Episode 9 - Safe Church

[transcript automatically generated - cleanup in progress]

for a church to be safe i think that means it needs to be a place where people can go and feel accepted it doesn't matter where you come from it doesn't matter what you look like it doesn't matter how you come off um you're accepted and you feel like you're accepted it's harder to come across than you would think unfortunately everybody welcome to uh the latest weird episode of the liturgist podcast and it's weird because it's another episode without michael gunger he's on tour so we decided to do another special edition of the podcast because you guys have been asking us tons of questions on one particular topic in episode three on church unity and episodes six and seven when michael and i told our stories of faith lost and found we made references to safe spiritual community and the internet spoke out in a thousand voices and said how can i find one of those so i invited my pastor pastor betsy on the show hello good to be here and we're gonna talk about that um we asked you guys on facebook and on twitter to give us your questions and thoughts about creating and fostering and finding safe spiritual community in churches and we're going to cover as many of those questions as we can now i want to be very clear from the outset that this episode is not the final answer to this question we're trying to start a conversation with us and and you know 50 000 of our closest friends to try to understand what it means to have churches that heal more than they hurt if you've listened episode six and seven you know that i grew up in the church and i was happy growing up in the church but i reached a point in my life where i left church every sunday feeling worse than i arrived my church didn't change i did and as that happened i found that every time i was there not only did i get hurt my presence hurt other people and so uh my family and i uh left our church that i got married in my oldest daughter was baptized there was a really really traumatic and difficult situation we took some time to grieve and then i realized uh i'm not a sleep in sunday morning kind of person and a friend of mine visited a church on the south side of town which i didn't want to do at first because it was like a 20 minute drive from my house uh who's going to drive 20 minutes for church and she said you've got to come try this this church good samaritan united methodist church and with some hesitation i did and i fell in love i fell in love with that church and being there in a community where i feel safe and accepted has created not only healing in my life but also growth my time at my church is a huge part of everything i do and all the work that i'm a part of i am in in a very real way spending spiritual energy i received in a local congregation and what we're understanding what we're learning michael and i are seeing because you email us is that there's a lot of people out there who hunger for the kind of spiritual community that will help them grow but they don't know how to find it and the environment they're in doesn't fit or even hurt so much that they've moved on and that's not good i don't think that's what paul was talking about in the new testament so we're going to dive in and just start covering your questions and the first thing i kind of want to talk about is uh what makes a church safe or unsafe specifically sarah from facebook asked what defines a safe spiritual environment what makes it safe i.e is it ideologies that we cling to for safety or is it the empirical slash consumerist church with flat screens and pastors who are authors is it the community of believers itself or must it only be closed to believers or open i would be interested on a discussion of safe ideologies and apparently based on facebook likes a lot of you are interested as well betsy what do you think what are safe ideologies what does that mean well at first of all i would say that um naming or labeling anything suddenly doesn't feel safe to me because i think that once you start labeling a church as liberal or progressive or conservative then you suddenly are not open at some level or even safe what does safe mean you know you you pick up a lot of baggage with any label but i would suggest that the way to enter into a community to discover if it's safe for you is to listen listen carefully to what's being taught listen to your own body physical body are you squirming does it feel comfortable do you feel relaxed you can find a lot about the kind of church that's safe for you by listening to your own heart i know that there's some churches that would be very safe for some folks because they're they're rigid in their ideology they're very clear of of what's expected of the believer you know you will believe this you will vote this way you will not do this you will do this and for some folks in their spiritual journey that's a safe place in fact lots of people that begin a spiritual journey start with some of the rule-bound ideologies and i would say the sad thing to me is that too often they're caught there they're kind of caught there in a box but if you're truly growing if you're truly growing following christ then you're going to change it's called sanctification to use a a religious church word all right so we're made in the image of god and for some reason we're marred um by the fall if you hold to that ideology but but even more often just by life right we are not the innocent babes that came into the world and so sanctification is the remembering if the world is dismembering us then faith in christ for me as a christian is the remembering of who my original image is made in so a movement towards wholeness a movement towards health a movement towards true self versus false self i grew up in a small church in a small town in northern canada and the lead pastor didn't have any accountability structures in place and so he used his position of influence to hurt our family one