“Although many mainline Protestants no longer attend church, many still identify themselves as spiritual, but not in any organized way,” says Lois Malcolm, professor of systematic theology. The recognized terminology is “spiritual but not religious,” or “SBNR.”
This mainline decline is not just happening elsewhere–it’s happening in our own families, in our own circle of friends and with our loved ones. So how does the church respond to this shift?
Mid-Winter Convocation takes on the SBNR topic
Looking closer to home is the point of January’s 2015 Mid-Winter Convocation, “Religious but Not Spiritual?” Malcolm is a keynote speaker at the event. She’s joined by Nadia Bolz-Weber, pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver; and Nancy Ammerman, professor of sociology of religion at Boston University who recently published Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life.
One of the main questions Convo is asking its participants is what, in the midst of it all, is God calling Christian public leaders to learn–and unlearn–from this wave of momentum for SBNR?
“Many people have a deep yearning for some sense of the larger whole,” Malcolm says. “But they’re not interested in organized religion. There’s a large atheist movement, but an even larger category is spiritual but not religious.”
Malcolm hears two main questions being asked about this group: What does it mean that this category has emerged, and what does it mean for us, amidst our own congregations, families and networks of friendships? In the same way that Paul proclaimed the gospel in ways that connected with people’s deepest yearnings–as in Acts 17–how might we do the same in our time?
Malcolm ponders the implications of this by pointing to changes that are happening even within Christian communities. “Many even within Christian churches are engaging in spiritual practices–like yoga–that have roots in other traditions.” Trying to name what is happening with the spiritual yearnings that people have doesn’t require most people in the church to look that far. “It’s not just about people out there,” Malcolm says. “We need to be honest about what we see taking place in our own families and circles of friends, and even within our congregations.
How is the Holy Spirit calling the church–as an assembly gathered around Word and sacrament–to proclaim and embody the gospel in this milieu? How is the Spirit of the Lord calling us–amidst our own families and networks of friendships, where many would identify as SBNR–to proclaim the liberty to captives, sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed that comes in Jesus’ name? “We want people to leave Convocation inspired, with a deeper experiential naming of how Christ in the Spirit is present among them,” she says.
The reality of what is happening in our congregations and communities can be seen in three of the newest ELCA worshipping communities in the Twin Cities. All of them are headed by Luther Seminary alums.
Malcolm’s illustration of Paul’s ministry is strikingly appropriate for Lydia’s Place, a new start in St. Paul.
Collaborate around passions: Lydia’s Place, St. Paul
Scott Simmons, ’12, Founding Pastor, Lydia’s Place; Associate Pastor, St. James Lutheran, Burnsville
Lydia of the Bible is a dealer in purple cloth. Perhaps the first person to fit into the spiritual but not religious category, her heart is opened to hear Paul, who has traveled to Philippi with Timothy in Acts 16.
Philippi is the thriving trade center of Mesopotamia and it’s not Jewish or Christian. It is the center of Roman power and it is diverse. When Paul and Timothy arrive, there aren’t synagogues, so they go to the river where they encounter Lydia.
Purple cloth is rare and expensive to produce. Lydia’s clientele is the Roman royalty and princes. “She deals with the top echelon of society,” Simmons says. “The Holy Spirit worked in her to hear the word of Paul and Timothy, and her whole house was baptized. She was a new spirit convert in a public, non-traditional and male-dominated space.”
Fast-forward to present-day St. Anthony Park. In the area near University Avenue and Highway 280, mere miles from Luther Seminary, this once thriving hub of the railroad that was home to freight depots has seen the dominant industry move out to the suburbs. The old storage warehouses were left standing, but the rail died and the nature of the neighborhood changed. An old neighborhood became new.
Simmons, who was seeking a call in the Twin Cities after graduation, began to look at the neighborhood with mission developer eyes. The first question that came to mind was, “What is God doing down here?”
This once industrial space was transforming into the domain of artists. It was cheap, unfinished space. Opportunity lurked. “The artists didn’t want finished spaces; they wanted to paint,” Simmons says. Being close to both the Minneapolis and St. Paul downtowns and being in a low-rent district also made this neighborhood a mecca for nonprofits.
“There are more than 1,000 nonprofits in this zip code within a mile of Lydia’s place,” Simmons says. “What do they do? They’re not organized around investor relationships but affecting the common good. This principal is similar to the very nature of the church. ‘Love your neighbor’ is the key component.”
