A People and a Place

In the fall of 1974, a teenager named Jim drove an hour north from Pittsburgh, arriving in a small town with a college on its highest hill. He was the son of an ornamental iron worker, born and raised in a city built by steel. He spent the next four years having his faith formed while sitting in the creaky wooden pews of a chapel built of slabs of yellow-tinged limestone. He married a minister’s daughter and became a minister himself. For over thirty years, he pastored rural churches situated in small towns that sometimes didn’t even make it onto a map. Those small towns became his home, and since I’m Jim’s daughter, those places became my home, too.

Growing up in small-town western Pennsylvania as a pastor’s daughter meant watching my dad also be a counselor, social worker, coach, teacher, janitor, and about a dozen other roles that seminary courses never specify as part of the calling. His work took him to hospitals, sour-smelling homes, and much to his surprise and ours, a brothel. His flock included college professors and high school dropouts, ex-Pentecostals and ex-prostitutes, therapists and addicts, baptized believers and cynical skeptics.

Admittedly, the taste of the pastorate did not always appeal to my palate. As a teen, I rolled my eyes at our congregation’s seemingly trite prayer requests shared during a time of the service called “Joys and Concerns,” which my brother and I relabeled “The Litany of Woes.” I judged fellow parishioners as “less serious Christians” if they left the sanctuary too quickly at the end of the service, assuming they just wanted to get home to watch the Steelers. I cringed when the ninety-something organist, Gwen, played the same hymn twice in a row one Sunday. The grass looked greener in more “well-fertilized” pastures.

Sometimes I wondered how my dad kept doing it. Why stick it out at these small churches where the pay was poor and the work appeared rather thankless? Why invest in people who care more about the Pledge of Allegiance than the Apostle’s Creed? Why remain faithful in a fraying faith community that no one has heard of?

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After years of telling my dad about Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, he finally read it this winter. He loved it. My dad isn’t the first pastor to love Jayber Crow, and I bet he won’t be the last. Though the book’s prose is beautiful, I’d argue that its unglamorous premise lacks universal appeal. However, the questions Berry puts before its reader — Why stay? Why hope? Why love? — are ones asked by people of every kind and creed … and ones I asked about my dad’s vocation as a small-town pastor.

One of Jayber’s many odd jobs is being a janitor and grave digger for his local church — a particularly poetic appointment given that Jayber was a seminary dropout. In my copy, there’s a dog-eared page with a passage from Jayber’s point of view:

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me after I became the janitor has been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on … It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

Reading that passage felt like getting a glimpse into my dad’s heart for ministry in small-town America: why he kept caring for people that I both belong to and wanted to disassociate from, why his final pastoral call was to a church that was dying, why he speaks with affection about places and people that sometimes gave him hell over things like hymn selections. My dad is no saint (nor is Jayber Crow), but they both understood an essential truth: to belong to Jesus means belonging to his church — to a people and to a place.

Belonging to each other and to a place are two commitments increasingly falling out of fashion. Transience has long been typical, and settling down can be seen as settling. Marriage rates have precipitously declined. Preserving a will towards goodwill with our neighbors not only seems unappealing, but unlikely to do much good in this political climate. And yet, as Berry asserts throughout Jayber Crow and his other work, our participation in community, even ones that disappoint us, is essential to the human experience — including the church. We were designed to need God and need each other.

As Berry wrote elsewhere, “The way we are; we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t” (Hannah Coulter p. 97). If you need it said not with a Kentuckian drawl, Apostle Paul writes this in 1 Corinthians: “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ” (12:12). As the early church took shape, Paul was quite clear: God purposefully designed this to be a group project. Paul continues:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor … If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

For much of my childhood, I did not value my membership in small-town Western Pennsylvania, opting instead to dream of a fictional utopian community I could join that surely existed beyond the hills where I grew up. But as I moved to one city, then another, and then another, all within two years, I realized how much I missed belonging somewhere — how much I needed to be with other people who were deeply rooted in their community. People like Gwen, the cheerfully forgetful organist; Wayne, the quiet funeral director; and Mitch, the awkward teen who loved cars and guns and his family. I didn’t have much in common with any of those people, but we had all suffered and persevered and were seeking a place where we could be assured that our imperfect lives were being perfected by the power and grace of Jesus Christ, whose love proves sufficient even when we are irresolute.

While we certainly have autonomy over our choices of where to settle and whom to settle with, we are missing out on a chance to learn what “We love because he first loved us” means if we don’t stay long enough in a place or with a people to be marred by them and persevere towards love, compassion, and forgiveness anyway.

I am grateful to have been raised in a church community that sometimes rubbed me the wrong way, because it taught me that “belonging” to the body of Christ is not a fuzzy feeling of alignment, agreement, and amiability. Rather, membership in the church means recognizing that God uses imperfect people and places to shape, refine, and grow our faith — even when those communities have, at times, deeply disappointed us. My understanding of the love and grace of Jesus Christ would not be what it is today without the frayed faith communities to which I have belonged.

Belonging to “the body of Christ” does not happen in the abstract or the intellect; it happens in the real places we live in our real bodies, alongside the real people that are there, too. This, I believe, really matters and is a reason to feel real hope about our fraying faith communities. Why? Because every ordinary small town, every ordinary church, and every ordinary person has been extended the gift to participate in God’s “divine conspiracy,” to quote Dallas Willard. That is to say, there is no place where God isn’t at work in renewing his creation and inviting each of its members to partner with Christ as the church is perfected by grace alone. When we pray “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” that reality begins right here, right now — with each other as co-laborers.

Finally, when we choose to become members of a people and a place and promise to persevere in these communities with an orientation towards compassion, we are honoring and anticipating our membership in the kingdom to come, as promised in the book of Revelation. From Steelers fans to Browns fans, Presbyterians to Pentecostals, PhDs to plumbers, “every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” is invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Together, we will feast as members of a new city, perfected and beyond time. I hope it’s a potluck.