Update (& Invitation!) from Pastor Nate: March 2023
It’s kind of hard to believe that this past weekend marks three years since I crammed every cubic inch of my Scion with clothes, books, and a can-do attitude, loaded my dog Calvin up, and hit the interstate headed north for six hours to come to this city, to this community, to you, and to kick off the adventure of walking alongside you to be your pastor. Three whole years!
I had every intention of hitting the ground running, of diving into ministry with y’all, of sinking deep into furthering the work I sensed God was calling us to do together. I had every intention of putting down roots in the community and finding friends and doing the whole thing. I had every intention of living into all the blessings that this new beginning promised.
We were gonna do the thing!
And we all know what happened immediately afterward; I’m not even gonna make a cutesy little joke about it. COVID hit, everything shut down, nobody knew what the heck was going on, and everything was weird and bad and chaotic for the next couple of years, and it still kind of is.
We have all been through a form of trauma. We have all experienced disruption and chaos and fear. And here I was in the middle of it, trying to figure out how to do the thing while preaching to an empty room and a camera for fourteen months, figuring out how to try to walk alongside you as you’re going through all of this while I’m also going through it, too. It’s been hard, yeah.
But truth be told I think that we’ve actually done pretty well navigating these experiences together as a faith community; we’ve all heard of church splits and closures and conflicts and anxiety and burnout—almost like the very things we’re experiencing on the inside are manifesting in the larger body of the communities we participate in. (Let those with ears to hear, hear!)
We have, by the grace of God, managed to continue in ministry together. We’ve grown and deepened our relationships with one another and in our spiritual practice. We have deepened our understanding of our faith and experimented with new ideas and new practices. We have become more comfortable with discomfort. We have undertaken some radical discernment work in moving toward a new future for our facilities.
And, for better or worse, we have held our post as a faith community for some of the most vulnerable folks in our city, thanks be to God.
That said, there’s no denying that the last three years have left their mark on our life together. I have found myself gazing back on the last three years, noticing all the ways that the tangle of my own stress, fear, and anxiety, and my own experience of these collective traumas we’ve all been through have impacted my relationships, my work, my calling, my covenant with you all.
I suspect we would all see something of the same thing if we were to look at our own actions and behaviors over the past three years, the brilliant beams of hindsight illumining them as only hindsight can.
All that said, the reality is that we are in a very different place as a community than we were when I first said “yes” to your invitation to come be your pastor. We have gone through it.
And so, might the time be right for us to ask the question, “how do we begin again,” after the ravages of the pandemic, after the changes in our community, after all of it?
What do we want to be born into? What post is ours to hold? What great longings of this community keep us awake at night? And what keeps us afraid to venture after them into the uncertainty and possibility of the night of new birth?
These questions are exciting, and risky. And sometimes it feels like it’s only safe to ask them under cover of darkness. Yet the good news remains: we can begin anew, right here, right now.
Each Sunday during Eastertide, which lasts from April 16th through May 21st this year, I am inviting you to sit down with me face-to-face after worship on Sunday mornings to dig into these questions together.
We’re going to have some focused, heart-centered conversation around who we want to be as a community post-COVID, what our values and priorities are for the next year, and what concrete actions we are going to center our efforts and resources on.
What we’re not doing is discerning a new mission or vision or statement or something like that. I am talking about figuring out what our sandals-on-the-ground ministry as friends of Christ is going to center on for the next season. I am talking about answering the question, “who are we now, and what do we do?”
If you want to be part of that conversation, I encourage you to join me. And as we approach the mystery and majesty of Holy Week, I invite you to join me in prayer (and fasting, if that’s possible for you) as we prepare to listen to the Spirit’s longings for our community. I’m so grateful for where we’ve been, and I’m thrilled for what lies ahead.
I’ll see you Sunday.
- Nate