by Joan Dennehy, Pastor, Findlay Street Christian Church
Twenty-one years ago Findlay Street Christian Church in Seattle, WA., became the first Open & Affirming congregation in our denomination. That was the heritage that drew me to her sixteen years ago, and we’ve been walking together ever since. It wasn’t open & accepting, not open & tolerating, certainly not open & praying-you’ll-change. It was and is a church that celebrates diversity and invites full participation and leadership from all who gather there. Over half its members are GLBT, including myself, yet it’s always been a church with a special interest rather than a single focus. Therefore O&A was a way of being in the world that would consistently challenge us. The thing is…every time you open, include, and affirm, you are changed. You let go of familiar and comfy things.
In the fall of 1999 we woke up to the challenge and gift of a new century to come. With no clear picture of it we knew the church was going to look and be different in the 21st century. We looked at one another and agreed that we could no longer skip down yesterday’s road. We needed to make another of leap of faith. After all, isn’t faith edgy? We felt called by the generations to come to prepare a place for them, one that would be viable and relevant.
We began with a congregational survey where we could safely say how we really felt about things. We confessed that we (and generations before us) had not been good stewards of our large property, now in hopeless disrepair, nor were we gracious “landlords” to the groups using our building. In fact, we had no passion at all for that form of ministry. We awakened to other Disciples churches near us and like children in a sand box began to play with our new friends. We liked the connections—creating worship resources together, sharing some worship services, learning each other’s names.
For a year and a half we explored a merger with two other congregations, all of us small and struggling with questions of survival. Though we declined in the end to merge it was a cherished process from which we emerged with deeper awareness of who and Whose we are.
As the Disciples were getting serious about becoming an anti-racist, pro-reconciling church we got serious about it on a local level. Fifteen percent of our membership consisted of strong lesbian African American women. A Race Relations group formed that continues to this day, leading us each year in a full month’s celebration of Black History Month. As one of them said recently: black folks are a complicated lot. Well, amen to that, and aren’t we all. We continue to muddle through our genuine efforts to honor one another and allow the other to change us. As we got better at telling the truth, at storytelling, at healing, at creating sacred and safe space, other diversity emerged. There were different theological views and language, more questions than answers, yet it did not stop us from sitting forward on the edge of the pews drinking in people’s stories, celebrating the ways God was active in their lives. And there were differently-abled people joining the community and we named them leaders because the wisdom of God can be found in and expressed through any human vessel. We looked at the children in a new way, named them teachers instead of seeing them as little things in the way of the main event. We are certainly a mixed bag of humanity; we soar and we drag, we tickle and we irritate—we are a real bag of surprises. It’s not easy being us! The polite description is: we are a community of storytellers, transformed by grace, celebrating diversity, and learning to be Christian. However, it dawned on us how very hard it is to be a Christian. Following the way of Jesus takes you to some strange places.
There have been many side roads taken with dead ends. One must not be discouraged or frumpy about it. You learn things about yourself with every turn. We wrote a future story, imagining what it would be like to come to our yet-to-be-created church in the year 2020. I think it was a way of giving thanks to God for what was coming but not yet seen.
We seem to be morphing into an intentional community where it is safe for diversity to exist and thrive, making room for any who want to practice being God’s new world with us, messy as that is.
So it was three years ago that with daring and trembling we agreed to sell our property without any clear idea of where we were going and what the future might hold. We didn’t have to communicate by survey any longer because we had invited the local Quakers to teach us the art of discernment, silence, listening, and caring, truthful talk. We became absolutely convinced that Spirit and Wisdom would speak in our gatherings and she could speak through any one of us. This was a great relief to the pastor! It took a year (and more dead ends) before a buyer emerged who could actually close the deal. As a legacy to the neighborhood we had shared for a century, we did not sell our empty land along with the building, though good business screamed otherwise. The land was earmarked for a parking lot, but we could not bear to contribute to more asphalt in the world. Instead it became a community garden and we sold it under market value (money not being the highest value) to the City of Seattle and to a local garden coalition with the promise that it would remain green space in perpetuity. We left Findlay Street after a centennial bash, broad and impish grins on faces that have not looked back. We put our ancestors, spiritually speaking, in a beaded gourd to bring with us. They sit on the communion table and we expect their unfailing support. They sit beside a pottery bowl that holds our ideas for the future, and we expect it not to sit empty. Did I mention that we pray a lot?!?
We have been in interim space for the past 18 months, sharing a stately, progressive gracious Presbyterian church, rattling around in their large dark sanctuary at 1:30 p.m. on Sundays. Everything we own fits into a few boxes. Our current passion is to build a mixed-use facility (God only knows how) in an urban village along the new light rail stops in Seattle, a combination of sanctuary and housing, a contemplative place in the density of commerce, a sacred place for the community to use for the moments in life that really matter and for the visual and musical arts. Being O&A is stretching us now in two directions: being green and being Christian in an interfaith world. Mother Earth is asking us for a deeper relationship, and we shall be changed by listening to her and creating a low-carbon life. In addition it seems to us that in this new century a Christian presence in the world is a humble one—one path to God among many. Years ago we were on the leading edge. When O&A gets into your bones you wonder if you can ever be anywhere but on that edge.
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