Light on our congregational community - by Helen A.

I grew up in a very conservative and very loving church, one filled with immigrants from The Netherlands. Many of the members had, like my parents, left their home country after World War II to seek a new life in America. Their parents and siblings remained behind, and so the bonds formed between these new immigrants were tight, like family.

As I grew up, though, my politics changed, as did my sense of myself. When I landed in New York, I sought out a progressive congregation. It was hard to find a place that challenged me, though. Many pastors preached messages on the general goodness of the world, the general goodness of the congregation—we just had to tap into that central reservoir of love a little more strongly and all would be ok. It’s not a bad message, but I got the gist after a few weeks. I yearned for something more.

In the meantime, Dan and I married, and he moved to New York. We searched for a new church home, and Trinity—a Lutheran church, in the tradition Dan grew up in—was just a few blocks away! The pastor had written a cool book I’d heard about. We decided to give it a try, and it wasn’t long before we knew we were home.

New York City is obviously in the same country as our native Oregon, but it often feels like a different world. Trinity ministers to many who actually have immigrated to the States, and the challenges those particular members face are often enormous, but I think many of us—even Americans—feel like immigrants to this magnificent, powerful, sometimes-frightening city. Many of Trinity’s members are far away from family. And so I have found a place not unlike that of my childhood church, where the members form a surrogate family.

I’m not going to lie, though: Dan and I have looked at each other more than once and said, “Couldn’t we have at least found a congregation where the walls aren’t crumbling down? Would that have been so hard?” I think we serve on five different church committees or groups between the two of us, and it can be easy to feel the demands on our time as a burden. Sometimes I want to say, “Hey God, so when I was yearning for ‘something more’ back at the nice plush progressive churches, I wasn’t quite yearning for this. I was thinking maybe just one committee would need me. And maybe the church could be at least breaking even?”

But God doesn’t always answer our prayers in the manner we expect. I suspect God knew Dan and I would find ourselves challenged by the sermons Pastor Heidi preaches, pushed to look at the world—and the way we operate in it—in entirely new ways. I think God knew that even if we don’t think we have more time to give, we probably do—and that it is important for our sanity to occasionally step back from the competitive, self-focused nature of our jobs and serve a larger community. And those crumbling walls? Well, they are a constant visual reminder that we need to give monetarily, too, and perhaps God knew that we would need that kind of push to give at a level more appropriate to our finances than we had been giving. (And if seeing the walls was a push, serving on the Capital Campaign committee has been a much-needed kick in the pants to actually start writing bigger checks.)

Trinity stretches us every day, but we are mightily blessed in return. The congregation has become our home away from home, a spiritual haven in a tumultuous city, a genuine reservoir of love freely given, humbly received.