Church on the Move

A recent poll concluded that up to 80% of Americans experience significant economic insecurity sometime in their lives (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57595861/80-percent-of-u.s-adults-face-near-poverty-unemployment-survey-finds/ ). One of the effects of economic insecurity and trends toward globalization is that many people are unlikely to stay in the same place for long periods of time. People I talk to on the street move often in a desperate search for resources, for housing, and for medical care. More and more college graduates are drifting from city to city (at least among my friends), rural kids move the cities to try and find work, and urban kids and families move to the suburbs as cities gentrify and they cannot afford rent. Economic refugees from the global south migrate north into our towns and cities, filling low wage labor gaps. We live in a culture that is increasingly unstable and constantly on the move. A culture of homelessness.

Our churches, however, are designed around the needs of people who live stable, middle class lives in one place. David Barnhart blogs (http://davebarnhart.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/why-are-fewer-people-in-church-its-the-economy-stupid/ ); “We designed churches to be anchors in the community and shaped them around heterosexual couples who were married, had children, a stable income, and predictable life patterns.” We assume a stable family structure that is less and less a reality for people on the move. We invest a good portion of our income in building maintenance, even as the neighborhoods we live in are in constant flux and our membership moves away.

People on the move, particularly those in poverty, deal with a keen sense of shame over the effects of their unstable lives and they fear that the church will judge them for their children born outside of marriage or their inability to obtain work or their inability to keep up middle class appearances. And, because our churches often do not have much understanding of the economic realities of more and more people, these fears are often realized if people do wander into church. The church rarely has much to say about the growing gap between rich and poor or the systems that have created it.

Even though we follow a wandering rabbi who said he had no place to lay his head. Even though the prophets and the gospels have much to say about a gospel preached to the poor and the struggling.

However, I have been privileged to meet with churches all around the country who have indeed found ways to be a church among those on the move. A church that meets on the streets of the Boston Commons with whoever shows up for a meal and worship. A church that consciously decided to open its doors to economic refugees and recent immigrants and became a center, not only for worship, but for building community and small scale economic enterprise. Churches who, in the midst of instability and loss, seek to find home and belonging alongside people whose lives are in flux.

It is not enough to say all are welcome. To welcome people on the move, we must be willing to change our attitudes and our middle class expectations and our insistence on how things ought to be done (perhaps Pope Francis offers us an example in this http://davidgibson.religionnews.com/2013/09/06/pope-calls-despairing-single-pregnant-mom-offers-to-baptize-her-child/ ). We must confront growing inequality in our society with a prophetic voice, confront systems that make more and more people homeless, both literally and figuratively. We are called to follow the wandering rabbi from Nazareth into places of pain and brokenness and instability. And to enter into the struggle of people who long for belonging in a world of flux, who long for home.

+Sarah