The Fare Forward Interview with Five Church LEaders
Shortly after Easter 2023, Fare Forward gathered a diverse group of pastors and priests to talk about what church is for.
Interview Conducted by Sarah Clark
Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I would love to answer this question and say that people are coming to church for Jesus Christ, but I think the answer is always more complicated than that.
Hayden Kvamme is the associate pastor of Children, Youth, and Family, and Pastoral Care, at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Rochester, MN, where he shares in all aspects of pastoral ministry. Gloria Dei is a midsized congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Located twelve blocks north of Mayo Clinic Hospital, Saint Marys Campus, Gloria Dei is one of many Lutheran churches in the area. Some of what sets it apart include its contemplative ministries; its participatory, image-rich worship; its sense of humor; and its delicious cof—no, the coffee is still terrible. Despite the pandemic shutdown, Gloria Dei is growing. A math major at Dartmouth, Hayden received his Masters of Divinity degree from Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. He now lives with his wife and their two children in Rochester.
Fare Forward: Why do you think people go to church, and why do you think they go to your church in particular?
Hayden Kvamme: I think that in general, people go to church looking for community and for connection with God, and sometimes that’s out of habit. I think often it’s not, because there are all kinds of reasons they might choose not to. So I think those things hold true at Gloria Dei where I serve, but I think they hold true more broadly too.
Eric Howell: I think that’s been my experience as well. Community and experiencing or connecting with God. One of the things I think the pandemic has done is, people who were just going out of habit or expectation or tradition—it killed the rhythm. And those people who were just going because it was a social expectation are far less likely to return. That’s what we’ve seen in our congregation and the churches in our community.
Heidi Thorsen: I would love to answer this question and say that people are coming to church for Jesus Christ, but I think the answer is always more complicated than that. I know that there are some people who come to our church for the music. There are some people who come for the stained glass, because it’s a beautiful church that was built in 1814. There are some people who come to church just because it’s the society church downtown, and you meet people and talk to people. But I think all of that does boil down to, people come to church to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and they might think of that bigger thing as the choir or the city of New Haven or the body of Christ, but ultimately it is that—it’s the body of Christ. And so whether people think they’re there for faith or not, that is always a part of the spirit of being in church.
Eric Howell: I think the connection and the community is the way that I would put, most tangibly, being part of something bigger than you are: feeling that you are connecting with, you have a meaningful role in, you’re contributing to, and being fed by, your connection with this group of people. So for folks who come and don’t make those social—I’m using social in a very deep and wide meaning—but don’t make those connections, I don’t think they stay as long. But those who do come because they’re coming to be a part of something.
I also think, however, that they come for the mystical experiences, that there’s something that is—again, I like the way you put that—larger than they are (God, of course) who they’re encountering, and not in a heightened experiential way every week by any means. But there are some times—and you hear that so much that it’s far more than just an exercise in community. But especially thinking about the last few days, the choir on Easter morning, the silence on Good Friday, the foot washing on Maundy Thursday, the Sunrise service—those experiences are much more than just the social network. And I still think people come hungering for those kinds of experiences, whether that’s for healing—for some folks, it’s just absolutely need of healing—and for others it’s just out of pure delight and they want more of it <laugh> and everywhere in between.
Hayden Kvamme: Eric and Heidi, both of your comments make me think that there is something, too, about people coming to be reminded what joy looks like and reminded that they’re loved. So sometimes, as you were saying, that does happen through the music; they hear something in the music that, especially because it’s right there in front of them, they don’t hear other places; or in the experience of Communion, there’s this sense that God is present and they’re a part of this place, and because of that, they know that they’re loved. And it’s a unique reminder in their lives of that, that they experience from God, but irreducibly experience in community too. And so church becomes a place where they come hungering for that.
Heidi Thorsen: I think one thing that’s interesting to me is how often that hunger shows up in sort of an “I want to help” attitude. I think that people often bring their need in the guise of wanting to help other people, when actually the need that they’re meeting there is that longing for connection to community, that longing for usefulness. And the irony, too, is even as I say that people come wanting to help, I’m also like, “But we are lacking volunteers right now!”
And when people are coming to help, I just think people are afraid of meeting their own needs. We’re much more ready to wash another person’s feet than to have our feet be washed (since we all recently went through that experience of Maundy Thursday). But I think, again, it’s that sort of mutual reciprocity that church can give that you can’t get at other places. It’s not a transaction. If we’re doing church right, I think we will get as much as we give, both as leaders and as community members who are part of it, whether that part is holding a cross or—I have a very aggressive but loving usher <laugh>. It’s that people want to have their “thing” at church. I think the existence of that “I have my thing” culture is a part of that wanting to feel useful and connected and contextualized in a community.
NB: Fr. Frank Black was unable to join the group call, and we spoke one-on-one the following week.
Frank Black: Why do people go to church? That is a very broad question, and the answers, I think, are so many that it would be hard to pin them all down. There are people that go to church because they love being in the presence of the sacred. We just had, as a matter of fact, a holy hour for Divine Mercy Sunday. And I looked out at the congregation that was there and I said, “I could have picked the fact that you would be here.” Because that group of people, if there’s something—a prayer service—if there’s something to get together and worship the Lord, you know they will be there. They will do the best they can to be there. Because they love being in the presence of the sacred. That’s one group. That’s a large group, I think.
There’s another group that are trying to bribe God. You know, if I do this, you’ll meet that. And if I do this, then you won’t send me right to hell. It’s this tit for tat kind of thing. That’s a group that’s in there also, and they’ll do what they think they need to do, but they don’t want to do anything extra. There’s another group, I believe, that is doing it because of almost fear or shame, that they figure that they owe the Lord so much because they’ve been so bad, and they’re trying to recover their whole life, trying to pay it back.
There’s another group, I think, off the top of my head, that are just doing it because that’s how they were raised. And it becomes a tradition: that’s part of our family history. It’s like having cigars for Father’s Day. And that’s the level of it, that they’ve always done it. It’s part of their culture. As a matter of fact, it’s kind of funny, because I’m from Jamaica. I was born in Jamaica, and Jamaica’s a big mishmash of people. My mother’s father was, I think, half or a third Irish, and he was a womanizer. He married this one woman, and she was the only one who didn’t have children with him; his children were from all these other places. But every single one of his illegitimate children was baptized and raised in the Catholic Church—because he was Irish <laugh> and that was his tradition.
So there’s multiple facets at work, of people who go to church and what they’re doing there. Unfortunately, for people like me, we’re supposed to be preaching to all of them on a Sunday. And you don’t know where to go sometimes, because you’re not sure which group you’re connecting with. So I think those are the basic groups that I see. I’m sure I’ve missed some, but those are the ones that I’ve seen more.
