That Story

I've been thinking about how my old church did community so much better than the church I go to now. One reason for this, I think, is that at my old church, the community was formed around a story. The story is this: Jesus Christ died on a cross to save us from our sins. If you accept Jesus as your savior--accept his gift of grace--you will receive eternal life.

But there are other stories as well that hold this community together--most importantly, the stories of the people who live in this community, and celebrate in this community, and grieve in this community. There is the story of Kathy, for instance, who died suddenly two years ago, a forty-year-old mother of three boys, an aerobics instructor, who was watching her oldest son's basketball game when she collapsed and died almost immediately.

Her funeral was packed. Everyone from church was there, of course, but also the women from her classes at the gym, her kids' teachers, people she'd worked with over the years. The pastor did a marvelous job. He made people laugh because Kathy made people laugh. He didn't need to make us cry, of course, because we were already crying. The music was glorious--particularly important, since music was one of Kathy's great joys.

The stories I tell from this time, however, aren't so much about Kathy, but how the people in this church took care of her family for months afterward. People organized to feed the family for several months. The women organized a cleaning team to go in once a week, which we did for two or three months, until Pete found a housecleaner. There were sign-up sheets for picking up the boys after school, taking them to their practices and music lessons.

People did all this because they loved Kathy, and they loved Kathy because they knew her. They knew her stories. I'm more and more convinced that in order to be a community, we have to know one another's stories. The church I used to go to was fairly small, and it was only fifteen or so years old, so many of the families who go there have been going since the beginning. So there are not only the stories of individual's lives, but also stories about the life of the community.

My new church doesn't have a very strong community, or at least not one that's visible to the eye. The longer I go, the more involved I get, I do see more connections, it's true. But to an outsider, it must seem like there's no center. The church itself is almost fifty years old, and there are plenty of folks who've been going since the beginning, but their numbers are dwindling. The stories that once held the community together don't get told. Maybe that's one sign of a community in trouble: no one tells the old stories anymore.

This is a congregation that's been through hard times, excellent priests followed by mediocre, not to mention the splintering that seems common to the Episcopal church these days, as the more conservative members trot over to the Anglicans in Chapel Hill every time the Archbishop of Canterbury opens his mouth. As people drain out of the congregation, whether it's because of a priest who ends up being an evangelical (he didn't last long) or Gene Robinson going into rehab, the energy drains out as well.

But I wonder, too, if the lack of community is because this is not the most Christ-centered church in the world, nor the most bibically-centered. Recently, I sat in a Sunday school class where a man stated, "The Old Testament isn't important, Paul's letters are just commentary; no, all we really need to read in the Bible are the four gospels." My thought was, "Way to make Christianity as small as you are, bub." But this man's comment probably expresses a lot of folks' views on the Bible--it's difficult, it's archaic, huge swaths of it are irrelevant, oftentimes it's boring; let's ignore it the best we can.

The problem is, the Bible is, among many other things, a treasure trove of stories that offer us both a way to re-vision the world as well as give us common ground as a community of believers. If you only know it partially, you are bereft of metaphors and images that help you communicate your faith as well as connect you to the generations of believers who came before you.

My main problem with my old church, wonderful as it was in many was, was that its version of God's story seemed too small. The focus was on personal salvation, which ultimately struck me as narcissistic. I also could never get on board with the notion that if you're not born again as a Born Again Christian, then off to Hell with you. God's got to be bigger than that, doesn't He?

So, regretfully, I left that church, hoping to find a community that had a more generous way of telling God's story. What I've found at my new church are a lot of folks who don't seem particularly concerned about God's story. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly people who are deeply concerned. But--and forgive me for judging--there do seem to be a lot of folks who are more invested in the traditions of the church than whether or not the story behind the traditions actually has something to do with their lives.

I suppose I could leave this church, too, but you get tired after awhile of leaving churches and looking for new ones. The perfect one doesn't exist, anyway, so why not work with what you have? Right now I'm in charge of the Pre-Teen group, which meets every other month. Yesterday, as I sat in church, I thought of a project idea: Have the kids do oral histories of the oldest folks in the congregation. The kids can ask people about their childhoods and their work lives--and also their faith lives. Maybe we can start being story catchers at this church. Maybe we can get hungry for stories. Maybe we can remind ourselves that God seems awfully interested in getting His point across in stories--and maybe that will make us pay more attention to the stories He tells.

But first things first: Let us listen to one another's stories. Let the old folks talk about their lives and times, and let the rest of us listen. And then, maybe, we'll start to love each other a little bit better, start to take care of each other because we are, as Paul tells us, members of one another--and we'll have the stories to prove it.