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This has been an intense January and it is not over yet. From the shifting of political power in this inflamed nation, burning houses in California, freezing roads in Michigan, to the fears of God’s precious children who see their immigration status threatened, their genders mocked, their economic lives ignored. In the midst of it all, we still stop to remember the Christian witness of Martin Luther King Jr, his timeless words and also his sacrifice, in systems of evil where words were as easily weaponized back then as they are today.
At times like this I go deeper with God, resisting my own temptation to ask for a few new words with which to speak my own truth to the people who already agree with me. Instead I dare to ask what gift the Church has to bring, as imperfect as we are and as imperfect as we have always been.
Earlier in January, as the cruel California fires were burning, I was in freezing cold Chicago teaching a weeklong January intensive course on the History, Polity and Theology of the United Church Christ at Chicago Theological Seminary. Nowadays, almost all teaching at CTS happens online. Our class was the exception to the rule, meeting in person, in a classroom, all day for five days. For my enrolled students, whose street addresses ranged from East Coast Massachusetts to West Coast Washington, that week was their first time “on campus,” their first time inside the beautiful building that was imaginatively designed for a future hybrid learning world that was about to come sooner than the architects predicted when the 2011 cornerstone was laid, in a pandemic we didn’t see coming.
Against our will, and shocked into action, our seminaries and our churches learned that some of what we could do in person, we could also do online, when we try, when we commit and when we must. And we did. We sought to connect in circumstances where there was no connection before.
And in the year after, our churches tried to take that learning with us, leaning into the combination of onsite and online connection, with hybrid community as our new salvation. As a pastor, in that first post-pandemic year, I coveted Chicago Theological Seminary’s high-tech facility furnished with desks and screens, podiums up front and plugs at every seat, futuristically designed to do it all, in person or online, the perfect hybrid school to teach a hybrid church synchronicity.
And yet earlier this cold January, as I taught in-person in the seminary’s heavenly high tech classrooms, I learned that for most of the year the building stays shiny, clean and mostly unused by staff, students and teachers, who instead work hard and faithfully from much weirder spaces like kitchen tables, the back wall of a messy bedroom, the fast food restaurant with wifi when the kids are hollering at home, or perhaps they have that coveted pristine home office with tastefully inoffensive art, where the camera is carefully angled by inches toward a carefully curated book collection but a good foot away from the cat's overflowing litter box. I learned that even the hybrid courses, officially offered both onsite and on zoom, will morph after a few weeks into being solely online when the Chicago students stop attending classes in person, and join the other students who are showing up from around the world online, and the seminary naturally leans into being the best mostly online seminary they can be.
At this same moment in history, in the same Chicago neighborhood, another seminary around the corner has decided to lean into a distinctive identity of being mostly in person, and another seminary around the corner leans into being hybrid in new ways, all of them competing for the shrinking number of students who are even remotely interested in leading a shrinking number of churches.
Here they are, in person for my January intensive, students who had cross-enrolled for the class from a variety of seminaries, online or in person learners, all of them reminding me of the distance people will travel, over icy Chicago roads, across dead seas and over spotty wifi, just to learn about Jesus and hang out with a few of his friends.
Speaking for myself, I think a hybrid of online and onsite is the hardest medium of all to pull off and I admire those who are able to do it. As a leader, it always requires more technology, money, equipment, planning and people power than I expect. Therefore, as a participant, given my low expectations and my capacity for self-pity, I am always sure that my group was the one left out, whether I was in person or online.
You can imagine how much I loved and cherished that week-long intensive and I wanted to enshrine it. Like the seminaries surrounding me that week, I longed to lean into my own momentary strength, my own way of being and declare it correct, grant-worthy and God’s will. But it was spending a week with students from different seminaries and different ways of learning that called me back to humility.
The online degree that mystifies and repels one person may be a gate of life-changing possibility for another. And the online offerings that bring people together from across the country through the miracle of technology may not be the answer for the person who has been called to drop their nets and follow Jesus to live, eat and learn on faraway shores.
In times of crisis, human institutions like the seminaries in Chicago, like our local faith gatherings, will end up leaning into what they feel they do best, or at least passably well. My prayer is that our churches do that and more. I pray that against all odds, they keep seeking God’s will for how they can reach God’s people, and leave the question of how all the other people do it up to Jesus, who will show up when, where and how he chooses.
And as for the news that is obviously fake to the person who blocks it and is too offended to read it but still feels qualified to post online about it…That same news outlet may be what pulls a family together to stick close, stay warm and celebrate in a house where the price of groceries competes daily with the price of heat. This is not the moment for individual Christians to pray to God for the right words, or for a better argument and the perfect scriptural seasoning with which to adorn our own already long held opinions. This is a time to ask what God wants to see from the body of Christ.
If there’s one spiritual gift that the world most needs to see in the Church right now, it’s humility, in the presence of others.
The future of the universe does not depend upon all human beings coming to an agreement on the one right way to do things, and neither does the future of the church.
Thanks be to God.
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