Why do they come to our church? I’ll tell you very, very honestly, they come to our church, and this is gonna sound terrible. It’s not putting them down, but I said this the other day: they go to churches where the stuff that they’re used to is present. People want to hang on to what they were used to. I remember once I was in my last parish, and I had a wonderful sister that was working with me, but one day she said, “You know, maybe we should try and get a little bit more Catholic music at Mass.” And I said, “Okay, Catholic from what country and what year? Because Catholic music in Africa is not going to be the Catholic music in Portugal. So you’re saying the music that you were used to listening to from your Polish background.” They come to our church because in this particular neighborhood, there are a lot of people from the Caribbean, and we have steelpan that plays sometimes; we have a young man that plays the drums; somebody else, tambourine. The music is very upbeat and very lively, and they’re in a community with people that talk like them and act like them and worship like them.
Meanwhile, the next church over, which was basically an Irish church for years—it’s the same cross-section of people, but the worship is a little bit more subdued. The third one was an Italian church for a while that then became a Black church, because the Italians became accepted, and the Black people were moving up in the south. Nobody wanted to deal with them. So it became a Black church. And it’s the same, a similar cross-section of people, but the music is more Gospel style. And the choir is more of a Gospel sound. So people will go where they feel the worship is making them feel most at home. They’re able to express their faith in a way that they’re comfortable with.
I believe that part of what the church has always been is putting into practice is the Gospel, which includes reaching out, caring, and offering the love of God.
Fr. Frank A. Black was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Brooklyn on Saturday, May 24, 1980. In September 2000, Fr. Black was assigned as the pastor of St. Laurence Parish in Spring Creek, Brooklyn and in June 2012 as Administrator of the Parish of St. Matthew with three worship sites, Our Lady of Charity, St. Gregory the Great, and St. Matthew. He is presently the Pastor of this merged parish in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. St. Matthew Parish has a weekly attendance of roughly 1,000 parishioners among the three sites. Most of them are from the Caribbean Islands, and there is a rather large Spanish-speaking population, made larger due to the recent Asylum-seeker migration from the Caribbean and South/ Central America.
Fare Forward: What do you think church is for? Are the questions, “What is church for?” and, “What does church offer people?” the same question or different questions?
Cameron Shaffer: Our church leadership has been talking through this question quite a bit over the last year. And one of the ways that I look at the question is to rephrase it: What is a family for? What does a family offer? And there are purposes for families, but you don’t think of a family as having a mission. A church may have a mission, but a church is first and foremost—the largest metaphor for it in the New Testament is family. So I think one of the ways I would answer the question is, the church is the renewed family of God gathering together: the family of God who is out and about their business, still connected to one another the rest of the week, regathering together to hear from God their father through his Word, and then to share the family meal together. So the liturgy of the church and hearing the Word preached and read and prayed and sung, hearing from God, and then sharing in the Sacrament of the Lord’s body and blood, is sharing in the mystical body and blood of Christ and being fed by our Savior. So there are a number of different metaphors that our church would use, but family and being the household of God is how we would primarily answer what the church is for.
Eric Howell: Our emphasis would likewise be—we don’t use family as our primary metaphor—but the idea of a community of moral formation to embody the Good News in the world. That is, to recognize that our experiences, such as they are, are not the end goal. The end goal is not to have an experience, but rather to be formed in the way of Christ, to know God and to love God, and for that love to be incarnate in our lives and our relationships with one another and to gather in the world. So there is an inward and an outward dimension to it that I think is at the heart of what church is for.
Church could offer a lot of different things that may fall far short of those kind of lofty ideals. And those things can be good in all kinds of ways. But one of the things that church offers in this setting, at this time and place, is an alternative to the atomization, individualism, selfishness that pervade modern life. And so in church, then, you become part of a community that challenges that and stretches you, and it gives you a way to express your relations with God, others, and creation in ways that we just don’t do on our own. I don’t think we’re made to do it. I mean, I think you’re getting into ontology and anthropology now. I don’t think we’re made to do it on our own, and the church gives us the expression of that. And so I think my starting and ending answer has to do with community in the living God.
Hayden Kvamme: Building off that, Eric, I feel like there’s a way in which I struggle with this question on a daily basis, because I think my gut is to say that first and foremost, church is about community. And especially as it relates to the loneliness and the, as you said, atomization of people today, it seems to me there’s just a shortage of community, by and large, in a lot of places. So in the midst of that, at Gloria Dei, one of the insights that we use to guide us is “life to faith.” The idea is meeting people where they are. And I love that.
When it comes to “why are we gathering this community?” or “what are we inviting people into?” or “how is God shaping us?” I find those questions continuously challenging, because my experience is that often when we get explicit about the “God talk,” so to speak, that what doesn’t necessarily happen, but what can happen is, people experience themselves as if they don’t know enough to contribute to the conversation, or they aren’t sure enough about what they believe to feel like they have a voice or are that interested in even being at the table. And so because of that, a lot of the experiences that we cultivate are things that look more like sharing a meal around a table, or meeting as families who have young kids at a park to connect and get to know each other. I continuously find that often my immediate goal as I’m connecting with people or helping people connect with each other is simply to facilitate people getting to know each other.
And then there’s a part of me that somehow trusts that when the Word is preached and the Sacraments are administered, God will take those connections and draw them up into a larger vision that is about a formation of a particular kind of community with a particular purpose. But I find that if I, or we as a staff, get too hung up on how to make that purpose explicit in everything that we do, it doesn’t always work the way we would like it to. And so there’s a tension there that’s often fruitful, but that I don’t have an answer for.
Heidi Thorsen: I really like the things you’re talking about, because it reminds me, well, if the purpose of the church is community, why not find community any other way? Why not join a soccer team? Why not get on a Facebook page and do a neighborhood meetup? And I think there are institutions and groups of people out there who are doing community better than our church, and they’re not Christian, and in some ways they are more sacramental because God is so present in that. So it’s that tension of how to both assert that wherever two or three are gathered, God is present there with them, but then, why a Christian gathering? Or why the Gospel as the vehicle that gathers that community? So having talked through all of that, all of those problems, I’m left a little bit in the haze.
I think one thing that does come to mind is—this goes back to Cameron’s metaphor of family. That in addition to the family that we cultivate now, in this moment, I also think that one of the whys of churches is to connect to the family of believers throughout history. What is our spiritual lineage? So that when I gather people together and we do so-called “weird church things”—you know, I elevate a piece of bread and believe that God is super present in that—the reason for that is because of connecting to a family that isn’t just alive now, but a family that has been living and growing and changing over centuries. I recognize that a lot of what churches are today would look weird and completely unrecognizable to Jesus, and yet the Spirit has moved through history to make it that way.
I think that one thing I’ve heard among other young adults like me is that one reason people go to church is because it’s weird. It is weird to go to a place where we’re doing things that are historically out of sync in terms of how our church does music, how our church even sometimes does language—some services are more contemporary than others in that sense, but sometimes we’re thee, thou, and all of that. And I think it is that goal, again, of finding those roots, both in this present moment and backward throughout history, so that we can be reassured that we’re not just making stuff up to feel good <laugh> or gathering to feel good, but that there’s a responsibility that comes out of our gathering too. And that responsibility, I think, is to make this world more like the Kingdom that Jesus preached. I think that that is one thing that makes churches fundamentally different from your average Facebook meetup: that there is something that you are required to do beyond just coming. There is a way that your—our—lives are being asked to be changed. And for me, I go to church in this therapeutic way to make sure I don’t fall prey to that selfishness and sin that Eric described.
