Unhelpful Observations

Last Sunday we at Solomon's Porch heard a beautiful sermon about how open and accepting our church is, and how well-suited and relevant it is to a beautiful, diverse, progressive city like Minneapolis. It was a good message, essentially accurate and refreshingly candid.

And while it's good to pat ourselves on the back once in a while and hear from a relative newcomer what it is that makes our church so appealing to so many, that we may strive to preserve and improve upon our strengths, it's also good to be sure we're not wearing blinders, preventing ourselves from seeing anything but the good about ourselves.

We're a church that talks about dreams. We try to base ourselves on 23 dreams that were dreamed, collected and set down at Solomon's Porch's inception. These dreams were read out at the close of the sermon. They are helpful guidelines and wonderful goals. And they are usually accompanied by the reminder that they are an unfinished list; that as new people join our community, we become a different community because they bring new dreams that become our dreams. And this too is often true in practice.

But as open and accepting as we say we are, we have much of the same rigidity and close-mindedness that we express disappointment with (on our good days) and condemn (on our bad days) in other churches. We've just settled on different things to be rigid and close-minded about.

So if you become a part of our church, your dreams become our dreams, as long as your dreams don't sound too much like any of these:

I dream of a church where I can sing songs and hear music that is centuries old, that carries the wisdom and spirit of the community of faith from generations long ago. Sorry. We engage in many practices that engage us with our ancestors in faith, including prayers, benedictions, postures and poetry, but we create all our music ourselves, and we have very good reasons for this. This will not change.

I dream of a church where I can speak positively about the modern evangelical church. Careful. If there's still a lot you like about evangelicals and you can't talk about your past church experiences without not sounding bitter or dismissive, we'd rather you didn't talk about it much at all.

I dream of a church where I get ripped a new one if I don't participate financially. We'd like our members Covenant Participants to be as engaged with their money as they are in other ways, but we don't like to talk about it much. If you consider yourself a member of our community but don't see giving as a part of that commitment unless its convenient, we might put out a form letter or make mention of it in an annual meeting, but you don't have to worry about us making any more fuss than that. This isn't an issue that we like to address from the pulpit stool. Oh, and please don't suggest that we have a time in the service Gathering dedicated to collecting tithes and offerings. That's not who we are.

I dream of a church where parents of young children are given the option of participating in worship without being responsible for the needs and safety of their children. We respect your dreams and we'd like to engage our community in a conversation about this topic. If it seems like enough other members of our community share this dream of yours, we will then engage our community in another conversation about what might be a good solution for our community. But it can't look too much like shutting the kids away in a room where they won't bother us, because that's what the evangelicals do. Give us a few months, and we'll come up with something. You don't mind if we wait until the next time we move to address this, do you?

Not all of the dreams mentioned above are mine. For the most part, I am better represented by the responses to them, satirical though they are. You all know that the last one is really the only one I am personally invested in. But I just want us all to recognize that even we have areas we're too rigid about, just like any other church. I'm proud of how open and accepting my church is towards all races, creeds and orientations. We're even getting to the point where we can say we're accepting of all ages. But we're not that much more open than everybody else...we're just open about different things than they are. Maybe even more important things.

And that's a great start. But it's not the end.