People Are Leaving Us

People are leaving us.

That might seem like an odd way to start an Easter reflection but stick with me.

It’s true, people are leaving us, but this is how things tend to go at Ponce Pres. We are a metro church in every sense. We have members who live as far out as Dallas, GA and members who live right around the corner. I myself pass a number of churches on my way to Ponce every Sunday. Still, my wife and I have felt called to Ponce basically since we arrived in Atlanta, about seven years ago. I know many others who feel the same—they sense their calling to Ponce despite living in Norcross, College Park, Marietta, or Decatur.

Callings do change though.

Being a metro church has its challenges. Apart from the church plant budding from Ponce’s roots, which has drawn away some established members (God be praised!), Ponce has had the privilege of seeing people marry and have children in our church. Sometimes, for affordability reasons and needing space to breath, they head out to the suburbs. They may or may not remain members at Ponce. Some feel the natural pull of a stronger gravity the farther their orbit extends—that of their new neighborhood. This is a beautiful thing! Ponce has also had the privilege of seeing people arrive in Atlanta for their studies. Whether at GT, Emory, GSU, or elsewhere, they don’t always hang around. There’s nothing wrong with that either! It’s the same with some professionals who arrive only to leave after a couple years or relocate for other career opportunities. There’s nothing wrong with that either! God calls us to excel at our vocations.

I would be remiss not to mention that some of our members have simply died. I think of Brent or Sharon, for instance. It’s hard, harder even than losing those who move, but we can hopefully find some comfort in knowing they’re now in Jesus’s presence.

Similarly, it always seems that Ponce gets refilled in waves—by babies or by relocations. My wife and I were part of one such wave. We arrived right when several other couples and singles arrived. We bonded with some of them. One couple in particular eventually moved to EAV, where they felt called to attend a church in their immediate neighborhood. Last month I had a chance to stop in at their home. It had probably been about a year and a half since I had seen them. It felt like a beautiful reunion. I imagine I will continue to see them around town or we’ll get together here and there. Still, if I’m honest, my heart grieves the loss of their daily presence. But, this is the way we all live these days and there is nothing necessarily wrong with our movement and changing church homes. In fact, as I sense we gear up for a season of transition, I must admit that I actually encouraged a family moving out to the suburbs that they kick the tires of some churches in their new neighborhood.

I want to talk about something—grieving and celebrating those who leave Ponce.

As a church, we should be drawing closer together. It may not always be perfect. It may be entirely absent from time to time. Whether that’s on us or on others in our lives, I leave that to the individual heart to determine. We should grieve departure though. We should mourn losing the daily presence of our brothers and sisters in Christ. On the other hand, we should celebrate it too! We get to see those with whom we have shared our lives go onward into the world to serve and worship Jesus with other believers in new places, whether right around the corner or across the globe.

I was recently reading a novel about two pastors and their wives called The Dearly Beloved. One pastor is a skeptic married to an ardent believer. One pastor is a firm believer married to an atheist. The two pastors end up sharing a pulpit at a NYC church during the tumultuous 1960s. Both men and their wives make their congregants quite uncomfortable with their positions on social issues and openness to the turbulent times.

Over the course of the novel, one of the pastors and his wife have twins, one of whom is autistic. In these early days of autism research (the 1960s), parents often didn’t know how to love or live with their autistic children, and the children would end up in group homes where a lack of staff and social support meant the children simply could get the love and attention they needed. The pastor and his wife are determined to keep their son in their own home, but they are also fearful of the reactions of those around them. They begin to retreat into their family unit. The other pastor and the rest of the church notice their attempted retreat and draw closer to them, sometimes being pushed away and sometimes making missteps in trying to be helpful. Regardless of their failures at engaging, the other pastor and the congregants earnestly seek the family out. It comes to the point that the other pastor and the congregants create a school for autistic children, staffed by medical professionals and well-trained special ed teachers.  

Sometime later, the pastor whose child is autistic must baptize the newborn child of his fellow co-pastor. He looks out at the congregations and begins with “Dearly beloved.” I will let the author, Cara Wall, narrate it:

“Dearly beloved,” he began. They were the words that started weddings, not baptisms, but the people in the church were his beloved, so dear that as he spoke his heart and throat grew tight. He loved every person in this church more than he would have ever thought possible, loved them not with the automatic love of childhood or the easy love of coincidence, but with the tautly stitched love of people who have faced uncertainty together, who have stuck it out, the strong love of people who looked to their side while suffering and saw the other there.