sunday one of the men that was close to the pastor stood up and declared that he was on the pastor's side and anyone that was on the pastor's side to stand up with him and the whole church stood and that was our cue that it was time to leave we were we were forced out of our home church we were forced out of our family and it hurt a lot thankfully a few months later we began attending another church and there was a pastor there that rescued me poured into my life and changed it for the better and because of him i'm in ministry now but there was a lot of hurt that that came from that church family and how we were dealt with [Music] when i use the word safe i'm talking about an environment where you will not receive persecution or abuse as a result of what you understand or believe about god well as you know at good samaritan we value holding the tension between our varying viewpoints what i mean by that is we have um people with different political ideologies conservatives um liberals whatever label you choose i love that they're worshiping together and i love that they're sitting around a table in bible study together grappling with the issues of the day to me that makes it safe because that's our expectation so it's you're not blindsided when you say i believe this and the person across you at the bible study says well i believe this indeed what happens is a great discussion follows so maybe that's a huge component of what it means when i say safe is to be motivated by grace maybe above many other aspects of our faith well there's something else that is characteristic of good samaritan and that is um people there have most of them have faced some really impressive hardships and so they bring their vulnerabilities there and their vulnerabilities are welcomed we don't posture much and one of the things that we did from the beginning is i chose people in leadership i actually recruited people from different perspectives and i let lots of people participate in worship at the risk of them taking too much time stumbling through their scripture reading saying something that they maybe shouldn't say but what that does is that sets up this environment where we're being vulnerable i from the top down i'm being vulnerable it's not a show we're gathered here to worship and everybody's welcome and everybody gets to participate and i know that there's critique around that because you want it to be professional you don't want things to miss a beat so that people are pulled out of worship but over and over again when i ask people so i know what brought you here but what keeps you here i'll hear well because you make so many mistakes and worship on sunday morning i'm like what yeah i came out of a very formal setting where you know any any mistakes were frowned upon i think that people feel that in the air it doesn't always work out the way i intend but it always conveys a sense of this is our community it's not my community it's our community gathered in the person of christ yeah so that's one of the things that makes us safe one of the other things that makes us safe is we actually say fairly often we're different so what holds us together the creed jesus is lord and we agree on the words of the creed but the interpretation of the creed that can that can be different so we we profess a virgin birth but then we can have a discussion about what does that really mean i don't tell you what it means i say this is what we profess together what do you think this means i i don't i don't uh have a great handle on chronological time um but so i don't actually know how long i've been a good sam oh at all probably um two years wow i know wow old timer and it's still safe it's still safe when i when i joined the church and you know you had to recite the creeds right i had to like really examine how real i could be in that language that's how much i've well grown i remember you asking me that in the new members class and i said um yeah this is what we hold but you can you can decide what that means yeah so jason ropp says uh on twitter how do you navigate uh from both the conservative and progressive ends of our faith i often find myself in both spots in our you know our little our church does a good job you know i have conservative friends who think oh you go to a really progressive church but i don't really i go to a church where conservatives and progressives are both very welcome and very present in significant numbers i think people are tired of being pigeonholed i think that lots of us will hold varying viewpoints that would not fit in either republican party or the democratic party or the liberal uh progressive christian versus the conservative christian i think we're tired of being pigeonholed i'm very pro-life for example i was uh the director of a pregnancy center i have people in my congregation that are really pro-choice if you will um in other words i'm not i'm not progressive in that right i'm conservative and dang now i've said it out loud to that end though um we talked about safe church and one of our our listeners on the facebook page said if you guys don't talk about marriage equality in the context of church you're not really talking about what safe church means today well when i when we opened up i said that we hold attention right the tension's real but the tension is held with such love and such um appreciation for the person sitting across from us i think one of the reasons good samaritan works currently is we are still fairly small um i'm not sure that i want to grow past maybe 600 would be plenty big before we start new communities and that's because you can't hold these kind of really strong principles and do it safely with other people unless you know the other people and you love the other people right right there's so many people out there who are looking for a place they don't just want a room full of people that agree with them right and this idea of holding different ideas in tension and just agreeing to disagree