October 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Being the Church

The camera looks up at a tower of the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C. The tower is scaffolded for repairs. In the background a deep blue sky is filled with white, fluffy clouds. The tower is in shadow. Photo by Keisha E. McKenzie. — Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie

During a keynote in Holland, MI, last month, I made a passing comment about the Nones and the Dones—”the religiously unaffiliated and the religiously exhausted.” A remarkable article I read this week speaks to what “being the Church” means from the perspective of the Dones.

Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes is a psychologist, theologian, professor, and author who recently left her congregation. In the months after she left, she also released the guilt she’d been trained to feel about ending her weekly church routine.

In a follow-up article for Collegeville Institute, Walker-Barnes writes about her attempts to keep serving and leading in local congregations—communities that come with their own schedules, demands, and social politics—while honoring her commitments to just social action and her preference for spaces where she doesn’t have to dim her Blackness or womanhood to fit in. She hasn’t found local communities where she can be all these things at once, and so, at least for now, she’s stepped away.

There’s a lot about that that I can empathize with. As I explained in a recent video, spiritual community and fellowship are important to me, and I was raised among people who experienced community and fellowship primarily through local church life. As an adult, I also spent several years being hyper-involved in congregations, and I’ve participated in a local church in every country and town I’ve ever lived in. I still do. I’m probably a “joiner” by nature, not just by practice: someone driven to affiliate and create with others, not someone who will likely achieve enlightenment in a 1-person cabin deep in the woods. (But I do love the woods!)

Over the last week, thanks in part to a conference I spoke at in Jamaica, I’ve been reflecting on the question of what it means to be the Church rather than to merely attend a church.

Who may speak for The Church™ and what qualifies them to do so? Who will people beyond our pews perceive as the Church and why? What makes our speaking and doing credible to those who watch the denominational drama circuit from safe distances and wonder whether we can be trusted to co-labor with them in this world?

Local social fellowship in any brick or coffee shop community is not the same “church” as the national, regional, and/or global corporation that a denomination will register with its governments. For me, these different levels of church experience mean at least three parallel systems are operating at once: the social church, the network of interactions between members; the legal-managerial church, the scaffolding of roles and policies and the paid practitioners that execute them; and the theological church, the mystical reality that church theologians attempt to describe and which I often tag as Capital “C”-Church). There are differences between the church I attend, the church corporation that some of my peers work for, and the Church that we collectively are.

Church workers, those who staff and draw paychecks from churches, directly participate in all three of these systems. The rest of us directly participate in the social and theological realms, and even if we contribute financially or otherwise to the legal-managerial realm as well, we leave direct organizational management to the administrators.

I’m fine with that: it’s a form of role specialization that allows artists and musicians and doctors and cooks and the rest of us to spend our days laboring elsewhere in the world—all in trust that our respective work supports the Church in living into the beauty of the Beloved Community and teaching others to live into it as well.

Role distinction becomes awkward, though, when the interests of the legal-managerial church don’t align with the interests of the social church or the ideals of the theological Church. Last week, for example, Christians from several denominations—some senior clergy, some engaged laypeople like me—came together to review the impact of global LGBTQIA criminalization, as well as church histories, civil law, pastoral counseling norms, and personal narratives from LGBTQIA people and those called to minister to them.

When local Adventist administrators “distanced” themselves from that event, it took me back to a similar summit in 2014 that Adventist church administrators hosted in South Africa, the first nation in the continent to include a comprehensive ban on discrimination in its constitution.

As the “In God’s Image” summit on gender and sexuality began three years ago, a senior General Conference vice president told the Adventist News Network, “The goal is to make sure that what is done here reflects the corporate thinking of the Church.” It wasn’t clear to me back then whether he meant “corporate” as in “legal person” or “corporate” as in “Body of Christ,” but I was clear that “Body of Christ” included me and any others rendered Other, even if some members of the legal-managerial realm wished it didn’t.

There’s a difference between the church that people might go to and the Church that they are. If Paul’s metaphor about the members or parts of the Body holds, the pancreas is as much “the body” as are its hands or eyes; the widows are as much “the Church” as are the apostles. All parts of the body morph as the body grows, the entire body suffers when a member suffers—and where one of the members shows up in the world so does the Body with her.