Now, remember that this is a baptism scene. It is about young people. It is about confirming the faith of the families of those young people. It is about how they plan to raise children in the admonition of the Lord. Cara Wall continues,

Together, they [the parents] would send all of these young people out into a world they knew was full of injury and hard to bear. Somehow, they would wave and wish them well and have faith that they would avoid the worst of the darkness, live mostly in the light.

I find these words so moving. The church members, he comes to find, amidst the personal hardships of life and the ruptures in their society, have become his beloved; they are “tautly stitched” together. How beautiful an image. Still, here at a baptism, he’s compelled to reflect on the fact that they will have to send their children out into a scary world. This world contains the very brokenness he’s had to face. I love the line, “they would wave and wish them well and have faith that they would avoid the worst of the darkness, live mostly in the light.”

The first time I read these words I was moved to reflect on Ponce, but not in terms of baptisms and young people leaving home, but in terms of our departures. We have seen and will see our fair share of departures. We’ll have to wave and wish them well and have faith that they would avoid the worst of the darkness and live mostly in the light. There’s both pain and hope in this. Hopefully, we can be stitching ourselves together to this degree, that we would call each other beloved and grieve our departures. For now, I leave it to you to wonder how you do this.

What I actually want to do, however, is encourage you, not chastise you. I submit we can do better even than Wall suggests. We can grieve the losses, we can wave goodbye, and we can have faith (and pray) for their futures apart from us. These are no doubt a must. But, we can also do more—we can celebrate eternal reunion. We believe there’s a future beyond this life if we are in Christ. It involves a table where we will sit with our fellow saints and our Lord and enjoy the bountiful harvest of a world restored to glory. Regardless of whether or not I see you around town, we believe we’ll see each other again in another life. We can embrace each other now and release our grip when the Lord says it’s time to let go. After all, we will embrace each other again. Even when we fail to embrace each other well on this earth (I know many of us feel this way), we won’t fail in the life to come.

There are many reasons why people leave our church. Some with joy and celebration, some in a more disgruntled manner (for good reason or not), some because we just cannot serve them for a season or two. My hope is that regardless of how they leave, we all recognize how we will be together again someday, our joys completed, our disagreements done.

Enter Easter.

Easter is somewhat weird for us as Christians, as is Good Friday for that matter. Good Friday is, well, “good.” What Jesus did in suffering and dying for us was certainly “good,” yet we dress in black and treat it like a funeral. It isn’t totally dark though because what actually makes it good is what happens next: Easter. Easter feels like a day of new life and celebration, a breath of fresh air… Yet, it’s also kind of not when you stop and think about it. As Christians we rightly believe that Jesus’s resurrection remains the pinnacle event in human history, but still, it didn’t set the world right right now. In fact, Jesus left us.

Okay, okay. He left us with the Holy Spirit and went to prepare a place for us (in no way am I minimizing that), but we--the church--are still awaiting the full return of our bridegroom. We--arm in arm, you and I--will be together in eternity.

A future, eternal togetherness is a beautiful hope we can lean on as Christians, especially as we reflect on our struggle to maintain connections during pandemic living, as we witness members moving on, and as we turn our attention to the not-entirely-completed joys of Easter. Hopefully, we won’t abuse our future, eternal togetherness by resting on our heels in the here and now. Instead, I pray that our future, eternal togetherness may push us forward in love to such a degree that we can both grieve our departures and embrace them. Right now, let’s rest in the joy Easter brings, while realizing we’ll eventually bask side-by-side in an even more complete joy.

Thoughts on Minority Representation, Our Society, and the Church

I never really grasped the importance of minority representation until recently.

Let me explain.

For Christmas last year my kids, who are Black, received a children’s book about the Obamas. It’s a nice little book about how the Obamas have worked hard for equality, stewardship of the earth, and a healthier America. One day, my son, a curious boy, pulled the book off the shelf and started asking questions about it. “Who’s that on the cover? What did he do? What’s a ‘President’?” At first, I didn’t think much of these questions, but as I began talking about how Barack Obama was African American (“chocolate,” as our son says) and held one of, if not the most, powerful positions on the planet I saw my son’s eyes grow larger and larger. I came to realize just how energized he was by the fact that someone who looked like him was so important. He didn’t even know what “President” meant (he still doesn’t), but he knew it was something special, and what made it more special was that Obama has the same color skin as him.

