Unraveling the Patriarchy A Latte: The Story of Our Starting Place

No one was looking for me, no one thought let’s ask Debra about starting a church. Two pastors I was ordained with were invited to new church development training, they took assessments and attended what is rightly named, Bootcamp. I was happily doing other things: like organizing prayer vigils around healthcare reform, or rallies around Immigration. I was starting and failing at starting things, like a communion service that had to be at sunset and Wesley Pub which did so well, I got in trouble with the Bishop for mixing church and beer, well not in trouble as much as invited to “discuss” what exactly I was doing. She asked if I could just do it with coffee. I of course said, “No!”

A few years later I was in a meeting and the conference staff (they are in charge of the area churches, for those that don’t care to speak Methodist) invited me to consider starting a church. I was put on the spot, in just the right meeting, by just the right people to share about Wesley Pub and the Director of New Church Development must have had an ah-ha moment. The conversation started that day and the ball started rolling quickly. I was sent to bootcamp. Bootcamp was some of the best training but also clarifying. I was the only woman in my class. It was not hard to see why I had not been invited from the start. No one was looking for me, everyone looked about the same: cute, white guys with a piercing or a tattoo (but not both, that would be too much); they wore skinny jeans; most could play guitar or at least sing; and they had exceptionally cute families, with two or more children, and a wife who felt called to attend the training too. I was an outlier in every way. I was there alone, no team, no spouse - because I didn’t have one yet. Plus I was there to start a coffee shop and a church. I had no idea that my presence would be so strange. The trainer didn’t think my idea would work and lamented that I had a female boss. I guess it never occurred to him that I might be a female senior pastor someday. Other folks were shocked that the church was ok with two clergy women, but I assured them the church had survived having two men before. Plus we were crushing it when it came to growing the congregation so it wasn’t too hard to shut them down. I knew sexism was a thing; I had studied it, witnessed it, and written papers about it, but the actual practice of daily interactions can be surprising, like a hundred paper cuts. Suddenly, I had found the spot where my mere existence was pushing on the norms, assumptions, and attitudes of clergy. I didn’t even need to organize a march or rally to poke at the patriarchy. The conference might have been with me but sometimes I wondered if they just ran out of cute, white guys.

New church start culture proved to be hyper masculine, I was often the only woman. A clergy colleague from my own conference (Nebraska and Kansas) and from my own United Methodist denomination (which has been ordaining women since the 1950’s) asked me, not once but twice, if I was Craig’s wife. “Nope. I’m a Pastor. So is Craig. We drove together. Remember last time I shared about starting the Urban Abbey in Omaha.”

No one was expecting me or looking for me when it came to starting a church. New church starts have a high rate of failure, one in five made it when I started, and most of those were started by men. One of my bishops pointed this out and I was mostly surprised that he said it out loud. So few women start churches, which makes us a bigger risk for the investment, I guess. And it’s not just the church structures that are bound up in the patriarchy but the culture; folks respond differently to male leadership and carry a particular image of a religious leader. I guess he must look more like the pastor from Seventh Heaven than the Vicar of Dibley. At my first Young Professional Summit, people said, “You are a pastor? But you don’t look like a pastor. You don’t sound like a pastor.” They were so astonished they went and grabbed friends to meet me. I attended a fundraiser for Women’s Health and Reproductive Rights, in my collar and while I was chatting and filling my plate with appetizers, a man asked if I was dressed for Halloween; it says a lot about the intersections of clergy and women’s health when someone assumes you are there masquerading or even mocking the church. When I assured him I was ordained in the Methodist Church and believe women’s rights were sacred he laughed awkwardly and asked if I would send him to hell. “Well, I’m not that kind of pastor” I told him with a smile.

