An alphabet for the evolving Church (part 4 of 5)

Even before the pandemic, I, like many of you, had begun thinking about how the Church needs to shift in order to be Christ’s body in the world. The twenty-first century has offered Jesus followers new awareness around individual and collective power (both having and lacking it), big questions to ask and challenges to overcome, and an increased number of tools for connecting with and on behalf of others. Covid-19 stripped us down to the studs, allowing us to see what is essential in a faith community. And now we as the body of Christ are moving through lingering exhaustion, fighting an illness that keeps popping back up (though thankfully with more ways to mitigate it now), and wondering which way to go next.

I don’t think any of us has answers about specific models of church. I know I don’t. But I think the characteristics of a flourishing church in 2023 are coming into focus. This month I will be sharing my thoughts on them via an alphabet of the evolving Church.

This week: letters P-T. (See A-E here, F-J here, and K-O here.)

Practices. Doing is more powerful than telling. Educators know this. It’s why they get their students to put new knowledge to work, so that it will become part of them, so that they’ll have access to it when they need it most. What are the practices in your congregation - both in and beyond worship - and how are they shaping people? Where do your church folks sense permission to try different ways of putting faith into action? What rituals do you need but not yet have to support emerging disciples? Our practices as a congregation either deepen our expressed values and beliefs or undermine them.

Questions. I have - and have always had - a lot of questions. As a teenager I refused to walk the aisle and request baptism until I found a church that would welcome my wonderings. I know I’m not alone. After all, we live in a world of mass violence, a crumbling ecosystem, and structural inequities, all of which deny various expressions of the image of God in the good world that God made. Church is the very best place to ask big questions and think on them together about how to live in spite of (informed by?) all we don’t understand. God can hold our questions, and yes, our doubts.

Responsiveness. Speaking of the world’s ills, the Church can be neither silent about them nor inactive in partnering with God on solutions to them. It’s not the job of an individual congregation to put a lot of energy toward solving them all. That’s a recipe for burnout. But it is the job of each church to pick one or two areas in which their faith enacted could make a dent in those problems. Congregations cannot be self-contained entities in which folks come for Sunday morning reassurance, then leave feeling unbothered or powerless to impact their wider communities.

Storytelling. We are people of story. Our story starts with God turning on the world’s lights and giving us life. It continues across generations and centuries, and still it goes on. The Church needs to tell that story, weird and disturbing parts and all. (Those weird parts are a big part of what draws me in to hear the rest of the story!) And, the Church also needs to do a couple of other things: listen deeply to people’s beautifully diverse narratives and help them connect their stories to God’s sweeping epic.

Truthtelling. Related to questions, responsiveness, and storytelling, we as the Church need to speak the truth in love. We don’t have all the answers. There’s a lot of work to do for God’s will to be done on Earth as it is in heaven. Life can be hard and wonderful, sometimes at the same time. Let’s lead with that and invite people to join us as we sit with all of the messiness and figure out how to move forward together, with the inspiration and courage of the Holy Spirit.

Next week: letters U-Z.

Photo by Robert Stump on Unsplash.