…or Creating a there that is there.
Jo James for the Ministers Fellowship Journal 2022
I had too much going in in 2016. I was facing a series of disputes within my ageing congregation, turmoil within the management committee, open hostility from Trustees, and my hot tempered organist was perpetually on the boil. For a new minister to a tiny congregation this was a lot of angst to be carrying.
My only strategy for overcoming these problems was growth.
I reasoned that bringing new folk in would at least dilute the troublemakers, and might in time even yield new volunteers, new activists who could take on the roles of running a city centre church.
Grow quickly.
How hard could it be? After all the USP of our Unitarian and Free Christian Churches is inclusivity. Everyone is invited; we place no expectation on newcomers; not even donations and certainly not tithing, not creed nor covenant, not even faith, we welcome those ‘of all faiths and none’ (even if we seem not to have much idea of how what we offer to people of no faith can also nurture people of faith). The huge sign boards that the previous minister had erected proclaimed the message loud and clear: “Sanctuary for All”.
Surely the people would come?
Growth was anything but fast though.
It was glacially slow.
Perhaps when your remit is as broad and wide as ‘Everyone is welcome’ and your appeal is to the ‘general public’ there isn’t enough to hold the attention of the actual individual you need to appeal to in particular…
The issues within the congregation didn’t help – it is hard to be very welcoming if you’re internally furious, and the organist didn’t help much either (you’ll know the old joke what’s the difference between an organist and a terrorist…
And then I began to notice that the few people we were attracting were often awkward and self absorbed too – and sometimes mentally precarious. One guy used to hallucinate and mutter audibly while I preached. Another screwed his eyes tight shut in a wild grimace and rocked hard while he listened intently. A woman with cleopatra style eye make up and 50% proof breath used to insist on standing with her back to the door so that any one arriving would be challenged with negotiating their way past her.
It was that same year that I finally got around to reading a book I’d bought a year earlier and had been looking forward to starting: Spiritual Activism by Alistair McIntosh and Matt Carmichael. The straight talking words of experience a few pages in still resonates:
“… Inclusive organisations can attract a disproportionate number of people that more mainstream organisations have rejected. Such people can introduce creativity and innovation and become part of demonstrating what it means to be caring and inclusive, but they can also damage the institution rendering it oddball and dysfunctional.”
(p.18 Spiritual Activism, 2016, McIntosh / Carmichael, Greenbooks, Cambridge.)
Oddball and dysfunctional was what we were fast becoming, or perhaps what we had already become long since – because I began to realise that the congregation had been more and more reliant on inward-looking misfits whose aptitude for church stewardship was matched only by their social anxiety and personal awkwardness.
Recently a social media meme proclaimed: “You can say ‘All are welcome’ but if sheep and wolves are both welcome then you’re only going to get wolves”. I think the point of the poster was that safe spaces need to be free of risk, which is fine, but (apart from betraying a poor grasp of ecosystems in the natural world) this meme overlooks the challenge of demographics in a world where church attendance is no longer a given. In secular Britain congregations no longer draw from society at large but exclusively appeal to people in spiritual need of some kind. Consequently as people with greater need – and less capacity to support others – self-select in, people with more capacity select out. And you end up with people with low self-awareness muttering to themselves and blocking the entrance. And anyone who gets past them and sees a congregation turn to stare furiously will most probably, and quite understandably, flee.
Don’t get me wrong – of course we are called to minister to people at the point of need, of course we must be a resource for needy, broken people too, but if we onlydraw people with great need but little capacity, we will not only exhaust ourselves, but have nothing of value to offer anyone anymore. We will be collectives of fragile, dysfunctional and unpredictable egocentrics wondering why, despite our signs that proclaim ‘we welcome all!’, no one comes to our services on a Sunday anymore.
One Sunday the fella who hallucinated angels from the Book of Revelation insulted a newcomer, telling her that he’d seen in a vision that she was to be one of his virgin brides in the afterlife. I decided that was enough and quietly told him that since he was unable to show the same respect to others as he himself had always been shown he would no longer be welcome to attend services…
On another Sunday a young family came and sat in another one of our newcomer’s favourite pew. He wanted me to remove the family and because I wouldn’t, he left in a huff, he hasn’t returned, and nor has the family. Actually I miss the guy – for all his vulnerabilities and needs he was also good humoured and charming – but I my work must prioritise providing a nurturing space.
The subtitle of Alastair and Matt’s invaluable book Spritual Activism is ‘Leadership as Service’ they point out that the abdication of leadership is not democratic, it is irresponsible. Lack of leadership leads not to autonomous community but the tyranny of structurelessness. As ministers we serve our communities by leading them, and part of that leadership is providing sound boundaries.
Another very popular meme a while back was the ditty by Edward Markham: ‘He drew a circle that shut me out- /Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout./But love and I had the wit to win:/ We drew a circle and took him In.’
Not only is this execrable poetics, it is bad community building too. For a place to have a centre which is capable of nurture, it must have a boundary which is capable to hold.
Being ‘there for everyone’ is really there for no one, as the great Lauren Bacall said (of Hollywood): ‘There’s no there there’.
The activist Ayishat Akanbi has said that ‘spirituality is really just the removal of that which is false.’
If we make inclusivity that which is of ultimate worth that is idolatry. Inclusivity as goal in itself is a false idol, and its worship leads to what Deitrich Bonhoeffer described as ‘cheap grace’, a spurious and shallow form of self approval without putting in the work – in our case the work of understanding how to create sustainable spaces which can provide nurture and coherence to a truly diverse spiritual ecosystem.
A Space of possibility 