or uh having unity not uniformity you know i travel to churches all the time all across the country and i really have found our little quirky community in tallahassee is remarkable that way well i would give credit to the holy spirit truly i mean we are spirit-filled congregation so if there's an umbrella over us it's it's that jesus is lord and the spirit of god is here and the spirit unifies and you know i mean what we say we want to be is we want to be a church that reflects the diversity of heaven so who's going to be in heaven when i start asking myself that question there's not a lot of people i can leave out [Music] i would say that a safe church is a place where you can freely express your thoughts on anything and everything and you won't be shut down or screamed at for holding an unpopular opinion you know it's a place where we all can freely express both the truths that we know and the doubts that we face and still call ourselves a family [Music] my last church was full of wonderful godly people who love me and who i loved and when i sort of went through this this transition through atheism and then back into belief and was you know i didn't know what i thought about the bible um i didn't i didn't know what i thought about certainly doctrinal issues but they were going to tell you what you believed yeah and that you know and you know honestly here's the crazy thing 95 of the people easily at my last church were just as comfortable and content to let me work through what i was working through as could be five percent of the people my process frightened them hurt them they were threatened by it they were threatened and i don't mean like threatened in a they're worried about losing some kind of like power or control i mean threatened sort of uh existentially um they called into question their own doubts and their own perhaps desire to explore and that in itself was scary and so they had to shut it down i can understand that christian risner from facebook asked what should the goal of churches be i like to think of them as a place where many can come and worship together and there's something to that however i struggle listening to the same person's thoughts every week this is why i go to a variety of churches hmm that's a good point and that's why i will probably take more sundays off this coming here no i take a minimum of eight sundays off a year and one of the reasons is certainly sabbath and rest and vacation and time with my family but one of the other reasons is that i want there to be other voices in the pulpit i don't always have the same person speak on those eight sundays because i i hear what he's saying and i agree i i think that different voices are important i think that's that's one of the problems with some of these personality driven churches they're so afraid to let somebody else in their pulpit or another voice be heard and i'm not quite sure why they feel like i don't they only lose power they'll lose followers i don't know so i actually think house churches do a really great job of dispelling this notion that church is specifically something that happens for one hour each week in a building these people are their church is not just this gathering it's an ongoing commitment to be in and involved in and working through each other's lives all the time now i actually think our church does a pretty good job of splitting the difference there because we do a lot of sort of uh ad hoc groupings and social functions and home studies and and we pull that tension pretty well um but i think one thing you'll miss there's not anything wrong if you want to hear different preaching all across town in my opinion doing that sometimes but i think ultimately this person this jesus came and he started churches for a reason because to me all this stuff coalesces and comes together and works when done as part of community right so the primary thing in my opinion about a church isn't actually the teaching or the preaching and it isn't actually the worship music both of those things are expressions or part of the gathering in community and i don't know if you can get that close-knit tight grouping and connection with other human beings if you're constantly going to different churches well you're just emphasizing the importance of belonging to community and i think some there's been a message out there that it's all about the preaching of the word that the community piece is just you know kind of extra add-on you know where the emphasis is so much on the preaching of the word that even in a small group setting it's all about the bible study so i think that christ is alive in you and christ is life in me and the word became flesh and so while we study the bible it's important that i hear the word in the flesh in your life so while it's good to hear different voices i hear what you're saying is that the belonging piece needs to be really central so if you're hopping around too much you're either avoiding being fully known um or avoiding letting other people into your life keeping others distant and that could be because of some bad experiences i mean community requires vulnerability true community requires that we let our guard down at some level so let's talk about should i stay or should i go should i stay i should i go yeah yeah i can't help it if i have a chance to use a song lyric i'm gonna do it um you should go if you ever feel controlled if you ever feel like your opinions are not valued if you ever feel like uh you know what i am growing beyond this place then you should go so what can happen when you're going to a church and you love the people and the people love you um but it's not working i think sometimes people actually try to soldier on too long and in doing so submit you know creating their own lives some emotional emotional trauma that's going to take a long time to work through and they end up traumatizing the other people in their church sometimes i think what would have happened in my life and