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.