The Big Tent

My biggest challenge in ministry right now, 3 1/2 years in, is that I don't understand my parishioners.

I love them. But God help me, I don't understand many of them.

That sounds harsh, I know. Let me qualify it.

The short story goes like this: I came to Christian faith from a liberal Presbyterian upbringing, having spent four years doing justice work and living in a poor neighborhood in New Haven, then three years at Union Seminary. Read: I am an upper middle class, overly educated, liberal Protestant with an activist's disposition.

There are upper middle class, overly educated, liberal and activist Protestant churches out there, where I would be a duck in water. But I don't work in one of them. I work in church where people come from crazy, disparate places. I work in New York, where no two people out of the 50 in my subway car have the same background.

So, you say, diversity is a good thing, right? Yeah, sure. Especially in the abstract--when you're looking for reasons why you love New York ("oh, I just LOVE the diversity we say while our New York neighborhoods grow increasingly homogeneous..."). But when you're trying to discover and articulate universal truths together, diversity creates, um... huge challenges.

When people have radically different backgrounds and life experiences, they learn different vocabularies of faith and belief, they have different emotional and psychological profiles, different senses of the self-in-the-world, they learn different taboos, have different relationships to the "institutional church," and embrace different norms about ethics and politics.

In many, if not most, churches, there is a span of difference that is mediated by core shared convictions, usually convictions pertaining to the Bible (inerrancy, something to be respected but not really read), or Jesus (the only way, a great teacher), or denominational identity (Presbyterian), or a set of social commitments (which are too often eerily similar to the Democratic or Republican party platforms).

But at my church, the shared conviction that unites us is a bit different: I would call it "non-judgment." Throw in "the human capacity for growth and change" as a topping. Not much more, really, serves to unite us.

Great stuff. Important for a faith community. But at bottom, it doesn't do much to mediate the vast differences in the people who walk through the door. We are an amazingly diverse, welcoming, gracious place to be. Almost everyone is welcome. But without a clearer, sharper set of shared premises, I find that it's often very difficult for me to identify with my congregants. I have congregants who want to share with me how deeply they were affected by The Secret, or Eckhart Tolle--both of which I've read and had real problems with. I work with folks who come to church regularly and confess they will never privilege Jesus over other manifestations of God--which I do, without shame. I have other folks who love Joel Osteen or Norman Vincent Peale, both of whom I respect, but neither of whom I find spiritually nurturing.

I don't lay the blame for the difficulties at the feet of my congregants. I blame the narrowness of my own upbringing--my Ivy League intellectual elitism taught me to distrust popular Christian preachers like Peale and Osteen... I'm still working to overcome that. My Presbyterian elitism taught me to look down on new age religion and self-help spirituality... I'm only now beginning to see how helpful many of these sources can be in opening people to consider the very IDEA of God.

It is a fascinating thing to be a spiritual teacher in a church where there is no consensus about the core curriculum. We don't have the a traditional set of teachings that we can employ reflexively to discount or de-value some of the things our congregants learn in their lives. We don't have a narrow "truth" upon which we focus. Our God language is spacious... and it means that I have to work hard to meet people where they are--even and especially when their religious experiences and sensibilities might lie far outside my own narrow band.

The thing that keeps me humble and grounded and committed to my work is that while I don't understand my congregants, I'm quite sure they're still trying to make heads or tails of me. And they love me just the same. And you don't need understanding to love people.