Building the Beloved Community
I spent this past week at camp with 60 high school students and 10 adult volunteers. From Sunday afternoon until Friday evening, we came together to learn about God and one another, seeking to build a community of faith quickly. Some of these kids have been to West River for 7 or 8 years in a row. Some have been part of this particular camp – Camp Awesome - for all four of their high school years.
But this year we had a high percentage of campers entering 9th grade or attending Camp Awesome for the very first time. They were brand new to this particular camp where young people come together for friendly competition, late nights, and quick vulnerability and deep dives into conversations about faith.
So… there were some campers there that knew what fun and intensity was coming at them, they knew the rules, they knew one another, they knew what to expect, they knew how they could contribute to a great week.
But more than 1/3 did not know any of this about this camp. They brought their hopes and dreams, their expectations from other camps, their fears and anxieties as well. And let’s face it, high school students have their fair share of fears and anxieties and insecurities in a familiar setting, so put them in a new setting with new expectations and the insecurity DRIVES behavior.
Within 24 hours, we had an incident that left some kids feeling shamed and ostracized. That’s pretty natural high school stuff – differentiation comes from finding places of superiority. Heck, it’s actually pretty natural human stuff – defining ourselves by identifying what is “less” in someone else so that we feel better, or as we put it by the end of the week, making our tower higher by knocking someone else’s down rather than building ours with greater integrity.
Another pastor and I, faced with some choices about how to shut down the behavior on Monday evening before it became bullying, decided to sit down with three campers to talk about the opportunity to build the beloved community.
You see, part of what we CAN do at camp, if everyone keeps the right mind set, is build a community where everyone brings the best of themselves. What we can do at camp is show up to everyone with love and encouragement for whatever gifts they bring.
And from year to year, if we stay focused on being a community where everyone brings the best of themselves and shows up with love and encouragement, we draw in the “newbies.” We make space for their gifts and their graces and their ideas and their passions. We can actually experience their new gifts in ways that draw different things out of us individually and collectively. Along the way, we remake the community year after year after year as we grow and are transformed, transforming one another and the community of camp itself.
I’m happy to say that challenging these three campers to working toward community rather than differentiation made a difference. They showed up, even when anxious and unsure, with more love and more care for their fellow campers. There was less shame, less bad-mouthing, more cooperation and affirmation.
This week, we are pivoting from fruit of the Spirit – a collection of attributes and expressions equally available to all of us as we deepen our relationship with the Triune God – to GIFTS of the Spirit.
Gifts of the Spirit are different from fruit – they are more unique. Each of us bears different gifts that God has created us with, and as we grow in our relationship with God, we have the ability to identify, refine and put our gifts to use.
Like the community of camp, where we had an influx of 9th graders with new gifts and expectations, this church – Faith – has experienced and influx of new gifts and graces over the last several years. As such, we have the opportunity to do the good work of actively recognizing, developing and engaging everyone’s gifts to continue build the beloved community.
This week I received an email from Rev. John Mullaney who grew up here at Faith and now serves in the North Alabama annual conference. He was looking for a hymn online and discovered our YouTube channel and then headed down a web search rabbit hole, finding our website, our social media, and our statement in response to the vandalism here at Faith.
John Mullaney received his call to ministry here in youth group and preached his first sermon here as a college student. His family moved away in 1999.
He closed his email with this:
As an inclusive and affirming pastor in North Alabama, it has not always been easy, but I hold fast to many of the lessons I learned in that sanctuary.
I tell you all this because I saw on the website the act of vandalism that was committed on the church doors. No more false statement could be said about your church. While I’m sure the congregation is made up of entirely new people after 26 years, I’m sure the heart of the church has remained unchanged. Please know that my family and I will be praying for the church and its ministries…
We are, as the body of Christ, constantly becoming a new thing – because of our deepening discipleship and because of the new gifts that show up with new people.
Thanks be to God. Our ongoing work then is to include those gifts and nurture them. Our ongoing work is to respect other’s gifts, let them work in community and learn from them. I invite you to really sit with that throughout this part of our summer series.
The first gift in our exploration is the gift of “perceiving” or “discerning.”
Biblically speaking, the gift of discernment is about deep intuition or insight.
In scripture, often the gift of discernment is addressed as a deficit. In Isaiah, God sends the prophet to speak to the people because they LACK discernment. They have failed to discern good from evil, truth from false truth. And in the New Testament writing, the author of Hebrews suggests that discernment is a skill of mature followers of Jesus only.
So…scripture suggests that discernment is a rare ability, one that those who have must hone, must practice, must fine-tune.
The United Methodist Church’s website defines the gift of discernment this way:
Discerning people can separate truth from fiction and know at a visceral level when people are being honest. Deeply sensitive and “tuned in,” those with the gift of discernment are open to feelings, new ideas, and intuition as valid and credible information. Discernment is not irrational, but trans-rational—beyond empirical—knowledge.
Now…we here in Rockville live in an area with one of the highest percentages of graduate degrees per capita in the country. So trans-rational, beyond empirical knowing, might be received with skepticism. Right? Wedged between NIH, NIST, NASA and the NSA, we are in the epicenter of empirical knowing.
That might make it difficult to accept the gift of discernment (or perception) in ourselves or others.
Do you have this gift?
Pastor truth telling time – my top three gifts are wisdom (the gift of translating life experience into spiritual truth and seeing the application of spiritual truth in daily living), discernment (as we are discussing it today), and teaching.
So…sometimes I feel like a bit of a unicorn right here in the DMV. Since childhood, there have been things that I deeply understood in my bones and in my flesh about God. Sometimes having that deep knowing makes it really hard to share how we know with others.
Quick temperature check – how many of you have taken one of the spiritual gift inventories we’ve shared over the past 10 days?
Anyone else willing to own up to having this gift of discernment?
Even if folks aren’t willing to share, we can assume there are those among us who have this special gift of discernment. And so I think some of our work is to leave room for the trans-rational/non-empirical voices among us.
That might look like leaving more space in conversations – taking more time to let people speak up.
That might look like leaving space for prayer and meditation in our decision-making (something we really are and should be doing, but I wonder what it looks like to be very intentional about this as a congregation).
That might look like seeking out those we’ve experienced as particularly wise or discerning in the way they navigate the world. It might look like saying in the midst of a conversation, “you know – Jane has a particular way of seeing that might be helpful to this process. What if we invited her into this conversation.”
And…if you have the gift of discernment, there is work to be done to cultivate and fine-tune that, partnering with God to strengthen that gift. It might require meditation and journaling so that you begin to trust what your gut is telling you. It might require a dialogue partner who’s willing to explore this gift with you.
In the weeks to come, we’ll be looking at some other gifts, including the gifts of serving, teaching, encouraging, giving and sharing compassion and mercy. I invite you, if you haven’t already, to take one of those spiritual gifts inventories. This is something we’ve done with our last two new member classes – and it is fun to see where the surprises are. If you are willing, I’d love to hear about your gifts – because as I said earlier, our work as community is to engage those gifts as they show up.
For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, 5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us…
Thanks be to God.
Prompt: what are your spiritual gifts? If you’ve not yet taken an inventory, what do you think are ways that you are particularly gifted? Don’t be shy. Don’t be modest.
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