp has said that we better like the books we write because thanks to these processes we have to read those books many times before they are published.
I’ve been reflecting on how this editing process is something like church. Church is not only about community: it’s about God, and worshipping God in community. Together, we try to become our best selves, something like the way editing prunes a book into its best self. Church makes us more beautiful, helps us adhere to a rule of life akin to a copyeditor’s style guide. Church asks us deep questions that help us discern our best selves.
In church, we return again and again to the Bible, the mysterious and sacred text which we can never fully know. Just the past two weeks, for example, looking at the Gospel of Luke, we heard in church about the Good Samaritan, which has me pondering neighbors. Is church just a neighborhood? Each morning I take two- to three-mile walks in our neighborhood, because exercise is increasingly important in my cancer recovery. The other morning, I encountered a little girl running to catch a bus, but when she saw me, she stopped to show me the ribbon in her hair. (She still made the bus.) A mile later, I saw an elderly woman and her senior dog come out of their house, both beaming with joy and brimming with life. These spiritual experiences lift my heart, but in church I view such encounters through the lens of the scripture of the day. Through Jesus’ life, and death, and resurrection.
As a preacher, I am blessed with hours to wrestle with several Bible passages--stories, psalms, letters-- every week. While having weekly deadlines is hard, I cannot express my gratitude for getting paid to dig into these texts again and again and write about them before proclaiming something about them that speaks of the relationship between my parishioners and Jesus. The best part for me is the conversation that springs up after the sermon, something like how the best part of this newsletter is getting to hear from some of you afterwards.
In church, in a community, we wrestle with larger questions as they apply to us as we walk through difficulties and share in joys in each other’s lives, trying to help each other put God in the center. Sharing our lives like this is something like editing.
Do you participate in a church, or are you one of the many who have been hurt by the church or who have left during the pandemic? I’d love to hear from you.
Blessings, Elizabeth
What I’m Reading
In Between Places by Lucy Bryan. I have so much to say about this fantastic book and worry that this little blurb will be too long! Here goes: I first encountered Lucy Bryan’s work in the Other Journal in 2018 via the essay The Weight and Wonder of Everything We Do Not Know. That essay is included in this collection along with so many others (and it has a lot to say about church!) Her prose is fantastic, and her metaphors dazzle—e.g., from the essay “Trail Time”: “I am hardly a decade older than she is, but each of those years has cropped the margins of my map.” Or from the same essay: “A millennium is a mountain’s yawn.” All of the essays revolve around nature. I didn’t want to set the book down so also bought the audio book for my walks, and she reads it herself, which I loved. Highly recommended!
Jesus and John Wayne. This book was recommended to me by a parishioner, and I’d also heard about it from my friend and writing partner Dana, who lives near Grand Rapids like the author. The book details the rise of evangelicalism in the U.S. Since so much happened in this area in the 1980s when I was growing up, comparing the book to my own experience fascinates.
Search by Michelle Huneven. This amazing novel has so much to say about church! Describes a Unitarian Universalist search committee seeking a new pastor. Tons of books I’d put on hold at the library came in while I was working on my edit and I returned most of them unread, but I devoured this one. While the UU beliefs were wildly different than my own theology, the parts about church and community and our differences gripped me.
My Body is Not a Prayer Request (review below) by Amy Kenney: I reviewed this for the Christian Century. See below. I can’t wait to tackle John 9 in Bible study next month with this book in hand. The review was a bit embarrassing for me to write because I realized how much I still don’t know about ableism.
What I’m Writing
I’ve been focused on my book, so mostly sermons this month, but one review I wrote a while back posted:
Book Review (Christian Century) My Body Is Not a Prayer Request
Sermons:
What Are You Doing Here, Elijah?
Jon Mathieu from Christian Century interviewed me about my recent review. I misspoke several times in this piece—maybe that shows what life is like without an editor. Despite that I loved meeting Jon and chatting over Zoom and am excited for the ways he is trying to connect with readers of the Century as community engagement editor.
I have heard good things about Jesus and John Wayne, although I am hesitant to actually read it because I find Evangelicism often so triggering. Was it hard for you to read it? I have a hard time regulating my emotions around some things and it makes me just not want to even go there even though I’m sure I will learn a lot. I hope that makes sense!
I was nervous doing healing after 2 years. I thought I would have lost that connection but I didn’t. It was Gods work I was doing I realized. I was not in charge. How could you not minister to these who come to get closer to Him.