June 29, 2014
Good morning. Thank you for having me back.
I imagine it won’t be a surprise to many of you that I’m going to talk about the changes unfolding in the life of Friends of Jesus Church, one of yourChurch of the Saviour siblings.It’s timely that I bringthe teachingat this moment, because just over two weeks ago, the Thursday after Pentecost, our church had its Commitment/Recommitment liturgy. During that service, six folks who have been involved in Friends of Jesus under the traditional Church of the Saviour practices were joined by four new members, who were coming into membership under our New Foundations practices. The ten of us joined together in claiming our belonging to this specific and unique part of the Body of Christ, agreeing to belong to each other for the year ahead.It was a very important time for our community, and many felt the presence of the Holy Spirit with us that evening.
I want to share some thoughts about how Friends of Jesus came to this moment, and what it means for us now and moving into the future. I want to name up front that this is not any sort of definitiveaccount of this story. My account is bound to reflect my own angle of vision, and as a woman with white skin privilege, and also someone with a long involvement with the Church of the Saviour, I can share onlywhat this process hasbeen for me.
I’m not sure how many of you know about the recent history of the Friends of Jesus. The short version is that, by 2010, the church had been struggling for some time with a sense that energy for the church was running low. Whatever the reasons—and it must have been complicated, twelve of the church’s fifteencovenant members left suddenly, and mostly at the same time. Clearly, the life of the church could not go on the way it had before.
The remaining three members discerned a new call for the church: that it be a multi-racial church, focused on racial reconciliation. But, given the C of S church’s structures, nopeople of color had come into covenant membership.So would the church try tocreate a multi-racial church with completely white leadership? Though not then a full member, Harold Vines had worshipped with Friends of Jesus for many years, and his wisdom and the maturity of his Christian journey were known and respected. He was asked if he would co-pastor with Joe Collier, and after careful discernment about whether this was call for him, Harold agreed.
So God had, as God so reliably does, made a way out of no way. The “dry bones” of a de-energized Friends of Jesus would now live on in a new way. It’s worth noting that this moment of resurrectingthe church was itselfbased on a departure from the traditions of Church of the Saviour—around leadership coming from covenant members.
Not surprisingly, Friends of Jesus Church, though resurrected, had a number of challenges facing it. Some were those arising from trying to supportweekly worship, classes in our School of Christian Living, and all it takes to welcome and support those who come—but now with many fewer members. Other challenges have gone to the heart and soul of how this community would now understand itself and its new call to racial reconciliation. Perhaps none of those challenges has been more complicated and thorny—but also essential, as the questions around church membership.
In mid-March this year, after many monthsof discernment, the mission group that has been holding the life of Friends of Jesus together createda New Foundations document, which, first of all, included a fuller statement of our call to a ministry of racial reconciliation. It also contained eleven marks by which we would be known as a community,and a new approach to membership in the Church. It’s come to be known informally as the Yellow Paper, [Copiesavailable, ask me.]
Our statement of call was scripturally inspired, and by one passage most particularly,
2 CORINTHIANS 5:7-12, which we read earlier. Here is how we used that scripture to name our own call to reconciliation:
The Friends of Jesus Church is called by God to the ministry of racial reconciliation--first reconciled to God through Christ, and then given the ministry of reconciliation. Across different races, classes, cultures and histories, we come together as a Christian community to live into the message of God’s intention for justice, peace, and new creation in our own lives, individually and collectively. We will endeavor to bring this message into the world around us in all its dimensions (including social, cultural, political, and economic).
One of the essential questions for us has been how to weave a beautiful wholeness from the strands of this call to a mission of racial reconciliation, andthe strands of being a church “in the tradition of the Church of the Saviour”. In our group, there are those who have been deeply shaped by long journeying within C of S, and whovalue and are deeply grateful forthe support given by its practices and understandings. Others have come much more recently to the Church of the Saviour tradition, and have not had as deep groundingin it.Instead, they have brought the fruits of their experiences in other church traditions, whose practices and understandings have shaped and supported our journeys just as much.
We honor the tradition of the Church of the Saviour, and we recognize ourselves as living within the same Spirit that has enlivened the CofS churches for so many decades. There is a line from a Friends of Jesus pamphlet writtensome years back, that fits: our present life emerges from the Church of the Saviour history, but we are not bound by that history. In creating the foundations for our church life going forward together, we refer to its teachings and practices as a source of guidance and inspiration.Our hope is to embody the deepest wisdom of the C of S tradition, as well as the wisdom embodied in the traditions of the African-American church, and additional church traditions over time. We trust we will find fitting and sturdy vessels for this rich mixture of wisdom from our different heritages.
Our process has a built-in dilemma, however. The new life of Friends of Jesus unfolds within the household of the earlier version of the church, which embodied traditional C of S structures and practices since its founding. So, you might say that Church of the Saviour structures had something of a “home court advantage” in the group’s deliberation. It’s a different kind of conversation when it begins within a context of there being “a way we’ve always done things.” However unconsciously, the ways that things have always been done gets a bit of a sense that it’s the right way.
The structures and practices we think of as “in the tradition of Church of the Saviour” were developed in response to the spiritual needs and concerns ofpredominantly, highly educated, middle-class white people in the 1960s and 1970s. Friends of Jesus was founded a bit later, in the mid-90s, and it sought to be welcoming to a larger range of people, so its embodiment of the tradition developed in some different ways, but in its core practices like membership, it was traditional.