in that church if i would have left six months earlier or nine months earlier um instead of just being determined that no these are my people i'm going to work it out you know it's interesting that but um people that are abused have a hard time getting out of an abusive relationship whether it's abuse at work abuse in a marriage abuse in church because abuse almost always and i'm not saying that what you happened to you was abused necessarily but there's always an element of control and an element element of manipulation and so when you're starting to feel like i need to leave there's also this piece inside of you that says but i can't i think it takes a lot of courage to move forward in life i think it takes tremendous amount of courage and faith and god and faith and grace and some companions along the way to help you take the next step in the direction that god is laying out for you whether it's leaving a church joining a church entering into something new can be just as frightening so there's sort of two perspectives on spiritual abuse you know i look at something like mars hill in seattle and mark driscoll and i say really clear-cut example of control and power and just unchecked forgive me conservative listeners patriarchy um and you know just a situation where lots and lots of people were deeply hurt while trying to be honest genuine servants of christ and so that's a real thing and a common thing at the same time sometimes well let's see my friend rob carmack said it on facebook what about when toxic people are confronted by their pastors out of a desire to protect others in their community but then the toxic person person says the church burned them there are lots of people who have been abused and let down by their churches but there are also abusive people who jump from church to church starting fires as they go oh yeah i don't really know my question on this one but i'd love to hear some dialogue about it how do we know where the abuse and where the toxicity is coming from is it leadership is it congregation is it both well i can speak from a pastoral perspective and that i've had people that were toxic that have come into the church and you can identify them pretty quickly because they want to change everything they want to enlighten me they want to change me they want to change the way we do this that or the other because they know better because god has spoken to them at some level and so god has sent them to our church in order for them to share the truth with us so and they're i mean these aren't crazy people i'm not talking about the extreme crazies these are folks that sincerely love at some level what they found but start tweaking it and pretty soon the tweaking uh becomes really invasive and so i think that's toxic and so how i've handled that is i've just said you know you can be involved in this but you can't be involved in this because what your perspective doesn't allow for other perspectives and usually they leave i've never had to ask somebody to leave most the time folks that i've found that are in that category if you limit their involvement in order to keep it safe for other folks they're going to leave anyway so one of the measures of toxicity then is when words and actions are causing harm to others would be sort of a way to look at that my parents had to stop going to their church home because of a younger brother who had severe autism and they didn't have anything to do with him and instead of calling my parents and asking if they're okay or where they were um they sent them a letter saying that they were never allowed to come back because they had stopped [Music] tithing it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over one million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists so you know i've had people say to me this um well your church just sounds like anything goes it sounds like uh we're still wishing it sounds like a you know unitarian church but it's not it's you know it's decidedly decidedly not it's a christian theologically methodist church it really is and i guess the point is that we we are christians we want to be followers of christ disciples of christ our mission is to make disciples of christ by sharing god's love but my personal perspective is that folks that sincerely follow jesus have different personalities different backgrounds different ethnicities different ideologies different interpretations of scripture so yes we profess jesus i want people to come to know jesus as lord i'm talking about the prayer in john 17 where jesus prays to the father make them one as you and i are one so that the world might believe so we want to be one that the world might believe but being one does not require us to be one of one mind as far as all the uh various ways of thinking and approaching life it's it's often quoted but unity and the essentials and liberty and the non-essentials is something we hold we really hold dear what do we think is essential well as we already spoke about the apostles creed is something that we hold to we believe that the scriptures reveal all all that's necessary for salvation and we have some essentials how do we handle people that don't hold those essentials well we welcome them we are very upfront about who we are and we invite them to be a part of the congregation wherever they want to be in other words you you can do anything in our on our church as far as serving pretty much without being a member there's only a handful of jobs in the church and they're mostly governance and that's because of the book of discipline where you have to be a member of the church i've had somebody play play in our band for quite a while i said you know that i was invited to be your bass player but i don't believe any of this you're still okay with me playing and i'm like are you going to play the christian music are you going to play the bass as best you can are you going to show up on time yes yes yes yes well then you can play and uh the