Community: Gather Your People

I very often wonder how I ended up where I am, swimming in the deep end of the Evangelical pool, where the water’s always felt a little choppy to me, or else maybe a little too still.

Somehow, at the age of eighteen, this Catholic adjacent childhood spiritual seeker, this girl always on the verge of poverty, this introverted, bookish thing who just wanted to teach second grade and maybe someday own a car, ended up at one of the most costly conservative Christian colleges in the nation. If that isn’t just the kind of thing those Christian-y types attribute to God…

This experience forged a path that led to the membership, and even employment, of my family in a non-denominational, Evangelical church. It’s a very odd place for someone like me, and I feel this oddity often. I’m built for liturgy and tradition, I’m built for sober justice seeking and well worn hymnals. However, through years of dogged commitment, these have become my people, a treasure to me. I’m learning to understand the hang ups and habitual responses of a group from whom I‘ve always been a bit separate. I’m learning to temper with mercy my gift of discernment. I’m learning to extend grace to those who may never develop the eyes to see the glasses they wear, while also learning to notice my own lens. I’m learning to recognize my own hardness of heart toward the people I call my church family. This has been a quiet, intense spiritual challenge of my early adulthood, and into the beginnings of middle age.

I say these things with humble compassion and empathy. The people of my beautiful and broken and blessed church are like any other people; we are earnest and loving, we are selfish and prideful, we are blind to our own blindspots and can’t feel the temperature of the water we swim in. And we love each other, in all the little ways and the big ways. We are doing this together. The truth and power of God’s love in our midst is a reality that I celebrate wholeheartedly.

Yes, and…I have been intentionally placed in this particular family of disciples. God wouldn’t open my eyes to discern if there weren’t a kingdom centered purpose for it.

There is so much to be gained from understanding who your people are. The world is crying out for the love and tenderness of each of our communities. To this end, I must ask myself: who is it my people would rather not see? where is it my people fear to tread? which questions are we too polite, or scared, to ask? whose pride are we protecting by not asking?

I am charged with the task of holding up a mirror so we can confront our own image, reflecting Light into our midst.

These are my people, and I am called to gather them.

My people have a hard time with perspective adoption. Again, I say this with humble compassion, drawing from a well of patience that isn’t my own. But it’s true, we do. It is hard to understand why a group of compassionate, loving individuals have such a difficult time taking on another’s perspective. Perhaps it is difficult because we still see ourselves as a group of individuals. We are still unwilling to see ourselves as a collective, with its own status and power. Perhaps when the words and feelings of those telling their stories sound very different from ours, when their experiences are all so out of line with our own assumptions about the world, it becomes difficult to lend credence to their voices. It can feel unreal. It can feel foreign, vaguely threatening. I acknowledge that this language and thinking may feel like an act of “othering”, but the feeling has to be articulated in order to be confronted, and it has to be confronted in order to be dismantled.

Groups of people living right next to us have had drastically different lived experiences, right within the same systems that have worked so well to ensure our general success. This is a difficult truth to digest. It can be overwhelming to shift our thinking away from individual stories of hardship or success in order to make room for an entire people’s story as shaped by invisible systems.

Our scriptures make room for both.

We understand that Ruth, for example, is a woman who made her own path, who faced personal hardship followed by grace, and who had a tender personal relationship with her mother-in-law. This is her story as an individual. But scripture isn’t only a conglomerate of individual stories. It is also the story of a group, ethnic, religious, and national, who experienced oppression within a powerful system, who became the oppressors in their turn, who cried out as a nation. This is Israel’s story as a people. Scripture also contains many accounts of individuals as they navigated the systems that molded their existence; Esther comes to mind, as does Daniel. And, you know, Jesus. There is a balance in scripture of honoring individual stories, while simultaneously acknowledging and wrestling with unjust systemic realities. It’s in the Bible, as my people like to say. These contextualized biographies in scripture are incredibly powerful, as they are in our own communities.

Listening to the stories of people whose experiences and perspectives are a world away, or even just a few streets away, is irreplaceable. Not just listening to them, but really hearing them. This is a privilege of having relationship with another image bearer, and it is a sacred duty of compassion.

Perspective adoption is very hard, life long work. I think it’s especially challenging for people whose life circumstances have never required them to question their own assumptions, their own way of looking at the world. Their own authority. Their own deadly certainty. For people who’ve lived this, the practice of breaking it down feels tremendous, maybe impossible, certainly uncomfortable. But I refuse to mistake discomfort for disrespect. For these people-my people-the call to love is not a call to seek comfort, it is a call to brave the depths of uncertainty and self-denial.

I am tasked with gathering my people and pointing them to those who need, with every breath and every heartbeat, to have their voices heard, so that we can listen and lift up, so that we can do the sacred and daily work the people of God have been charged to do.

This is the work of the kingdom of God, the work of Christ incarnate in the world, the work of daily redemption in our hands.

Gather your people, O Lord.
Gather your people, O Lord.
One bread, one body, one spirit of love.
Gather your people, O Lord.
No more harm on the mountain of God: swords into plowshares.
Free us, O Lord, from hardness of heart.

As always, your comments are highly valued. Please take a moment to read the Community Respect Statement if you haven’t already.