Finding Sanctuary Outside of the Sanctuary

How do you respond to bad news?

When tragedy happens, what do you do? What words do you say when someone tells you they saw the person who assaulted them? What do you do when your partner is experiencing intense depression and you can’t help them? Or when your friend’s parent has less than a year to live? What do we do when life is just too heavy?

What do we do when our people are hurting?

People respond in different ways. What is miraculous is how quickly individuals come together in crisis. While it’s unfortunate that it often takes a tragedy for a community to form, there is power in the compassion that everyone has in that unity. There is power in sanctuary.

When we hear the word “sanctuary,” many of us think of the room with wooden benches and stained glass windows in a church, or a nature sanctuary.

sancŸtuŸary \ˈsaŋ(k)-chə-wer-ē\

noun

a place where someone or something is protected or given shelter

the protection that is provided by a safe place

the room inside a church, synagogue, etc., where religious services are held

(Merriam-Webster)

What about sanctuary in people? Think beyond the cinder block walls of worship communities. The buildings would have little meaning if it weren’t for those who fill them. There is sacredness when friends and family members come together, forming a space for those who are hurting to be filled with healing.

When I think about finding safety in community when trauma happens, I also think back to the conversations about how church is changing. What is church when we really get down to it? Looking beyond the building walls, it’s that community of people coming together to provide safety, comfort, shelter, and support.

Recently, I’ve taken to going on walks with a friend of mine. There’s sanctuary in being able to spew out words to another person and not feel judged. That feeling of having another person next to you along your path, literal or figurative, is a motivation and a comfort as you push through the sludge of life.

Can walking outside be a form of church? That’s what church is about, right? Being with another person, or people, as you experience something that’s bigger than yourself. I like to think that church doesn’t just happen in a sanctuary; the feeling of sanctuary can be found in many places, or people. Walking outside, or sitting in church, alone or with someone else, there are multiple ways to feel sanctuary and comfort.

Making New Ways Out of Old Ways: Alternative Churches

Growing up, I was raised ELCA Lutheran and attended Catholic school through high school. I got the church experience from both sides. Sit, stand, pray, kneel, sing, sit, stand, sit. While both churches I went to differed in many ways, they had some things in common. For the most part, both services were very traditional.

Many people, including myself, associate the image of “church” with large sanctuaries inside a large building, with the pastor or priest wearing vestments (the fancy clothes you usually see them wearing during services,) sometimes incense, wood pews, a number of crosses and images of Jesus.

For some people, this traditional style of church is intimidating.

This intimidation has affected the church as a whole in America. Primarily, the Protestant church is seeing a rapid decline in membership. A leading response to this decline happens to be the rise of religious Nones. More and more, people are becoming less associated with church because of their disinterest, discontent, or discomfort with it. Declining numbers suggests that traditional ways of doing church are becoming less effective as they have been in the past.

For most, it isn’t that they don’t want to go to church. In fact, a lot of people have said they miss it. More and more, people are “shopping” around for services that are less traditional. There are places that offer more contemporary, alternative styles of worship. A couple examples are right here in the Twin Cities.

Places like Humble Walk are a response to the traditional forms of church. They’ve heard folks’ discontent with traditional styles of worship and styled a new kind with what they felt was most needed. While Humble Walk is more community-based, Mercy Seat, a Lutheran church in Minneapolis, is more liturgy-based. While maintaining a sense of ease and inclusivity, Mercy Seat uses chairs with backs instead of pews. Pastors Kae and Mark don’t wear the fancy vestments, but they do wear the white tabby collars you see most pastors wear. The music is entirely written and composed by the people performing it. There are babies and old people and everyone in between. The worship space is in a community center that’s shared with four other churches.

What is distinctive of the feel that Mercy Seat provides is the openness to questions. Their mission as an urban church is to provide “a creative response to a growing need for critical-thinking, grace-based Christian orthodoxy.” With a firm commitment to the arts, as well as children, Mercy Seat is what I would call alternatively traditional. It maintains the liturgy you would expect to see at a Lutheran church service, but throws in some spunk that keeps the punks-at-heart interested.

Churches are moving away from more traditional styles of worship and developing new ones. They recognize that some folks are looking to maintain some traditional aspects of worship, while others need to steer clear of it all together. They are acknowledging the feelings we are having about doing and being in church and are responding to us in alternative ways that say, “Come. Your questions are welcome here.”

