Genuinely Courageous Faith

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty good at hanging out with people who look a lot and think a lot like me. That's not always been the case: in my twenties in the Midwest, I attended a church with several folks I wouldn't necessarily have chosen, with opposite political and social points of view. I remember realizing for the first time how good that was — to not curate community, to learn how the well-being of a body of people is not about your comfort level. To bloom where you're planted. The church needs to get better at being uncomfortable if we’re going to forge a way forward, and I’m going to have to get better at calling out my own complicity and bent towards the status quo.

My husband Drew is a Fuller alum and attended the Northwest campus. Fuller NW just completed its last year as the school shifts more programs online, closes most regional campuses, and moves from its longtime Pasadena, CA, home to a new facility in Paloma. I took furious notes on the back of a program at a Fuller NW gathering a couple of weeks ago when the seminary’s president Mark Labberton addressed the group about the future of the school and the church in general.

Labberton spoke on the question “why does the church matter?” In other words, how will it live out its identity and build credibility? He told us that a church that matters in the 21st century needs to be built on “genuinely courageous faith.” He spoke calmly, projecting curiosity and not alarm.

A Northwest native, Labberton knows the stats about how the PNW has been (and remains) a region with a small Christian population.

“But even in a space like this, where just belief might feel courageous, there’s more to belief than simply enduring in our faith,” he said, asking if we will embody a faith that “steps toward a world of pain, division, and competing interests.”

Labberton also said the church needs to do a better job of living into the reality of a body of folks who look and act different, who maybe wouldn’t have chosen to end up together, but who can live in “a different way in unexpected community.”

When I heard the term “unexpected community” I quickly thought of Urban Light, a church quietly doing important racial reconciliation work in the small of Muncie, Indiana, where I lived for four years after college. I shared a little about our friends Pat and Lezlie, leaders at Urban Light, and the question of what would have happened if we’d stayed in Indiana and chosen to live alongside these friends instead of move to Seattle in this podcast episode.

Urban Light is a community of people from different ethnic backgrounds, generations, able-bodied and people with disabilities, college educated and high school dropouts, people experiencing addiction and recovery. In other words, a pretty perfect picture of the church. Especially since the 2016 election, this community has had to navigate its fair share of complicated dynamics.

A couple of years back, a woman arrived at a Sunday service holding a purse printed with the Confederate flag and worshipped alongside black believers. Apparently she did not do this as an act of defiance, but did not know better.

Here, a small church in a fledgling Midwestern city is doing mighty work in a context of racism, poverty, and addiction. The daily realities of life are at the forefront, and change is molasses-paced. Lezlie told me:

“Sitting by each other in church or living next door to somebody who is different than you does not automatically make you understand where they're coming from and how they might interpret [the Confederate flag]. Therefore reconciling people have work to do to bridge that gap in relationship and cultural awareness and understanding. People don't know how to love each other well just by being in close physical proximity to each other.”

In response to this and similar incidents, our friend Andrew, the pastor, decided to preach a sermon that incorporated a historical look at the meaning behind the Confederate flag. “Sometimes work like that too has to be done,” Lezlie said.

If someone flew a Confederate flag in Seattle, there would be instant outrage. We clearly have our own insidious and systemic challenges, all the way from homelessness to pacification with tech, but they look a lot different than the Rust Belt. Living out Labberton’s call for unexpected community in places like Seattle could manifest in a lot of different ways. But what do they look like?

In five or ten years, Labberton’s call for the church to live differently and express genuinely courageous faith in unexpected community will almost certainly matter more than ever. Unless we do a better job of working alongside people of faith that look a lot less like us, we lose even more social currency.