the end of that story is that within seven months he was walking down the aisle taking communion and within a year i had baptized him but i allowed him to go slow and if he had never if he had never converted i still would have valued his friendship and his contribution on that note brent o'neal on facebook said when do differences become too much so that they cause division i guess it's different for each person's situation but at what point are the differences too great well this this may be a simplistic answer but i think it's too much when people have a sense of hatred towards one another i think it's too much but you know that's that's up to the individual isn't it how you're going to respond to the differences question off twitter probably my favorite question we got out of all the questions how do you avoid being stoned for asking questions that challenge dogma get under the table stay in the closet gnomes i thought that was like a eucharist reference or you don't always avoid getting stoned sometimes you get stoned and sometimes you get hate mail and sometimes you get really hurt by because of the stand you take on one issue or another especially if you're saying things that are difficult for people that you were once with to hear i mean i've gotten hate mail right most pastors have gotten really scary mean things said to them so i don't think you avoid being stoned but what i do think you do the best way to avoid being clobbered is to have a loving grace-filled handful of people around you so they can help deflect those stones when they keep coming you know do you think there's do you think there's questions in our church that would cause people to get stoned if they ask them no i don't i don't think so either the internet's one thing you could say i like puppies on the internet and someone is going to stone you i hate dogs you know you there's no cat person right there's no safe internet questions but in your actual spiritual community if you have this feeling that by asking a question you're going to be attacked that to me is a red flag that you're not in a safe spiritual community and i also think you need to use some discernment you know find some safe people so that you can ask those questions there practice practice on safe people before you ask questions in a place that might not be safe and the reason i say that is my impression from these questions that there's you have a lot of change makers listening to this podcast and i i sense and read in between the lines that they're asking these things because they have questions and they don't feel safe asking them or they feel like they're supposed to stay in a community because they want to be the change i i can't you can you and i can't make the judgments for them or their final decisions but they need to cultivate maybe this podcast and the twitter feed is that place where they can begin to ask questions they can begin to express doubt and they can feel safe and you know the difference find a few people at least for me uh that started after i went to two days with rob bell and had my magical beach moment right the people who were in that room stayed a safe community for me to this day right i can call anybody that was in that room anybody that was in that room and say anything that's on my mind with no concern they're going to talk to somebody else about it or tell me the devil is taking over my life or and and i and i imagine that you have lots in common as far as ideology with those folks but i would also venture to say that the reason why that particular group is so close is that it was episodic something special happened in your experience you know physically you bonded through the power of the spirit in such a way that it's now safe even if you don't agree with everything and that's what happens in christian community where um where the holy spirit's invited to move i there are episodic moments that change who we are and change the way we feel about the people that gather with us yeah i think that in many ways the most important things that happen in faith are are more like music and poetry yes then fact right so when you're looking for a safe community is your heart moved are you touched do you find yourself tearing up for no apparent reason do you leave smiling or changed in some way that's not necessarily something you can write down on paper i hear that over and over again pay attention to that the church is safe when all questions are taken seriously when anyone can walk in and feel welcome no matter what state they're in the church is safe when leadership is willing to admit that they don't know the answer to a question or maybe that they've answered one wrong in the past the church is safe when one member can sit down with another member and say i disagree with you but i love you enough to hear you out and not write you out of our story [Music] five times a week i get an email that includes this phrase i i work at a church where i can't put my raw bell books on the shelf and that sort of encapsulates this tension right where they're you know where someone is growing and learning uh in a way that is viewed as dangerous or evil in their day-to-day spiritual community so let's flip the table a little bit okay what happens when you are a paid staff member of a spiritual community that you do not feel safe in or among well and you want to i want to tread lightly here because i don't want to be flippant in any way because i have experienced the pain of being somewhere where i didn't feel like i could fully be who i was in ministry um and there was wonderful experiences in that setting that i've taken with me but there were also a lot of painful things and so i understand that the fear of not having a job or the fear of you're in the wrong place and now what but i am i am a person that believes that god is real that god hears our prayers and that god has a plan for us and i also believe that he leads us and i would say muster up the courage to take