Somewhere around early June, a group of us from Hope Church gathered over lunch to process some of our engagements over the spring in racial equity training. It was initially a moment to gather those who attended the one-day Summit on Race and Inclusion but I invited people who had joined me in other lectures or trainings around the community and when I counted up how many there had been it was four in less than two months. It was about the same time that people were planning the Keeping Families Together Rally in response to the immigration and refugee crisis at our southern border. It was just after a flurry of meetings with city leaders about police and community relationships, following a high stakes traffic stop in our neighborhood. At around the same time, Faith Leaders for Justice began addressing some concerns with city leaders on another front.
If you feel like you have been hearing a lot about social justice in the preaching at Hope Church through this season and over the past two years, it’s because you have! It has been alive in our community and at the fore front of your three pastors’ hearts and minds. And frankly the texts of the lectionary made it easy to bring a reflective lens from Scripture to this work that was happening all over our community and the realities of injustice happening all over our world. We have more intentionally preached in recent years with “the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other” as one reformed theologian has commended.
However, I began recognizing a feeling inside of myself throughout this last spring that became more crystallized for me as I talked about it with Pastors Beth and Gordon and then later with some of our leadership in the Reconciliation Ministry, the Worship, Prayer and Spirituality Ministry, and the Personnel Committee. We began talking about a polarity between Social Activism and Spiritual Formation. The polarity came to mind because I was feeling (and others were confirming) some red flags going off that this polarity was not flowing back and forth as freely as it should.
Let me back up and do a quick refresher on what we mean by polarities. Kay Hubbard initially brought this concept of polarities to the Hope Church leadership quite a number of years ago now. Some of us read a wonderful book back in 2010 by Roy M. Oswald and Barry Johnson called Managing Polarities in Congregations: Eight Keys for Thriving Faith Communities. If you are not familiar with this concept from organizational development of managing polarities, the very simple and obvious polarity you manage every second of every day is the polarity of breathing. In order to stay alive and be healthy you need to manage the flow between inhaling and exhaling. It’s not about finding the balance between these two things as if you could find that place between inhaling and exhaling and just live there. It’s about keeping a healthy infinity loop back and forth between one pole and the other. You hang out too long on either pole and red flags will start going off signaling that the polarity is off kilter. Oswald and Johnson identified 8 key polarities that need management for congregations to be healthy and vibrant communities of faith. The consistory identified four that were particularly relevant to our life together: Tradition and Innovation, Strong Clergy Leadership and Strong Lay Leadership, Inreach and Outreach, and Individual and Community. We took a survey of the congregation back in the fall of 2014 that looked at people’s perception of how these polarities were functioning. We are planning to do a follow up sometime in the coming year.
One of the gifts of polarities, is the way it reframes our either/or thinking into both/and thinking. We value each side of these polarities. We cannot choose between them. Truth be told, some of us like one side more than the other and can quickly name the “upside” of our preferred pole and the “downside” of the other. Someone could make the claim that tradition, for example, honors the gifts of the past and keeps us grounded in our strengths and can point to the chaos that comes from too much innovation where no one recognizes the distinctives and stability of our church anymore. Someone from that perspective may find themselves in conflict with the person making the claim that innovation breathes new life into a place that otherwise feels stagnant and irrelevant to the realities of the world. You can’t make the claim that one of them is right and one of them is wrong; they are both seeing parts of the same polarity. You can see each of these perspectives charted in the polarity for Tradition and Innovation below.
So that is the background for what I mean when I say that I was feeling like there is a polarity for us at Hope Church around Social Activism and Spiritual Formation. (This may not be a wholly unique polarity but just a more particular way to name the polarity of individual and community or another of the polarities named in the book that we didn’t measure called nurture and transformation.) I first began thinking about it because I began feeling some red flags flying or as the chart above names it: early warning signs that I (we?) were hanging out too exclusively on the social activism side of this polarity. Here were a few of the red flags I was feeling: exhaustion, feeling like I was absorbing every “code red” coming from the community as if it were my “code red” to try to solve, realizing that I wasn’t feeling grounded in my relationship with God but in a reactive mode that had me running ragged. At the same time, each of us as pastors had a conversation or two with Hope Church members that was beginning to help us see this polarity more clearly. One theme was a recognition that if we are to engage this work of social activism together we must be drawing from an internal reservoir that was full through a sense of connection and strength in our relationship with God and with each other. We cannot run on empty…in fact we could not always be running. A second theme was a need to keep connecting the dots between the scriptures and theology that grounds our faith and the movement toward action on behalf of social justice. We need to go about our work in the public square in ways that are distinctive as followers of Jesus and flow from our relationship with God and our drive to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.
It is an incredible gift to serve a place where we can talk about these things together. Raise concerns, reevaluate our strategies, and do a course correction. If your passion is for the work of social justice, please do not get anxious that we are going to step back from that call. We aren’t and we won’t. The gospel does not let us! But for those who have been feeling the red flags, know that we have some plans in place this coming program year to attend our need to fill the reservoir and dive a little deeper into the spiritual formation end of this polarity.
As my favorite prayer book leads me to remember on the Saturday mornings that I pray with it, “For the night followed by the day, for the idle winter ground followed by the energy of spring…for rest and wakefulness, stillness and creativity, for reflection and action, thanks be to you…let me know the disciplines of withdrawal and the call to engagement. Let me know from my world the cycles of renewal given by you for healing and health, the pattern of the seasons given by you for the birth of new life.”
Peace,
Pastor Jill