Why are we so comfortable?

By David E Braden

I was in Aurora, Illinois last week at a church event. The church I was at is exploring a series they call, "Living Faith, Seeking Justice,” and I was asked to speak on a panel focusing on “Immigration, Diversity, and Inclusion.”

Aurora is one of the fastest growing communities in the entire state of Illinois. It also has one of the fastest growing immigrant populations in the state. This is probably a large reason why this church community was having this discussion in the first place – to discuss what it means to be in a changing community and what it means to be a Christian community under such circumstances.

What boggles my mind is that in a city that is growing with such speed the United Methodist Church is actually declining! How is this possible? How are we missing this opportunity for evangelism? And the larger problem is that this isn’t just a story in Aurora; it’s true across our Connection.

Somehow as a denomination, we’ve become so afraid of change. We look inside our own communities and we like what we see. Somewhere we got too comfortable. We got too comfortable sitting in our pews listening to sermons. We got too comfortable ministering to the same comfortable people who far too often look like us, speak like us, wear the same clothes as us, come from the same stock as us, and on and on.

Far too often, United Methodist congregations fall into the xenophobia of our country and close its doors to change and difference.

We don’t want immigrants in our community. What is it that we hear so often? “They’ll take our jobs,” “they won’t learn our language,” or “they won’t integrate into our culture.”

We don’t want people of color in our community. Actually, we’ll say that we’d love to see some color in our congregations; get some diversity in the ranks. But there are the old excuses of, “They don’t live here,” or “If only we could find some,” as if people of color are some commodity for which we receive more points on some politically correct scale.

We don’t want gay people in our community. Aside from being “incompatible with Christian teaching,” queer folks just aren’t polite dinner-table conversation. For some reason, we cannot think of queer folks without thinking of sex. And sex just isn’t appropriate in our puritanical Church.

We spend so much time making excuses for why we should stay the same or why we cannot change that we leave no time for doing the work of Christ.

The Aurora congregation I visited is taking a good first step in talking about what they can do to be a more welcoming and community-building people. But the next step is more difficult. The next step requires us to live in a posture of “intrepidness” that Ann Thompson Cook so beautifully describes in “Becoming intrepid.”

May we all take that deeper step into community with one another, “becoming intrepid,” and building a Church that more closely resembles the Beloved Community of God and our one family in Christ.