If you’ve ever searched for a church home then what I am about to tell you will likely feel quite familiar. You might find yourself in my story, both grinning and crying for the truth of it all and for those reasons, I have overthought every word, possibly failing to share the most vulnerable, most tender parts that belong only to me. I imagine your search for home also includes some tenderness that is tucked away deep inside of you. My hope is that together we find a balm and a renewed hope for the journey.
So tell me, are you a pastor?
The question came from a couple sitting in the row behind us a few weeks ago, after we’d shared the eucharist, after we’d passed the peace of Christ to one another, right before we slipped out the door to head home. We’d made small talk before the service, answering the normal questions—Are you visiting? Where are you from? Are you Anglican? What brought you to Apostles today?—but nothing deeper than the surface of water. And the question threw us. It wasn’t in our script. It wasn’t a question we’d anticipated so we had not decided upon a reasonable answer to offer.
Thad grinned and went in for his usual handshake, but evaded the question by asking a question. I froze, wide-eyed, while they offered a few sentences in response to Thad’s question before they asked again, Are you a pastor? This time Thad froze, grinned, and said nothing. He looked at me and I looked at him and he answered with the most ridiculous response I never thought I’d hear:
I was a youth pastor in my early twenties.
I excused myself to the bathroom, almost laughing, but mostly fuming. A youth pastor in his twenties?! I knew why he’d said it. It was a truthful answer that would likely not invite ten more questions. It was a quick exit, a way out of a conversation that would likely go to places we didn’t want to go just yet. But really?! That was the best he could come up with?
I’ll spare the details of our ride home, but forty-five minutes in a car sitting with the fullness of a life, our shared life of pastoral ministry, seemingly reduced to one sentence made for a heavy trip.
Thad’s evasion in responding to their question with something more holistically true was not born out of a desire to hide the truth, rather it was born out of the deep desire to be wholly loved in the context of our whole story. His truthful, short answer was a safe offering given the context of the question which, in hindsight, was truly not a question. The couple was asking Thad to affirm what the Spirit had already revealed to them.
This past Wednesday, after an afternoon of yet another round of decision making, I quietly waved my white flag of surrender letting Thad experience the full joy of making the final purchase. After signing all the papers, we slogged our way through rush hour traffic around Raleigh before calmly pulling into the church parking lot for a get-to-know-Apostles interest meeting for those discerning membership.
We are discerning membership for the first time in nearly twenty years. We are discerning what it looks like to belong to a church body as congregational members with no positional leadership. We are discerning God’s call on our lives and imagining how we fit. We are feeling the weight of experiencing a new tradition of our Christian faith and wondering if can learn a new way to swim in God’s eternal stream. We are bursting with new wine, quite certain what is in us cannot be fully expressed without a new wineskin in which to be poured, yet wrestling with the logistics of belonging to a people and a place some distance away.
But this season of discernment has also been a reckoning with the passage of time.
The last time we looked for a church home, we did so because we’d just moved across the country to attend seminary. We were twenty-five with three kids under the age of three and although the rose colored glasses were as broken as we were, we were still full of youthful vigor and foolishly hopeful. Life was a little more ahead of us…as were three more children.
Now, we are middle-aged people with four kids all but launched into the world. The other two kids are right past the age where assimilation into a youth group is the ripest. We have vocationally served the local church since 1997 and have lived to tell the story. We’re a little wiser and a little more tired. We’ve wandered around in the wilderness and our faces have been wrinkled by the scorching sun yet still glow, set ablaze by the God who met us there. We’ve failed miserably and failed beautifully. We’ve buried parents and grandparents and friends. We’ve learned to live in decaying bodies and still praise the hands who formed them; our bodies are magnificent and medicine is a gift. We’ve got roots in places we no longer live and fallow ground in the places we’ve lived the longest.
It is hard to begin again in your mid-40s. Our embodied souls tell a glorious, complex story and the thought of beginning again with a new people in a new place where no one knows us is both exhilarating and terrifying. It’s hard to meet new people and mention your kids when in all likelihood, they’ll never meet half your family. It’s hard to tell the truth without feeling the need to fill in all the gaping holes with the gore and glory of it all. It’s hard to graciously entertain kind questions when the truest answer you most desire to give sounds something like a twelve hour audio book told in your own voice, tears and laughter in all the appropriate and inappropriate places.
It’s hard to let yourself be known again. Even when you know that the pathway to love is paved in vulnerability and truth telling. And especially when you know you live a good, hard story and you most long to tell it, in its entirety, over and over again.
I could write another thousand words on the kindness of God, but the mosquitos are still biting here in NC and I’m writing from my picnic table in the front yard. It’s been six years since I wrote from this worn perch. Writing here today has felt like a coming home.
But I also want you to know that on Wednesday, when we were invited to walk the halls at Apostle on our way to the fellowship hall, I had a feeling of coming home. The church exists in a remodeled office building with pockets of outdoor spaces in between the buildings. Trees make green spaces between the concrete where people gather. I wandered down a few children’s ministry halls and the framed photos of the volunteers and children caused a sweet rise of emotion in my chest. The halls and classroom spaces looked like the spaces Thad and I created at Fellowship.
Tonight, the kindness of God looks like driving away from a new church, after dark, under the cover of twinkling lights at North Hills and feeling nostalgia flood my body, not in a longing sort of way but in a shimmering sort of way,
An invitation reminiscent of the last time we searched for home.
We’ll do the slow, intentional work of building relationships over coffee and dinner. We’ll join a small group and pour cheerios in the Garden. We’ll tell our story without the script, without the fear of being known and unloved.
We will begin again, trusting that in God’s time, the body of Christ will call us who we already know we are.
I do love your words! I hope for good, rich community for you and Thad!
It is always good to find a new church home. Remember it is full of sinners and to focus on worshiping God first. Anything else is a blessing.