Simmons approached St. Paul Area Synod’s director of evangelical mission, Paul Erickson, about engaging in community support services in this neighborhood and was told to think on it over the summer following graduation.
What God was doing in this neighborhood was providing a space for a lot of self-employed and home-based professionals. Simmons had made a career doing exactly that before coming to seminary.
“When you’re working at home, you’re isolated,” he says. “Hardly anybody was near me when I was in Colorado working project to project. In fact, I had clients I’d never met in person.”
The idea of co-working came up as an option. “I was struggling with this isolation and I feel like this was this culmination of call to ministry for me,” Simmons says. “What if there is this space for people who have this spiritual yearning that Sunday isn’t necessarily answering?”
Co-working is about bringing together those workplace professionals into collaboration to do community building and become sustainable. People in different industries can find a common bond and common space to float their ideas and ultimately put those plans into action. “We strive to provide a holding environment where people can collaborate around their passions and what God is doing in their lives,” Simmons says.
“I came to the realization that we should use co-working as a tool,” he says. “But we’re really called to be a collaborative community to help people find their vocation and express it in their everyday lives.”
While these dreams were hatching, Simmons still had the minor detail of ensuring this new idea for ministry would be supported by the ELCA.
After some red tape and hoop jumping–as well as divine intervention–Lydia’s Place officially opened Aug. 1, 2013, as a synodically authorized worshipping community.
“Why do we see something as spiritual and not religious?” Simmons asks, adding that at Lydia’s Place the religious isn’t represented. “Religious points to crosses, altars and inclusion, and going to a certain type of place. Spiritual points to some sort of relationship with the creator. Lydia’s place is focused on how God is at work in our lives, in our midst and beyond our reach. That is the spiritual question. We don’t look or act like a church.”
At least not most of the time. There is one time when they do look like a church. “When we worship, we look like it,” says Simmons. “We bring out the wine.”
Now, with the light rail, the community has made a dramatic shift from older residents to younger families who are drawn to this lifestyle. The warehouses are being converted to lofts. It’s a place for struggling artists. Simmons asks, “What kind of church can emerge from this milieu of people?”
He may be asking that question specifically for Lydia’s Place, but with the backdrop of the 2015 Mid-Winter Convocation, he names the question for each of us.
From Lydia’s Place, head east and you might bump into the Shobi’s Table food truck in St. Paul, delivering free meals every Thursday to mostly poor and homeless people.
Converting Lutherans: Shobi’s Table, St. Paul
Pastor Margaret Kelly, ’09, Pastor, Shobi’s Table, St. Paul
Sometimes, the call doesn’t come right away. For Margaret Kelly, she is thankful for that–even if the waiting wasn’t what she was hoping for at the time.
“The way my story starts is that God’s time isn’t my time, and I shake my fist at God for that,” Kelly says. “But it’s always better that it’s that way because I wouldn’t have (my daughter,) Francis.”
All the pieces came together because of the waiting. “If I had a call when I wanted a call, I wouldn’t have worked as a social worker in Ramsey County,” she says. “Besides not having my family, I wouldn’t have that professional experience to build relationships and get the credibility to do this ministry.”
What is this ministry that is Shobi’s Table? In short, it’s a food truck.
Shobi’s Table, named after a passage from 2 Samuel, is a ministry among people in poverty–two areas that Kelly knows plenty about. She’s also worked as a cook, so the ministry fit is pretty perfect.
Thursday mornings, Kelly starts at Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church in St. Paul to do the prep work for the free calzones they will serve. By the end of the morning, the truck rolls on to Payne Avenue to serve the meal. But Shobi’s Table is about more than the food.
“The food shelf is good, but Shobi’s Table is seeking to answer a different question than hunger,” Kelly says. “We get deeper when we look at community support, loving and caring for one another. Simply serving your community builds you up in a way when you need to figure out how to get your next meal.”
Prayer is one of the main ingredients of the Shobi’s Table ministry. Yet religion isn’t what this group is serving. “We don’t make anyone sit through religion to get a meal,” she says. When the critical mass hits, Kelly starts a service of reading the Bible, saying prayers and giving a brief message.
Then, anyone who wants to can come together and talk about what they need to pray for and then they pray. “It’s about the feeling of being remembered and receiving the pastoral care that is needed in that moment,” Kelly says. “Folks are eager to give us the updates–and that’s community. And somebody cares that they stayed sober or out of trouble or got a place to stay or got to see their kids again.
