300 Posts, A Look Back
On Wednesday of last week, we celebrated our 300th blog post! What began as a late-night thought from our Editor, Pastor Mary Brown, grew quickly in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has always been our dream that the Church Anew Blog could be a place where a diversity of voices could share hope, invite honest reflection about life and spirituality, and cultivate new imagination about this thing we call church.
We are thankful for our contributors who have shared so much with us. We are thankful to those of you who have read and shared these posts. We are thankful for the Spirit’s guidance and work, creating something more than we could have imagined.
To celebrate this milestone, we wanted to share some of the top posts of our last 300:
An Open Letter to Those Who Haven't Come Back to Church
Natalia Terfa
I know there are a lot of reasons you may have decided to stay away, and I hope you hear me when I say that each and every one of them is valid.
I get that maybe you aren't sure what you believe anymore, but whatever it is certainly doesn't look like what it used to look like, and you know you won't find it going back to the way things were.
I understand that you might not feel like it's safe to gather yet, for you or for someone you love, and you don't trust that the people gathering will make decisions based on your safety.
I get that you don't want to come back yet and that it feels like the church is moving on without you, that you are being left behind and left out.
Valid. All of this is valid.
And I get it.
I get all of it, because I feel it too.
On Hoarding Eucharist in a Hungry World
Diana Butler Bass
I’ve worried that in withholding communion, the church has been, in effect, hoarding the bread and wine, restraining the healing beauty of Eucharist when hungry people most need to feast. A forced fast is no fast—it is an expression of institutional power over and against God’s people in a time of emergency. And I can’t help but think the lack of theological imagination at this moment will give people already wary of church another reason to consign Christianity to historical irrelevance.
When God’s Normal Becomes Abnormal
Walter Brueggemann
When the capacity for shame evaporates, the maintenance of human dignity and the valuing of human life are dramatically diminished.
Human persons easily become throw-away objects, completely dispensable for those who have reduced life to tradable commodities. For such brutalizing practice and policy everything depends upon the verification of new normal that no long seem stunningly abnormal
It is a new normal among us that homeless persons, that is, the house-disadvantaged, are accepted as ordinary social fixtures without hope or reprieve.
It is a new normal among us that health care is primarily for the well financed and the well connected.
It is a new normal among us that many people should work for pay that make a viable life impossible.
It is a new normal among us that racism is often forcefully practiced in administration of justice.
It is a new normal to keep unwelcome children in detention.
All of this is old stuff; but now these practices have become normal and accepted; we are no longer shocked or horrified by the cynical legitimacy of these hard habits. No one is embarrassed. No one blushes.
Preaching Thomas and Embodied Solidarity
Raj Nadella
He wants assurance that Jesus wasn’t just an eloquent teacher and a charismatic leader, but actually had his skin in the game, nails in his flesh and a spear in his side.
When Jesus finally met Thomas, he invited him to touch his wounds and side. The text doesn’t say whether Thomas actually touched them. He likely did not. He did not need to. The scars left by the nails and spear were too big too miss and too scary to touch.
Thomas responds by saying, “My God and My Lord.”
What made Thomas call Jesus God and Lord was not his power but his wounds and scars. It was not the resurrection alone that convinces Thomas of the Lordship of Jesus but the assurance that Jesus did in fact place his body on the cross.
For Thomas, the scars represent Christ’s commitment to challenge the power of the empire, to suffer along with the powerless, and stand in solidarity with them.
Racial Equity as Spiritual Healing
Naaima Khan
Race has become, not just a conversation at the forefront of our minds, but also a divisive conversation.
And, in my opinion, that is because we not only have a problem of racial hatred in the form of outright bigotry — we also have a deeper problem of racial denial eating away at the spiritual soul of this nation.
The average American will likely not overtly hate or discriminate against groups of people based on their racial identity. However, our problem is coming to terms with the need to scrutinize and counter the more subtle forms of racism — the problematic narratives we’ve internalized since we were children. For example, seeing the founders of this country as people who perpetrated genocide and enslavement instead of heroizing them to the point of glossing over these realities.
Must Someone Die Before We’re Visible?: Myths and Hot Takes
Sam Tsang
Must someone die every time before we’re visible?
Words matter. Until our white citizens make an extra effort to treat non-whites as human beings, this pattern will persist.
“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me”? Bullsh-t! Words are what cause sticks and stones and empty bullet casings. The failure of recognizing the cause and only coping with the symptom will continue the vicious cycle. The last four years cultivated the linguistic hotbed for this deadly moment. Take care how you talk.
Rev. Matthew Ian Fleming
Matthew Ian Fleming is a recovering evangelical who opens up his Bible bruises with curiosity, wonder, and a fair amount of irreverence. He is the founding director of Church Anew, an international platform equipping church leaders to ignite faithful imagination and sustain inspired innovation. With four colleagues, Matthew launched Alter Guild, a podcasting network with over 350,000 downloads that now features four shows including Cafeteria Christian with Nora McInerny and New Time Religion with Andy Root. Matthew is ordained in the ELCA and serves as teaching pastor to St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. At home, Matthew sings unrequested car-duets with his spouse, Hannah, jams on banjo with their two daughters, and religiously bakes sourdough bread.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.