By Bishop Ann Svennungsen
Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth. A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace.
— Frederick Buechner
The above might be my favorite Buechner quote. Yet, in addition to Buechner’s list, I would add another: A congregational home is grace. A community of welcome and belonging – where grace is proclaimed, faith is nurtured, wounds are tended, dreams are encouraged, lives are transformed – that is grace.
“Congregations are filled with sinner/saints living in a changing world.”
Recently, our retired clergy gathered at the synod office. In their introductions, I asked each person to name the congregation where they belong. After each congregation was named, I felt this deep sense of awe and gratitude. Yes, this community is grace, and this community is grace. We are richly blessed.
OH, IT’S NOT EASY or simple to be a congregation. Our unity is in Christ; in other ways we are quite diverse. I recall a story that Riverside Church’s Rev. James Forbes liked to tell. Shaking his hand after services, a woman announced, “I really didn’t like the hymns today.” After a moment, Forbes replied, “That’s sort of how it is. We’re a community of diverse people. I’d say if you liked the hymns 30 percent of the time, you’re doing great.”
In addition to being diverse, congregations are filled with sinner/saints living in a changing world. Our leaders sometimes lose their way; a conflict or trauma from the congregation’s past may continue to disrupt the present; a pandemic might completely change how we do worship; a Christian Nationalist movement may make people write off Christianity all together.
No, it’s not easy to be a congregation, a community of grace and belonging. But, oh, how important it is.
“Let us pray for those elected leaders, staff, deacons, pastors who provide leadership in these diverse congregations filled with sinner/saints.”
It is Congregational Annual Meeting season throughout the synod’s communities of faith. We gather to make decisions, pass budgets, and elect new leaders. As we began the annual meeting in prayer, let us also commit to prayerfulness throughout the year: that the decisions made will bear good fruit and that God will provide wisdom and courage for the decisions we make in the year ahead. And let us pray for those elected leaders, staff, deacons, pastors who provide leadership in these diverse congregations filled with sinner/saints.
Yes, I believe a community in Christ of welcome and belonging, a congregational home, indeed is grace.