Posted on by PeaceBang

The Cruise Ship: Grieving Changes in the Church

Hello kittens,
I have just returned from a restful week in Key West, Florida, most of which I spent floating in water and reading The Tiger’s Wife and Chris Hedges’ The Death of the Liberal Class. I ate delicious fish tacos, saw a wonderful drag show, made some new friends, drank rum drinks, toured Hemingways’ house, rode a bike around, and slept.

What I did not do was work on my book, blog or accomplish what I wanted in terms of sermon planning and prep, although I did do some of that.

I find that I am just very sad right now. I am sad because in my time away, I opened myself up really wide to the truth of my ministry, and what I could not push away any longer is the grief I feel at the ways the institution of the church is changing, or maybe just dying. I want to say evolving, but I don’t know if that’s honest.

This article by the president of my denomination helped me identify what I am feeling. I am a super huge committed fan of social media and use it every day to connect with people in my congregation and far beyond. In many ways I am a poster girl for how the new media can create opportunities for community-building among strangers. I feel that the relationships I have developed with you are precious and real, and I have had those feelings validated ten-fold when we have had the chance to meet and fellowship in person.

But I love the local church so much. I love the local church’s traditions, I love its architecture, I love its cast of characters, I love its organs and its parish halls and its altars. I love its presence on the landscape, its seasonal fairs and its parking lots on Sunday mornings. I love its rituals, its candles, its spirit when empty and when filled with people in the act of singing or praying together, or just listening. I love the incarnational, embodied reality of it. I love its kitchens, its coffee hours, its bulletin boards and hymnals. Best of all, I love Sunday mornings when parents bring their little guys up the sidewalk with insane bed head. I love standing in a din of chatting people after the service in a post-service state of zonkedness, and watching the kids zoom around playing a forbidden game of tag. I love the moment when someone brings someone else a cup of coffee. I love the sign-up sheets that signal that we’re not doing all our business electronically.

I am as adept a purveyor of the zippy Tweet as anyone, and certainly talented at writing simultaneously thought-provoking and entertaining blog or Facebook posts. I have participated in meaningful on-line worship services and I am glad they are being developed and offered. I find a great deal of hope, power and holiness in the ways that technology makes us aware of what King called “the inescapable network of mutuality” and what my own faith tradition calls “the interdependent web of existence.” But I am very mindful of the limitations of virtual connections and spiritual affiliations that are not grounded in the local church experience.

As much as I treasure the ways technology has brought us together in the Holy Spirit, and as fascinated as I am by the less traditional ways people are gathering to create religious community, I I would be lost without a living, local community to discipline my heart and attitudes. Nothing keeps me humble, faithful and heart-centered like my church, and I don’t think anything ever could. Nothing else is quite so real. Nothing else is so demanding. Nothing else brings me into a daily, living, embodied encounter with what it means to be human. As much as I love you in this BTFM community, I am painfully aware that there are thousands of you reading who aren’t extroverted enough to comment, or to connect so that I know you by name. I am aware that online, we connect in spirit and mind only, and very partially at that. In living community, I see you laugh. I watch you develop lines around your eyes. I can smell your sickness when I hug you, and I can hear, and worry about, that lingering cough. I notice the new tremor, the sudden weight loss or gain. I hear your voice change from pipsqueak to young man, and get stinging tears in my eyes when I see that you have developed a little mustache or on another one of you, a set of shockingly womanly breasts. I walk into a hospital ICU and confront the inevitability of your death. I see your transformation over several years from exhausted, bereaved widower to healthy, smiling senior newlywed.

I know that church life is boring for many, that it is inconvenient, that worship frankly sucks in many congregations, that the music is awful to many ears, and that the meetings seem like a total waste of time. I understand that there are now a thousand options online and on demand for participating in the kind of programming that the local church has traditionally offered. I know that other organizations do a better job in more comfortable and cool environments of offering much of what the church has historically offered. I know that the vast majority of people don’t look to the local church to provide a social life and that they see many church gatherings as quaint and even nerdy.

I know that religion has been a divider and not a uniter. I know that congregations have been notoriously inhospitable, dysfunctional, racist, homophobic, sexist, and hurtful places when they were covenanted to be just the opposite.

