Walking to Church on a Summer Evening

Honest talk on faith formation, parenting, and what discipleship looks like from here

I don’t know how else to begin this letter than by admitting what is true. It has been a brutal couple of weeks with regard to church. It doesn’t matter that it’s July, or that the Canadian wildfire smoke has finally cleared and Lake Michigan’s waters are finally tolerable. It doesn’t matter that I planned to “take July mostly off,” whatever that even means. Regular life always has the final say. Now, as ever, it refuses to be ignored.

And so, it is July. The sky is bright, the air alive. My alley-side garden is cranking out green beans and future-pickles (my favorite name for cucumbers.) Silas just finished a week of camp. Cal is doing serious manual labor every day. The blackberries are ripening. And I have taken meds twice this week for what I can only assume is a stress-induced migraine.

The irony is that I began the bones of this note to you two weeks ago, when there wasn’t a flash of trouble glinting against the horizon. I’d just come off of a highly enjoyable conversation with my friend Tim Soerens, along with a couple of well-timed podcast interviews, where the common thread was along the lines of, “Tell us about your church experience because it seems kind of weird in a really interesting and unexpected way.”

{Barb turned 99 this year.}

So that’s what I wanted to do, and to my great relief, my feelings about this (and my answer to that question) are not victim to the recent complications.

To start, some SMUMC Cliff’s Notes:

• We traipsed into a tiny, aging church at the end of our street approximately twelve years ago, probably five minutes late, and with a trail of tinies.

• The intensity with which we were instantly loved and embraced was the answer to a question we hadn’t even known to ask.

• Pastors have come and gone. Drama has come and gone and come and gone and… we are still there.

• This beloved community has no programming. As in, zero. In this year of our Lord, 2023, we have no youth group, no children’s classes, no anything. We have zero chill, zero cool, no church directory, and we decorate with felt banners designed and constructed in the 70’s and 80’s.

• On a good Sunday, we have 90 people in our sanctuary. Roughly half are men and women from the Work Release facility located in our neighborhood. (This means they are incarcerated, on an ankle monitor, living in a jail-type facility, but allowed to attend church and work.) The remainder includes a high volume of white-hairs, a few snow-birds, and a smattering of singles and young families.

• Our “worship team” consists of Rich, who is a full-time manager of an auto parts store and a smoker, a fact I only mention because I believe it has enhanced his voice (one of my favorites of all time) and I’m positive it has enhanced his connection with our broader community, but more on that in a moment. I told Cory years ago that I could endure most things at church as long as Rich stuck around. On any given Sunday, he might have another person singing with him. If not, he has been known to call out to the congregation, “Who wants to come up here and help me?” and he will hand the other microphone to anyone up to the task.

• Our baptismal is a plastic horse trough on wheels, set up in the fellowship hall, which happens to be disastrously…carpeted.

• Last weekend a drunk driver drove through the South wing of our sanctuary, where many of our work release friends sit, which is totally unrelated to all of this, but timely and worth mentioning.

Over the past dozen years there may have been a handful of days where we didn’t carry a knot of concern over whether all of this was a big mistake, particularly as it pertains to our children. Cory and I have struggled to imagine a faith experience for our kids that doesn’t include a youth group. (For both better and worse, youth group was central to our teen years.)

For years, we have stewed, worried, and occasionally doubted our choices.

I don’t think there is a formula for parenting, or for spiritual life, as much as I have been led to believe otherwise. As with most significant life decisions, we exist in the flow of surrender and gift. True, we have lacked many of the things that formed the foundation of our early spiritual formation like a youth group and even just a robust community of peers. This thought alone, left unattended, has a long history of blooming into panic. As we zoom out, we remember that now, in adulthood, we’ve had to work diligently to untangle many of those foundational certainties passed down to us. Maybe they’ll avoid some of that, too? (While this is my hope, I imagine the work of deconstruction and embodying one’s faith is never circumvented.)

