Ten years ago this fall I entered seminary to pursue my M.Div. and, I thought, a career as a campus pastor at a Christian college. The “calling” to the pastorate was one I’d felt early in my life, and I took that call seriously during my time in seminary. I thought often about the past, present, and future of the church; engaged in earnest and hopeful conversations about what the church could be; and tried to discover and learn how my strengths (and litany of weaknesses) informed and impacted who I was as a pastor-to-be.
But as I completed seminary and my internship in the same summer, I felt the particularity of that call to the pastorate begin to shift. I wasn’t sure what it was shifting towards, just that it wasn’t the same call I’d known three years prior. As I set out to discover just what that towards happened to be, it led me to work on my Ph.D. in Religious Studies. I could still be a pastor to college students, I thought, but just in a very different kind of context and role.
So for the past three years I’ve been working on my doctorate – a degree I never imagined I’d pursue, but one in which I’ve found a great deal of life and passion. And yet through all my years of “religious graduate education” I’ve maintained a curious, contentious, and (at times) hostile relationship with the church. For much of the last ten years I’ve been a reluctant church-goer, unable to really tolerate the alt-rock worship and the 45-minute sermon-show that so much of the Evangelical tradition has become (if it can’t be said in 15 minutes, you surely don’t need 45). I’ve bristled at the contrived “nice-ness” of so many churches, the inability of many of them to really disturb attendees, to really make people uncomfortable as people of faith. My own read of Scripture is of a Jesus who – while loving – is deeply disruptive of the norms and practices around him. The church, I thought, needed more of that in its life and ethos, and I just couldn’t sit through one more sermon on the “ten steps” to anything.
There was much, much more critique, obviously. Too much to mention here. But after years of discontentedness I finally stopped going to church altogether. And for a time, it was really nice.
This past summer, however, I decided to return to church. So much of my work and reading these days is in the philosophical tradition, but with an eye towards the ways it intersects with conversations of God and transcendence and the infinite. And I felt like I once again needed to be rooted in the tradition and conversation that initially gave birth to and shaped so much of my theological and philosophical curiosities. I didn’t know what my experience would be like, and I anticipated being flooded with all the critique and cynicism that characterized so much of my last ten years.
I walked through the doors, however, determined to keep that critique at bay and to simply take the experience for what it was. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Admittedly, some Sundays it takes all my effort to sit there silently in my chair and simply listen through all the noise and criticism echoing in my head. Those are hard mornings; mornings where I take multiple trips to the coffee maker in back and spend more time on my phone than I care to admit. And yet there are some Sundays I actually experience what I once thought impossible – I actually hear the whisper of God – ever so slightly.
There’s plenty I could list that I find problematic about this particular church – and it would be lengthy – and yet there’s probably an equal amount that I found I’ve come to really enjoy. I look forward to Sunday mornings now, and I haven’t been able to say that for a decade. It has become a respite in my week, a grounding place to be in community, and perhaps most unexpectedly, a necessary part of my own intellectual life. It has become – I think – essential to how I’m beginning to form the outline of my dissertation and how I’m understanding my (ever-shifting) research.
But more than that, it is a way of re-embracing the calling I felt so many years ago. If I’m to truly pastor my students with integrity, then I also need to be pastored. I also need to be rooted in a rhythm of worship, celebration, and thanksgiving with a community of people oriented towards the incarnate God. And I need to be reminded that I’m one person in a long, long line of people wrestling with what it means to be in relationship to/with God.