Getting reacquainted and reaching out

As we come to a respite in the pandemic, I’m back at one of the nagging questions we have had all along. Who will come back? 

This question has been a strand in all our phone chains, upgraded e-newsletters, livestreams and videos. Yes, it’s about care and affection, concern for anyone who is isolated, and even opportunity. In my experience, clergy are creative community-builders. We have been tied to buidings and in-person liturgies. I accepted that for the rest of my life, Sunday would be about welcoming those who come. I never expected there could be an interruption that would release so much creativity among my clergy colleagues and friends. 

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I have been an early-adopter with some ways of connecting and slower with others. There are so many ways to connect. There isn’t enough time or “ram” in my brain to be on top of all of them. I enjoy seeing the different ways parishes have approached this. And I never expected to thrive and even enjoy the challenge of figuring out how best to keep people connected.

Now that we are back in the pews, I am also back to that strand of anxiety that has been there all along. Who is coming back? It may be that my vision is limited because I’m new – I don’t have a mental picture of what St John the Evangelist looked like before the pandemic. I don’t know who is missing. I want to admit my anxiety. In my 30 years of ordination, it looks to me like every Anglican diocese has been in a process of orderly retreat from sacred buildings with worship in every town and neighbourhood. Will the pandemic speed up the whole process of what we are becoming?

During the protest in downtown Ottawa, I walked regularly among the protesters. I wasn’t there to debate anyone and neither were they. It was more a walking meditation about hardened positions talking past each other. Much of what I saw was hard to bear. Fires, children, non-stop horns and fumes. And placards, including many bible quotes. These were not verses I would ever quote. I would not be surprised if someone read these and said, “If that’s what Christianity is about, I will never darken the door of a church!” 

How are we doing at presenting the version of Christianity we practice? And who needs to know? In addition to asking who will be back, I’m wondering about who will be visiting our churches for a first time. We live in a time of anxious questions and not just our own. These days, there are three people that I expect to see in church. 

First, there are the people we already know. Parishioners who are part of the ebb and flow of engagement. Some are drifting away; some are getting more involved. Second, there are people who have left a fundamentalist version of Christianity. It wasn’t working for them anymore, and even though they reject it, they are very much shaped (even unconsciously) by its assumptions and values. Third, there are people of no religious background. They are here because they married into the church community, because they discovered us through some overlapping community event, or because some crisis or trauma has prompted a time of searching. 

They won’t have the same questions about which version of Christianity this is. But now that we are back to in-person gatherings, I am longing to get people together. Their questions might be different, but we might help each other as we tell our stories. We might even create an orientation to the Christianity we practice here. 

I see coming back together as the best opportunity we have to say who we are. Let’s use it well.