I also know that “Thy will be done” means that I need to be faithful to what God is doing in this new era with God’s people, and that I do not want to be a “Churchitarian,” worshiping buildings and traditions that may not minister to seekers of today. But there is a difference between false worship, or idolatry, and love. The Church has earned my love, respect and loyalty. It has changed my life in all good ways. The discipline of Sunday morning worship has been a challenging spiritual practice that has hammered a lot of alienation and unkindness out of me. Preparing and participating in Sunday morning worship for the past sixteen years has been spiritual boot camp for me, a commitment that I made when I realized that it would be a sacrifice, a constant challenge and a beautiful wrecking ball to my theatre girl ego.

But most of all, there is just the spiritual practice of making a point of being together in real time and in one place that I fear is vanishing. I have long said to my people that I believe that it is not an accident of fate or random occurrence that we are part of each other’s lives for this brief moment in this one location, but a sacred mystery. When my congregation gathered in 1642 and wrote their first covenant, they said, in what was a remarkably generous and open-minded expression for their time, “We shall not refuse into our society those whose hearts God hath inclyned to joyne with us for the worship of God and for the good of their souls.”

I find that as I get older, I cherish the inconvenience of church practices and traditions. I have so many choices for so much else in my life; constant opportunity to choose my own flavors, tailor my listening, watching and participating to perfect levels of individual preference and comfort, and to connect with people in a variety of ways that no longer require us to be in the same place at the same time. When I began in ministry, the phone was a huge help in keeping in touch with folks. A few years later, we had e-mail to help us organize, share information, and keep in touch. It was a baffling medium at first and we made huge mistakes with it, but now we have figured out its limitations and are completely dependent on it. Eventually, we got phones that we could take with us, and that allowed us to move out into the world and see ministry as something we could do all the time, everywhere, and with people who weren’t in the pews on Sunday mornings. We could collect messages while away from home or church, which was first a huge stress (because we felt obligated to check for messages twenty times an hour) but eventually became another essential aid in managing our commitments.

By this time, we all also had laptop computers that brought us out of our studies and into public spaces to write in. The crafting of liturgies and sermons became far more communal, as we met in writing groups and shared resources with the click of a button. I remember writing a funny, feminist version of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree about ten years ago that I wound up e-mailing to over 50 colleagues who learned about it through a (now quaintly outmoded) minister’s chat. The idea of fifty congregations hearing my story was jaw-dropping to me. I never imagined any of my work being so widely shared. Now I think nothing of it if a piece of mine is read by thousands of people online. Although I always prepare sermons in the hopes that they will minister to my own congregation, I am aware that far more people will hear or read most of my sermons than will ever hear them in person. This makes me sad, as I believe that the preaching is a living art form that requires the preacher and the congregation to be in the same space breathing the same air, but I accept and appreciate that times are changing. If my recorded or typed words on a screen minister to people I don’t know and will never meet, I am surprised and grateful.

After ministers started carrying our own little phones with us, we soon took the quantum leap into total communicative mobility with texting, Facebook, Twitter and a vast range of social media. We could travel around with our entire world in our palm, glancing down at the sound of a bell to retrieve all sorts of notes, messages, reminders and documents. I experienced this as fantastic, inspiring and freeing. It has helped me feel less isolated in the work of parish ministry and helped me immeasurably as a single woman who used to struggle with terrible loneliness. Social media has made me a much happier person, less prone to brooding, anxiety and depression. I am extraordinarily grateful to it.

And so this may be why it has taken me so long to acknowledge my grief at the ways that the church is changing. I have been so busy and absorbed with sharing ideas, talking with people in my own community and beyond about these trends, learning and writing about them, and just trying to keep up with the news. It was not until this past week that I realized, deep in my heart, that these changes personally affect me as a woman of faith, and as a church-goer.

