Problems and Promise

A good friend of mine who shares my Christian faith has been coming out of the closet in various ways over the past year and a half. When I asked him about what happened to get him to make the decision that being both gay and Christian was okay, he said something like, "I heard about Christians and churches that accepted gays, and I wanted to go check them out to see what they had to say."

The more I have thought about this answer, the more important the words become to me. Looking at the bigger picture here, the story could be told a different way: a person who is searching for an expression of Christianity that he or she finds more authentic hears about a rhythm of belief that may be more expansive and relevant - and therefore attractive.

This gives me a lot of hope for mainline Protestant Christianity, if we can open our hearts to own who we truly are. The Episcopal Church especially has a good product, because liturgy is timeless, as is the ethos of true community and trusting faith shaped gradually out of a common experience of shared prayer and eating a simple meal together.

I think we are different - and this difference is what makes us attractive.

When I think about my own interests, I think about my intrigue with how systems function. I think of cities with their complex transportation networks, infrastructure, architecture, and social concerns. I think of our political system and its (dys)functions as it is influenced by varied factors and the techniques those within the system use to bring about change. I think about social challenges, how they come about and how they can be mitigated.

More than all of these, though, I think about the church and the Church and how it functions in similar ways to all of these things. I think about the ways that it is unhealthy - perhaps made up of people who are more broken than average: people who squabble, who hurt, who have trouble setting limits, who avoid confrontation, who have unrealized longings, who have vague but very sincere ideas about how to change the world, who have hidden agendas they don't even know within themselves.

Yet even in this brokenness, we can still create churches where people who need a place for healing can come and find wholeness in Christ - to be nurtured into a place of being different in the world and for the world. Places where outsiders will hear a word so fresh that they experience a joyful attraction to something they did not know existed.

Even with all of its problems - and I've both experienced them and contributed to them, in ways known and unknown - the Church is at its best a place of blessing.

What is in my heart is to be a person that understands my own deep desires, good and bad, strong and weak, discovering and using my own gifts to help churches be a place of blessing - knowing the problems, but also loving the promise of the Church.

I pray for God's grace to have opportunities to do this - and God's strength and knowledge to do a good job of it.