Frank Black: Tough questions. What is church for? In my particular tradition, coming from the West Indies, and growing up in the Brooklyn Diocese, church is for living. It’s part of who we are, who I am as a person. You know, I wouldn’t consider not going to bed at night (in most circumstances). I wouldn’t consider not going to church. It was just part of the routine for our week. It’s part of what made sense to our life. Now, that’s me. That’s how I was raised. I mean, I was raised by—somebody around here was yelling at me one day and pointing a finger at me, and I said, “Look. I was raised by a Jamaican woman. If you think you scare me, you’ve got another guess coming!” <laugh> Because my mother was no pushover, I’ll tell you right now. But it was just what we did. There was not any question—you’d question if you’d go on some special occasion to pray during the week, yeah. But on Sunday, it was church day, and everything else revolved around that.
When we moved from Brooklyn to Queens, and this a whole other story for another time, I walked into the new parish the first day. It was in first grade, and I walked in with my mother, and the day I walked in, would you believe, they ran out of chairs. Can you imagine? Just by coincidence—and because they didn’t want to see me there. So the whole building of the community, that took a long time for some of us. Because quite frankly, in many places, they really didn’t want us. And because the faith was part of who we were, we wouldn’t let that push us away. The community thing became a reality later on. So it’s supposed to be for worshiping the Lord and for developing a community of believers that support you in that. But that took a while, and that’s why the church has lost a lot of people all over the world, I guess, with the reality of it. Because a lot of times culture has taken over the truth of the Gospel and the way it was lived out.
What does the church offer now? I believe that part of what the church has always been is putting into practice is the Gospel, which includes reaching out, caring, and offering the love of God. So what the church is supposed to be doing is putting into practice the love of Jesus, and therefore reaching out and getting other people to join them and building up that love. And the worship is the support of that mission. I think that’s what it’s supposed to be. And, you know, sometimes we do it better than others. But we keep trying. And I think right now why people are coming to our churches is because they feel comfortable. But I think also, they want to put it into practice.
I had no idea what a pastor did on Tuesday, but whatever that was, I wanted to do that thing.
Eric Howell is Pastor of DaySpring Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. DaySpring, founded in 1993 as a “Baptist Church in the Contemplative Tradition,” is a 450-member congregation affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. DaySpring’s creative and impactful care for its grounds is the subject of Eric’s Doctor of Ministry dissertation, “A Geography of Hope: The Place of Church Grounds in Ecological Conversion.” In the fall of 2022, DaySpring welcomed the inaugural guests to its Naomi House, a hospitality home for asylum seekers in Waco.
Fare Forward: Why do you personally go to church, and what led you to become a priest or pastor in your particular tradition and in your particular place?
Eric Howell: I’ll go, and I will try to keep the answers short, though you’re asking lifelong questions <laugh>. I’m going to root my story of going into ministry back in the fifth grade, but not in the way that you think I’m going to tell the story. I went to this camp—and I begged my parents to let me go to this camp. My friends were going from school, and I got to go, and it was real expensive. Whatever real expensive means, I just knew it was real expensive. So I got to go to this camp, I had a great time, I did all the things—first class fun camp—came back home.
The very next day, I got sort of arm-twisted into going to church camp, and I went to this church camp that my church did with another church. And I mean, it was janky. We had to share baseball gloves, because there wasn’t enough to go around. We probably hit a rock with the baseball bat—I don’t know. But it was not at all the kind of experience the other one had. We had to do crafts, and that was boring, and we had to do a Bible study, and that part was probably fine. But my point is, I have a very clear memory, really only in retrospect as an adult, of that experience and how I felt at the end of those two weeks of camp. And even as a fifth grader, having had those two experiences, something about me knew that my experience at church camp, with the richness that it was—I wouldn’t use that word then, but I’d use it now—was more meaningful and was more important to me than the other thing was, even though it had all the fancy things.
And that stayed with me, and I think informed later my sense of calling to ministry. There’s something really good here that I want to be a part of. I don’t know how else to put that, except that that experience at that really basic children’s camp I take to be pretty formative when later in college I’m wrestling between going to ministry or becoming an engineer. And it plays out in some pretty hard decisions later on. But ultimately it became abundantly clear. And for me, the day that I—and it really was a day that I sat up in bed, going to work as a summer engineer—that I, in college, sat up in bed, and said, “I wish I was going to church today to do whatever a pastor does. What does a pastor do on Tuesday?”
I had no idea what a pastor did on Tuesday, but whatever that was, I wanted to do that thing. And I probably thought that meant I was going into ministry to help people, which I learned is a very poor expectation for going into ministry. But, you know, it probably had something to do with that. Fast forward a number of years, and I had pastored two churches, had very good experiences at both, but was really hungering for something that was rooted deeper in the tradition and also open to new creativity. And I kind of thought I was the only person in the world who felt that way—and ended up discovering Dayspring. They found me; they called me to be pastor. And from Day One when I sat there—and my wife and I both had this experience—we said to ourselves, “I feel like we have a lot to learn here from this community.”
And I think that if I lose that feeling, that sense of respect for the community and the sense of the community’s richness, then I think it would be much harder for me to get up and go to church. But I feel like there are saints here—that now of course I know 15 years later personally—but there’s a pattern of prayer and life here that continues to encourage and challenge me. I find our church life-giving to me as its pastor, and I don’t take that for granted. And my children then get that too in their own ways, at their own ages. They receive that as a gift. So those are the reasons that I go to church. That and the preaching. Preaching’s amazing. So that and the preaching are the reasons that I go to church.
Heidi Thorsen: I really resonated with what you were saying about learning as much from people at your church as you teach them. I think that the vocation of a pastor is often seen as a preacher, a teacher, one with authority. And yet I think that part of the job is turning it around and feeling that that authority goes both ways. To answer the question, I feel like for me, I became a priest for the best selfish reasons, which is that the best version of myself is this version of myself that is gathering people in community and exploring what it means to be human, and what it means to be the best version of ourselves as taught by Jesus.
I was raised an evangelical and was deeply moved by that tradition until I hit a roadblock in my questions, as people sometimes do in the evangelical tradition, and then found myself attending Unitarian Universalist churches because I was like, man, I love the community, but I need a place that I can explore these questions that I have. I was in San Francisco, the only person in my friend group attending UU churches on a Sunday. And it was beautiful, but still there was a longing that I had for roots. It wasn’t until I sort of accidentally stumbled into an Episcopal church that I felt the intersection of my head and my heart <laugh>. And it felt like coming home, and that metaphor of home in my life has been so significant.