The other day I was sitting on the beach in Key West reading a book. Every few minutes I would look up and gaze out at the ocean, watching sailboat races and smiling at the sunshine on the sparkling water. After reading a chapter or so, I looked up and almost jumped out of my skin to see a Carnival cruise ship blocking my entire vista. Holy SHIT, that thing was big. My heart almost stopped, I was so shocked. It had slid into place so quietly, this steel behemoth, it was as though it was conjured by some malicious fairy to ruin the tranquility of our pretty little tropical scene. What an imposition of ugly modernity onto the ancient elements of sun, sand and sea! I had to crane my neck way back to see all the way to its upper deck, that perfect, shining thing made of nothing natural, with no purpose in life but to bring human beings on a pleasure ride over serene waters and then home again, unchanged except for having experienced pleasure, eaten good food, soaked themselves in the sun and pool, and glided over ancient life forms that they would never see and whose habitats they would disturb and pollute in their wake.

I returned to my book, my heart pounding. When I looked up again, the cruise ship was off in the distance and a giving the illusion of being of far more manageable size.

Obviously a metaphor of some sort. What, I haven’t exactly worked out yet. But I keep thinking of him in that little wooden boat with his disciples, braving the wind and the storm, feeling the waves through the vulnerable vessel. I cherish hand-made boats made of wood, the boats that you can launch or drag on shore with one or two people, the kind that rock if the seas are rough so you know what kind of conditions you’re traveling in, and that are cozy enough to take a nap in if someone else is keeping watch. I like small boats where people know each other and can pass around one meal to share, and where you can’t help but notice if someone falls overboard, or even gets a splinter. I like boats that don’t block the whole view of creation for everyone else not on that boat.

Technology is great and the modern world is a bright and beautiful thing, potentially. I just hadn’t realized how big and sharp and metallic it all was until I got off that ship and saw it from the shore.

20 Replies to “The Cruise Ship: Grieving Changes in the Church”

  1. My internship supervisor frequently spoke of the church as a ship – that things move slowly, change takes time, strategy – a long vision. You have to steer slowly and anticipate that a change of course will take a LONG time. As you reflect today, ships actually can move along at a pretty quick clip…I’m struck by the conversation you pose here, about the grief and loss – companioned with the flurry of beautiful mission and vision posts you and others shared in recent weeks. We really are at sea these days and what rough seas we ride.

    I’m long past the denial and sadness parts of the grief, and lingering simultaneously in the anger and acceptance modes…occasionally looking forward to the dance on the lido deck…

  2. This is a profound post. I can feel that you are really struggling as we all are with the disconnects that are inevitable, whether they be virtual or face-to-face. I don’t know what to say to you. I am trying to discern what you mean when you say the church is changing. The church is always changing. Your writing is beautiful but I am adrift at pinpointing the cause of your sadness. We need to use all resources at our disposal to reach out to others, as you know. Don’t be sad. You are doing a great job in so many ways. I don’t mean to sound obvious but there is only so much any of us can do. You reach out, you are genuine, you are truthful. You will touch some and others will go their merry way. I don’t know you but I so appreciate you and your ministry. Keep on keeping on, my dear. Sending love.

  3. I sad thank you on Facebook, but I’ll say it here again. Thank you for expressing how you feel.

    There are two interesting things to me in what you say.

    First, this pain sounds familiar to me. It expresses how I’ve felt for the last decade, after finding that the UUism I was raised to be a part of didn’t actually exist, and instead I was expected to be a part of this completely other faith that the people who had been my teachers, mentors and advisors were all a part of, but hadn’t told me about.
    That’s how this Young Adult views our congregations and how we bring up our children in our RE programs (I’m not talking cons here, merely the IN Church functions). I know more and more UU Young adults learning to express their feelings in this way.

    And the second part is this: I hear Morales’ call to be completely different than what you’ve taken from it.
    I hear a call to take all those fabulous things you write about, bring them BACK into the public sphere, and stop having them stuck in Walden Pond, 2 miles past the last bus stop. I hear an acknowledgement that our congregations aren’t going to abandon the churches they’ve built, but are to bring the life of the congregation outside those cloistered walls, some literal and some social.

    I don’t entirely agree with the Congregations and Beyond letter. I think it DRASTICALLY mis-understands both young adults who grew up in our faith, AND the young adults who would feel a kinship within our faith. I think that, maybe, your congregation might be one that this letter is LEAST addressed to. If your congregation is as you describe it, it’s closer to the ideal that Congregations and Beyond calls us to than most UU Congregations I’ve ever encountered.