"Un-vogue" to be sad: Depression and the church

This past Sunday, my university hosted a forum discussing the intersections of spirituality and depression. The keynote speaker for the forum was Reverend Dr. Monica A. Coleman. She is an associate professor of theology at Claremont School of Theology in Southern California and she speaks openly about her experiences with bipolar disorder in her blog and lectures.

In her discussion, she reflects on how she’s often felt that it’s  “un-vogue” to be sad in the Christian tradition and that “ we are too blessed to be stressed.” Over time, she has come to realize that God doesn’t need us to be happy all of the time. God gets it because God created us.

To hear that we are theologically created in God’s image with all of our flaws and shortcomings was a relief for me. Dr. Coleman’s words were more than academic for many of us at the forum. It resonated with me as someone who lives with depression and anxiety. In the times that are harder than most, a reflection that said that God is totally cool with how we are, as weird as we are, was needed.

In addition to finding solace in God’s affirmation of us, one of the points that Dr. Coleman brought up was the impact of community. For her, being in community is sustainable and something that brings her out of a depressive state. So how can religion be responsive to those experiencing mental illness?

Community. Remember when I talked about koinonia? As human beings, we have been created in community with other living things. As Rev. Amanda Lunemann, associate pastor at Hamline Church, told me over coffee, “we are not created to be in isolation.” It is not conducive to our already ailing brain chemistries to be isolated. Beyond the rising virtual connections in technology, there is a deep hunger for physical, face-to-face human interaction in spaces that are non-judgmental, often flexible with our schedules, and honest.

As church communities, how do we create those communities? Rev. Ruth MacKenzie of First Universalist Church in Minneapolis argues in her sermon that there are qualities of culture that we need to pay attention to: warmth, respect, beauty, expression, uninterrupted time, honest assessment, kindness, and connection. Demonstrating these qualities will not instantly cure someone of illness. However, it can provide a space where we can heal without judgments.

For Dr. Coleman, a part of creating a culture of welcome involves churches doing a better job of talking about mental health by first recognizing that mental illness is not a lesser form of ailment than physical illness. Churches can demonstrate this by ministering to the wholeness of each person in sermons, mentioning trigger warnings if dealing with more intense topics, and providing safe spaces that allow for tough questions in and outside of church.

An example of the qualities mentioned earlier is seen in churches that talk about mental illness with compassion and sensitivity. We need to talk about mental illness, affirm the human soul, and validate our friends’ and family members’ struggles as just as real as any other. In churches, we can do that in the pulpit, we can do it at coffee hour, and we can do talk about it one-on-one. No matter how it happens, we need to bring to light all levels of suffering.

To say that churches offer no room to talk about mental illness is false and over-generalized. A more accurate claim is that churches need to become better at providing spaces that are mindful of all human experiences, visible and invisible. We can be in dialogue with one another. There’s already a stigma with mental illness and frankly, we need to move beyond our fear of it. In order to rid ourselves of that fear, we must recognize mental health as something just as important as physical health. 

In our connections with one another, we must minister to the wholeness of each other, allow for personal expression, and provide uninterrupted time, warmth, respect, and kindness.

Weird Humans Together in Community, Otherwise Known As "Koinonia"

I had the honor of spending last week with a group of fellow students and one staff person from my school in San Francisco doing service work in areas related to queer and intersecting identities. We stayed in a hostel in the Tenderloin, which is essentially Skid Row of San Francisco. There was overstimulation from a new environment and experiences, but I think one of the hardest things we faced as a group was the overwhelming presence of people experiencing homelessness on our walks to and from the sites we volunteered at.

Having lived in the Twin Cities for the majority of my life, the presence of people experiencing homelessness has been made clear. However, I’ve noticed that we’ve been conditioned to move past the people on the medians holding up cardboard signs with “God Bless” written on with sharpie. We ignore their humanness.

In San Francisco, we learned quickly that in order to cope and grow with the overwhelming presence of people in need of food, shelter, health services, and even the simplest “Hello,” we had to see them as humans. We had to realize that everyone we encountered was a person. We made it a point to ask how their days were going, we listened to their stories, we were pained when they shot us down with profanities.

We prepped meals for and served them to people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, we canvassed for San Francisco Women Against Rape, we cried when we felt we weren’t doing enough, or even too much, we ate food, we cried some more at cat videos, and we had nap puddles. We were outside our comfort zones from the moment we walked from the transit station to the hostel at 12:30 that first night in the Tenderloin to the sleepy moments we left.

All of it was in community with one another. (Even the moments of some dire bathroom emergencies.) Our little community was intentional in our service to not only the nearby neighborhoods, but also to ourselves.