You would likely be astonished by the biblical facts my kids can’t regurgitate. Because there was no Awana, no VBS, no Bible quizzing, no Sunday School, and because we were often treading water in those early years, they lack some of the basic Biblical literacy Cory and I had firmly stitched to the corridors of our memory.

But it would be wrong to say they have not been “discipled.” We are always being formed by the company we keep.

It hasn’t looked like a workbook, a mountaintop experience, or a WWJD bracelet. It’s been raw, personal, easily-overlooked and impossible to ignore. The discipleship of St. Mark’s UMC snaps the limits of generation, stage of life, class, and race. Cal, Ruby, and Si have grown taller under the stained-glass light of gut-level honesty, bone-deep desperation, and incalculable hope.

They have watched people they love relapse on meth then return years later to a prodigal daughter’s ecstatic welcome. They’ve strung the Christmas lights, because someone has to do it. They’ve been called upon. Doted on. They have embraced a rare vision for endurance, a love song for the long haul, sputtered through the 1990’s sound system along with praise songs that were cool when I was eleven.

Permeating the commotion of our restless congregation, they have learned to recognize the still, small voice of God, moving within and among.

{Ruby’s spontaneous baptism}

{My kids have gotten cards for every birthday and special event. Barb (above!) sent this one for Cal’s graduation, along with $20. We still have no idea how she got ahold of his yearbook photo from last year.}

They say rain is coming later tonight, and I believe it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. The future-pickles are counting on it, scrambling up the trellis to fight for the first drops. Is it bad? Is it good? It’s expected, as boring and miraculous as a faithful crew of misfits who keep showing up and allowing ourselves to be knit together by the strong ties of love. (Col 2:2)

Today, despite the angst percolating around me and the uncertainty of ahead, I stubbornly choose to have faith that it has always been enough.

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Listen in to my conversation with Tim (It’s personal, heartfelt, meandering in the best way. I tell a bunch of related stories.) If you’re at all into these conversations, please connect with Parish Collective, the host of this “Fellowship Hall” (best name!) conversation. This group of folks has been a lifesaver for me in recent years.

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As a reminder, I write books for a living! :) My church community manages to sneak into every one of them, including Start with Hello, which is currently on sale on Amazon for less than $10 including shipping. You can also grab the full-fat version from Bookshop and support local bookstores, if that’s your thing! This book continues to find her place in the world and it is an absolute delight. There are book clubs springing up in coffee shops, churches, employee lounges and parks. I’ve never received more speaking requests for one of my books. It seems we’re ready to say “It doesn’t have to be like this. Let’s learn a better way.” For those of you who haven’t read it yet, there’s never been a better time! (The audiobook is read by moi!)

And here’s a tiny (favorite)church/neighbor excerpt from The Ministry of Ordinary Places:

“When I moved to this neighborhood, I remembered this verse often. I thought my job was to go around and make sure all of my neighbors came to know God. This was my mountain. Over time, I lost my intensity with this. People kept moving away, and I wasn’t really seeing any results. Now I am wondering if the miracle Jesus is calling down is for me to stay here and keep loving my neighbor, little by little inviting them into the family of God. The mountain isn’t my neighbors. The mountain is me.” - My neighbor Bubu, one of the wisest men I know, “Uncle Bubu” to my kids

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One last thing! We’ve reached the juicy middle of Fat Tomato Summer over in my paid “Secret Soup” community. Want to join us? Each week we gather there (with randoms on our secret IG account) to find ways to focus this summer on actual, real-world abundance. It’s been a Godsend in the midst of the knock-abouts of (waves around) all of this.

It costs just $5/month (cheaper for the year.) Your free to cancel afterward or stay on. We always have a good time! My paying partners are what help keep this whole thing afloat. (Thank you!) As always, if the fee isn’t in the cards for you, just reply to this email and let me know. I offer free subscriptions for anyone who needs one.

Love to every single one of you!