    I don’t doubt you’re seeing some things fall or fade away, and at a faster pace than ever, in your congregation. I’ve seen social media grow congregations, and I’ve seen it completely dissolve the tenuous connections that another had. It’s the nitro-glycerin of ministry: capable of both extreme good work, and extreme destruction, both in a flash.

    Congregations and Beyond excites Me. It makes Me think that the faith I was promised as a child might become a reality. It also makes me ask “How can I leverage our more mobile and visible faith to strengthen the bonds of fellowship in my community?”

    ~DW

  4. I am more moved by this than I can say, not least by gratitude for your gift of putting the inner wail into real words about real things.
    You’ve made me think, often and often, you’ve made me laugh times without number, and now you’ve helped me to cry, some. And I do thank you.

    That said — with some guilt and a giggle mixed in, I have to tell you that my suitcase is open in the middle of the living room floor as I prepare to get on one of those very same big white Carnival boats… and there on it will be forty-plus beloved RevGals, very much in the flesh, very much in the flesh…

    Peace and consolation and all blessings, dear PB.
    [And also with you, my dear! Enjoy that cruise!! LOL! – PB]

  5. I love to listen to other people’s sermons online and I know my sermons should be online, too, so that they would be of service to many more people.

    BUT my inner being feels very reluctant to do that. For me, a sermon is very different if it is meant for a wide, unidentified audience or a local community. My sermons are, should I say, private… They belong to those who are present. The momentum, effect, experience, and value are created together by the Holy Spirit, the preacher AND the people who are there.

    It’s communication created together.

    So, until further notice, anyone who wants to listen to my sermons, has to actually come to church.

  6. Thank you for this beautiful post. It reminds me of a love letter to a long-time lover. You have recalled all the things that made you fall in love long ago, noted all the changes over time. Some you love, some that still make you uncomfortable. Like people, institutions change over time–and we want to make sure that those things we fell in love with persist through all the changes.

    As a fellow lover of the church in all its messy, muddled beauty, my prayer in these fast-changing times is that the church will not forget what made us fall in love in the first place. That was not the windows or the hymns or the Christmas pageant, even if I adore those things. What made me love it was the fragile human community that somehow becomes a vessel for the Divine. As long as that remains, I might pine for the old days, but I’m not falling out of love any time soon.

    Again, thank you. Beautiful. [I love your categorization of this this as a love letter. Thank YOU. – PB]

  7. Thank you for writing this. Thank you thank you thank you. [You’re welcome. – xoxo PB]

  8. This is a most beautiful and honest reflection on the blessings and deep struggles of being in church. Thank you. You have touched my spirit today.

  9. Sit still and breathe. Now I’m going to hand you a cup of water. Yes, right now.

    How did that work for you?

    😉

  10. Thanks as well from one who also loves the church in it’s beautiful, frustrating, and amazing messiness. A wonderful, heart-felt reflection.

  12. In this Diocese of Oregon (Episcopal), I am constantly filled with a wonderful sense of hope about what we are doing and what is happening here. I think we are crafting the church that is becoming. I know this is not happening everywhere, and I feel for my friends in imploding positions. I’m fully aware that I should be training for additional bi-vocations because the parish won’t be here like this for my whole life.

    Yet, as a chaplain, I’m comfortable with that. To me, clinging to the church that was is like Mary clinging to Jesus in the Garden. She truly loved the Jesus-who-had-been. He gently introduced her to the Jesus-who-is-now. I’m comfortable letting our churches be in that role. And I think our churches are well served right now by ministers who have a tender heart towards Mary, weeping in the garden.

    Meanwhile, for Lent, I am going to do a tech fast each night. From 6Pm to 9AM, no tech. I plan to read books, play piano, watch TV with my husband while knitting and not having my phone right next to me to text. My boss and I agree that we will keep our phones ON for emergency calls, but otherwise, no tech. I’m curious to see if this detaches me from the anxiety of the world on the superhighway and lets me rest in the world that is all about me.

