Renovations Needed

I’ve given a lot of thought to the heartache and fracture the UMC has endured and inflicted over the past week. It’s been difficult to find words to convey the sadness I feel, but I’ll share one insight I had. Dusty and I have been together for over twenty years, and we have lived in many different residences. But those residences are not our relationship. Similarly, while the church provides a shelter and structure for our faith, the church is not our faith.
As committees make decisions and the structure of the church fails us, our faith and love for all people can remain. I have never felt strong ties to one denominational structure, but I have felt deeply loyal to God and my faith and the desire to love, include and affirm all people. I have been involved in various churches and denominations, and my faith grew in all of them, sometimes in spite of the structures in place.
I recall the first place Dusty and I lived, which we referred to as “The Blueplex.” The rent was $285 per month and the small structure stood a few blocks from Taylor University, where Dusty was finishing his undergraduate degree. We only lived there a few months before we decided to move to the neighboring city of Muncie. Our first home in Muncie was in student housing, where each time our neighbor ascended his staircase, we felt as though he was ascending ours. The walls were paper thin and the smell of smoke from our neighbor’s apartment wafted through the vents. Neither of us knew how to cook and regularly burned food to a crisp in the tiny oven there. We shared a twin mattress for a few months because we couldn’t afford a new bed and the student housing did not allow the waterbed we’d used previously. The next year, we housesat for professors who were traveling abroad for a year in France. Their home was as different in style and setup as it could be from our own, with bright green metal cabinets completely covered with at least a hundred eclectic magnets. The one thing we had in common with them was a love for books, which made finding any space for our own books challenging. On one occasion we returned home from a weekend away to find the kitchen covered in some type of brown sticky substance that had leaked in through the roof and splattered everywhere. We spent time repairing the roof and thoroughly cleaning all of it off of the kitchen counters, cabinets, appliances, and floor.
Soon after that, we purchased our first home in Muncie. We did house project after house project but vacuumed and cleaned only intermittently amid all of our graduate school responsibilities. When we moved to Atlanta, we lived in a small, sunny apartment next to a park where our dogs could run freely. I watched the Today Show a lot, rehabilitated our rescue dog Max, and worked on my dissertation until I began my internship at Emory. We moved to another apartment closer to Emory where our neighbors yelled to their cats Oliver and Lucky promptly each night around eight p.m. and our dogs barked their heads off. We then purchased our first Atlanta home with an initial bug and rodent problem that we quickly addressed after being traumatized by the size of Southern bugs. We sanded, primed, and painted all of the kitchen cabinets and replaced the kitchen floor. We then moved to our current home where we have been for nearly nine years, renovating rooms slowly over time and making the home our own.
In each of these structures, our love thrived, faced challenges, and survived.
Our current home is the most beautiful, the most stable, and the most “us.” I believe our faith will be the same way. Our current church needs some renovation. It’s disappointed us this past week. Brown stuff flew everywhere and it’s going to take time and effort to clean it up. But regardless of the structure around our faith and its leaky-roof dysfunctional processes, faith and love remain realities that are present or lacking within people. As long as people exist within the walls of the church, faith and love for all people can exist as well. I want the church to evolve and change and move toward greater inclusivity. I think many of us do. Conforming to Christ means dropping the stones of accusation and supporting one another. Some will move, and some will stay and renovate. Let’s continue to renovate.