A Word from Laura: Familiar
Western’s worship ministry team met last night. On the agenda was a letter from a group concerned about low in-person participation, with a request to return to familiar patterns of Sunday morning church.
The worship team made a proposal for the session this Tuesday, including worship times, publicity, and opportunities for dialogue. Everyone on the team loved Western church, the community we share, the Spirit that comes alive in our worship. I suspect each of us on the team longs for something about the way church used to be.
We all long for what was familiar. At the same time, as I pay attention both to larger church trends and to many of your comments, no matter what we do, Sunday mornings of the future will look different from Sunday mornings of the past. Fewer people in our larger community join in-person groups – whether for church or work or shopping or meet-ups. As Westerners, some of us have moved out of the area, some of us no longer drive, three of us have found churches closer to home, while four of us have returned to in-person church after being gone for years. Newcomers continue to find us when in Foggy Bottom or surrounding neighborhoods. Conversations around our intercultural and antiracist vision have led to new approaches for our Personnel and Finance Ministry Teams; I anticipate that these kinds of shifts will continue.
Our vitality as a congregation comes from how we find God in the midst of these changes. As one of my mentors said recently, for any church to try to replicate being church a la 2019 would miss out on the things God has been doing in the meantime. We who loved Western then (including myself!) will need to grieve what we miss to embrace the new things God is doing: connecting us on-line and across time zones, providing opportunities for significant conversations around response to Christian nationalism, creating dialogue about the impact of racism on Western’s mission and ministry.
We are in the midst of a new familiar. It’s important that we find enough of what is familiar to us as Westerners to embrace the new things God is doing. We will remain committed to being a “courageous community, living into God’s love and justice” – people with a passion for what is prophetic, who value good questions over pat answers, who have hearts for diversity and whose faith remains connected with those whom society marginalizes.
And for the foreseeable future, our in-person worship will be smaller in size than 2019, and therefore harder to remain anonymous. We will need to find new ways to practice Christ’s commandment to love one another, whether we are in-person or on-line, long-timers or newcomers, finding ourselves at the center or at the margins of the church’s ministry. This might look like introducing yourself, asking what brought someone to church, or inviting them to join you in writing postcards, serving at Miriam’s Kitchen or Calvary, or having a cup of coffee after worship.
This Tuesday night, I am going to ask the session to consider our new familiar. What plans for the fall, including our Sunday morning schedule and communications both within and beyond our congregation, will ensure that we have done all we can to make things as familiar as possible, so that together we can embrace the new kind of familiar God has in store.
In truth, God’s been about the new familiar since the beginning. Each time we baptize someone, we welcome them into a new family. “Family” is at the root of “familiar.” I hope and pray that, together, our new familiar grows us into Christ’s way of being human: belonging to each other as siblings in the human family.
Grace and peace, New Family,
Laura