Divine sufficiency compels me to imagine a world of enough, where flourishing isn’t zero-sum and attempts at abandonment or dissociation aren’t the last word. Even people with completely specious presumptions about me and my communities are included in my vision of a world of enough. I admit that sometimes this annoys me very much but that there’s enough room for all of us is still a faith tenet that I can’t shake.

No matter the gossip and slander, no matter the statements and votes, and no matter our collective failure to manifest the Beloved Community so far, it’s still a vision that resonates for me and one I believe is worth holding coherently across time and across lines of difference too.

[Religious liberty] is vital to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. While we are a rapidly growing denomination around the world, the church often finds itself in the religious minority, and consequently, understands the importance of ensuring that all voices be allowed to speak.” —Adventist.org

Listening, I said three years ago, is a holy act, and not listening isn’t sustainable. This might not be the year that the legal-managerial church learns that lesson. But last week at the University of the West Indies, I watched the Church practicing it: story, history, heckling, and all.

And it was sacred.

September 3, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

In a world of matter, you can’t live on ether

"Hope"—Robert Indiana's three-foot tall painted aluminum sculpture created during the 2008 US presidential campaign. Via Premier Art Scene — “Hope”—Robert Indiana‘s three-foot tall painted aluminum sculpture created during the 2008 US presidential campaign. Via Premier Art Scene

In the misty Grecian past, philosophers imagined that the perceptible world was composed of five elements: earth, air, fire, water, and ether. Ether, or quintessence, was said to fill the realm in which the gods lived.

In our time, most people no longer build our understanding of things on four or five elements. But we do still work with dense, social structures and the ethereal hopes and ideals that motivate us to develop them.

Two of President Obama’s first campaign keywords were “hope” and “change.” He didn’t imagine the nation’s chief executive handing down either ideal to the rest of the country. Instead, he envisioned a nation of people “fired up and ready to go” in their own communities, people who claimed ownership of their nation enough to put matter behind their hopes and desires for change.

I think he knew then, though perhaps we did not, that putting the matter and mass of people and policy behind these dreams was the only way they could become real.

It’s the “ether” of our ideals that propels us to design, build, and maintain material forms in specific contexts across society. The customs our congregations express, the policies our organizational employees use and are judged by, the doctrines our denominations use to interpret the world of experience and the people in it—all of these things are structural components. Together they create the context that people live, work, and choose in. They are our tools, and they are also our container.

So when there are conflicts between our ideals and the structures that allow us to express them, structure wins. In a contest between what we hope for and what we’ve built for, what we’ve built will win. And if a group’s structural container isn’t large enough for its ideals, we’ll be able to trace that in the results it gets.

One community will talk about a “faithful and compassionate response” to difference while promoting rules and interpretations that block some categories of people from experiencing authentic and intimate relationship in families of their own. The community’s structural container isn’t large enough for their ideals.

Another community’s leader can speak of non-judgment and welcome for minoritized groups at the same time as, layers down the organizational chart, ministers who actively apply those values in their congregations and neighborhoods are censured or fired.

In cases like these, the structure that restricts and controls trumps the ideal that engages and receives, and this is to be expected because matter makes the difference.

Where we continue to invest our time, money, human resources, processes, and habits of interaction and attention are places where we’re structuring matter. These are places where the raw materials of life harden, where we gain stability and surety, and where we lose the ability or will to move.

But sometimes, our structures are built on top of people.

August 24, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Mutuality meets self-interest

A white wildflower grows out of a parking lot crack. — The wildflower I mentioned: beautiful things grow in hard places. Photo: Keisha E. McKenzie

Obviously no single church can deal with the vast social problems that exist in the world… Even with the help of governments, this an impossible task. Adventists must move away from the idea that they should do good only if it helps to convert. They must also move away from helping only where it serves their self-interest. Yet they must not try to do everything and everywhere. As much as possible they should concentrate on areas that logically flow out of their theology, without renouncing their participation in other areas as it becomes appropriate. —Sakae Kubo, in Zdravko Plantak’s The Silent Church: Human Rights and Adventist Social Ethics

Kubo and Plantak both argue that Adventists can root routine social action and advocacy for human rights in the ideas and principles that lie beneath church doctrines. This is a challenge to align our values and our action. It’s a challenge we still need.