In Greek theology, the term koinonia (koy-no-nee-uh) means communion, Eucharist, to be in community or fellowship with one another.  Koinonia is a key theological term. It isn’t restricted to the walls of a church. It pours out into the streets of the Tenderloin of San Francisco, it happens in the middle of reflections after a long day of manual labor, when we want to curl up into a ball and turn into an introverted gremlin, our people are there with us and they bring koinonia.

As I talk to people about whether or not they think church is a worthwhile institution, I’m finding that the biggest thing people yearn for in terms of worship is a sense of community. And not the kinds that gather together, is silent during worship, mouths the Our Father, and moves on with their daily lives. I mean the kind that moves together, that feel together, that acts together in service, all while simultaneously uplifting one another in our confusion, doubt, frustrations, fears, and heartbreaks. Intentional community.

Koinonia is not a simple thing to create.

Nadia Bolz-Weber explains in her book that as her church House for All Sinners and Saints (HFASS) aged in years, “the lack of growth in church attendance was maddening.” Later, when the congregation grew, she was still frustrated when she found that a large portion of new members were from the ‘burbs, driving into HFASS because it was new and more authentic and cool.

To have a community of weirdo hipsters is awesome because many of us have felt excluded from the normalcy of the world and we finally have place to be ourselves. We create a new kind of normal. The problem that might bring up is the restriction of other people’s “normal.” To be part of a community that has endured being frowned upon by social norms, it’s pretty hypocritical to exclude others because “they don’t look like us.”

How do we include other people’s kinds of normal? By realizing that there is no set definition of the word “normal,” by removing prejudices of people’s experiences and embracing them for what Nadia calls the greatest spiritual practice: simply showing up.

The point of intentional communities is the first two letters of “intentional.” Everyone is “in,” everyone gets their own letter jacket, and everyone is welcome to join in on the team cheer (be it the Our Father, a team cheer, or the Beyonce song that plays over and over…)

Tell the people in your communities that it is good that they are there. Learn from them, listen to them, grow with them. Acknowledge and embrace their humanness.

Wait, What Even Are Nones?

If you’re like me, the first thing you think of when you hear the word “none” is Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act. Yes, Whoopi played a nun in a movie, but that’s not the kind we’re talking about.

Someone who identifies or is categorized as “none” is someone who is not affiliated with any place of worship or religious/spiritual practice. So let’s say you’re taking a survey and a multiple-choice question pops up. It asks “Which church do you belong to?” and lists off options. If you don’t belong to any of them, you may select “none,” as in “none of the above.”

Nones are not a new phenomenon. However, there has been a rather stark increase of Americans who are not affiliated over the past 50 years. According to the Pew Research Center, statistics taken from the U.S. Census Bureau’s August 2012 Current Population Survey show that just under 20% of US adults are religiously unaffiliated. A large number of nones are young adults (18-30ish) and the number is growing.

For some people, me included, the phrase “none” carries connotations that I do not like. It’s a vague word that suggests that someone who is a none is someone who holds no religious or spiritual beliefs. And while that may be the case for some, it isn’t the case for all.

In their book, Robert Putnam and David Campbell explain that it’s important to clarify that nones are people who are “less attached to organized religion than other Americans” while they also “do not seem to have discarded all religious beliefs or predilections.”

There are many reasons why the percentage of nones is rising in the United States. Putnam and Campbell offer one example that historically, a number of churches have been deeply infused with politics, and vice versa. That makes some people uncomfortable. The topics of abortion and women’s rights, 9/11, and homosexuality and same-sex marriage, are a few topics that make people uneasy when religion is thrown in.

One of my goals for this conversation of nones is to come up with a new term, as well as think about whether a term is even necessary, or appropriate. It sort of reminds me of gender fluidity. A number of my friends identify as gender non-conforming and queer. That’s putting it simply because many of us feel that there just isn’t a word in the English language that articulates how someone identifies well enough. The same goes for how some people practice religion. Maybe I’m Buddhist today, even though I was Christian yesterday. Tomorrow, I could have no idea what I am. 

There have been some religious typologies that a lot of people have thought of. My favorite so far is “Seeker.” But is that specific enough? I’d love to hear your reactions to “none” and offer any thoughts on it in the comment section below.

A Humbling Walk in Questioning Faith

I am very overwhelmed.

I’ve been going to church services for a couple weeks and it’s been great. A rabbi gave a sermon at one service, I painted a tiny wooden ninja at another. At the Sunday evening service I attended at Humble Walk, something happened. As most of you know, I’m not the most expressive person when it comes to talking about my feelings. But what I experienced at Humble Walk Lutheran Church was everything having to do with feelings.

