John Dorhauer was the special guest at a gathering of the St. Louis Association Ministerium back in February of 2022. It was great to have a chance to hear from him and to absorb some of his enthusiasm. But I especially caught it when he announced what were then tentative plans for the Summit we are currently engaged in. I have been eager for years for us to have a conversation about the future of the church broadly and the UCC in particular.

But as the event approached I began to have concerns that the topic is framed too narrowly. Yes, the pandemic is ending [even though it is still virulent enough that plans to do the event in person were scrapped.] The transformations that the social distancing that Covid created are worthy of reflection. And the ways that we do church are sufficiently in flux that we do well to support each other in discovering where we are now.

But Covid is not the only pandemic, and social distancing is not the only dynamic that has brought stress to our local congregations. It is the health of our local congregations that concerns me the most.

I remember March 11, 2021 as the day the World Health Organization named the outbreak of the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic. I already had my boarding pass for a flight on the 12th. I cancelled. And I bought new computer equipment.

The virus was not the only, and in most respects for me, not the biggest pandemic. White supremacy, police violence against brown people, global warming, and the erosion of support for liberal democracies are all parts of a crisis of social collapse that has me very concerned about the future of human community and for the wellbeing of the planet itself. We are in deep shit here.

And my sense of what is needed is for the human community to very rapidly mature into ways of being that can care for each other and the planet. We need some radical and rapid initiatives to grow the hell up.

And there is really only one institution that I see as having any chance of making this happen, and that is our faith communities. I mean locally grown, face to face, spiritually oriented communities of care.

I am worried that at this Summit we are not thinking far enough outside the box. We have some huge questions to address. We can certainly assure ourselves that we are right and they are wrong and we can muster the courage to tell them that they are doing horrible and evil things… but that has virtually no chance of creating the transformation that we need.

But do we really want transformation? I have rarely been in a worship service in which there was not some indication that we wanted God to transform us. But in practical terms we are doing next to nothing to make it happen. We ask out loud for God to bring about transformation, and we say in our hearts that we really hope it will happen to someone else.

I found Rev. Dr. Jacqui’s sermon to be stirring. But I had to notice that the lies are all told by someone else. We have to call out the lies, but what of the lies that we are telling ourselves unaware. I am not worried about speaking the truth to “them.” My concern is about speaking the truth to “us.” If “they” don’t like it, so what. It is my tribe that concerns me. And I routinely experience those in my tribe saying things that I know are not true. Even in this context, I see us constructing divisive duality. We heal the world, not by chastising our enemies, but by turning them into allies.

We are able to worship in many time zones. But what is worship for? How do we know if it is effective? Because we get a good feeling? Or because we behave differently?

Rev. Dr. Mark Lee Robinson
St. Louis