“I’m not the evangelist. I’m the pastor in praying with each other, but honestly, the folks who do the work of Shobi’s Table are so generous, kind and good,” she says. “They bless people as they come and go and draw people in.”
In order to get the funding to make the food truck ministry a reality, Kelly gathered the support of traditional churches in St. Paul that wanted to participate with their neighbors and not just give charity.
“The supporting congregations want to figure out how we do this together. Our model is such that we can fund our own ministry because we can do fundraising at other churches for their fundraisers (by providing food),”she says. “We’re not just receiving something for nothing, but offering a service–we have something that people need. We bring together food, community and fun–and that feels good.”
When asked if she’s had any converts to Christ, Kelly’s response may surprise some. But it goes hand in hand with the theme of Mid-Winter Convocation. “What I do find is that we’re converting the people in the pews–that people are feeling new energy in being church, being in relationship and being community. We’re converting Lutherans.”
Kelly says she never wants to have a non-synodical call. “Shobi’s Table should always be supported by the synod because this is a value that the ELCA holds. We gotta figure out justice and how to draw people in who aren’t hearing the unique word. I love that there are 105 congregations that have a say in my ministry and a whole community says this is of value.”
The motto of Shobi’s Table is “the infinitely flexible church.” It helps to have an infinitely flexible pastor to drive this ministry to the places it needs to be.
Now, head west of the Twin Cities to Montrose, a town that has never had an ELCA church before–and you’ll find House of Grace.
Speaking the Language:
House of Grace, Montrose
Kimberly Buffie, ’12, Pastor, House of Grace, Montrose
Montrose, a growing community of 3,000 people, is on the fringe. Literally. When Buffie proposed starting a worshipping community, it wasn’t clear which Minnesota synod would claim it.
After much arm wrestling, the Southwest Minnesota Synod won and Buffie was named the developer.
“Once it was declared, every door was opened,” she says. “People were on board and this is where God intended for us to go.”
Since there wasn’t an obvious building to use, House of Grace asked for space at the Methodist church in town. The response from the Methodist pastor was, “Thank God you’re here. Families need you.”
House of Grace started meeting at the church and gathering in the fellowship space. Knowing that the community had been without an ELCA voice, Buffie knew that she needed to target the unchurched and people not familiar with the language of church.
“I have them generate the conversation through the language they speak in their daily lives,” she says. “Our worship services (which just began at the end of September) are around a table, not the pews.”
House of Grace uses the image of the kitchen table in setting up the space. The common meal that the worshipping community focuses on is the Lord’s Supper. “As we enter the space, great things happen around the table,” Buffie says. “If anything is missing in Montrose, it’s a sense of community. People are finding that community in both the Holy Supper and the potluck that follows service.”
House of Grace ponders the question: What does it look like to gather around the table? “We want people to feel that in church so that they can feel that in their own home and in their workplace,” Buffie says. “We want it to be an engaged style of ‘come as you are,’ then when you go into the world, it doesn’t feel distinctly different and you can carry those conversations with you.”
Buffie also wants to help the community discover its identity and purpose. “I meet with the mayor and city council members and I ask them, ‘What are the hopes and dreams? What are the needs?'” she says. After posting a call to meet with Montrose residents on Facebook, Buffie met with a woman skeptical of church. Though a resident of Montrose for 26 years, the woman felt like an outsider. After a cup of coffee with Buffie, the woman organized a gathering at her home where others would come and ask Buffie questions.
“We also need something for our kids,” Buffie says. “I imagine a ministry center developing where people can have a job interview, come together for encouragement or meet for classes.”
She sees the purpose of House of Grace as helping Montrose residents connect first with their community and in the process connect more deeply with one another as well as with their faith. “To me, this is what Christ did,” says Buffie. “He went to the people and allowed outsiders in and created a sense that they too belong.”
What can we do?
Ultimately, this topic comes back to you. The future of the church is not waiting for a secret antidote to suddenly bring back the church the way it used to be. “Convocation will be deeply experiential,” Malcolm says. “The participants are as much a part of the content as the presentations.
“We have aging communities who are feeling really guilty that their kids aren’t Christians and that their church isn’t there for them,” she says. “Instead of focusing on that guilt and fear, what if we ask ourselves what God is doing in this and, more importantly, how are we being called to respond? We have to attend to this seriously as a communal question.”