Why would someone who is not sure what they believe or even if they believe in God want to practice Christianity? I was introduced to some answers to that question more than twenty years ago as a seminarian serving at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington D C. St. Mark’s had, for many years before I arrived, been honing their welcome of skeptics and agnostics into the life of their congregation. A recorded message on their phone had led me to check out the congregation as a place to do my field education training. The message welcomed people with big questions and with little or no belief, as well as “more conventional” Christians. I was intrigued and showed up the next Sunday. I am still intrigued by their message of inclusion and an emphasis that I now understand as one that shifted the standard for participation in the community from belief to practice. The congregation was full of people who had no interest in discussing their beliefs, but who were committed to serving the poor, promoting the arts in dance and theatre, and who met often in small groups to discuss life and meaning and growth through engaging life’s deep questions in community. In that community, I met lots of people who were wary of traditional “church” and many of its ideas about God, and who practiced Christianity in ways that enriched their lives. Many of those folks had stories about having been wary of or even hostile to religion and were glad now to have found a place in the church.
So why this blog?
I still meet people all the time who ask me if it is ok to participate in the life of the congregation if they don’t believe everything they think they are supposed to. I know people who tell me they come to church at least in part because they have found a place where the clergy speak openly and often about all being welcome, regardless of what they believe. Sometimes, those who have found a home in such a welcoming congregation ask for copies of sermons to send to friends who are, for one reason or another, wary of Christianity. Maybe they had a bad experience with Christianity as children or they were pushed to affirm belief in doctrine they couldn’t accept in good conscience. Maybe they have only been exposed to Christianity in the news and in popular culture or they surmise that Christian belief is all about miracles and magic and ridiculous sounding, outdated explanations for how the universe is ordered. I hear those kinds of stories and more from people who are cautiously approaching the church for reasons they sometimes can’t name. This blog is for those people, for their friends and relatives, for anyone you think might benefit from reading some part of the discussion around what is for me a strong sense of call to speak encouraging words to the religion wary.
What to expect
I hope this will be a place of conversation and welcome. I will post at least once a week, sometimes more often, working from stories that some parishioners will have heard more than once, from reading what others are writing on these topics, and from what I am learning in the life of the parish. I will be writing about the language of Christianity and the concepts conveyed in our language, about creeds and the prayers that shape our Eucharist. Words like sin and salvation have begun to chafe and I’m not sure anymore what the Church means by redemption. I can’t imagine God consigning anyone to hell and when I said that recently in a sermon, I was met during the exchange of the peace by a man in tears who told me he had been waiting 75 years to hear that sermon. I want to say out loud things many of us have been waiting to hear. I hope some of you will comment on these posts and suggest new topics. You can expect that I will be honest about my own beliefs. I won’t try to defend creeds or doctrines, and where I have trouble with the Church’s language or teaching, I will say so. I want those who are wary of religion to know that it is possible to live in this place where all the ideas don’t line up easily and that some of us choose to stay here anyway. It was meeting someone who had decided to stay anyway that fueled in me a strong sense of call twenty years ago and that gives this blog its name. That encounter is one of the stories I tell over and over again. It’s a good story.
When I arrived at St. Mark’s, it was their practice to provide a time for parishioners to respond after the preacher had finished preaching the sermon. In one of the first sermons I heard there the preacher had talked about Jesus asking his disciples who people were saying that he was. One of the people who stood up to speak that Sunday said she had been coming to services for several weeks. She went on to say, “I’ve been coming and I don’t know if I believe in Jesus or even in God, but there is something here I need, so I’m going to keep coming.” Her words have stayed with me all these years. They’ve helped me welcome people who approach the Church with serious doubts about “conventional Christianity.” They’ve helped me when I have wondered about my own beliefs. And they have led me to the deep conviction that the Church must always provide a safe place for such honesty, a safe place for those who show up in our communities saying simply, “there’s something here I need.”
