Read an Excerpt
I became a Lutheran pastor against my will. I never really meant to.
“How did you decide to become a minister?” someone asks me. My hairdresser as she captures portions of dampened hair between comb and blade; a friend of a friend at a party as she smiles and smooths her boyfriend’s dress shirt; the young seminarian who looks up at me with wide open eyes, hoping to catch sight of her own illuminated future.
My heart curls inward, like a crustacean receding into its shell. It’s a simple question, completely innocent, yet it seems impossible to answer.
“God made me do it” are the words that usually flash through my mind. I don’t say them out loud, though. They taste too bitter in my mouth for casual conversation. Usually I smile, lips pressed together, and say something like “That’s a long story,” and wonder how I might manage to explain.
At gatherings of Lutheran clergy, I don’t fit in. I am young, I am female, I am not married, I do not have children. There are some younger clergy and women scattered through our assembly, but the majority of Lutheran pastors are men who were ordained decades ago. They all seem larger than I am, delivering strong handshakes to one another, inquiring about wives, and cracking loud jokes. Har har har. They wear their clerical collars with ease, as if born into the uniform. With black suits and white collars, they mingle like a colony of penguins in a huddle.
I know a lot of these men. Many of them have welcomed and affirmed me, offering words of encouragement and resources to share. They are kind. I like them. But when they’re all assembled together, it’s clear I’m out of place. I’ve wandered into the wrong zoo exhibit, a small bird with unruly plumage. My heart starts racing beneath my garish feathers.
St. Lydia’s, the church I founded and for the last seven years served as pastor, is a convention of odd birds. Each of us would be wholly out of place wandering through the doors of a clapboard, steepled church. Most of us are younger than the average church-attending Christian by at least twenty years. Many of us are single, many of us are Queer. We are the kids who hung out in the art room long after the bell rang but flunked out of algebra. Or maybe we earned a 4.0 but carried a constant yearning for something different, something far away, which brought us to this city of a million lights and hard realities. Our congregants are quirky and earnest, pouring themselves into graduate school or tugging at the threads of theological questions. They don’t believe being gay is a sin anymore, like their pastor told them when they were kids. But what does the Bible say about it? they want to know. Ultimately, the thing that ties us all together, I guess, is that most of us got beat up in middle school, or narrowly avoided it.
***
At dinner, a congregant passes me a full bowl of soup. I scan the three tables to make sure there’s someone at each with enough social skills to keep the conversation going. We’ve had trouble with this. The most confident Dinner Church participants tend to arrive later and end up seated at the table closest to the door. Soon they’ll be guffawing loudly at a joke somebody’s cracked while at the table where I’m seated, near the kitchen, we sputter and lurch through small talk.
Somewhere along the line, St. Lydia’s got the reputation for being a hipster church. “Oh, yeah, the cool church,” people would say to my colleague, Julia, or me when they ran into us at church events. Sometimes their words carried a hint of dismissal. Perhaps they imagined that St. Lydia’s was a boutique ministry geared only toward the privileged. Or that we were unwelcoming of anyone who didn’t ride a fixed-gear bike or have a mustache. Julia and I always reported these stories back to one another with incredulous laughter.
“Let me assure you,” we’d tell them if we got the chance, “there’s nothing about it that’s cool.”
Sprinkled around these tables are geeks and geniuses, fools and misfits. Some of us have done a better job than others of climbing our way into something that might be identified as “success” in work or life. And now here we are, stumbling our way through dinner conversation that is the opposite of refined or easy.
My table struggles along. There’s a computer programmer visiting for the first time who blushes whenever someone makes eye contact with him. Harrison bounces around from shelter to shelter, and always has a long story to impart; two Lutheran pastors visiting from Des Moines listen, nodding. Malika sits across from me, listening with focused patience to Gerry, a retired electrician whose pants are held aloft with a set of elastic rainbow suspenders, as he describes the technical details of a recent repair. Next to me, the new computer programmer and his tablemate have lapsed into a weighted silence that seems likely never to end. They sip their soup, staring straight ahead.
Across the room at the rowdy table, Jason, an affable engineer with a head of curly hair, leans close to Ula in her wheelchair, trying to understand what she’s saying. She had a stroke a few years ago and finds it hard to string words together. She is also hard of hearing, so Jason is forced to lean close to her wheelchair and yell.
“WHAT DID THE DOCTORS SAY ABOUT YOUR MAMMOGRAM?” he shouts.
The scene elicits a familiar feeling for me: 49 percent flight reflex, 51 percent tenderness. A not-insignificant portion of me wants to run out the door. But keeping me in my seat is a warm wash of love for the people in this room. My congregants are often exasperating, unbelievably generous, reliably surprising, and very dear to me. And they keep coming back to do something that isn’t all that easy—make halting conversation with a stranger—because there is something at these tables that is more important than being cool.
***
I think often of Jonah, God’s reluctant prophet who tried to run everywhere but the place he was being sent.
“Go to Nineveh,” God said. It was a simple instruction, yet Jonah balked.
“Tarshish,” Jonah says to himself. “I’ll go there!” It’s like deciding to lie low in Pittsburgh, or Boise. “Yes, that’s the answer. Tarshish will be just right.”
But it was not just right. God did not say Tarshish, God said Nineveh. So Jonah ends up getting dumped over the side of a ship, swallowed by a giant fish, and, eventually, spat out onto the beach, putrid and soaking. All of that before he’ll agree to just go to Nineveh and speak the words God’s given him. We all do our kicking and screaming.
Christians have this strange notion of a “call,” which means doing things that don’t sound too appealing. If God had said to me, “Movest thou unto New York City, and startest thou a Dinner Church with no funding, no training, and no paycheck,” I would have started looking around for road signs to Tarshish. Generally, our call makes us want to run like hell in the opposite direction. But there’s also something about these “calls” that won’t let us go. Something alluring and compelling and a little intoxicating that we can’t help responding to, despite our best intentions and the flutter of fear.
I need everyone together around one table. It’s the only thing that makes me whole. And so, despite my trepidation, I kept taking step after step to bring a church into being.
“Why did you decide to become a pastor?” a friend of a friend, perfectly coiffed, asks as she takes a sip from her cocktail glass at a party we’re both attending.
I didn’t decide, I wish I could say. It wasn’t a choice.
