Circa 2012.
Then.
Six years ago, some of our dearest friends came over on a Sunday afternoon bearing a chocolate ganache cake. In thick, white loopy icing were the words “Happy Church Transfer.” Earlier that morning, we’d said goodbye to our church community across the bridge. Something had been percolating in our hearts and minds that was propelling us to find a place to worship in the neighbourhood we’d moved to five years earlier. Our pastor placed a book in our hands that had us imagining what it would look like to live in community with folks whose central ethos was cultivating a culture of belonging. The main tenant of this paradigm shift was rather than professing belief and thereby being included in the life of the church, a church *should* enfold everyone, and as ordinary and extraordinary folks journey in community, "faith happens." We looked at our children, wondered about what "The Church" might look like in twenty years, and jumped in.
First Sundays are weird.
How strange is it to walk into any building of strangers and join in their worship rituals? In this, I envy the Catholics, for whom mass has not changed much and participation around the globe offers few surprises. But for mainstream Protestants, entering any church on a Sunday morning can be intimidating. So there we were, our little family, walking into the bright atrium of the John F Perkins Centre, and finding a place to sit at one of the round tables. The service began and a man came to join us. I smiled politely, glanced over, and to my horror, noticed he was carrying a four-foot sword. Immediately my body began to tense up as I curved my arms around the kids like a shield and watched my warrior neighbour for signs of agitation. I have no idea what the sermon was about or what songs we sang. Eventually, I took a deep breath.
Everybody belongs. (?)
I have yet to get stabbed at church. (Later on one of the elders asked the man to please leave his sword at home in the future.)
We went back the next week.
Joining a small community was a huge learning curve for me. I quickly realized that if there was something I wanted to try, I would have to champion it. At New Hope, if you dream it, you drive it. In 2012, there weren’t many children, so we often let them play or colour during the service. As time passed, however, the volume of the kids’ voices overwhelmed the speaker. I decided to gather up the kids for an impromptu Sunday School huddle with whatever materials I could find in the closet. Afterwards, someone said to me, “Oh, that was so New Hope.” I think they meant it as a blessing, like I’d passed some kind of initiation/rite of passage and now I was one of them. One of the chaos-loving, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants people.
Except that I never wanted to BE one of those people.
No matter how grassroots, organic or revolutionary something was, part of me would always chafe against disorder. To me, this offhand remark felt like a curse. Inwardly I thought to myself, “What have we done?”
Maybe this anti-establishment gesture was pure arrogance. I started craving things like doctrine, *sound* theology and orthodoxy. When we left our former church, I felt like the only left-winger in the building. Now, I felt like voting for any conservative within 100 miles, even if there was no election, just to conserve something. I’d moved from margin to margin and was feeling lost.
I wondered if I really belonged.
So, I did what any other frustrated doubter does. I went back the next week.
Time passed.
Essential, right?
One Sunday my kids were colouring at the tables at church and the musicians began to play the classic “How Great Thou Art.” Something in my tightly wound heart opened up. Finally! My kids would learn the lyrics to this beloved hymn, a seed of faith for the storms of life ahead would be planted as long as they learned these verses!
But my kids didn’t want to stop colouring to learn a new song. (Squirrelly disobedient offspring!) I panicked. I quietly fell into despair. Without “How Great Thou Art” they were probably doomed to atheism. (Reasonable assumption, right?)
By now, you might be thinking, “wow, this woman is really uptight. She needs a counselor or Xanax or something. Why can’t she just TRUST a little? Why does she have to be such a control freak?” I wouldn’t blame you if you wondered that. I was starting to wonder the same thing myself.
The spiritual tank was empty. So I did what any other faith-less, broken Christian does. I went back to church the following Sunday.
And that week we had a guest speaker. This particular pastor was well respected in our community. He was a man of great humility and gentleness and his message that morning was a simple object lesson. He brought along a suitcase and pulled out different articles of clothing. Each article had a label. The labels read, “greed”, “envy”, “bitterness” etc. We were all tracking with the simplicity of his reminders. And then he pulled out this brown wool patterned sweater.
And I burst out laughing.
You see, somehow, of all the articles of clothing, he’d managed to find a sweater identical to one our lovely Shane Claiborne-type elder had worn almost every week for the past three years. I looked around, embarrassed, but everyone else was also giggling uncontrollably. The poor pastor. Here he’d come with his nice, tight, this-will-be-good-for-you repent message and we’d interrupted him with our raucous laughter. I was wiping away tears at the ridiculousness of it all: The stupid sweater, the chaos and the snorts of laughter echoing through the atrium.
The Sweater.
Something happened that day. God lifted the lid on a pot that wasn’t dry so much as ready to boil over.
It was, looking back, so New Hope. And I felt like maybe, possibly, since I couldn’t get a grip, maybe I belonged there, too.
Now.
My kids still do not know the lyrics to “How Great Thou Art”. But like their mum, they are picking up many other things along the way. Many people are coming to New Hope, especially Millenials. I am being shaped and changed by this generation’s passion for justice. My kids think it’s normal to stop a party (& put down one’s beer) to pray. They know the “f” word is only allowed for major lamenting situations. They experience church beyond Sunday mornings. There was the soccer league, the sewing circle. They are helping take responsibility to re-naturalize a swath of industrial land near the highway and sharing meals with newcomers to Canada at a refugee settlement house. Somehow their faith is being formed without hymns, though my faith was too small to imagine the possibilities.
Here’s what I believe today:
Life (& church) is not about ordering chaos. That’s God’s job.
Belonging does not equal liking everything. (If Church was about getting your way or personal preference, there'd be no room for forgiveness or grace or growth or transformation. You probably shouldn't get your way, but that would be a sucky way to entice people to join your church, so nobody advertises that.)
Believing does not equal every practice aligning with my personal theology. (Which isn’t even a thing.)
Life isn’t, as Carol Shields wrote, like a book with chapters. There are always new characters (sometimes colourful), long sections of dialogue (sometimes punctuated by action, after time-consuming but character-shaping consensus-building), long slogs of moving boxes from place to place.
New Hope isn’t a book, but it is a story that’s hard to put down. It has universal appeal because one recognizes the sinners and saints. And lastly, I love this story because God has laced the important scenes with cake.
Jen's fabulous creation that captures the world of New Hope.
Happy Birthday, New Hope! Here’s to the next ten!