Radical Welcome. Stephanie Spellers

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СКАЧАТЬ I will lift mine eyes to the hills, knowing my help, it comes from you . . .”

      Was I hearing right?

      “Your peace you give me in times of the storm. You are the source of my strength . . .”

      Could it be?

      “You are the strength of my life.”

      Oh my God, that was it!

      “I lift my hands in total praise.”

      Like a giddy child, I turned to my friends on either side, whispering, “Do you hear it? Do you hear it?” They nodded, but they really didn’t have a clue.

      On the surface, we all heard a magnificent quartet from a local black church singing Richard Smallwood’s “Total Praise.” What I and perhaps a few others could hear was sweet memory. My mama used to play “Total Praise” on those random Sundays when she would pack me and my brother into the Oldsmobile Omega and cart us to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. Later, I sang in some school-based gospel choirs and cobbled together my own gospel music collection. Even later, once I landed in the Episcopal Church, I played the songs religiously while I dressed for church, my private time to “get my praise on.” But hearing this music—a pop gospel hymn sung by soaring, expressive black voices—in an immense, dignified, European-American identified space? The tears poured, my hands waved, I lifted my voice, and deep inside I heaved a huge sigh of relief and gratitude for the welcome.

      Years after my official reception into the Episcopal Church, a part of me that I didn’t even know was sitting outside finally opened the door and came in.

      Rewind a decade. It was the early 1990s, toward the end of my first year of divinity school, and I had just arrived at an Episcopal guest house in a major U.S. city. Mind you, I wasn’t Episcopalian. I wasn’t technically even Christian yet (I liked to study it and sing about it, but that was my limit). Still, coming to the door of the lovely building was like coming to a God-filled oasis for this country girl.

      The host appeared at the door and asked how much I would be paying before I could step inside. I hopefully mentioned the sliding scale their materials advertised. The host offered to take $20 off the price if I didn’t eat meals with the community. It was still pricey, especially if I had to arrange my own food. The host smiled, suggested I try the nearby youth hostel, and shut the door, leaving a single, petite, young, black woman with limited financial resources and no place to go on the doorstep.

      I walked away wondering what kind of religious community, and what kind of church, these Episcopalians had created. Whatever it was, I was sure it was not very Christian. And needless to say, it was radically unwelcoming.

      I kept my distance from Episcopalians after that encounter. But the God of surprises had a shock tucked away for me. A few years later, I was baptized at a remarkable multicultural Lutheran parish in Boston, and even considered ordination in the Lutheran fold. But something still hadn’t clicked. Then I discovered St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a vibrant city congregation filled with people of color and whites; heterosexuals, lesbians, gay men, bisexual people, and transgender people; young adults, some youth, middle-aged people, and seniors; poor and middle-class people rubbing shoulders with the Cambridge elite.

      Not only did this mixed-up community feel like home, but the Anglican theology I was voraciously consuming resonated with my own latent sense of what a lived faith ought to be. I needed a comprehensive theology that tolerates ambiguity and acknowledges that no single perspective could ever capture the mind of God. I needed to join a body of people who maintain a reverence for tradition and Scripture alongside a deep respect for reason and context. I wanted the awe, the mess, the beauty, the poetry. I craved the emphasis on justice rooted in an incarnational, resurrection-focused faith. I had found it.

      But that experience of welcome did not erase the memory of a door shut in my face years before. Yes, I have witnessed the enthusiastic response when a mostly white congregation sings that rare gospel tune, and I have quietly rejoiced when others remarked, “Why don’t we sing this music more often? It’s like something in me wakes up and starts to praise God again.” But far more often, I have suffered the snide comments about evangelical and gospel music that is not “theologically sophisticated” enough for our churches. I have heard or read leaders of supposedly welcoming churches saying they don’t want to “dumb down” their sermons or programs, or to water down their identity, in order to accommodate different races, classes and generations. As a thirtysomething person of color raised in the working-class South, I’ve had to continually set aside the hope of hearing and seeing the voices, images, stories, and values of my home culture incorporated regularly in any but the most intentionally welcoming mainline churches.

      And I am not alone.

      We are already here: the strangers, the outcasts, the poor, people of color, gay and lesbian people, young adults, and so many more. We resonate with our church’s theology and traditions. We love our congregations and pray and labor for their health, growth and ministry.

      That doesn’t mean we feel welcome.

      This conflicted experience has led me to wonder what it would take to reverse the effect of years, if not generations, of alienation, marginalization and outright rejection. Is it even possible to transform mainline churches into the multicultural, multigenerational, inclusive body of Christ so many of us yearn to become?

      That’s where radical welcome comes in.

      Radical welcome¹ is the spiritual practice of embracing and being changed by the gifts, presence, voices, and power of The Other: the people systemically cast out of or marginalized within a church, a denomination and/or society. Your church may be predominantly white or Latino, wealthy or working-class, gay or straight, middle-aged or fairly young. Regardless of your demographic profile, you still have a margin, a disempowered Other who is in your midst or just outside your door. In fact, you may be The Other. Radical welcome is concerned with the transformation and opening of individual hearts, congregations and systems so that The Other might find in your community a warm place and a mutual embrace and so that you are finally free to embrace and be transformed by authentic relationship with the margins.

      The Radical Welcome Project

      My survival in the church has depended on finding communities devoted to extending radical welcome. I first saw them in relative abundance on a study tour in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. But what if you couldn’t get to L.A. or some other oasis? Where were their stories, and how could others learn from their experiences?

      I dusted off my reporter’s cap that summer and set out to examine eight churches moving toward fully embracing The Other in what I called “The Radical Welcome Project.” Those congregations were Grace Church in Lawrence, Massachusetts; St. Philip’s and St. Mary’s, both in Harlem, New York; St. Bartholomew’s in Atlanta, Georgia; St. Paul’s in Duluth, Minnesota; All Saints in Pasadena, California; Holy Faith in Inglewood, California; and Church of the Apostles in Seattle, Washington. I consciously chose to focus on the unique hopes and challenges of a selection of Episcopal churches, trusting that ultimately their struggles and insights would also prove useful across denominational contexts.

      The sample covers small, medium and corporate-sized churches and draws from the coasts, the heartland and the South, as well as the suburbs, large cities and smaller communities. Most importantly, I wanted to study churches that ran the gamut in terms of community composition and who and how they were welcoming. In particular, I opted to СКАЧАТЬ