Churches, communities, flocks, and sheep

When Adorable Child was very small, we lived in a teeny tiny village in upstate New York: 2,000 people, one stoplight, four churches, four bars. No doubt you’ve driven through places just like this hundreds of times.
Economic conditions in this miniscule town are rugged… partly because it’s remote, but more because the winter is extremely long and brutal, with temperatures that plummet to -30 degrees or more with the windchill. The local economy only runs in the summer months, when tourists flock, swelling the area population to double or triple the year-round residents.
You’re never, ever financially secure in an area that lives off tourism dollars for maybe 1/3 of the year. The unemployment rate there is roughly 13% (hard to pin down because of the seasonal nature), the average income is ~$30K, and the average home price is under $60,000.
But for all that, I loved living in a town where everybody knew everyone else. There was an incredible sense of community, and whether that, too, was a function of this village’s difficult circumstances, it manifested in uncountable little ways.
Pretty much everybody went to church, and ours was led by a fairly young minister. It was a gospel church, and the biggest part of his message — embraced to varying degrees by the congregation — was love and Jesus. Because this was an extremely conservative, tightly-knit, traditional American town, though, this energetic, dynamic young preacher’s message occasionally made me squirm.
Still — in those years AC’s religious experience consisted of fingerpainting clouds or angels, and gluing popsicle sticks into crosses. We were still years away from having to talk about the teachings that went on in the “big church” upstairs from the Sunday School.
Moving away from that little town was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
When I arrived in Texas as a single mom, I wanted desperately to find a similar environment — but in an impersonal, transient area like this, it proved to be impossible. And when I turned to the area churches, they were so enormous that I felt completely lost (what’s with that, anyway?).
And we encountered another problem: because AC was getting older, it was no longer possible to just park her in Sunday School. She’d sometimes come to part of the sermons (or even all) — and I’d find myself squirming as the pastor exhorted wives to support their men, and to remember their womanly roles as man’s helpmeet. I began adding lunch to our Sundays, for the long, necessary discussions about Polimom’s view of things, as I tried to counterbalance the minister’s designation of second class status upon me and my daughter.
And in the end, we gave up on joining a church here.
Because I don’t agree at a profound level with some of what many churches here are teaching (any more than I did in that tiny village), I was looking for that feeling of communion and shared love and lives — community — that my church up north gave me. But in an area where community is confined to meeting now and again at a soccer game, or a nod across the vast expanse of a sanctuary that seats thousands, that’s hard to find.
So. People join churches for many reasons… and for me, one of the most important is to be part of a community. The pastor or minister or priest or rabbi has a massive role, and “guides the flock”, yes — but all of his/her views aren’t necessarily accepted or embraced. The sheep metaphor only goes so far, after all.
Obama’s response to the uproar and understandable questions regarding where he does or does not agree with Jeremiah Wright is sufficient for me — but then, I spent a significant part of my life sorting some of these same issues in my own mind.
Evidently, not everyone has — but those folks weren’t inclined toward understanding anything about Obama in the first place. On the other hand, there are many who can, in fact, wrap their minds around the possibilities. Clearly people will come to their own conclusions, based in part on their own life experiences… or their own political tendencies.
But I assure you that if Polimom and AC still lived in that little village, we’d absolutely still be going to that same church — and I’d still disagree, at the very deepest level, with some of what was said.
Is it really so hard to understand how Barack Obama could have belonged to a church where the pastor sometimes preached ideas with which he disagrees profoundly?