The question appears not to be finished with me yet. Why do I stay?
I stay because any communal body should be judged, if it must be judged, by its horizons and strengths alongside its past and present. Just because a community fails at being true to its calling does not invalidate the calling nor, en masse, the community, let alone the truth either professes. I stay because somewhere we need to learn how to hold one another in compassion, trust across doubt, and to honor the dignity of every human being in a creation yearning for compassionate care as well.
Where better to practice than in a community with so very many opportunities to practice compassion in the face of ignorance, love in the face of fear, forgiveness in the face of injury? The Christian church today is rife with such things, such opportunities for practice; probably always has been.
So a story. I remember seeing a leadership role land at my feet in a group gathered to discern processes and eventually dossiers for calling an executive leader into the community. As I looked around the circle, hoping madly that someone else ‘fit’ better for this role, I felt a sinking reality in my stomach. I knew I had many of the gifts necessary to do this work, even if it wasn’t my desire or much of a felt-choice. I remember thinking to myself, “I wish, for once, I worked for an organization in which I could be proud, in which I could feel worthwhile work unfolding. Just once.” As you can surmise, I was not feeling that at my primary institution of affiliation, and I was despairing that I was now closely associated with a second institution of little else but faults, foibles, fallenness. There was a bit of Rocky-ego simpering along…”I coulda been somebody, Coach. I coulda been somebody.” Instead, I was limping along with an arm of the church, with a leadership role I could not ignore or deny. Sigh.
We gathered, discerned process, garnered dossiers to read and listen to. Eventually, after a couple months, a consensus began to form clearly around one individual, who indeed appeared to recognize a felt-connection with the calling, with us as a local arm of the Body of Christ. I felt satisfaction and even some excitement about the prospect. Phone interview went swimmingly. Face-to-face interview did as well. We decided and he accepted. At the very last minute, however, a snag appeared that required the group as a whole to extend its heart in trust or to decide that trust had already been broken and rescind our interest. The group gathered at my home, to listen together, to have one more cellphone conversation—on mobile speaker phone, low-tech option for our purposes—and then decide what we were being a/Asked to do. The group decided that we were to extend our hearts and minds in trust. Even with the snag, the pathway was clear, with consensus.
And then I felt something I had not expected to feel at all.
I felt pleasure, satisfaction, such wholeness in participating in a communal body that sought grace before censure, trust before a test, communal wisdom amidst individual doubt. I felt a kind of pride in living into a relational way that I know is scarce outside in the overculture today. I was reminded that this ‘way of being the web of relation’ is a (gospel) kind of foolishness that the world scoffs at regularly, and with good reason. It is a fool’s way. It garners you nothing you can call ‘your own’ in the market. It offers your ego nothing in the push and pull of professional standing. From the outside, it looks like a consumer-suicide or a pansy-willed acquiescence to low-standards. And perhaps it is that sometimes. But sometimes, just sometimes, it is the way in which the world’s order is transformed. It is the way in which we can learn how rich life is in relationship, regardless of how the world quantifies or qualifies it. It is the way we know there is something beyond what we can see or fear.
Granted, this way of being human together, strong across doubt, wise amidst risk, is less and less traditioned in how we live, communally, today. It is certainly less common in the “church,” which should not surprise. Just like the rest of us, the church is so captivated most days by the culture that it cannot see its own path or calling to live a different wisdom, a different way into the world. But its traditions and its practices attest to a different way, a deeper logic (to go back to my youthful C.S. Lewis days), a wisdom way to be human beyond expectation, for good.
I stay because I learned this ‘way’ in the belly of a church as fallen as any Presbyterian confesses it to be. I stay because I’ve heard those outside the church be just as mean as those inside the church. I say we need all the traditional resources we can muster to challenge inhuman behavior, wherever it be found. The church has incredible riches we’d be foolish to ignore.
And so, I think any Body ought to be judged, if it is to be judged, by its horizon, its celebrations, its strengths, as well as its obvious faults. It’s easy to poke at the foibles of anyone and anything—just turn on the news and you can see how to mimic that behavior. It is much harder and more worthwhile, I’d argue, to acknowledge and accept the faults and foibles as one’s own, holding the woundedness of others in a compassionate way without defense or reaction.
How else will healing happen? How else will the World to Come come?
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