Our history as a church is just exciting for me. It’s energizing in the sense that we’ve always been a church that, in a sense, is like the incarnation: there’s this very human part of us, and there’s this divine part of us. I always think of Christ’s coming to make the human part of us better because we don’t do human well. When the church has not done human well, what you see is a lot of divisiveness, a lot of pulling things apart, a lot of controlling people. When you see us connect that to our divine selves, you see a love that can really bring about some fantastic change.
This material was originally recorded as part of the Renovations Project. It has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Find a better way to do things instead of running from difficulty
The church has these thoughts and these times when we force people to conform to what we see as human, which is to control and not to be what we are when we’re connected to our divine self, which is to be free. Our history has done that, whether you look at it from a gender perspective, an ethnicity and racial perspective, or a denominational perspective. We’re always pulling things apart. But at the same time, we bring things back together. That history helps maintain homeostasis—it brings you back to balance when your balance is out of whack. You recognize that things go bad all the time. How do you bring them back?
I love the thought of complementarianism versus egalitarianism, which the church wrestles with now. With being complementary, we’re saying that men and women are equal, yet women have their place in this particular way. On the other hand, our society says, to be egalitarian, everybody can be everything. And a woman can be as powerful as a man in every way. And then you get a church that then says, for some of us, women can assume positions of authority in the church. For others, they can’t. And the outcome for me was personal; my wife and I pastored a church together for 16 years. We used our sameness to pastor and parent our children, and we used it to pastor our church. How do I really pull all these diverse thoughts, all these diverse pieces, all these diverse realities together? That’s what the church has to do. I think the more we embrace that, the more we engage that, the more we say, “I’m not running from my deficits, and I’m not running from my difficulties; I’m loving those.” Then you come up with ways to do things better.
Related: How to become an egalitarian church: four steps in the right direction
There have been so many examples of doing things better. For example, look at Robert Schuller and how he preached on top of a drive in, and that morphed into the Crystal Cathedral, where they opened up a wall, and he’s preaching to people in cars. There are so many ways to learn and have fun with it. I think one of the things that you learn from the church—both its strengths and its weaknesses—is that if you love church, if you love doing this work, if you really, really embrace the spiritual disciplines that God has for us, you’ll find joy in doing it. If you find joy in doing it, you’ll find a better way to do it.
Related: Innovation moves the church forward
Take the best (and worst) things from the past and reimagine them
Some of the best things that we can keep would be our ability to overcome the worst things that we’ve done. I think too often even in our culture right now, there’s this major movement of whether we take down a statue or keep up a statue. Do we do this? Do we do that? The best way to approach those kinds of complexities is to actually embrace them. Too often we throw out the things that we’ve done wrong. We can’t reimagine those things. How can you reimagine something if you’ve not dealt with what it is and who you really are? For the church to recognize its deficits, its difficulties, its complicity to certain things, I think it’s important to reimagine it.
Related: Repent, repair, and reorient to restore church and neighborhood relationship
For me as someone who walks in issues of human health, mental health, and spiritual health, we’ve got to look at the fact that many people are broken because of what the church has done. In that brokenness, how do I have conversations with you to let you know that I unconditionally value you as a human being and then help you to embrace the spirit in you? Whether it’s an education situation, whether you come without certain aspects of being gifted educationally, I still see you as a gifted being, as a person who can overcome whatever obstacles before you. How can I encourage you to bring your full self to the academic moment?
If it’s a spiritual thing: yes, you may have made mistakes as a human being. We all have. How do you bring those mistakes as a human being and bring them to this moment in time? The church has been good at doing that. You can look throughout time. I was blessed in growing up in Detroit, Michigan. Several of the pastors who mentored me—even after my father, who was my first pastor, had abandoned me—were able to come and say, “Look, I’ll take time with you. I’ll spend time with you. I’ll teach you how to be a man.” That’s reimagining that happened. In doing that, I was fortunate where both of my major mentors took broken situations in their communities and had their churches evolve to a place where they actually had social ministries. They had ways of doing things and meeting the needs of the communities that we were in. That’s reimagining it.
Related: Why church leaders need to lead from imagination, not memory
The church can be a healing agent in the face of trauma
In order to be a healing agent in the face of trauma, an important factor for me is preparedness. I think too often when it comes to difficult situations, we don’t take the time to prepare. Everyone wants to just rush in, but to prepare is the first piece of it. And secondly, I call in a posse—the people around you who can support you as you go through this. Too often we choose to be in isolation rather than being in community. And to heal, you need community.
Once you establish those two pieces, then you have to get into the thick of it. I love the concept of Holy Saturday. We don’t talk a lot about it as Protestants. Holy Saturday is that time between Jesus’s crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. It’s a time Paul says that Jesus “made captivity itself a captive” (Ephesians 4:8). For me, that Saturday is not a time that is without activity. It’s a time where you actually go down into the difficulties, go down into the problems, and then help people come out of them.
One of the ways to help is to become mindful of what’s going on around you. We have so many spiritual disciplines. How many of us really engage in contemplative prayer, really engage in fasting, meditating, and thinking of the things of God that are healthy? We’re so focused on the negatives and the problems that we can’t overcome the trauma and really move to healing. You need to take a minute to think and find the spirit that’s within. Hebrews 12:1 says, we’re surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. How do you pull that witness power to do things you want to do? I’ve found so often in my work, that’s what helps folks. I remember when I was sent to New Orleans to work with pastors there, ten years after Hurricane Katrina. The pastors had healed the city, they had restored their churches, but they hadn’t taken care of themselves.
After talking and listening, I had pastors get together and go fishing. They started a collective group of just pastors meeting and talking. Stop comparing who’s got the best church, or who’s got the best ministry. Start just being brothers and sisters in Christ and doing that. One guy really blessed me because he hadn’t played his saxophone in 20 years. He went and purchased an old, used saxophone and started playing again. They found their souls. They realized that they could, in essence, hibernate and then come back out and do the work again that God has called them to do. They worked through their trauma and came out the other side.
Related: Christ calls us out of the way “things are supposed to be” and into new life
Rev. Dr. Micah McCreary
Rev. Micah L. McCreary, Ph.D., is president of New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a minister of Word and sacrament in the Reformed Church in America (RCA). He also serves the RCA as a General Synod professor of theology. Prior to coming to New Brunswick, Dr. McCreary served in the pastorate, psychological practice, and professorate at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He studied engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and theology at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