That’s what it feels like to be a pastor for me. That’s vocation. We love the word vocation in the Episcopal church, if you haven’t heard it already: What is your calling? But it is not only priests that have vocations; everybody has vocation. I have a vocation as a mother, I have a vocation as a spouse, and my vocation as a priest is just another facet of who I am. And I hope that everybody who walks into a church can find their vocations and feel as alive as they can.
Hayden Kvamme: I resonate with a lot of what both of you were saying, and what it makes me recognize is that over the course of my life, the reasons I’ve gone to church and the reasons that I still want to be a pastor have changed a lot over time. Growing up, there probably wasn’t a why to going to church; it was just something that we did. But when I started to have some agency in the process, I think I was attracted to the friends that I had made at church. I had never quite been a part of a community where the point of us getting together really was to connect and include everyone, and that was really important. You know, I’d connected naturally with friends at school through all kinds of ways, different activities, whatnot. But there was something about the norms and ideals of our church community that said, “Everyone who wants to have a place here gets to have a place here.” And that really stuck with me.
But then as I got older, I think around the time that I was exploring questions of faith was also around the time I was sensing a call to be a pastor. And I think initially, probably in part because I was asking questions, what I was sensing was a call as a teacher. I thought I wanted to teach math—then it was, oh, maybe I want to teach faith and life to all ages. And so that was true. But then as I really dug into those roots, over time, I see those two things as in a lot more harmony than I think I would have at the time. I think trying to do constructive thinking about God without forming the community of God’s people can be really counterproductive.
But I also think that forming a community of God’s people without doing some intentional thinking about God and who God is also doesn’t necessarily go very far. So they need each other. Part of that for me these days has come to life in recognizing that I think a significant part of my call as a pastor is to ignite a hunger and a curiosity in people to immerse themselves in the stories of the Scriptures and in the story of the Scriptures, and to do that in part by really paying attention to their stories and wondering where God might be moving in their life and how that might resonate with the ways that God has moved in people’s lives for a long time. I often remind myself that if the Church does not make some kind of an effort to rehearse together the story of the Scriptures, no one will, and it will just go away. And to me that would be a tragedy. So I take that really seriously, even as I think we have to get more and more creative about what that means and how we do it. And I really enjoy that piece of being a pastor.
Cameron Shaffer: Like I think everyone in the conversation, I grew up going to church. It was just something that we did. I think what that probably instilled in me is really the reason I go to church is a combination or a flip-flopping between duty and love. I love it. I love being with the people. I love worshiping God. I love the encounter with God that comes in a special way when the people of Christ are gathered together. And there are times when I don’t. And what motivates me then is the knowledge of duty and responsibility to my God and to my community. And duty is a good energizer to remind you of what you really love, even when you’re not feeling it. And so just on a basic level, it’s probably the two reasons I go to church, beyond what we actually confess as Christians.
I did not have any kind of epiphany moment, no fifth-grade events that I can look back and say, “That was the trajectory.” I just kind of accidentally kept taking the steps into ministry. I went to seminary, the school to train for pastoral ministry, for another job. And that job didn’t work out. And then there I was being trained anyway. I grew up an Evangelical Baptist, and my views started to shift in a more Presbyterian direction, and I found myself interacting with Presbyterians who wanted me to come on board, and then I was being affirmed in my gifting for the work of pastoral ministry by people in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. And then suddenly I was a pastor. It was a journey that didn’t feel like a light bulb moment, but it feels incredibly natural for how I ended up here.
Frank Black: Okay. Easy answer. To make a difference.
Now be that as it may, I went back and forth. I was a fairly bright student. First of all, with all the background that I just explained to you, I didn’t think that I was going be allowed to be a priest. I didn’t think they would accept me. Because, and I remember mentioning this to one of the priests in our parish—he said, “What would you like to do when you grow up?” And I went, mumble. “What?” I said, “Well, I don’t know if that’s not possible.” He goes, “No, what did you say?” I said, “I’m thinking of being a priest.” And he goes, “That’s wonderful!” And I went, “It is?” And he goes, “Yeah, that’s great.”
It was either that, very honestly—when I was a little kid, they’d ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’d say a doctor, lawyer, priest, or teacher. It was something that would be able to make a difference in the world. I did get a partial scholarship to Johns Hopkins for premed, and I turned it down, and my father called me an ungrateful little jackass. But it was in those days like—you have this opportunity to make a difference. What is the thing? And it came down to, I could either help somebody, heal people in this world, but then again, that wasn’t going to be permanent, right? I could help to bring them something even more profound. And in my more holy and prayerful times, that’s what was going on. Although it sounds very arrogant to say publicly like that, but you have these gifts, you’ve been blessed, how can’t you give them back? So that’s what I ended up doing. It was something that you could make a difference in a profound way.
I think that there’s a way that following Jesus moves us in a direction—it gathers us, but then it moves us too.
The Rev. Heidi Thorsen is the Associate Rector at Trinity Church on the Green, a program-sized Episcopal church in the heart of downtown New Haven, Connecticut. With 300 years of history, Trinity on the Green is a church that is shaped both by the past and the present—drawing on the richness of the Anglican liturgical and choral tradition, and responding to the physical and spiritual needs of people in the community today. Before her ordination in 2020, Heidi was serving as Trinity’s Outreach Coordinator working primarily with Chapel on the Green, a weekly outdoor service and meal that is intentionally welcoming towards unhoused and precariously housed neighbors on the New Haven Green.
Fare Forward: At your church, what is the centerpiece or most important part of a service, and does the architecture of your church reflect that? If so, how?
Hayden Kvamme: I think our community is in a bit of transition—healthy transition—with this question right now. We worship in a sanctuary with high ceilings and stained-glass windows that was constructed with pews that all face forward. And during the pandemic shutdown, the church, before I got there, made the decision to remove those pews and put in movable chairs. One of the main reasons for that is that a worship service that had been meeting in the basement at our church had grown out of its space and so, coming back from the shutdown, needed more space to worship, and the sanctuary was the biggest room in the church. So we, the community, did what I think was a great job discerning that need and making the decision together to transform the space in that way. But the result for the moment is kind of funny, because the architecture of the space doesn’t necessarily match the layout of what that service is trying to do right now.
And that’s okay. I think we’ve gotten creative with that. But the main reason for that is that this worship service has always met in the round for the ten years that it’s been in existence. We do that now, and there’s an altar in the middle. And without a doubt the centerpiece or most important part of the service is, as we transition from a time of prayer to Communion, the table gets set. And the way the table gets set is that all the young people, all the kids in the room, are invited to get the elements off of a table in the back and bring them to the center table as some music plays. And whenever I watch that happen, it doesn’t matter what the Scripture has been, it doesn’t matter what’s been preached, it doesn’t matter what season of the church we’re in—I am reminded of what the Church looks like and is for when that happens, because I watch a group of kids, who may or may not have a deep understanding of what they’re doing, gather themselves around this table for the sake of others gathering around that table. And as they bring that meal to the table and we set it up and we’re ready, we never quite know what’s going to happen. Some weeks it goes really smoothly, other weeks it doesn’t. And it doesn’t really matter because in the end, the meal gets set and then it gets shared. And so in my church imagination these days, that’s the moment that just continues to animate what I do as a pastor. It’s not really about just kids. The kids end up—in addition to representing themselves, they come to represent all people everywhere who are gathering there.
