Last November, I began this new blog, Journeyman Preacher. My first post was "A Place Called Vertigo." I had just begun a new call as a church planter in St. Petersburg after being the pastor of Woodlawn Presbyterian Church for eleven years. I remember that those first few months in my new work did feel like vertigo. Vertigo is defined (Dictionary.com) as a dizzying sensation of tilting within stable surroundings or of being in tilting or spinning surroundings. After living in the same house and being the pastor of a local Presbyterian congregation for eleven years, the call to be a church planter in St. Pete felt like vertigo.
But it wasn't just simply moving to a new job and new home after eleven years, rather the feeling of vertigo was the result of the larger church changing drastically. The way we do church has been changing and it seems like there is a lot more change on the way. Some of the change is simply caused by the use of new technology. We don't print weekly church bulletins on mimeograph machines anymore. The change has to do with responding to the reality that many congregations have become holy huddles disconnected from their communities. We've been forced to ask, wat does it mean to be the a faithful congregation today?
This past year has been a growing experience for me. I have learned to welcome the confusion I have felt at times because it helps me to trust God more fully. It has been a time for letting go and letting God work in my life, and, for pushing me out into the community in a new way. Creating this new blog is just one of the many new things I have experienced as I move out in a new way, as a new church pastor. I have also become the Interim Director of Campus Ministries and Chaplain at Eckerd. By letting go and letting God work in my life, I have been led to both campus ministry at Eckerd and to my new faith community, the Missio Dei Community in St. Pete.
I have been a pastor for almost 23 year and want to continue to grow in faith, hope and love. I desire to learn new and more genuine ways of being a community of faith. One question that captures my attention now is "What does it mean to be an authentic church in the 21st Century?" Gordon Cosby, founding pastor of the Church of the Savior in Washington DC, has said that in the later part of his life, this is the most important question for him. He writes, "For me the central question is what it means to be the authentic church of Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected. What is its nature? Its essence? And how can that essence be structured and expressed so as to become a healing agent for the world?"
He and Kayla McClurg write about the authentic church as a place of extreme diversity. They write, "The world has been damaged severely by the lie that we are meant to be separate from each other, that we are not bound together eternally as the children of one God. The authentic church will be a diverse body, interconnected and interdependent. The diversity will be of every sort--race, gender, economics, sexual orientation, age, etc. Even persons of other faiths can find themselves at home in the authentic church because Jesus Christ, with whom we are deepening in relationship, insists that we belong to the totality, the whole family of God. If we think Jesus excludes anyone, we haven't yet gone deep enough in discovering who Jesus is."
To me, as a new church planter, a new faith community is not something we create, but something we rediscover and lean into. It's something that we do together as brothers and sisters in conversation and in relationship to God. This place, a feeling of vertigo, is really just an invitation for me to let go and learn from God. With open hands, an open mind and an open heart, I seek to rediscover genuine community. At our faith community, we are seeking to be a holistic, missional Christian community of faith. I am grateful to God for all I have learned in 2009, and, for the people who journey with me.