The more I thought about it, the more I was also like, “Yeah, it is super cool that Obama, a Black man, became President!” I started probing deeper into President Obama’s life and legacy. Eventually, I stumbled on John McCain’s 2008 presidential election concession speech (and here). I’m not sure I had ever heard the speech before, but it was interesting in light of recent events. In case you need reminding, there was a time when certain conspiracists, Donald Trump foremost among them, spread the lie that Obama was not born in the US, and was not, therefore, eligible for the Office of the President. There were also people saying that Obama was a Muslim who wanted to destroy the US. Terrible, terrible racist things were said. Unlike some politicians these days, McCain stood up for Obama throughout his campaign, opposing some of his own supporters to their faces when they tried to spread false information about his opponent. McCain now looks like a man standing among playground children for having done so (also see this). In his concession speech, McCain—again, he had just lost—emphasized, “This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.” I don’t see McCain as a flawless man mind you (nor his concession speech), but to this day I’m struck by how he highlighted the significance of the 2008 election for millions of Black people across the US (even as his audience booed every time they heard the name “Obama”), all still feeling the sting of this country’s racist legacy. I’m struck by how McCain, a decade before my son was born, affirmed my son’s pride in the accomplishment of another Black man.

Whether its Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Raphael Warnock, Cory Booker, or Tim Scott, you don’t have to agree with someone’s politics to celebrate what they might represent—in this country, a light flickering in the dark history of violence and discrimination. In no sense do I want to turn the figures I just mentioned into “tokens,” signs of “how far we have come” or something like that. We have work to do that feels insurmountable at times. The murder of Ahmaud Arbery (among many others), delight at the purposeful butchering of Kamala Harris’s name (also here), and the Capitol insurrection, even “Jewish Space Lasers” (look it up; also this) show us how hate rears its head from top to bottom in our society.

In America, there has been a trend among White people to paint over differences in color and gender, to pretend we don’t see them. We want to say, myself included, “it doesn’t matter what your skin color is or whether you’re a man or a woman; Americans judge fellow Americans on the basis of merit, not skin color, background, religion, sexual orientation, etc. The past is the past. We don’t deal with those issues anymore.” As the long, arduous year of 2020 has shown, that’s simply not true.

I fear we make a similar move in the church. Hear me out. In the church, we like to cite Galatians 3:28—“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”—as proof that since we are all united in Christ we shouldn’t care about “trivialities” like minority representation in the church. “That’s a fleshly concern,” I’ve basically heard people say. Or, we like to say, “Black or White, it doesn’t matter. As long as they love Jesus, it’s all good!” It’s a kind of “I don’t see color or other differences” Christianese response. We can then slide further into something entirely unbiblical—a reflexive opposition to difference, outright or subtle.

In Revelation 21, the Holy City, New Jerusalem, descends from the heavens prepared as a bride. There isn’t a temple in this Holy City and there isn’t a sun or moon. God’s glory provides the light. On whom does the light shine? Revelation says, “the nations.” In fact, Revelation 21:26 states, “The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into [the city].” In the Ancient Near East, “the nations” could denote all sorts of human “groupings”—ethnic, political, social, etc. Most importantly, what Revelation 21 shows us is not the total dissolution of differences, but God’s celebration of difference. As theologian William Storrar writes,

The one new humanity in Christ is a community of unity in diversity, a holy nation made up of people of all nations who, in embracing their new identity in Christ, retain their social and cultural identities as Gentiles and lose only the oppression and distorting effect of sin and their separation from God’s covenant people… The Bible affirms both equality and difference.

Honestly, I don’t know what that looks like most of the time. Sometimes I see glimpses. I live in a broken world that struggles to recognize difference in a way that isn’t pandering, self-satisfying, or goes beyond a meaningless gesture. The good news of Revelation 21 is that whatever this recognition of difference is supposed to be, it will be perfected and pleasing to God. How great is that! Think about it. There are right now brothers and sisters in Christ who were racists praising God in the heavens because they were set free from that racism, an ironic twist on their earthly lives.

We, still earth-bound beings, are all united by Christ, but, once again, we also live in a broken world where we have to fight hard against our biases and fight hard for racial and ethnic equality. Part of what it means to fight hard (biblically) for racial and ethnic equality in our present is to recognize and celebrate that unity in diversity.

Do we even try to live with the knowledge that God has set us free to embrace unity in diversity? I fear we, the church, as individuals or entire churches, often repackage unity in Christ into a type of Christian “tokenism.” That is, we can easily use unity, forgetting in diversity, as evidence of our “profound” spirituality, a sign of how “non-racial,” “post-racial,” or whatever you want to call it, we are. So, we use unity in Christ to push away wrestling with minority representation in the here and now because that wrestling makes us uncomfortable. Maybe, just maybe this happens in our own church.

Take heart! Christ will come again and set right all things! But we would be fools to forget how our future hope of perfected unity in diversity is impacted by our sinful minds, our family histories, and the way our society oppresses and demeans the marginal. More than fools, we may be in sin to deny sin’s presence. May we remember that unity in diversity matters: it matters to God.