In debates about complex social issues, values are the under-acknowledged legislators, the filters sifting this likely solution from that dead-on-arrival proposal. Buzz-phrases like “family values” are ubiquitous, but their meanings aren’t. People with very different family configurations may hold values like integrity, community, and kinship in common. And while they may never agree on what to do with those common values, acknowledging that one group doesn’t exclusively possess values like these is a good way to begin a nonviolent conversation.

In the world of public science, savvy climate communicators have begun using values to frame climate science and to refine language that helps people to first take responsibility for our climate and then take action to ensure it stays habitable (or hospitable). The fifth of ten communication principles from the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, New York’s Columbia University, and think tank ecoAmerica reads simply, “Connect climate change to issues that matter to your audience.”

This principle goes deeper than mere audience awareness: it encourages us to engage people’s core beliefs about the world so that the actions we invite them to take with us don’t falter because of resistance or weak supportive structures, because they directly contradict people’s values, or because they’re four steps along a path that hasn’t yet been built.

Again, we find a reminder of just how essential it is to pay attention. There’s no way to engage people’s core principles if we won’t attend long enough to learn what they are.

February 5, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

February Update: It’s all about Faith (and Work)

My February social good calendar is shaping up to be all about faith: continuing work with a non-profit on its 40-year-old relationship with a hostile denomination, discussing the future of Seventh-day Adventism with four other Millennials, and meeting with other young adult faith leaders around the US capital.

February 1: Meetings in Riverside, CA

I spent some time with educators and friends in Riverside, CA, this weekend. While there, I took a micro-tour of the La Sierra University campus.

Of course I loved how green the site was: this was the first week of a cold February and it looked like mid-spring. But my favorite campus feature was the series of quote-flags around the greens, student lounge, cafeteria, and administration building. Combined with the photo-value flags on the road up to campus, these flags represent a powerful statement of what motivates the La Sierra community and what it strives to become.

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Integrating attractive flags into your institutional environment is an inexpensive way to make a campus values campaign both tangible and beautiful. The Texas Tech University Ethics Center oversaw a similar series of flags installed in the Student Center while I worked there. La Sierra has already taken the next step: dispersing these flags outside across campus rather than concentrating them in a single albeit central space, and matching the flag principles to the actions taken by students, staff, faculty, and administrators.

Texas Tech administrators were pleased to discover how much their ethics flags and other campaign publicity efforts embedded the ethics principles into the conversations that students and faculty had with each other and with the administration. They helped to provide a new common language—a common sense—that the community could use to build up together.

If you’re part of the La Sierra community, I’d hear from you about these flags. How long have the flags been up, and who determined which quotes would be used? Do people cite them when talking or writing to the administration? Does the student paper ever refer to them?

February 8: Young Adult Faith Leaders Summit, Washington, DC

This Saturday I’ll be part of the 2014 Young Adult Faith Leaders Summit in Washington, DC. Hosted by the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, the summit is the second-regional convocation of people under 40 who care about and are working in or across communities of faith. Eleven traditions cofounded the IFCMW—and Seventh-day Adventism is not one of them. I’m curious about whether I’ll be the only out Adventist in the cohort this weekend. I hope not but will report back.

Thanks to Ogun Holder for reminding me that this was coming up!

February 15: Adventist Today Panel, Loma Linda, CA

“In a quest to better understand and minister to today’s younger generation in the Church, Adventist Today and Loma Linda University are bringing together a panel of articulate young adults from various backgrounds to share their stories, perspectives, and comments about the Adventist Church.”

Monte Sahlin will be hosting this conversation on behalf of the Adventist Today board; I look forward to talking with him and listening to stories and thoughts from the other panelists.

I’d started writing my talk about 3 weeks ago, but I’m radically rewriting it this week. If the text survives the next 10 days, I’ll be talking about my denomination’s current future, an alternative vision of the future baked into its fundamental beliefs, and what keeps me engaged and not merely frustrated. There will be cybernetics and art references; there’ll also be a cute childhood photo if I can fit it in.

If you’re local to Loma Linda, join us! I understand that a recording will be available post-event.

Scholarship Review Offer: Still Available

I’m still offering reviews to students and researchers working on scholarship or fellowship applications over the next month. Check out the three levels of review you can choose from and contact me to get started.