I’d like to turn to Scripture at this point, and look at the story being told in the two passages we read from the Acts of the Apostles. Recall, first, that one of the readings on Pentecost, just three weeks ago, was Chapter 2 of Acts. Ittells of the great moment when the Spirit descended upon the apostles, empowering them to speak in such a way that everyone in the diverse crowd gathered around them could hear the Good News in their own language. 3,000 people were added to their number that day, and all met constantly to hear the apostles teach, to share the common life, to break bread and to pray.
But by Chapter 6, only a short while later, the new community was confronting the need to change the shape of its life together. The apostles’ way of community leadership was no longer enough. Interestingly, the difficult situation that surfaced the need for changeinvolveddifferences in how well the needs of different segments of the community were being met. Grievances arose from those on the margins of the new community, ethnic outsiders—that is, the Greek-speaking Jews who had joined the new movement. They brought their concerns to those who were the inside-insiders, the Apostles, who spoke the language of the Jews, who had been around for a long time, had a history, and were now exercising power to shape the life of the community: in other words, to those who were privileged in that context. While the community had expanded and become more diverse, the Apostles had not kept up with the new conditions and new needs. Now the apostles did respond effectively-- by empowering those at the margin, the Greek-speaking Jews, to themselves choose seven of their own to address their needs as they saw best. This was the Church’s first recorded act of institutional “doing with” rather than “doing for.”
Their decision for empowerment created a new reality. This new reality in turn led to additional unexpected unfoldings in the community’s life. Among the seven Greek-speakers were Stephen and Philip. Stephen’s powerful words and actions brought on his own death, and at the same time, the beginning of violent persecution of the church in Jerusalem. At that point, Philip left for Samaria, and began a powerful ministry to an ethnic group further on the outside by far than the Greek-speaking Jews: that is, the Samaritans. Perhaps dismayingly to at least some in Jerusalem, the Samaritans accepted the Good News in great number. Again, the apostles confront a new situation, again involving increased diversity, and once again are faced with the need to change their practicesand structures to meet the new reality.
Fast forward 2,000 years. Picture mentally therealities of the world of Adams-Morgan, the District of Columbia, and the nation in the 1960s and 1970s when the traditions of C of S were becoming condensed. Now picture the changes in these same worlds 40 years later. The magnitude of the changes is, I suspect, much greater than we usually hold in our awareness when we are thinking about the structures and practices of our Church of the Saviour communities.
One of the crucial ways in which the world then and the world now has changed for us, particularly those of us who are white, is in the depth of our understandingof how racism has been at the very core of the political, economic, and social life of our nation from the beginning. We are increasingly aware of how racism’s pernicious expressions and consequences have been passed down through the generations, and inescapably affect all of our lives today.
We at Friends of Jesus church have challenged ourselves to change our structures and practices to respond to that understanding. In the same ways as the apostles were called to shift their understandings and practices in Jerusalem, Samaria, and then in all the places that Paul’s mission activities challenged existing understandings and practices, so we are called to shift our understandings and practices now.
There’s not time today to talk about the ways we’ve approached weaving the strands of our call to racial reconciliation with the strands of our Church of the Saviour tradition, and what we were trying to accomplish with the Yellow Paper. It has taken conversations over months, even years. Recently, we’ve had a number of extended sessions, lasting sometimes 5-6 hours, as we allowed ourselves all the space we needed to really hear each other into full expression of what our deep values and purposes for our church life were, underneath whatever differences we were having in the moment about strategies.
This process has definitely not been without pain. Right now, the ten of us who just committed to membership are reading an important book on forgiveness by Desmond Tutu, as a way of coming together to build community after this time of crucial shifts. Tutu says, “All real growth proves to be astoundingly painful and profoundly beautiful.”Part of the pain is that we are doing this work within the dominant culture whose social relations and practices reinforce white privilege—an important additional “home court advantage. So while we’re doing this difficult work together, we’re also trying to be accountable for growing in awareness of the hidden assumptions of doing things the ways most familiar to white culture. That’s hard.
We have experienced the beauty, as well as the pain. My experience is that there is a different way that we come to know each other when we are working across differences—when we are committed to showing up again and again, and again, staying present to the dilemmas, and to each other. When we journey together that way, a different kind of relationship develops: you begin to know who is in this for the long haul, even when in the short run, we’re getting on each other’s nerves. For me, whenI mess up and then own up, and then that mess is forgiven, it’s sheer grace.
This process of creating a new foundation for our life together is definitely an ongoing process, and I suspect we are going to be at it for quite a while. Even now, after just a couple of months of living into the New Foundations, we’re already considering ways we might want to approach some things a little differently. There is a great gift in this: it allows us to be clear that, unlike Moses, we have nothing that is etched in stone. Ours is a work-in-progress, whichwe know will unfold organically from our lived experiences together.
Someone asked me, a while back, if I had any advice to give any other C of S church that wanted to begin a journey in a direction like ours. It took a few minutes for me to work out the advice that I shared: “If you want to follow our path, the first thing you need to do is to get 90% of your core members to resign at the same time.” While I first wrote this as a laugh line, now as I think about it, it’s solid advice in a wacky way. It might take that level of newness to disrupt the ‘home court advantage’ I’ve been talking about.
What I have shared today is the Friends of Jesus journey. I trust you at 8th Day will continue to seek the mind of Christ as you live into your own continuing discernment of God’s call on your community. God’s blessings on all of us. Amen.