a step in the direction you're feeling led which may mean out the door of your current setting and i understand there's bills to pay and those kinds of things but i i also believe that our god is greater um and and can open doors that we would be surprised at if if we're willing to do that i often tell people to email me on this topic and i get it a lot a lot a lot um it's maybe cut the cable and start putting that money in savings yeah you know what i mean no no make yes prepare away get get ready get ready for what god has next yes absolutely that's yeah it's like people don't believe that it's possible to have a community that will support them where they are spiritually which saddens me that that's such a widely held belief but it is really widely held and it makes sense why people don't want to come to church if that's what it's like i mean really no i i we're called to be who we were created to be and if whatever you're doing is preventing you from being who you are created to be then then god is not being glorified it's for freedom you have been set free i know i'm sounding really preachy today but i am a preacher you're a legit a preacher i am a preacher i love it let's talk about finding community we got to ask over and over and over and over how do i find a church which is a weird question in america because the the flippant answer is open your door walk any direction and you will find a church but obviously that's not the question how do i find a church didn't your friend rob say you should check out the united methodist church plug um i i think but even that this is a really important point no no they're not all the same i get um probably 30 40 tweets or facebook messages or emails a week for people saying i'm in city blank do you know of a good church and at first i said yeah i'm gonna i'd find a local um they're all different and i got awful reports absolutely no every congregation is different and the sign in the door doesn't really tell you a whole lot i i would say that some of the ways that i have discovered people that i read and i've learned from is through internet connections but you can do the same thing on churches i mean ask your your followers to say if they have a safe church and been posted i mean there's all sorts of ways you can kind of follow the net and the web but there's there's probably reality to this sadly that there may be pockets where there aren't any safe communities and every i think every church thinks it's safe if you ask someone who's going to a church is your church safe finger go oh yeah yeah yeah yeah my church is safe but i mean this a couple of real examples um i had someone ask me you know i love the lyricist podcast you know can you can you help me find a liturgical example in city blank and actually tweeted out and said any good you know affirming liturgical worship communities in city blank and i got several responses back and this person found all those churches um too progressive for their taste right you know but then on the other hand i had someone else say you know i need a i need a a really safe church in city blank and i got several replies back and i had to clarify i said this is for a an agnostic bisexual person in a same-sex relationship who is trying to figure out what they believe about god right and then that definition of safe is right really really sick well my my suggestion would be pray and ask god and if you're not a believer in god yet just ask the universe there's this longing within these people to connect with god and connect with community and i believe the creator hears and knows that and will lead them let's not um discount the power of the supernatural and the spiritual uh whether we can explain it or not we know and you know that you've had mystical experiences and a lot of it was based on networking friendships connections and then you were at the place in your own being on that beach where god could speak to you so folks that are longing for connection put that out the fact that you even tweeted it is you're putting it out but now start listening and watching and expecting god to lead you to that place back when i was in middle school my family and i went to a church that was a good half hour away from our home practically all of the kids in sunday school went to the same private christian school they lived in the same communities they saw each other everywhere i felt like i was constantly trying to break through this wall to get to where they were i'm not sure what could have been done differently necessarily but i do know that i walked away from there never again wanting to involve myself in a church that's full of people who are so alike i feel safe in churches with diversity because i've been on the outside looking in and i don't ever want to be a part of a church that's exclusive [Music] now some people either can't find a church or they have something different on their heart and it's kind of revealed by this question i've been thinking about helping start a small church community what should the beginning stages look like if you're thinking about starting a church in 2014 and i really look forward to specifically having you on for this question because you've done this you started a community that helps people in this day and age you've done it so what would you tell someone who was trying to follow in those footsteps well first you have to define what is safe for you and then you have to be really true to yourself um and not be afraid to articulate who you are i had a great church start coach that told me let people be drawn to you and let people bounce off of you if you start out being really honest and really true to yourself then you're setting the tone for other people to be really honest and true to themselves i know that might sound simple but it is radical it is radical don't be afraid to say who you are what you believe where you stand because that creates an invitation for those that are looking for that i shared