None of this was intended to harm, of course, but it is the reality. We have an image leadership in general, and clergy leadership in particular, that makes embodying this work different for everyone, particularly if you are not white or male. This sexism has created hurtles my friend Craig didn’t have to worry about. Like trying to hire a music director for the Abbey. I asked everyone I knew for help. I posted the job description everywhere. I asked the board to ask everyone they knew for help. I asked every church music director I knew. I called professors at UNO and Creighton. I even asked friends from high school who had a metal band if they, or anyone they knew, might be interested. We had folks who volunteered or contracted, but no one wanted to make a real commitment. A few folks interviewed and those that were church musicians and knew about worship, were well...maybe a little too Christian, or at least the kind of Christian that didn’t think it was very Christian for a woman to be a preacher. Most of these folks took one look at our Queer Faith on Campus sign and politely never came back. Other folks had been hurt by church and didn’t want to come back, or had never been a part of church and were not so sure about doing this worship thing every week, so I kept looking. The conference’s New Church Development Board offered to pray for me. The conference treasurer said, “There’s not a single guitar playing, skinny jean wearing guy in Omaha.” Nope. My friend Craig suggested I call the two local Christian colleges. I left messages and emailed the music professors with my job description, shared my hope of finding an above average singer and guitar player who could collaborate with others and lead worship. One professor called me back, he didn’t have a single student that would fit. I reminded him I wasn’t asking for a volunteer, I was paying them. They still didn’t have a student. I asked, “You don’t have one student who sings and plays guitar.” He said, “no" one more time. “Thanks for your time,” I concluded, “I had no idea you worship music department taught so many organ majors.” In the end, I’m glad it wasn’t so easy to find some “dude in skinny jeans” because we found the right person. We were attending a fundraiser for one of our partners and after conferring with my table of Abbey folks, I got up to give Kyle my card and ask him if he would meet with me sometime. We took our time getting started, he had been burnt by the church, but he put one toe in at a time and our worship started to really bloom.

I’m glad I wasn’t sent to Bootcamp from the start. I’m glad they were not looking for me. I’m a pleaser and a good student. I went to bootcamp with a plan and it didn’t look at all like their plan. I didn’t know a new church start should be in a suburb, in a Gym-a-caf-atorium (that’s my word but I think it’s a good fit). I didn’t know we were supposed to become the next megachurch, preferably matching or even dwarfing Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. I didn’t know I was too short, that my voice was too high, that my singing was too poor, and my curves too curvy. I didn’t know that my plan was to weird and that my presence alone would be radical. I thank God no one had taught me this. I had time to envision and practice starting new things. I had folks to plan with and dream with; folks who challenged me on the name until we landed on Urban Abbey. I had started smaller things and failed as much as I had succeeded. I already had a vision and a thought or two (well actually a 10-page front and back, single-spaced document) about how to get there when I started Bootcamp training. This training refined it, made it 100 times better and gave me good skills to bring home but it never supplanted the dream. Bootcamp didn’t rewrite my plan but it did add 10 more pages.

I proposed a vision of a church that was small - enormously small (thanks to e.e. comings) - an imagining of how we seek the relational aspect of a small church and attain the capacity of a larger church. I was driven by this question of how we stay relational and inclusive, making room to welcome new folks, rather than falling into the trap of small and “clique-ish”. I sent the conference page-after-page, ask-after-ask, for a dream of a living sanctuary open all the time. We would be mindful of every morning, not just Sunday. It was a vision that asked how can we be relevant, how can we be a part of people’s lives and how can we help connect people, particularly people who would never dawn the door of a sanctuary. I refused to move to an auditorium; when one bishop asked I responded, “We will have 10 services of 60 before we have one service of 600 people.” It has been harder than I ever imagined but it has taught me about vulnerability and uncertainty in a way that I would never trade.

You see the challenge of new church start culture is the idolatry of certainty. It is one thing to write plans; to dream of reaching, growing, and connecting with new people; and to create something remarkably new, fragile, and lively. But there is a trap in the training. Those well intentioned plans and disciplines can start to seem like a certainty; and expressing any vulnerability, or naming the challenge for what it really is, can be deemed as not being all in, or worse, not being faithful. Durable hope in the face of obvious struggle can become arrogant certainty, unmoored from the audacious calling of church work. Pastors go from the “man in the arena” to the “man of steel”, and it is not a good look. I have witnessed people explore the work and self-select out or be limited because they were honest about how challenging starting a new church might be. This left me with a cohort of folks who said things like, “My biggest fear is blowing through my space in the first month and I have a lease for six.” His biggest fear was growing too fast and my fear that day was not making it the next six months. He fit the profile perfectly; charismatic and determined with a cute family, but his new church isn’t a church anymore.

