The lasagna is just being served when she asks what we all think about the use of mushrooms in therapeutic practices. A retiree tells about using psychedelics in the ’70s and the immediate transformation he experienced. That leads to a conversation on slower, more mundane transformations. We go around the table, each of us sharing the moments in which we rewrote our narratives about ourselves and our relationship to the world. We consider the events that facilitated those transformations, and we hope for the next transformation. We look for the resurrection of the cast-off parts of ourselves.
By the time we’re clearing the dessert plates to the kitchen, we all agree that this feels more like church than anything that happens in a steepled building. I join the chorus of enthusiastic hmms and return home, and only then do I realize that I have no idea what we meant by that, or if we even meant the same thing. What does it mean for a moment to feel like church? And why are we identifying that feeling as church, when it’s decidedly not how any of us feel when we are in a building that claims the title?
As dinner churches pop up in cities across the country, the conversation from that evening likely reoccurs in different ways. My adopted hometown of Seattle has dance church and hike church, and I’ve heard of a man up north who leads CrossFit men’s church, shouting psalms over dads as they do their burpees.
I believe in holding a spacious definition of church, but in each of these cases, I’m left puzzling over what the creators and congregants mean by the word.
One dance church enthusiast explained it to me in this way: “It’s a positive vibes dance party on Sunday morning.” Well, OK—other than the scheduling, what does that have to do with church? Are they using church as a tongue-in-cheek marketing ploy to reach people in the least religious city in the United States? Or are they sincerely wanting to evoke something of worship—connection, praise, spiritual encounter? And if the latter, how does that manifest in the liturgy of a morning dance party? And can it manifest if the congregants don’t identify it as worship?
Do we have to be able to articulate spiritual togetherness in order to experience it?
Recently, I was walking with a friend, and we were getting into the big questions of life: how to be generative into future generations, what it means to live as Christ, how to be happy and helpful. In what seemed a non sequitur, he offered: “I am so sick of church. I never go. All they have is answers.”
Here in the United States, the church has betrayed its people.
No, it goes deeper than that—the church has betrayed itself.
Spiritual maturity is the ability to tolerate uncertainty, to embrace ambiguity, to recognize the liminality and interconnectedness between self and other and whatever name we want to ascribe to the ethereal substance that includes and transcends the universe and that we often shorthand as God. The church is meant to be the place that cultivates this spiritual maturity. Instead, US churches too often offer the comfort of platitudes and spiritual certainties. Too many pastors offer concrete statements and inerrant belief systems built around an unquestionable, indisputable God who not only loves certainty but embodies it by Himself (and it’s always a Him) by being so very certain that He can never change His Divine Mind. The church too often offers obvious, plain, legible, shiny answers.
And people were comforted by this approach, for a time. They were comforted until, of course, they weren’t—until they were grieving a too-sudden or too-early death, until their kid, their friend, or their loved one came out, until they got the diagnosis or were waiting and praying for entire medical teams to figure out a diagnosis and relieve them of their uncertainty. Until Trump. Until COVID. Until life.
We are comforted until life happens, and we are suddenly confronted with the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent to all of life. That uncertainty asks us, Are you alive? New life always begins with tears. And if we are honest, we have to admit that we haven’t been alive and that we aren’t sure we want to be. It has been so comfortable to live in the certainties.
Some of us double down on the platitudes and the rules and the certainties, and we find leaders in the image of the he-god that dictates and demands. But some of us acknowledge the complexity of an uncertain world, and we find that we need a different language for spirituality: different images, symbols, metaphors to encompass more of the breadth and ambiguity. And so here we are, picking at lasagna leftovers and pie crumbs and weighing the possibilities that a psilocybin experience might offer in our journey with the divine, life, and ourselves. Here we are, wondering what the next transformation might reveal.
Years ago I heard a great teacher talk about three rabbis who regularly gathered to debate a particular portion of Scripture. One might be swayed by an argument and change his mind but then so would another; they could never come to a consensus. This went on for years.
It went on for so long that Yahweh had had enough and parted the clouds: “Listen, the meaning of that text is—”
“Stop!”
“What are you doing?”
“Who do you think you are?”
Yahweh explained, “I’m resolving it for you!”
The three looked up incredulously and spat, “If you resolved this, then we wouldn’t have a reason to gather. Who do you think you are to tear apart our community with your answers?”