  13. As one of those people Morales talks about, young adults who were brought up in the church and who are no longer members I think that what you mention here is the reason I miss church. For a long time I was involved in UU things all the time, I did RE, choir, youth group and sunday services at my home congregation. I did local YRUU cons and was on the MBD youth staff, and for 3 years I was youth worship coordinator for GA.
    There was a while where the liberal religious views made sense to me, when I felt I agreed with what the church stood for and when my views on those things changed I left. I worked with folks in DRUUMM and saw the racism and classism so present in our mostly upper middle class white faith and I spent a lot of time learning about the history of oppression and genocide present in the story of most organized religion throughout history and today. I kept going to church for a while until these things bothered me too much, sometimes I would take away things from the sermon, but most often I felt uncomfortable about what was said in a way I couldn’t articulate.
    It has now been about 5 years since I’ve been actively involved in things Unitarian, but I still find myself constantly missing the church you talk about. I long for a community of people who meet at least weekly, in person, to deal with the important real life things that so often get left behind in our modern world; a place to deal with grief and love, with belief and hope and anger who not only have these conversations in the theoretical but also bring casseroles to the sick, babysit for a new mother who hasn’t had a moment to herself in months. I think people need that kind of community now more than ever, so I thank you for pointing out its importance.

  14. Pingback: Moving and Being | Reflections

  15. I’m living in Silicon Valley and seeing people going to the church for an oasis of face-to-face connection.
    I also see ex-clergy kvetching about the church and not going to church. Any church.

  16. I’m living in Silicon Valley and seeing people going to the church for an oasis of face-to-face connection.
    I also see ex-clergy kvetching about the church and not going to church. Any church.

  17. Ah, this great mystery, the Church.

    I marvel at your creativity and committment to your people. You are ministering to them in their sorrows and joys, face-to-face, reflecting the relationship between God and God’s creatures, that deep desire to know and be known, like the deep gaze between a parent and infant child. Your people know that you are giving them that deep soul-touching “gaze.” (Which is why you need vacations from time to time!) Technology is great for handling the business of running an organization–in an earlier era, someone rang the steeple bell to keep the villagers informed, or they plastered the town walls with notices of deaths, or published the bans of marriage. Now some of us tweet and text.
    For me, as an Episcopalian, I’ve got to be with someone else for Holy Communion. That feeding thing, it’s so important! We “feed on Him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving” in bread and wine, but others feed on Him by faith with thanksgiving through music, dance, art, preaching, prayer. A sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving that is done when we’re together.

    Mr. Morales referred to faith as a “movement” and sadly I think many denominations think of themselves that way. That can’t be right. I can be part of a movement (disability rights, etc.) of course, but I would drop out of seminary today if my calling were to share a movement.

  18. Thank you so much for this. I was reluctant to read it – so much stuff going down in my little brick & mortar, I wasn’t feeling brave enough to read “bad news”. But it’s the real news. And reading your expression of grief and abiding love for the church helped me look at it. I felt like you were looking at the situation with me.

    When I’m feeling more hopeful, I think about what a young 20-something recently told me about how she sees social media. No, she said, it certainly doesn’t replace face-to-face relationships. I don’t think of my strictly online friendships as being terribly “deep” or basic to my life. But I do facebook as a way to keep connected to people I cannot see everyday, like those I went to school with [in another part of the country.] The next time I see them, I realize I am still close to them, and that is, in part, due to things like FB.

    I’m noodling with what this means for the church. Maybe it means we keep people connected somehow. And those we can entice into our nerdy, germ-ridden, f2f church life, we will. In fact, for many people, it will be their only way in. Maybe it means our walls are less permeable than they used to be. And I think this may help us mean it (more) when we say that our primary mission is to serve people, rather than try to get them through the doors and give stuff to us (money, volunteer hours). I know that’s a crude expression for church membership – that belonging to a faith community is far richer and deeper than that. I wouldn’t be a minister if I didn’t believe that. But mission is hard for us to really wrap our brains & hearts around, and our feelings of grief over whom & how we serve is part of that.

  19. Thank you for this thoughtful wrestling, for your witness to the “in flesh” beauty of church, for bringing the Morales post to my attention (totally off my radar as a UCCer). For all of the delights and opportunities that technology and social media offer for making connections in ministry in the 21st century … still, is “online incarnation” really possible? I hear you asking a question that’s not only ecclesiological but deeply theological. Where’s God/the Holy/the encounter with the Sacred in virtual relationships? …. Thank you again!

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