Heidi Thorsen: Being Episcopalian, we are similar, in that the table is the centerpiece of our service. The arc of the service follows that; our architecture follows that. But we have a number of different tables that we gather around. We have an outdoor service for folks who are unhoused in New Haven with a round table, and it’s kind of in the round. We have box pews on the inside of our church. So actually, if I could, if I had a million dollars, maybe I would change that—and then I would have to deal with all of the pushback from long-term donors and congregants. But we have box pews that face one way, and an altar of marble that is smack-dab up against the front of the church. But we also have an alternate made of elmwood (New Haven is the Elm City) that comes out a little further into the church.
Basically, we do Communion two ways. How we do it most often is with the priest facing the congregation at that smaller altar that is free from the wall. But then for big feast days, including for Easter and Choral Eucharist, we use that marble altar facing the facing the wall. And we are all facing liturgical east, as we say. It’s the idea traditionally that we’re facing the rising sun, like the resurrection of Jesus. It’s actually west in our church, but liturgical east, notice the technicality <laugh>.
Somebody just this Sunday asked me—actually it was another priest, because it’s mostly priests who get hung up on all of this stuff, or people who are thinking about liturgy a little too much—asked how do you, how can you do that? Your back is facing the congregation; you’re not gathering around a table. I will say that we do multiple things, first of all, and I love a table in the round. But there is something beautiful when we do it about everybody facing in the same direction, and it doesn’t land that way for everyone. But it’s that same feeling I get, like when you’re going on a run for a cause or marching in some kind of protest or demonstration. I think that there’s a way that following Jesus moves us in a direction—it gathers us, but then it moves us too. So even if that doesn’t read that way for everybody, I think that there’s beauty in both forms of Communion. But in the Episcopal Church, it’s the table. It’s all about the table. It’s not about my 15-minute sermon—which I love to preach!—but it’s the table.
Eric Howell: So in the Baptist tradition, preaching is—it’s the service of Word, and we do the table every once in a while, whether we really need it or not <laugh>. That’s kind of the Baptist approach. But, with that said, I want to say two things. One is, yes, the pulpit is generally in the center, but we can move it. And sometimes based on the season of the year, we’ll swap the table and the pulpit, and I’ll come back to the table in a minute, but the architecture of the sanctuary was built very simply, and the only furniture up front is the altar, the pulpit, and a piano. So music, preaching, table—that’s it.
Whenever you participate in the service to help lead, whether it’s me or somebody else, you come from your seat, you lead your part, and then you go back to the congregation. The choir comes up and sings and then goes back into the congregation. And it’s a way that the church, when they built the sanctuary, was embodying a kind of highly participatory, egalitarian—even the pastor—we all are part of the congregation. But what it has done, even if I’m not sure they intended it, is it keeps all of us facing the same direction for everything, which accomplishes exactly the kind of phenomenon that you were just describing, where everybody’s facing the same direction, which is really quite wonderful.
But in addition to that, all the windows are open. They’re all just plain white windows looking out over the field and trees. And of course all this is just a really happy privilege of the setting of the church, but the way they did it took advantage of it. So the stained glass for us are the changing colors of the trees. I mean, green to brown is about all you get here, but still, you get a little bit. Occasionally the animals come up—deer, we’ve had birds, fox. And this is the thing that every new person tells me when I ask them these kinds of questions, when we’re doing kind of a newcomers’ meal. You’re like, “Why did you come? What was your first impression?” They always say the light in the room and the openness of the windows. And somebody interpreted that, I think, through a theological lens—the main elements in the church are stone and windows: that which you can trust, and that which is open. What gives an openness to what’s new and what’s moving amongst us. And that, I think, is really framed very nicely for us: the key architectural gift of our sanctuary really is beyond pulpit and table. It’s like the presence of God in our midst, beyond our words and beyond our actions. I think the congregation really, really likes that. That’s really important to all of them.
With that said, of course, I’ve already talked about our tradition. We celebrated Communion once a month, which is a little bit more often than a lot of Baptist churches, but there’s a lot that do it once a month. But before Covid, I had started to poke around at folks asking, “How would you feel about us doing this more often?” Just doing what you do as a pastor, feeling the place out. And we decided with Lent of 2020 to start celebrating Communion every week. I told them it was just going to be for Lent, but I knew it was going to be ongoing. And then three weeks later, you know, everything’s shut down <laugh>. So my timing is impeccable in these matters.
But what happened was—and there’s a lot of details in the intervening years—when we came back full on, I didn’t ask. We just started celebrating Communion every week. And what I found was that during the shutdown, what people said they missed most of all of being in person was the choir, and taking Communion every week. Just like this, they became a people for whom Eucharist every week was just what you do. Of course you do that, and they missed it. And so now that we’re back—and we’re Texans, we’ve been fully back since day two of Covid <laugh>, Covid didn’t really happen here. But since we’ve been back, the centrality of sharing Communion, which is normally what we call it, has taken center stage in ways that are really beautiful. And I view the sermon as the preparation to come to the table. So they really do work hand in hand for us.
Cameron Shaffer: A really quick bullet-pointed answer would be, the primary focus or the central piece of our worship would be Word and Sacrament. But that framework isn’t probably accurate for how we think of our worship. It’s closer to what is the flow, and these are milestones along it. The way that the liturgy of our service is organized is around the idea of covenants. That God has summoned us together as his people to provide to us his grace as our father, speaks to us by the reading of his Word, the preaching of his Word, and then we receive the sign and seals of the covenant in the Sacrament. So kind of like what Eric was saying, the Word is preparatory for the supper or the Eucharist when we take it.
But it’s not simply preparatory. It’s also conversational and dialogical in that the worship service is the people of God lifting up their voices together in prayer and song and confession of sin and receiving from God’s Word his teaching and instruction, his law, his hope of the Gospel, his commands and assurance that our sins have been absolved. So the idea of covenants and then redemptive history, that God has made all things, that we have fallen into sin, that Christ has redeemed us and is returning, that all shapes the general flow of our liturgy. We begin with a call to worship; a few steps later, we hear the law of God. We have a rotation of different readings: the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, a number of other places in Scripture. We confess our sins together, and then we read from Scripture the assurance of our pardon, that our sins have been expunged. So God has called us, we are his children: we’ve been created, we have been summoned, we are sinners in need of a Savior. The pronouncement of that salvation is given to us, then as the redeemed people of God, we hear his Word, and then we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ proclaiming his death until he comes again. So that’s the general flow of our worship service.