with you earlier that i was really intentional about wanting to have a um interracial interracial multicultural church and so when i was looking for folks to invite to be a part of it i looked for folks like that from the beginning we we took on subjects that we knew that would be interesting and that would set a tone so we tackled topics like world religions and i invited people from the various faiths to come and share so we set a tone that kind of communicated who we were and we drew people that were interested in being a part of creating this different kind of a community so betsy did that in the context of the largest mainline protestant denomination in america um my uh cohort and partner in crime michael gunger in denver started a community called bloom um and i've been to bloom a couple times and it's a really remarkable community it's like a house church federation so you know they have a few hundred members but they all are in house churches and they meet and congregate throughout the week there but then they also gather together on sundays for a time of worship all together what's interesting about bloom is it's very very liturgical worship which a lot of people are hungry for today especially people that are from evangelical backgrounds sort of the trendy liturgy somebody should start a group devoted to making liturgies um and uh what i like about the way bloom does things is if you're just kind of scoping things out you can come in on a sunday sit on the back row talk to nobody be anonymous if you want to be no one's going to mess with you and you can do it as long as you want but then when you're when you're hungry for community or you're new in a city and don't have any friends yet and you plug into one of their house churches you're in community all of a sudden like just guaranteed it's it's really interesting well and what good samaritan did is we we knew that we wanted to be pretty much a traditional family church so we have a lot of the elements that you'd find in a traditional church we have the women's group that puts roses on the altar and and knits baby afghans and we have the traditional youth group and children's ministry so we don't look on the outside a lot different so it's not a different model what it what's different is the overall attitude and view view on acceptance and accepting one another and i will also say this i think that any any group that is going to come together with any sort of cohesiveness there needs to be some sort of affinity and if people were to ask me what the affinity is at good samaritan i would have to say we're we're a university town and um while we have people that are from different perspectives as we talked about already they're all pretty much highly educated so there is that education element that probably contributes to our being able to hold tension yeah that was actually believe it or not one of the main ways you hooked me to the church was when i could meet people who worked on the apollo program i remember so the church i was like wait what you know what i mean like lots of scientists lots of artists we're thinking we're we're thinking people that's for sure and don't and i don't think that that's a wrong thing i think folks are naturally drawn to one another for a variety of reasons we don't need to combat that right yeah and that you know there's a lot of talk about how young people that sociologists call millennials i'm not sure what i think about that term but everybody knows what i'm talking about that they're very post-denominational that even if they're a member of a denominational church they don't really acknowledge denominations i do think one of the interesting things about denominations that i'm learning to not be quite so antagonistic towards the idea is they do allow people to find and serve in a community that is really conducive to their growth and flourishing and we're rooted we're rooted and grounded and uh for united methodist and wesleyan theology so we're we're not um we're not as likely to go with the whims of a personality or the whims of the latest way of thinking or and i think the rooted grounded traditions and teachings and theology that we share i think that's really important yeah but if you think if you think wesleyan theology is bonkers right there's other denominations exactly but that goes back to what i'm saying be who you are and don't be ashamed or afraid to say it don't try to be all things to all people that's a that's it's just you just set up the next question okay just set it up all right thank you on purpose kim from facebook discuss the notion of being able to safely say i don't know and question slash wonder while also leading a community that naturally expects leaders to have answers at all times well what's interesting about her question is she says that naturally expects leaders to have answers at all times so the leader needs to train them not to think that leaders have all the answers uh which begins with the leader's vulnerability just simply saying i don't know i don't know or i grapple with that or i too have doubts i've really found that the best thing to do is say i don't know oh it's so powerful i'm not sure we'd be having this conversation right now if when i was in a room with rob bell and i said i don't think there's a god if in his response to me he hadn't said and don't think sometimes i'm not sure if there's a god and for that level of honesty and vulnerability for someone that prominent to just be open that way invited me back in right in a way that if he would have said well god said it he did it i believe it i might have been like okay i've heard that um i used to have that on my car my bumper sticker i guess i need to just figure out how to go to a humanist church well not to flip it on you science mike and talk about brains but um you know brene brown's work on vulnerability it's really clear that being honest and vulnerable with other people has a power to connect like nothing else so