Story and Community

On a snowy January morning, twenty-five people (ages 6-86) gathered in the chapel at St. Dunstan’s Church for a homemade breakfast and a Christian formation program, Growing In Faith Together (GIFT).  I had created GIFT the year before with input from dozens of parishioners, and on this Sunday, each piece of the program was led by different people.  A mother and her teenage son provided breakfast.  A fourth-grader led the prayers and worship songs.  A drama teacher led a response to the Gospel story with physical action as well as discussion.  And an elderly couple offered to clean up.

This program, exemplified in this morning, demonstrates two important parts of ministry: story and community.

As Christians, we automatically engage in storytelling during Sunday morning worship. We read our faith stories from the Christian Bible and the preacher responds to those stories in her sermon.  We also tell our individual stories during the week: to coworkers, family, friends. But we often overlook that both sets of stories are interrelated and need to interact for our faith stories to be whole. Our personal stories are built upon the stories of the community, which starts local (in time and place) and expands to all times and all places.

Each person’s story is unique, while still having similarities with other people’s narratives.  Just like each individual is unique, yet we are all equally beloved children of God.  I visualize this concept by using a Venn

diagram.  Each person is a circle that overlaps with the other circles, and is only engulfed by the enormous circle that represents God and includes all things and all people.

In a similar visual, all people’s faith journeys also overlap.  No person’s “line” is straight.  No person’s line is always headed in the same direction.  No person’s line is exactly like anyone else’s.  But the different lines cross.  They mirror each other in places.  They join each other for stretches.  Each faith journey enriches and affects other people’s faith journey.

Humans are naturally drawn to communities.  My job as a lay pastor is to create a space where genuine communities can grow and flourish.  Where a person can continue her journey for awhile with other people who love and respect her while also introducing her to disparate ideas and giving her a place to grow and change.  Where being unique can occur side-by-side with being a welcome part of the group.  

Testify

This morning, we became congregationalists.  During Sunday worship, we participated in the liturgy that made us official members of First Congregational Church, UCC.

As I was trying to describe what our part of the service would be like to our son, my husband told him that he would have to  spontaneously testify to the whole congregation. Now, that was just my husband trying to be funny and falling flat, but it did spark a discussion about what "testifying" means.

I said that there are two ways the word testify is used. One is in a court of law and means to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The other way is in a religious sense. It is also about truth telling, but the truth isn't recounting facts correctly.  It is about describing your own truth about your experience of God and Mystery.

My family has always belonged to progressive or liberal churches because of our belief that Jesus was all about social justice. But, liberal churches often also lean more toward the head than the heart. They are afraid of testifying, of unruliness, of the unknown of Mystery and the Holy Spirit.

I'm still very uncomfortable with testifying, except to safe audiences. I'm trying to overcome that.  The story of God moving in and throughout my life is much more exciting and interesting than what I did last weekend.

Repent!

A friend's church is hosting a six-week study of the biblical book Acts of the Apostles.  Like with exercise, I know that I will be more faithful to reading the Bible if I'm doing it with a group.  I love this church's pastor and the congregation's acts of social justice, so I asked my friend if I can tag along.

Today was the first day, and our discussion centered mainly on how inclusive the first two chapters of Acts are, with side-notes about how un-inclusive we as humans still are.  But what caught my attention, even though it was a passing comment, was verse 2:38.

Everyone there was reading from the New Standard Revised Version of the Bible, which says,
Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit..."

But I am reading from the "Seek, Find: the Bible for All People" which is a Contemporary English Version of the Bible, which says,
Peter said, “Turn back to God! Be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, so that your sins will be forgiven. Then you will be given the Holy Spirit..."

They pretty much say the same thing, but I was struck by the use of the phrase "turn back to God" instead of "repent".  The pastor mentioned that repent comes from the Greek metanoia and means to "turn around". He then physically showed us that it is...

• To turn from a life facing the wall, to a life facing people.
• To turn from a life of destruction, to a life of creation.
• To turn from a life of isolation, to a life of community.

The pastor continued on with verse 39, which is also pretty cool, but I sat and pondered metanoia some more.  In starting to write this blog post, I did a quick search for the definition, and I didn't find anything that quite fit with what I was looking for.  Most of the dictionaries referred to a spiritual conversion, which doesn't have the right connotation.  

I (we) don't just repent or turn around once in our lives, which is the connotation of the word conversion.  I (we) repent daily, hourly even.  I get turned away from God often, and so I often need to "turn back to God"; I often need to repent.  I probably needed to repent several times just while sitting in the Bible study inside a church.  I don't even want to think about how often I need to repent in other more profane settings.

So, I will try from now on to mentally translate the word "repent" to the phrase "turn back to God".