Our architecture kind of reflects this. So, our pulpit is kind of weeny. It’s one step below, like a music stand or lectern. And if I had a million dollars, we’d get a real pulpit. But if you come in and look right down the center aisle, there is the Communion table on the floor on the same level as the rest of the congregation. Behind that, up a few steps, is the pulpit, and next to it off to the side is the baptismal font. Our space is traditional, more of a sanctuary theater mode. We don’t have space to do Communion in the center. So the idea is that whenever people come into the church, what they should visually see is that the centerpiece is the table of God, and the Word of God, and the water of God. We don’t do baptism even once a month. We’re getting there—we’re doing our best to have enough children and converts to do it once a month, but we have that as a visual reminder that we are the baptized people of God. The architecture of our building, though—the ceiling comes to a point, and it’s all hardwood. So when you look at it, it’s supposed to, in the interior, be reflective of an inverted ark, like Noah’s ark. The idea, going back to the church fathers, is that the Church is the ark of God. And our building, if you look up, is intended to and designed to communicate this idea that salvation is passing through the waters of the world, and God is carrying us through. And that’s what we’re gathering for.
But I’m going to have to go back now and look at the lighting of our room to see exactly how is it—are we getting enough from the outside? Do we need to put some stained glass in? You guys have inspired me.
Frank Black: Well, yeah! <laugh> I mean, you walk into this church here, right? It’s the Blessed Sacrament over there. And everything points to that. That’s what it is. The fact of the matter is very, very honestly, the center point of the church is the Eucharist, is the thing that makes us unique among all those other churches. I respect those other churches, and we work together with those other churches around here a lot. But when Jesus said, “This is my body, this is my blood,” we take it seriously; we take it literally. And a lot of people don’t do that. And that’s the thing that is the focus of who we are. Unfortunately, I don’t know if all the Catholics in the world actually even understand that or even believe that. But that is the focus of it. And you walk into to the church, and that’s the first thing you see. It’s there. So yeah, it’s the Eucharist.
As a matter of fact, we didn’t have the tabernacle in on the altar—and this is a fairly big church over here. We didn’t have it on the altar when I first got here, and the bishop told me that a church like this needed to have the Sacrament back on the altar. The bishop told me to reinstall it back then, because we had it in a Eucharistic chapel on side. And he said, no, it needs to be right there in the center. So that’s what you see when you first walk in.
We think of baptism as a family naming ceremony, being baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Cameron Shaffer is the Senior Pastor of Langhorne Presbyterian Church, a congregation of 300 members belonging to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and located northeast of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. LPC just celebrated its 135th anniversary of worshipping God together. Photos of the church’s bell tower show that the entire, original edifice was rotated 45o between 1900 and 1920, and no one knows why. Cameron has a MTh from the University of Glasgow and is a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is married to Lauren and is the father of two (soon to be three!) happy children.
Fare Forward: What is required to become a member of your church, and what does your church do to make newcomers welcome if they’re not members?
Eric Howell: We had a couple of guys who made bracelets for themselves that read Ministry of Alienation on it, and their job was to chase away newcomers so that they wouldn’t fill up the sanctuary too much <laugh>. So we’ve tried to keep them sequestered <laugh>.
So how do we make newcomers welcome? This next Sunday, as a matter of fact, we have a newcomers’ breakfast where my associate pastor and I will just have a lighthearted breakfast with folks. We’ll follow that up with three Wednesday nights called Dayspring 101, where we’ll do, again, a pretty lighthearted attempt to give folks a sense of the story of our church and connections with one another, ways to participate in the church and connect, and a sense of where we’re going as a community: what’s the vision? At the end of that, my hope is that they know some people, which is really important, to get to know just a few people whose faces you recognize. They get to know us, so there’s a connection there. They know how they can connect, and they know what stream they’re stepping into, where this is not the same thing as First Baptist Church of Whatever. I’m not criticizing, it’s just different. So I want them to know what they’re stepping into so they can fully participate and draw from the community who we are and who they can be as a part of us. We do that sort of rhythm from time to time, and it’s starting again this week. I think that’s pretty helpful.
In terms of becoming a member, that’s not required to be a member, but everybody who joins sits down with either me or the associate pastor, and we have two or three goals. One is we want to hear their baptism story if they’re already baptized, or we want to talk about faith with them and the path toward baptism. We want them to be getting to know some other people in the church besides us. And we’ll often ask people to delay their decision to join, to let us put them in situations where they can get to know some people. So again, the connection. We don’t want it to just be they’re joining me and the institution, but they’re joining the community. We emphasize that, and then we want them to know something about the history and story of the church, like I mentioned, so they get to know what they’re getting involved in. So those things are part of the conversation. Inherent within that, of course, is their confession of Christ as their Savior and their Lord and whatever path, whatever step they are in the path, whether it’s preparing for baptism or growing in their faith or deconstructing it or whatever it is. But that’s inherent to being a church member as well. That’s pretty much it. It’s pretty simple here. We ask them to do a couple steps in addition to that, to acknowledge that, and we celebrate that as a community, but that’s the basic process.
Heidi Thorsen: I think we at our church are in a phase of trying to rethink our welcome processes. But one thing that’s come up a lot in the process is just this question of, “What is a member?” I think that the way that we talk about membership feels a little bit outdated. At least, in the Episcopal Church it’s sort of like “a regular communicant” or the fancy terms for “received Communion at least three times a year.” I mean, all of that to me feels very specific in a way that actually isn’t very helpful. And then, I think the way that people think of membership is different. People are members at gyms, <laugh>. I don’t know. And then there’s just the fact that my church is in downtown New Haven. There are three churches on this massive green where there are regularly public events, there are several bus stops.
Everybody from the people working at the bank, to people who are unhoused, living behind our church, are all together. And then on top of that, it tends to be a church that gets a lot of attend-only-on-Christmas-and-Easter people. All of that can be frustrating, but it also can be very beautiful because of the blurriness of who is a member and who is not a member. I would rather err on the side of saying that our community includes a really wide range of people.
Like I mentioned before, we have a weekly service called Chapel on the Green, where we serve people who are unhoused or precariously housed. We gather for Eucharist outside and then serve a bagged lunch. Eucharist maybe gathers about 35 people. The lunch can get up to 100. How do you say who is a member in that or not? It’s hard, because we run up against these very traditional ideas of membership, when I want to affirm something less institutional. All that being said, what I ended up putting on the website as just some clarifying point, a place to begin, is that members are people who come, connect, and give. Which again, I can interpret that very broadly. So if you just show up, even if you show up twice a year, great. You came. If you connect—did you talk to someone? Are you volunteering? How are you not just an individual, but a part of that bigger thing that’s happening at church? And give, again, can be financial, but it can also be giving in other ways, giving as be being a reader in church, and so on.
It’s interesting as I described this that I realize, Eric, that there is no confession of faith required <laugh> for us. There is no requirement. And I actually know of some people in our church who are, “I’m a Buddhist, my wife is an Episcopalian, can we attend?” or “I’m Muslim.” There are so many interesting ways that people describe themselves that don’t necessarily fall into a conventional confession of faith. And even so I would still consider them members. That creates all kinds of theological challenges that I can’t entirely wrap my head around. But the body of Christ is complicated, so it’s a very interesting question. Good to think about.