Jesus never promises anyone certainty, certainly not the folks who take root in the leadership of his movement. He was incredibly vulnerable and asked us to be the same. Vulnerability is strangely enduring, I think that is at the heart the durability of our faith. We read ancient words about seeds sown and much mended nets and they can come alive in our time. He does not take on the world by its own measures or strategies, but by turning the very notions of power and strength on their head. He is not building an army - not even a salvation army in the way the church largely approaches “salvation” today. He is not building a temple or an empire. He is building relationships and inviting us to rethink everything so we can do the same. His folks are not perfect, they are so far from “Superman,” but you know what they are for sure? Coachable. They are open and attentive, vulnerable and present, they are honest not only about their confusion, but about their uncertainty, and they head back to fishing when they are at their lowest point. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like no one was looking for Jesus, Peter, Paul, or Mary Magdalene to do any of the faithful work they did. No one in the temple or government looked at Jesus and said, “Let’s give that bright, young Jewish man an internship and get him on a great career track.” Jesus showed up, opened the scroll, and dropped the mic.

In Acts, chapter 16, there is a story about a woman named Lydia. I wish I remember singing songs about her as a child, or coloring her garments as purple as the cloth she sold. But I don’t, I know a song about frogs that plagued Egypt, but not one lyric about a powerful woman. I didn’t really find her until 2015. In the story, Paul is going to Macedonia because he has a vision of a man, but he gets lucky and finds Lydia instead. She was among women, gathered by the river in worship, community, and prayer. Perhaps they had gotten tired of the temple’s boys club, or maybe they liked the sound of the water, the shade of the trees, and the sound of the breeze running across the leaves and grasses. Lydia is a dealer of purple cloth, and before we start imagining that she has a cute craft store; being a dealer of purple cloth meant she was a businesswoman working with the wealthy in this Roman colony. We might translate it better as Jaguar or Lexus dealer. She has some capacity and gifts, and has managed a business, which is still a bit of an outlier in our context some 2000 years later. Not only is she presumably remarkable in her professional context, she is a worshiper of God. She leans into the God of the Hebrew Bible, finding life in the stories of Moses and Miriam, Ruth and David, learning from the prophets and singing the Psalms. She is probably not ethnically Jewish, but she is in awe of the Divine and open to the wisdom she experiences in the Biblical Narrative. It is like she was waiting for Paul and the message of Jesus, his way of being in the world that included and called on her to be a part, to answer the call with her own life. Paul doesn’t say this often but Lydia “prevails upon him” to stay, perhaps he figures out how she has a business. She is determined and it’s apparently not easy to tell her no. Her household is probably the first house church, and might I add, she didn’t need a bunch of letters like the folks in Corinth, who can’t remember to wait until everyone sits down to eat at the communion table. Paul was looking for a man and he found Lydia, the first Christian in Europe. Look at how Paul get’s his expectations re-routed, surprise its a girl!

I wish I had known this story. I wish I had known it better or sooner. Maybe someone tried and I missed it. Sometimes just showing up as you are tugs at the fabric of the patriarchy, which is news to me because I was pretty sure it only counted if there was a march, rally, or Supreme Court decision. Paul wasn’t looking for Lydia and she shows up and won’t take no for an answer. I found her when it was a hard road at the Abbey. The Director of New Church Development was so excited that I had found her, and he, in a sense, claimed her in me and with me and for me. It was incredibly strange and empowering to find someone else who was kind of a weird outlier and to journey together in a sense. But that is what makes church powerful, it is not that faith makes us invincible, it is that faith makes us durable and vulnerable. Faith means that maybe we all show up in ways no one expects. Maybe you show up at the conference room and remind people of the voices that are not seated. Maybe you push for strategies to listen and everyone expected you to go along and get along. Maybe you show up and say that joke isn’t funny; or remind everyone that Lisa said that idea three times already and you invite her to clarify and elaborate, you celebrate her contribution in a world that doesn’t always do that well. Maybe you show up to say the hard words that need to be said and no one expected you to do it, but you changed everything. Maybe you demand paternity leave or even take it and maybe you didn’t think about parenting in that way as a radical act but it is. Maybe you show up as a teacher and students can see themselves in a new way. There are hundreds of ways we show up and it matters. Sometimes unraveling the patriarchy happens when you show up and pull at the loose ends and point out the gaping holes. I am ever grateful for all the folks that show up with me, week-in and week-out. This little unlikely adventure has taught me about showing up, staying vulnerable, taking heart in a dream that feels so far away, and making peace with uncertainty. It is so unlikely that we are here together. Thank you for making this happen, for standing side by side, for showing up and then going out in the week to show up even more. Faith in everyday action is hard and it is really the only way to be faithful. Who knew that unraveling the patriarchy would be something we could do one latte at a time!