A Home for Hungry Minds and Souls
by Joel Bergeland (M.Div. ‘14)
Pilgrim Lutheran Church has a history of looking to its context while engaging its tradition. When it was founded in 1921 and most of the congregations in its denomination were still worshiping in German, Pilgrim chose to worship in English, the dominant language of its neighborhood. More recently, the congregation’s motto—“a home for hungry minds and souls”—both affirmed that it as a place where intellectual and spiritual questions are welcome and reflected appreciation for the neighborhood’s independent bookstore, the Hungry Mind.
Part of Pilgrim’s strategy to be a church engaged with the whole of people’s lives is its staffing model. Rather than hire multiple pastors, Pilgrim has one pastor (Carol Tomer), a lay Director of Shared Ministries and Faith Formation (Peter Spuit), a director of music (Paul Stever), and a number of short-term stipended residents in theology, social action, and other emphases. Cultivating a staff with diverse gifts, including lay staff who also hold jobs outside the church, has prepared Pilgrim to address crucial questions: “Who is missing from this church body? Why? And how can we serve them?”
Questions about the gap between who lives in the neighborhood and who shows up for Sunday morning worship led Pilgrim to focus on three underrepresented groups: children and youth, young adults, and people who have become “dechurched.” Pilgrim knew that it was not enough simply to invite these groups to come to church and conform to existing worship practices. Instead, they were able to find ways to discover and recover elements of Christian tradition that honor and speak to each group’s distinct concerns.
Take children, for instance. Rather than adding a moment specially geared toward children, Pilgrim asked how children might take ownership and find delight and meaning in the entire liturgy. As a result, children and youth have headed processions, sprinkled the congregation with water, led songs, pulled stops for the organist, read Scripture, led prayers, and made rhythm in ad hoc percussion ensembles. And even when youngsters aren’t serving as leaders, the congregation has learned to watch the bodies of children and take their natural fidgety-ness not as a distraction to be fixed but as a need to be addressed. “Every time there is an opportunity for children to move during the service, we take it,” says Carol Tomer. Children gather around the font for each baptism, come forward for communion, and roam freely about the sanctuary during the service. Tables, chairs, and art supplies are set out in one of the transepts, and rocking chairs dot the worship space.
One remarkable discovery has been that enriching worship for young people has made worship richer for adults as well. Attending to and honoring children’s tendency to use more of their senses and a fuller sense of their bodies in worship has made worship more of a whole body, multisensory experience for everyone. Pilgrim has seen fruits in both the spiritual depth of worship and the attendance of new families. More than half of the congregation is now 40 or younger, and nearly 20% are under 10.
By seeking to involve children more fully, Pilgrim began to dismantle what ISM faculty member Tom Troeger calls “cognitive imperialism.” Troeger points to psychologist Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences, which theorizes that humans have many different ways of knowing; linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic intelligences reside in each person. If God created us to know in a variety of ways, why does our culture privilege some forms of intelligence (linguistic and logical-mathematical) over others, and what are the consequences of this privileging? Chief among them, Troeger says, are the loss of a “repertoire of different, faithful ways of coming to God” and a diminished understanding of Jesus’ great commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
In reaching out to “dechurched” people and young adults, Pilgrim has drawn on contemplative prayer traditions. Every other Sunday evening, Pilgrim has a prayer service with Celtic or Nordic music and plenty of space for contemplative prayer. Some of the people who attend these services are active in the Sunday morning worshiping community, but many more are new to or reacquainting themselves with Christianity. Pilgrim’s focus on ritual and spiritual experience has allowed many who had distanced themselves from the church to take part in and grow from Christian practices once again.
Even though apparently successful, the Celtic and Nordic services raise questions for Pilgrim’s leaders. On the one hand, these services are bringing people to Pilgrim who otherwise would not be there; citing Lutheran confessional belief that the true church is anywhere where the gospel is proclaimed and the sacraments are administered, Carol sees the Sunday night services as authentic offerings of the gospel that are fulfilling their purpose. On the other hand, Peter acknowledged, “We wonder whether or not we are being good stewards of the gifts that God is sending us in these people.” Very few of the regular Sunday night worshipers have become involved in the congregation’s other ministries or shared responsibility for organizing and sponsoring the Sunday night worship itself. Even fewer have become members of Pilgrim. Their apparent disinclination to invest in this community of worship, which they claim to find very meaningful, prompts Carol, Peter, and Paul to wonder: Are these merely spiritual tourists? Is the congregation called to help them grow more fully into Christian faith? Might something besides traditional ‘church membership’ be offered as a path to encourage the deepening of their sense of belonging and responsibility?.
Church membership as defined by contemporary mainline denominations arose in the specific context of American voluntarism, historian Dorothy Bass noted in her comments. Over the centuries, the church has also adopted other forms of belonging and investment, and the time is ripe for fresh reflection and new possibilities. The questions about forms of congregational engagement that are being asked by Pilgrim’s leaders, she suggested, are widely relevant today. Is “membership” a matter of believing, behaving, belonging, or some combination of the three? What does a faith community desire from those who join—and thus constitute—it? What practices define belonging, and what gives people the experience of belonging?
Pilgrim is addressing this set of questions by articulating its deepest hopes for all who enter its doors, whether for the first or the 500th time: a vital relationship with God, a love for neighbor and creation, and a desire to be drawn more deeply into the wider mission and work of the church. While the summer seminar did not arrive at a conclusion about alternative forms of membership, participants did agree that Pilgrim is asking questions, creating space for openness to God and neighbor, and listening to its context and its tradition with the kind of attentiveness that can lead to new insight and faithful action.