Hayden Kvamme: In some ways I think as a community we have side-stepped this question on purpose and are still thinking through it. And so currently what someone has to do to become a member is show up, get us to send them an email from one of our administrators, and fill out a form that says that they want to be a member. And if someone says they want to be a member on that form and we know who they are, then we consider them a member. And if they haven’t been baptized, then we start a conversation with them about getting baptized and why they might want to do that and what that would look like. But most of the time, I would say, they have been baptized.
And that is really related to the second question, which is that in terms of making newcomers feel welcome, we try to remove as many barriers as we can. And frankly, even as Midwest Minnesotan Lutherans, it blows our minds—it blows my mind—for anyone to walk into a church who hasn’t been there these days. I just don’t take that for granted at all. So when someone does that, we want to create a space where they don’t feel like they have hoops to jump through, but do feel like there’s a reason they’re there and that there’s something they can jump into. So about three or four times a year, we have gatherings for newcomers, to which we also invite some current members of the church, and a number of our staff are present for those. We introduce ourselves, but also gather around tables and get those people connecting with each other and also connecting with oldcomers—as I call them in my own brain, though I don’t know that as a church we do <laugh>.
And then personally, I’m always encouraging us—and others are too—to do really simple things like get to know people’s names and remember something about their stories, because they notice that, and it makes a difference. And so those would be some of the things we do. We also invite anyone who walks in the door to participate in leading worship. We could probably be even more thoughtful about what that looks like and how we do that, but we do make that an explicit invitation and offer people the guidance that they need to do that. So that’s another thing.
Cameron Shaffer: As far as becoming a member of our church, like everyone else, we have multiple layers to this. So, the official, bare bones requirement is you need to be a baptized, professing believer in Christ who wants to become a member and has been part of our church. That assumes a couple of other layers under it. We actually police our membership pretty closely. I think we’re probably a bit more formal and institutional than some of the other parties that are here. And part of our motivation for that is one of the biggest, most effective charges against Christianity in our culture today is hypocrisy, and holding our members who claim the name of Christ, who claim to be Christian, who claim a public identification with our church, and saying, we have particular ethical expectations and standards, and you need to be living within them to identify with us, is one of the ways that we communicate to the world that we actually don’t let people in our congregation get away with grievous, heinous sin. It’s not about reputation protecting, but about maintaining a good witness and saying, we want to take the log out of our own eye before we start accusing people about specks in theirs.
Part of what that looks like with our membership process is people don’t have to agree with our church’s doctrine to be a member of our church, but they actually take vows of joining the community. I’ve used the illustration of covenant for our church’s framework in other places, but that’s true for becoming a member. The people are covenanting to belong to the community in a special way. We have five vows that our members take. We have them do that in a worship service as part of, “you are now in an official kind of way, being made part of the family.” They vow that they are sinners in the sight of God and without hope of salvation on their own, that they depend upon Christ alone for their salvation as he’s provided for them in the Gospel, that they resolve upon the grace of the Holy Spirit to follow Jesus, that they vowed to serve Christ and his church, participate with our congregation, and to promote the unity and purity and peace of the church.
So for people who are coming in from the outside, that is part of the process for membership. We have all sorts of little things that we explain what this looks like, kind of like what Heidi was saying with the “come, connect, give”—some broad stuff. The expectation is, are you in worship? Are you connecting with people? Are you serving? Are you letting people know that you need help? Are you praying? Are you serving children? And if you’re married and have kids, are you upholding your marriage vows? Are you parenting your kids well? Are you supporting the church with your gifts and resources as you have means? This is the kind of expectation that we set. We don’t go to people’s homes and check to make sure that they’re meeting all of these requirements or anything like that. We also have lots of people who come in the door and hang out, and people who have been part of and have served in our church for decades who have never become members, either because they don’t think it’s necessary or they’re philosophically opposed to the concept. So becoming a member isn’t necessary to be a participant in the community and worship of our church.
For the children of our church, we have a kind of a separate category for them. If we use the metaphor of a family, again, they are part of the family. They have been baptized. For us, that’s the admission into the community, the family of God. We think of baptism as a family naming ceremony, being baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So for the children, we think of them as members of the church, but until they are confirmed (which is a process as they get older, where they go through an additional class to provide them with the vocabulary of the faith), until they are able to make a sincere profession of faith that they own, that is theirs, they don’t become full members, what we call confirmed members, of the church. So that’s another way that we move through that process. We want honor the natural family, and children are fully part of the life of the church, but we don’t want to just assume their growth into Christianity. Christianity is not just caught, it’s also taught and well, we want them to own it. If they don’t own it, we don’t want them to presume or us to presume something about them.
For people who are visitors coming in, we have the greeters who know everybody so they can spot the people who are new to be able to welcome them. We have in our narthex all sorts of resources, little booklets ranging from booklets to explain our practices and beliefs to little pamphlets that are one page or maybe four pages, depending on the person, with information about who we are and our values, how to plug into the church, how to connect with the church. We have little coffee mugs that we give out with things like wristbands and gift cards to local coffee shops.
In a digital age, it’s hard to justify physical bulletins or worship guides, but one of the reasons we still do it is we want to be able to put instructions and explanations for the things we’re doing liturgically. So when they open it up, they can go, this is the part where people stand. This is the part where we all recite something together. And I can read this and not be caught off guard. There’s an explanation for it. Here are the songs that are coming up. Sometimes we have the songs in our hymnals, sometimes in the guide itself. I can go and look at that, and every week we rotate an explanation where there’s details on here’s what the call to worship is, here’s what Communion is all about, here’s what preaching’s about, here’s what the benediction is.
We don’t want to have, as Hayden was saying, we don’t want to have barriers. We don’t want to, in the pursuit of removing barriers, water down our liturgy; we want to provide explanation and guidance for people. And we always have a fellowship hour after our service where we gather for the typical church stuff, bagels and coffee and snacks. We always, always, always make sure that the visitors are welcome and wanted there. And that’s how they start to connect with people. And we try to not pressure them at the same time because we understand that introverts exist <laugh>.
Frank Black: I’ll do the second one first. We have this thing which is again, a very Caribbean, Black kind of traditional thing where at the end of every mass on Sunday, we ask, “Is anybody here for the first time?” And they stand up and we greet them and pray for them and applaud and stuff like that. So we do that to try and make people feel more welcome. And then we used to bring them up onto the altar before Covid. We may start that again soon and actually ask them what their name is and where they are from, and say, “You’re welcome to come back anytime.” So we do that all three places.