Whether it was the art gallery space that we were in for the service, the painting of the wooden ninjas beforehand, the snacks, the kindness of everyone, the fact that Pastor Jodi Houge was in jeans, or when she talked about just how simply weird church is in her sermon, I’m not sure. It was probably a combination of all of those that lead me to trying to hold back tears in the back row in my comfy chair. I was in the midst of the one of the best practices of community I’ve witnessed in a long time. It is that sense of community I’ve been waiting to either stumble upon, or have thrown at me.

I’ve never reacted emotionally to a church service before.

My girlfriend and I joke about how we can’t be seen doing cute things because “it’s not punk rock” and that’s sort of how I feel about talking about church. And as a young adult in America talking about church, I realize that it’s rare to hear of other Millennials talking about it as well. I get nervous about talking about my project and this blog because so many people I know and am friends with get uncomfortable with just the mentioning of the word “church.” I get uncomfortable too. It’s become such a taboo thing to talk about that people are leaving the church as an institution to go elsewhere, or nowhere at all.

More and more, scholars are finding a rapid increase in religious nones, or those categorized as “not affiliated” to a place of worship or tradition. This makes me a little bit anxious because of my current plans to attend seminary and eventually become a pastor. 

If people aren’t going to church, is what I want to do relevant?

As a young adult, and maybe as someone who you could call a "none", I want to find out why people are leaving church. I want to learn what people are doing to try and bring us back.

 

That’s a question a lot of faith leaders are asking these days. In response to that, a lot of churches are changing how they do services while maintaining their identities as faith communities. In an interview I had with Rob Fohr, Youth Catalyst at the Presbyterian Mission Agency, he argued that churches need to continue to be who they are and not change in ways that people will like them more (that sounds a lot like some of the relationship advice I got in high school.)

This whole experience is forcing me to come to terms with the fact that if I am to work in a church in my future, I need to start talking about it now so I don't have a breakdown in front of my community members in the middle of a sermon. I need to become comfortable with church again. With going to services and just simply saying it. Church.

Doing Things Differently

I’m going back to church.

This past February, I visited a service at Hamline Church United Methodist. I wasn’t with family and it wasn’t for a holiday. I went by myself just to “get back in the swing of things”. I knew it was going to be different than past worship experiences for me, but I was shocked at how nervous I was when I sat down in the pew. It was a similar environment compared to the sanctuary I grew up in, but at the same time I felt a little uncomfortable being there – not because of how the greeters treated me (they were more than hospitable) – but because I simply have not been to a regular church service in what feels like forever. It was sort of like how you feel on your first day of school, or first day at a new job: finding your way around the building, the closet door you just opened is not the bathroom you thought it was, where you sit, when you stand, do I genuflect?

What happened at that service was a radical thing. A rabbi gave the first portion of a two-part sermon. The associate pastor, Amanda Leunemann, presided for the second half.

In the years that I’ve been a member of the Lutheran church and gone to services, I don’t believe I have ever sat through a sermon that included a leader from a non-Christian community.

It was awesome.

This semester (and hopefully continuing into the summer) I will be studying various kinds of responses from Protestant faith communities to the decline of membership. Alternative forms of worship, whether it’s the style of the building, or how the service is designed, will be one of the main focus points I will be visiting and talking about.

I will also be focusing on the religious category “none”, or folks not affiliated with any faith tradition or place of worship. I believe that while “none” is a practical category, it can mislead one's understanding by suggesting that those categorized hold no religious or spiritual beliefs at all. My goal is to explore other terms and categories and discuss whether or not a new one might be better.

The inclusion of non-Christian individuals in our services, and more importantly, our daily lives, is critical in our current society if we are to build a “beloved community.” If we are to truly be in communion with all of our neighbors, we must include those who might not always hang out with Jesus, but might instead read the words of the Hebrew Bible or the Qur’an, or those who worship multiple deities like in Buddhism, or even those who are either not sure what they believe or are sure they hold no religious beliefs. If we are going to do that, a lot needs to be changed about how we “do” church in America.

This is important because, as a young adult in America, more and more I'm learning of people my age (and older) leaving the church. This is important because church shouldn't be intimidating, abusive, or hostile. This is important because we should feel comfortable asking the hard questions and not feel like we're being spoon-fed answers. This is important because in a society that is as culturally diverse as the United States is today, we need to see that reflected in our local communities, including church.

A rabbi giving a sermon at a United Methodist place of worhip? Now that’s an alternative.