the best leaders are vulnerable vulnerable the best and safest leaders are honest and vulnerable about their own questions and lack of knowledge in areas what does it mean for the church to be safe we need to be able to have deep and loving relationships that point each other towards christ the danger in this is that it requires a high level of vulnerability from us and a high level of risk in that we need to be open which for anyone that has been hurt by the church is a really difficult thing to open up to two questions that we're going to close out this discussion with this grant jacobs on facebook said is there a yelp for churches i just wonder if there's a place where people can see feedback before they attend glad you're exploring this yelp if you don't know is a place you can review restaurants and other establishments to see if people like it or not and then spears stephen on twitter said could a network of certified churches be established where people could return or could be referred to and resources can be shared the challenge is who certifies them by what criteria how does it keep from becoming a good buddy club and how do we define safe we get asked this all the time can we as the liturgists in some way create a database of churches and that we can sort of certify or guarantee our good communities and michael and i have actually spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying to figure out how to do that uh and right now the sort of conclusion we've come to is it's impossible um which i know i can hear the the groans even right now uh on in the twitter sphere but um i literally started charting out what it would look like and you would have to ask each church to check what things they are comfortable with or affirm so that people could like quarry churches based on well i want to go to church that's for gay marriage or against gay marriage or i want to go to a church that uh accepts atheists or doesn't or believes it so suddenly you're just fragmenting right you're actually contributing to the problem of divisiveness rather than unity or safety right and the problem is there's no there's no consensus on what the right church looks like exactly so be warm and welcoming and don't don't don't do that but that's tough because some people have suffered legitimate spiritual abuse yeah and for them even one sunday in the wrong place might be five weeks of therapy right like i mean that's a real thing there's some people that have had truly horrific church situations um if you guys have thoughts on ways you can do this i also here's another thing if you think this should exist you might be the person that needs to build it there you go because i don't know i want to be in the network i don't know that michael and i uh haven't have a handle on this at all i mean we definitely what we do want to do if you talk about resources we are all about trying to figure out how to provide resources for local church communities that's the main focus of what we're talking about in our our plans for 2015 but in terms of a network that starts to sound like a denomination that starts to sound not like what we're up to look for a joyful place look for a place that makes your insides smile and don't be uh don't be worried or hesitant to walk out halfway through a service if it's starting to feel uncomfortable or abusive in any way trust your instincts and trust that the holy spirit will lead you right out the door or right into the next good place the pursuit of christian community is a worthwhile pursuit and you're not in it alone because there is a god who desires for you to be in a safe place we believe in a god that has healing ready for you and available to you so keep looking and uh and leave if you can if it's not the right place i went to a lot of churches before i found good sam and i even went to one church that i really enjoyed for like weeks but there was something that i didn't quite connect with right that doesn't mean that's an awful church or i'm an awful person but it means and this is uh an idea i'm becoming increasingly comfortable with god had a different place for me now if you don't believe there's a god or you don't believe if there's a god that that god has consciousness there was a place better suited to my temperament but either way the end result is the same by being open and continuing to look and not give up i found a place that not only i felt great about but that my whole family grows closer by going to together well guys i hope you've uh got something out of our discussion this week uh we'll be back in december with michael and lisa and my wife jenny to talk about the spouse's perspective on doubt stories but listen on this topic of safe spiritual community we want to hear what you think what we miss what additional thoughts do you have because this is a topic that's going to come up again we're going to cover it in season two uh we're going to continue to explore this issue because it's vital for this work we're talking about this body of christ that we say is resurrected in our lives so we'd love to hear from you go to the liturgist.com podcast you can comment on this episode i'll be there looking i'll encourage michael to come look and comment as well you can hit us up on twitter at the liturgists or go to facebook.com slash the liturgist leave a comment on a wall and if you're in a situation where you don't feel safe and where you don't want people to know you're even talking to us that's okay you can send us a message on our facebook page and i read them and michael reads them and we don't always reply you guys send a lot of messages but we do read all of them uh thanks for listening this week i know it's been a little weird format we didn't do the science art and faith thing but i really wanted to start putting together a conversation and and some some insights and opinions on a question you guys ask a lot uh this has been science mike and pastor betsy all right see you guys later