What does it take to become a member of the church? Okay, to register. However, if you want to become a practicing Catholic, and you’re not baptized in the Catholic Church, you have to join what we have called RCIA, Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, and that used to be a one-year program. Now it’s a two-year program where you actually take off some time, and you sit down and discuss what all these things are, what the teachings of the Church are. Periodically, we stop and say “Do you still want to do this? Now that you know what you’re actually getting into, do you still want to say yes to this? Do you still want to embrace this?” Now, here’s the difference. If you’re a baptized, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist—if you have already been baptized, then to become a member of the Catholic Church, you say publicly, “I believe what the Catholic Church preaches is revealed by God,” and that makes a Catholic. If you have never been baptized, then you have to be baptized, and when you do that, you receive a confirmation and first Communion at the same time, usually on Easter weekend. And there’s a whole process where we present you to the community, we pray over you, this whole big thing where little by little you’re invited into the community and hopefully feel the warmth of being part of the family of the Catholic Church. So that’s the process.
That would be my dream: to have the church really be a place where everybody can be at home and find a home.
Fare Forward: With all the time and money in the world at your disposal, what, if anything, would you add to your church, whether to the building, to the resources, to the programming, anything?
Heidi Thorsen: I have three things. One: pews. I would love more flexible seating. Two: air conditioning. It’s hot <laugh>. Three: I’ve mentioned housing is a big feature of our church. If I had a lot of money—let’s build an entire housing shelter, a transitional housing place. Would the city even allow it? Probably not. But that would be my dream, is to have the church really be a place where everybody can be at home and find a home.
Eric Howell: Beautiful! We just got back last week a report from our architect we’ve been working with, that the building that we’ve been working on designing for a couple of years and working with him on getting a budget for is at least a million dollars more than we think we can reasonably afford. And so to go forward with that is either faith or stupidity, and we’re not sure what it is. I met just before this meeting with some of our church council folks and our building committee to actually make the argument that we’re thinking too small and actually, instead of needing to think smaller, we actually should think bigger in a longer timeline. And so I’ve put before them an 11-million-dollar, ten-year sketch. I mean, I just did this myself, but I submitted this sketch to communal discernment for what we would do, phased over roughly 10 years. And it adds up to about 11 million dollars.
It includes additional space for our children, redesigning that. We have nowhere to eat together; we’re crammed into our narthex—which is, I mean, it’s a narthex, it’s not a dining space. So a place to eat, a place for our kids, and a place for our youth who are sitting on each other’s laps, which is never what you want youth to be doing. So additional space for all these things—but all of that couched within a larger vision of caring for these 14 acres and developing them and using them in an ecologically vibrant way, both in terms of providing a home for the critters which are here; raising food, for all the kinds of purposes you can imagine a church raising food for; and doing community compost, which we’re doing a bit of; and clearing out the woods as a space for contemplative prayer; and a place for caring for these majestic live oak trees that we have that are getting swallowed by invasives. So all of that, all the building we would do is couched within this place being a carbon neutral, in fact carbon sink campus, that would be a model for congregations and individuals throughout the community to see our faith as an ecologically vibrant faith and have an ecologically vibrant Christology. So there, that’s what I want with 11 million dollars.
Hayden Kvamme: If I had all the time or money or resources at my disposal, I would love to see us reimagine our connection to our local neighborhood. My sense is that 50 years ago, many of the people coming to Gloria Dei came to Gloria Dei because it was the church that was closest to them, and they connected. More recently, because there are truly a dozen and maybe more Lutheran churches in Rochester, people come to Gloria Dei because there’s something about our identity that draws them specifically. And I think that’s a really good thing. But what it also means is that we’re a bit out of touch with our immediate neighborhood. I would love to have the time and the resources to literally walk down the residential street that our church is on and knock on those people’s doors and say hello and learn their stories and share ours and see what comes of that, if anything. So, we don’t need a lot of money to do that. I might actually do it this summer. We’ll see. But I’m sure we could do it even better if we had more time and more money.
Cameron Shaffer: If I had all the time and money in the world, I think there’s probably four things that we would do. We need to redo our sanctuary. It was built in the sixties and has not been—it had a redesign about 25 years ago and was instantly outdated <laugh>. And it needs to be remodeled.
We are very close to a college campus, and it would be good if we could hire somebody whose focus was ministry on the college campus. The nature of our community and neighborhood is, you don’t have a lot of young adults and young families that easily connect in, just because of the nature of the age of the community and the cost of housing. So it’s difficult to intentionally build up anything in the late teens, early-to-mid-twenties range. The college is close enough that that would be a good pool, but also, they need help. And so that would be one thing that we would do.
In our community, there’s a service that’s a kind of halfway house for people with developmental disabilities or traumatic head injuries. It’s also a place where people on the autism spectrum who can live-semi independently but still need to be in group homes are able to live. There are houses in the neighborhood that are run by this institution, and a lot of places for people with dementia and neurological disorders. So if we had all the resources in the world, I would want to begin moving and trying to assist in that—I mean, we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of people that live in these communities—to engage with them, help them out, do more disabled ministry, things like that.
Within a five-minute walking distance is the local tavern that was founded in 1720, and it recently went up for sale for two and a half million dollars. If we had all the time in the world, we could justify purchasing it and using it as kind of a faithful presence in our local area. But that is a very difficult pitch <laugh> when we don’t have all the money in the world. So that’s what I would probably do right now if we had infinite money, I would want to spend it on those four things.
Frank Black: First of all, I’d repair everything that’s falling down, because it’s a constant battle. These churches are so old. I would get back our school and our convent and our gymnasium, which we all had to sell because they fell into such disrepair that there’s no way the parish could afford to repair them. This was before I got here. I’d have to get that back. I would also buy a block of apartments and hire maybe 10 or 12 people and keep them in there, people that had experience in social work and people that had experience in psychology, and reach out to those people who were living on the street, who were battling mental diseases or were battling drug addiction and who seemed lost, and try and find the way to offer them an alternative to the life that they were living.
I would also arrange to get a lot of other people from different countries who had other skills, that we could offer and give them a free place to stay if they would just work and help to upgrade and keep up the buildings and the properties that we had so that we could afford to reach out to more people and not have to worry about how we’re going pay for everything. There are so many things that we would like to do. Like to have bigger food pantry. We had to close the food pantry because we had to sell the convent. The stuff couldn’t fit in the basement of the rectory. All these things that we would like to do to reach out to the community, which we can’t do, because we’re held back by the fact that everybody thinks we have all this money and we’re just barely making it.
So yeah, I would do all the things that we would like to be able to do: Take care of the homeless, take care of the mentally ill, take care of drug addicts to get some sort of reentry into society, take care of the hungry, and have a place for the kids to come and participate in having a great time—and having some place to go, so they wouldn’t be living on the street. And having a place like the convent to have people that wanted to volunteer have a place to stay and not have find a way to pay to live in New York City. Oh, I’ve got all these dreams <laugh>. I have all these dreams I’d love to see happening, but unfortunately, we’re limited by reality. That’s what I’d like to see.
Fare Forward: Thank you so much for participating. This was amazing.
Eric Howell: Thank you for the invitation. It’s really encouraging to meet all of you and hear your stories from all over the country. What a gift. Thank you.
Heidi Thorsen: Good to meet you all.
Hayden Kvamme: Thank you, nice to meet you guys.
Cameron Shaffer: I’m happy to be here. This has been fun.
Frank Black: God bless you. Keep it going.
