Praytell

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

You may have noticed in these pages how often I refer to church.

It is, perhaps, because in church we talk about life.  Sometimes, to my great regret, we’re quite sure that truth is to be found in an unending litany of complaint.  But sometimes when we are authentic enough, and caring enough, to talk about the way it really is, authenticity unlocks a meaningful conversation.

When I went to seminary I had no intention of becoming a pastor.  Something else caused us to leave coastal Maine for Manhattan island and Union Theological Seminary.  One day, the president of Union Theological Seminary, just across the street from the famed Riverside Church, stopped by a group of new students.  “Can you believe it?” he asked  us.  “We’re here to actually make sense of God.”

Unbelievable.

Who would pay for such an endeavor?  Who would value such an endeavor?  Who would actually do such an impossible task?

I remember nodding my head in agreement with his fundamental perception.  And that’s why I went to seminary.  If there was a God, one should pay attention.  That’s what seminaries did.  They paid attention to God.  Some were conservative, some liberal.  It didn’t matter to me.  Either way, they paid attention to a central question:  If there is a God, what bearing would that have on life?

At this point, a story emerges.  I was eking out a living by being a consultant.  “Isn’t that the title one what when one doesn’t have a” friend asked me.  “Yes,” I answered, though my pride took a hit.  I’d been writing about “church.”  But then I realized my assumptions were all too many, and my understandings all too few.  How could I write about church when I had never led one?

I wrote out an application.  When I say “wrote,” I do mean “wrote.”  I did not type it.  I wrote it longhand.  And sent it in.  Soon, there was a response from a little church in southwestern Minnesota, out there on the edge of the prairie.  They were struck that my application, unlike all the others that were up-to-date and up-to-speed were carefully and precisely typed.

They asked, “Would you consider coming here?”

“Where?” I asked.  I found Montevideo on a map, not far from the South Dakota border in southwestern Minnesota.

I flew to Minneapolis.  The man who met me, Bob Reed, raised a sign over his head at the airport.  It said, “Pray.”  “It was a bit odd,” he later said.

It was a good visit.  But I wasn’t sure.  That consultancy thing, you see, still held power though no power did it hold.  And so, they invited my wife, Connie, to pay a visit.  She went.  And she returned.  “I don’t know where you’re going,” she said when she returned to Manhattan.  “I’m going to Montevideo.”

I knew in that moment that the Spirit wasn’t working through me.  It was working through her.  It said, “Go.”  And so I did.  It was the best decision of my life.  When I say “church,” I think of the way the First Congregational Churches I served  in Montevideo, Minnesota, Grand Marais and Big Timber Montana, taught me the meaning of love.

It’s the meaning of love.

That’s what churches are about.

Come to think of it, that’s what healing is about too.

Tags: First Congregational Church, Manhattan, Montevideo Minnesota, New York, Union Theological Seminary

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