The gospel writers don’t seem that concerned with Jesus’s attendance at religious services. We hear about him debating with the rabbis as a child, and we hear about him scandalizing a congregation with his reading of Isaiah in the synagogue, but there isn’t much there to imply well-behaved regular attendance.
If anything, the writers of these sacred texts seem more concerned with conveying—even flaunting—Jesus’s irreligious impulses. His disciples harvest food on the sabbath! He heals on the sabbath! He turns the water in purified vessels for ritual cleansing into wine and then serves this sacrilege to unknowing wedding guests! When the Pharisees confronted his work on the day of rest, I wonder whether they would have been comforted if had he defended himself by saying, “Well, I went to temple this morning.”
More than his religious observance what the writers do describe is the company he keeps: the disciples who spend the majority of his ministry nearby, the tax collector he invites to dinner, the woman with many husbands who draws water at the well, the blind and injured, the unclean bleeding women and lepers, the unclean dead. Again and again, he invites the people who are deemed socially undesirable into meals, into conversations, and into relationships.
More than religious attendance, Jesus seems concerned about healing and building society, one community at a time. He seems concerned with the small groups of people he encounters everywhere but at church.
The group that gathers for feels-like-church dinner organizes a potluck about every other month. We meet in the dining room of our one member who has a home large enough to contain a dining room. Everyone brings something to contribute according to ability, from homemade pasta to an on-sale grocery store purchase. We don’t do Bible study, don’t read books published by Christian presses beforehand, don’t start with a Scripture reading, and don’t open with prayer. We refer to Scripture when it’s natural—half of the members once held the title pastor—but we never use it to scold or correct. The closest we have to a liturgy is that we start with a cocktail before moving to the table; this gives time for that one person who is always running a bit behind (every group seems to have one).
But in sharing about our lives and our grappling for meaning in an uncontrollable, constantly changing, ever-uncertain world, we end up talking about God. We talk about what we mean by the word or about whether or not God is active in human affairs. We talk about where we see God at work in (or notably absent from) the world or how we might join with God to respond to the events around us. We talk about what God is healing and building and how we might join in the effort.
We refill one another’s wine, we refill one another’s spirits, and we go back into the uncertain world to do our best to heal and rebuild community.
Jesus did not come to fix religious structures, and he didn’t come to create new ones. He didn’t sit down with the pastors and parish administrators. He didn’t train his disciples in property management. He eschewed established religion, and he seemed to regularly get into confrontations with the religious institutions, from the exclusivity of the Pharisees to the practices of the moneylenders in the temple.
So why did we replicate the system that our founder so pointedly chose to live on the edge of? Is our imagination so small?
What does it mean for an event to feel like church? It’s tempting to go the route of via negativa and to say all the things that we regularly do at church that feel tired or unhelpful or even antihelpful. Criticism is an abyss: bottomless and counter to building.
I’m not one to prescribe what church should be or even what it should feel like. Instead, I’ve tried to offer a description, a sense of how I feel when an event “feels like church.” I’ve tried to offer an invitation for you to notice and reflect on those feelings in your own experiences.
What I’ve noticed is that the feeling of church is intimate: a hidden part of our soul becomes named by the frame of a scriptural story, or we are moved by a small group where one person speaks what is true, and it is confession and proclamation at once, or the sunlight falls at an angle on a trail as though it’s revealing beauty just for me. Or it’s large: a concert of hundreds that invites all our grief, or raises up our joys, such that we feel connected and transcendent. It’s personal, and it’s shared. It’s talking our way into the big questions, refining those questions, and processing their meaning through the activities of our lives, questions that can’t be answered but only lived. This living of the questions might, in fact, be the truest meaning of living like Jesus. Or it’s beyond language, that awe when we can only acknowledge mystery and unknowability.
The feeling of church has a vertical element such that we are somehow connected with the divine within and beyond. And it has a horizontal element such that we connect with other people and with the reality of the world. It must have both. The vertical without the horizontal may feel spiritual, but it doesn’t feel like church.
If church is small or large, spoken or silent, personal and shared, vertical and horizontal, how, then, do we plan for it? Perhaps what is truest is to say that church is in response to the moment. It is connecting with the holy unknowability of our own lives and collective experience. It is ambiguous and uncertain. It is transformation engaged. It is more than answers.